In January I've biked 185 miles and walked 92, so on the average day I walked almost three miles and biked almost six. It's hard not to walk three miles a day just doing errands and walking around the house. My goal was to ride 10 miles a day. For every day I didn't ride, I wanted to walk at least five miles. By that measure I did pretty well.

Suite 3. V. Bourrée.

This is the high point of the entire sequence for me. This movement. Yet ironically this is where I stalled, listening instead to the Goldberg Variations, the Well-Tempered Klavier, Beethoven's late quartets... According to my computer I have listened to this 14 times.

What is a Bourrée anyway? This is where you normally expect to find a minuet.

Interlude

Nothing I have read so far is as good as the type of novels I normally read--by Harry Mathews, Gilbert Sorrentino, Murakami, and a few select others. A few novels I've started--by Faulkner and G. Eliot--are a bit more promising. My plan is to read quality literary type novels checked out from the public library, avoiding novels I've read before, and not repeating authors more than a few times each.

If a person read novels instead of watching television for two hours a night, that person would in a few years' time be very well read.

My cousin was a prophet. Actually, THE prophet. Technically he was my first cousin twice-removed, the first cousin of my paternal grandmother Vera Hinckley Mayhew. I never met him, of course, and the only thing I can remember from family lore was that she liked her younger cousin.

One of my new (new to me that is) favorite blogs is University Diaries. "Scathing On-line School-Marm" is both useful and funny as hell. You can also read about James Joyce, Philip Larkin, or the abuses of big-time college sports.

Shadowing my 100 novels will Mark's 100 poem-books. It's too bad we don't have a word for that like the Spanish Poemario.

(4)

Stanley Elkin. The Living End. 1979.

Elkin's concise, comic treatment of eschatology is probably the best novel I've read so far in this project. He achieves a funiness that his buddy Gass often gestures towards without reaching.

To translate poetry you must be a poet, because you are actually writing poetry. The activity of verse-translation is not a fundamentally different activity from that of writing poetry. That is one lesson I might draw from Eliot Weinberger's demolition of Robert Alter's Psalms.

Weinberger softens this precept a little by saying that the translator has to be at least a reader of poetry. That doesn't make too much sense to me, because translation involves the production of a text, not just an act of reception. There may be poet-translators with no work of their own, but they are still poets in the act of translating.

"On the evidence here, Alter seems to know very little about the last hundred years of English-language poetry."

Harsh, but Weinberger backs up this point with examples.

(3)

Vladimir Nabokov. Glory. 1932/1971

It seems like a rather conventional Bildungsroman for the most part. The main character, Martin Edelweiss, is an athletic, not quite believable, aimless Russian emigré. The translation, by Dmitri Nabokov, is rather interesting. It read well in English but never conceals its origins.

(2)

William Gass. Cartesian Sonatas and Other Novellas, 1998.

Every one of these four novellas has a brilliant conceit at its core. "The Master of Secret Revenge," about a man who needs to exact revenge for every trivial slight and offence. Another about a sleazy itinerant accountant enchanted by the odd knicknacks and momentoes at a Bed and Breakfast run by an earnest older woman and her invalid husband. Still another about a woman with sensory overload, extreme synesthesia. Each is carried to its logical extreme at excruciating length. They are short stories bloated to the length of novellas, rather than novels made into concise, pared-down versions of themselves. Gass can write. He can also overwrite. You often find yourself listening to an explanation of something you understood perfectly well 30 pages earlier.

(1)

The Sandcastle. Iris Murdoch, 1957.

Reading this is like watching a very clumsy-looking fighter take apart a smoother and supposedly more "correct" stylist. Murdoch signposts her plots, explains things too much, introduces jarring shifts of focalization. Then, just when you think she doesn't know what she's doing, Bam! There are some well-done dramatic scenes--the car going into the river; the rescue of the protagonist's son off the tower; the afterdinner speech by his wife that seals his fate. Murdoch manages to develop all the pieces of the plot so that it all works, even the more contrived elements. There needed to be more about Felicity, the psychic daughter. I didn't quite believe the young painter, Rain, falling in love with the middle-aged schoolteacher.

It's a "B-." If a major character has an ample bosom we shouldn't learn that 10 pages from the end. You don't have to explain who a character is after the first mention of that character in the first chapter, and do this several times in a row!

I wish it were more polished and modernist. Virginia Woolf she's not. But I will be reading more Murdoch. Last one I read was The Severed Head in about 1978, which I remember as better than this one.

I don't read much fiction, so I've decided to read a little more in those "dead hours" when I'm usually just randomly flipping through blogs and such, say 9:30 to 11 p.m. I'm reading 100 novels and blogging about them. It might take a year or two. My plan is to start somewhat randomly and, if I like a particular novel, read another by the same author. If I don't like it, I'll switch to another author. The blog tag "100 novels" will help me keep track of what I've read. Since it's a "stretching exercise" in some respects I'm not reading novels that I know I'll like in advance, or revisiting old favorites.

I still haven't forgotten Bach, either. I took a break to listen to The Goldberg Variations for a few weeks but should return to the cello suites very soon.

Preciosa throws away her tambourine
and runs off without stopping.
The stud-wind pursues her
with a hot sword.
The sea scowls up its roar
The olive trees grow pale.
Flutes of forest shade sing,
and the smooth gong of the snow.

That's Langston Hughes. His translation of the Gypsy Ballads is the best one out of all. Not only that, but I'm prepared to argue that this is some of the best poetry Hughes himself wrote. (Just as Cathay and the Seafarer belong to Pound's best work.)

It took me a while to be a connossieur of Lorca translations. It takes a special kind of bracketing off, of forgetfulness. I have to forget that I would use the word "chase" instead of "pursue" in this case, that "y el liso gong de la nieve" HAS to be "and the smooth gong of the snow." That's a gift from Lorca so why credit the translator? The translation dissolves in the analysis. You have to sit back and enjoy it as the particular performance that it is, not judge it against the one true performance that it will never be. You have to know you are reading a poem by Langston Hughes, not a poem by Lorca.

Hughes has a defined voice as a translator. What I like, though, is that it isn't intrusive. It's vernacular in tone, but there is no attempt to reproduce any particular American vernacular.

Improvisation on a Theme by Joseph

I saw a worm blow a hole through the roof.

I saw a worm question a stork.

My feet on the grass were wet.
My feet on the grass were dry.

I saw a root grab an ankle.

I saw Henry eating pie.

My feet on the grass were wet.
My feet on the grass were dry.

The ankle was mine.

The pie was mine.

The roof was not mine.

I saw something else, off in the snow and fog.

I'll never tell.

My feet on the grass were wet.
My feet on the grass were dry.