If you’ve found Golden Rule Jones via this week’s Timeout Chicago: the “blogging issue,” welcome! I don’t think I’ve been ever been described as a “tastemaker” or an “elder statesman” before, so I guess that’s cool. I love the little pixel-art caricature of me that artist Jude Buffum created. My ears stick out just like that. How did he know? In elementary school one of the older kids told me that I looked like a taxicab driving down the street with its doors open. I still wonder: why taxicab?

Annnnyhow, I’ve been at this blogging thing since 2002. You can read about why I created this blog here. These days, I spend much of my time over at Wandering with Robert Walser, where you can enjoy my slow-motion translation of a book from German.

A couple years back I collected some of my favorite posts. You might like them too. Here are a few more recent faves:

For it was late now, and everything was dark
All the jokes
The six-foot-four-man
Keep away, keep away
A porter’s knot
Books for losers
You must stay awake
Paint me a small railroad station then
The Gandhi of modern Indian literature
I rejoice to concur with the common reader
Who invented the modern short story?

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Currently reading, or recently read:

J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (2007). Coetzee continues his eccentric exploration of authority and identity in the novel.

Mark Sarvas, Harry, Revised (2008). Harry Rent, recently widowed, tries to escape benighted “Harry-land.” Comic novel by the creator of The Elegant Variation.

John Gay, Trivia: Or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716). Here’s an online version. Read about a related book in the TLS.

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1962). “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.”

Alastair Dingwall, ed., Traveller’s Literary Companion to Southeast Asia (1994). “For the Western visitor to Southeast Asia, the perceptive comments of observers such as Isabella Bird, Anton Chekhov, and Marguerite Duras often help to articulate feelings that we feel but cannot always express.”

John Heilpern, John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man (2007). Bio of the British playwright, just out in paper.

Czeslaw Milosz, ed., Postwar Polish Poetry (revised ed. 1983). CM translated 25 Polish poets and provided lovely one-paragraph summaries of each (”his imagination is not urban”).

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Favorite books of 2007, third installment:  from Pascale Casanova’s Samual Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution, translated by Gregory Elliott:

Aside from a brief stay in London (in 1935), he sank slowly and consciously into decline and self-destruction.  His letters to, among others, Thomas McGreevy, with whom he remained in contact by letter until his death in 1967, attest to it.  He was “doped and buttoned up in sadness,” “[a]n insensible mass of alcohol, nicotine, and feminine intoxication.  A heap of guts.  With no end for.”  Beckett became the “family idiot,” the black sheep of a bourgeois family that sought to conceal the vices of a hopeless case from the gaze of the world.  Branded, pointed at, marginal in a prudish society, and unable to bear the burden of the fault for which he was blamed, he slowly destroyed himself.  On 8 October 1932 he wrote to his friend George Reavey in Paris, “I’ll be here till I die, creeping along genteel roads on a stranger’s bike.”

Casanova will be in Chicago later this month, delivering a lecture entitled “The Literary Greenwich Meridian: Reflexions on Literary Time.”

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Favorite books of 2007, second installment: from Zbigniew Herbert, The Collected Poems 1956-1998, translated by Alissa Valles:

Tenderness

In the end what can I do with you — tenderness
tenderness for birds and for people for a stone
you should sleep in a palm in the eye’s depths
that’s your place may you be woken by no one

You spoil everything you get it back to front
you contract a tragedy into a pocket romance
you change the high-toned flight of a thought
into sobbing and exclamations into moaning

To describe is to murder because it’s your role
to sit in the darkness of a cold and empty hall
to sit solitary where reason blithely rattles on
with mist in a marble eye tears running down

Apparently there is an online chat on Herbert this week at the website Words Without Borders, hosted by James Marcus and Cynthia Haven and featuring several worthy guests including translator Valles.

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Favorite books of 2007, first installment:  from Alex Halberstadt’s Lonely Avenue: The Unlikely Life and Times of Doc Pomus: 

A table stood next to the window in the kitchen. When he reached it, Jerome lowered his elbows onto it, leaned his crutches carefully against the edge, and hauled himself onto the table. His cheeks pressed against its cool surface. He slithered on his stomach and pulled himself forward by holding onto the windowsill. The metal latches of his braces scraped against the wood. Jerome stuck his head through the curtains and inhaled the cold October air. He pulled a Chesterfield from his shirt pocket and lit it. Pulling on it until he felt it saturate his lungs, he blew a huge draft of smoke into the night. Jerome flicked the ashes out the window onto the canopy downstairs, where his cigarette cinders left black smoldering holes in the cloth.

It was his favorite time of the night. McKibbin Street was quiet. The stickball games had broken up; the stoop orators had gone inside. The old Jewish women in housecoats who spent afternoons watching the street from their windowsills had drawn the curtains. Only a few windows were lit. The night was teaming with street sounds: the whine of automobile engines, the creak of pushcart men rolling the carts home after a long day on Moore Street, a lonely rumba wafting down the street from someone’s radio. Jerome flipped on the set and wiggled the dial until he picked up the remote from the Elks Rendezvous in Harlem: Chris Columbus’s band was playing “I Can’t Get Started,” a whole section of muted trumpets woozily carrying the melody. Jerome exhaled another lungful of smoke, rested his head on his arm, closed his eyes, and listened. In those early morning hours he felt like he belonged to the world most acutely, protected by the darkness and solitude of night. At those moments he had access to the entire storehouse of adult knowledge. But he was still fourteen, and tomorrow was a school day.

Related item discovered as I hunted for pictures of McKibbin Street: Helen Levitt’s New York street photographs, 1938 to 1990s (link from wood_s_lot). 

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