Binge Reading round up
Treats!
On my reading and listening travels this week, I traversed…
Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante’s Divinia Comedia
https://ia601306.us.archive.org/31/items/drawingsbysandro00bott/drawingsbysandro00bott.pdf
2.
Lorna Goodison & Linton Kwesi Johnson
“Writing on Lorna Goodison’s poetry, Derek Walcott asks ‘What is the rare quality that has gone out of poetry that these marvellous poems restore? Joy.’ Goodison has served as the Poet Laureate of Jamaica and published twelve volumes of poetry; her Collected Poems came out from Carcanet in 2017.”
Also:
Lorna Goodison published a new translation of Dante’s Inferno earlier this year in Jamaican Patois.
“For the last two decades, Goodison has translated and reimagined Dante’s cantos, setting the original poem into her native Jamaica and employing Jamaican expressions and sayings.”
You can buy it here in Canada/US at Vehicule Press
or here at Carcanet Press in the UK
3.
I attempted to catch up with the Bleak House APS Read Together. Yiyun’s notes are very helpful because they are short and because you’ll notice how varied the parts of the text you’re drawn to are in comparison or contrast. It’s great to have an extracted idea to bounce your own extracting or noticing against. This is what is divine about reading. How many readings there are and can be and how different a reading may be depending on the eyes, ears and mind of the reader in that moment. Put them all together and a quilt forms.
One approach I found helpful — I should add I am navigating jet lag and pole-axing grief currently, plus in need of an eye test and new glasses — was to listen and read the text simultaneously. I’ve been having some bouncy moments, where my eyes hop around on the page and as my auditory sense is heightened, this combining the two can help. It’s as though I can disappear into the words I am hearing and surface while reading them again. Obviously this isn’t going to be necessary for most readers, but should you bump up against this kerb ever, eh voila. Also, may prove useful for younger readers with different ways of reading/learning.
On Bleak House, I am still absorbed by the early mention of fog and each time I hear Mrs Jellyby’s name I keep seeing Kean Soo’s purple dragon Jellaby, which my son loved as a small boy. I like the absurd collage or disruption that forms as we read and especially the older we are. I think this slightly absurd interjection this time may come from the recent, distressing loss of my own mother Hannah who read to me and my reading as a mother to my son now having become a history of its own. All the buried readings perhaps.
4.
To bring the brain back to/towards long form reading is its own process and requires application. At different times, days and hours, we are more able for it. This is challenging if one is ill, exhausted and seeing double. The mind will wander, the eyes will dart and distraction may prevail. (I do enjoy some aspects of this though) But ambition is a starting point. Our brains have been undone by technology and only individual will and/or desire can redo it. Perhaps my brain never was anything other than undone, but it’s still fine to reroute, for who wants to have a predictable head and footpath?
For this reason, I’ll endeavour to provide more audio here, since there’s more space for language in audio and language is the means in literature. The visual offers other and is amply supplied. We’re here for reading. We want to reign in or rein off the clicks. The annoying barrage of adverts in videos, which continually require you to click or suffer, won’t help that.
5.
Library of the week
Chetham’s Library has been in continuous use as a public library for over 350 years. It is housed in a beautiful sandstone building dating from 1421 which was built to accommodate the priests of Manchester’s Collegiate Church.
Thanks for reading whatever and however and wherever you are reading.