Book Meme

[dr_pretentious]

No more memes! I acquiesced once, but don't think that means my resolve will falter again! Won't! Won't!

Dammit.

Once I saw this on matociquala's journal, I compulsively started tallying up my books, and then there was no stopping.

1: Total number of books I own:

Despite several attempts at culling, I probably have about 1500 books in the house right now.

2: The last book I bought:

Lud-in-the-Mist, Hope Mirrlees

3: The last book I read:

Mortal Love, Elizabeth Hand
(This is the last one I finished. I'm in the middle of three others.)

4: Five books that mean a lot to me:

Is it possible to pick just one volume by H.D.? It would have to be the Collected Poems, then, to get the war trilogy and still have Sea Garden and Heliodora included.

Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin

The Spiral Dance, Starhawk

My own unfinished manuscript--after all, it's the central organizing principle of my daily life. I can't think of any other book I've worked on every single day for over two years. Not even the dissertation, though that took longer.

5:Tag five people and have them do it on their blogs

No need to tag anybody. Resist it if you can.

Comments

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

Interesting. But out of curiosity, who is "H.D."? And was Mortal Hand any good?

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

H.D.'s the poet I wrote my dissertation on. She was born Hilda Doolittle in 1886, started publishing in 1913, and died, a productive writer to the last, in 1961. (You'd publish under your initials, too, if you had a name like Hilda Doolittle.) For a while when they were very young, she and Ezra Pound were engaged, which is how she got mixed up with the modernist avant garde in London. She knew everybody, and everybody knew her. Everybody, as in, Sigmund Freud was her therapist. During her lifetime, she was as famous as Pound and Eliot, but after that whole generation of modernist writers died, it fell to the first generation of modernism scholars to form a canon of stuff that would get preserved from that movement. The scholars were male, and they formed an all-male canon that the male writers of that era would not have called complete. It wasn't until the mid-1980s that the women writers who'd been considered major powers in the movement got rediscovered by the second generation of modernism scholars, and thereby got back into print. An H.D.'s Greatest Hits album would include: the three long poems that make up the war trilogy, "The Walls Do Not Fall," "Tribute to the Angels," and "The Flowering of the Rod"; a few of the poems from her first volume, Sea Garden, which helped launch the Imagist school of modernist literature in 1916; the novel Madrigal (originally published as Bid Me to Live); a selection of her essays from the world's first journal of film criticism, which she and her two lovers published in the 1930s, Close-Up; the verse drama Hippolytus Temporizes; and the memoir Tribute to Freud. I think there are also some lovely neglected jewels in Yale's collection of her papers that would be every bit as well recognized, if they were in print. I learned a lot about which flaws kill a novel from reading the unpublished works she trunked--her good stuff is so good, and her bad stuff has so many good qualities, it was very easy after a while to see what was a personal quirk and what was an error in judgment. Despite my disillusionment with academia and my general sense that the 10 years I spent there would have been better spent doing almost anything else, I'm still in love with H.D. If I had to make the mistake of getting a Ph.D., I'm glad she was the dissertation topic.

Mortal Love was pretty good. Hand made some choices that I think were not the best ones available for the story, but the stuff she does well just blows my mind. Every time I caught myself comparing my work unfavorably to hers, I had to remind myself that this is her eighth novel. I may not be able to keep up with her yet, but will I have caught up with this degree of attainment seven novels from now? Hell, yeah.