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I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened a little, and all I have to do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over again, every time I can make the mouth I want appear, the mouth which my hand chooses and sketches on your face, and which by some chance that I do not seek to understand coincides exactly with your mouth which smiles beneath the one my hand is sketching on you….

This is Julio Cortazar, enormisimo supercronopio, reading chapter 7 of his novel Rayuela.

I am reading and enjoying Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. It is my misfortune, I realize, to be so sensitized to colonialist attitudes as to imagine I detect in the book a faint taint of colonialist condescension.

But I am not here today to rant about colonialism but rather to share the following amusing passage from the book. The detective, Mma Ramotswe, muses about her feelings about hospitals and doctors. After reflecting that she is not ashamed of her weight or her corns she continues:

Now constipation was quite a different matter. It would be dreadful for the whole world to know about troubles of that nature. She felt terribly sorry for people who suffered from constipation, and she knew that there were many who did. There were probably enough of them to form a political party — with a chance of government perhaps — but what would such a party do if it was in power? Nothing, she imagined. It would try to pass legislation, but would fail.

Here in California the Constipation Party — with its two warring wings — is already in power. Will it also dominate our national politics, currently focused on the struggle to pass health insurance legislation?

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Image from the blog of the LA Times

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Pophangover thinks it has the list. But I’m pretty sure we can do much worse. Click the image to check out their bottom ten.

Readers of this blog are probably tired of this topic, but I have been spending a lot of time on this project, so it occupies my attention. I’ll try to restrain myself in the future, I promise (sure I will). This is the first building nearly complete, though still wanting siding. The second building is now almost as far along, though as yet without books since I haven’t installed doors.

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Many years ago, as a graduate student in comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a focus in part on the linguistic model in literary criticism, I turned my attention to beyond-the-sentence topicality. Scholars have parsed the sentence since ancient time, but they have paid less attention to the way sentences connect to each other.

One of the applications of this line of research is for machine translation. How does the translation engine determine, for example, whether the word lead in a text refers to the heavy metal or to the concept of leadership?

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I’m back from my short vacation, which was spent not being a tourist somewhere but rather working on my second library building. Even though I didn’t go away I found the computer did not call to me. I enjoyed working outdoors and not sitting in front of a screen.

Below you can see progress on the second building, looking through eastward to the first, which is mostly completed except for the siding and finishing up the roof fascia.

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• Maurice Bendrix, The Ambitious Host
• D. B. Caulfield, The Secret Goldfish
• Vivian Darkbloom, My Cue
• Nicholas de Selby, Country AlbumGwendolen Erme, Deep Down, Overmastered
• Andrew Hibbard, The Chasm of the Mind
• Robin Penrose, Domestic Angels and Unfortunate Females: Woman as Sign and Commodity in Victorian Fiction
• Boris Alekseyevich Trigorin, Days and Nights
• Harriet Vane, Murder By Degrees

Answer after the break . . .

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Here’s Peter Laufer, three or four of whose books I published at Mercury House, on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

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Want to store your library information on the web? Want to be able to computer search some of the content? Entering ISBN numbers too much trouble? Try this tip from Google employee Matt Cutts.

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How many of Modern Library’s hundred best novels of the 20th century can you name if you’re given the names of the authors? Fine out here.

I was doing okay until I got to Samuel Butler.

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Copper Canyon has been selected by the NEA be the U.S. publisher for its International Literary Exchange with China. According to Publishers Weekly, “Copper Canyon will receive $117,000 to support the translation, publication and promotion of a bilingual anthology of work by about 35 Chinese poets born after 1945.”

This is an excellent choice. Copper Canyon has been a reliable publisher of international poetry for decades, and all of their books are prepared with care and attention to detail. Bravo!

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Gotta love it.

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Cortazar’s unpublished works have been collected and will be released at the Feria Internacional del Libro en Buenos Aires within a few days.

This should be a big book. If no one in the U.S. has snatched it up yet, some enterprising publisher should get in touch with Carmen Balcells right away.

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In his 1913 classic (if that’s the right word) publication entitled Poets Ranked by Beard Weight, Upton Uxbridge Underwood (1881–1937) ranked poets according to the gravity of their beards, assigning each one a “pogonometric index” score. (So I have learned from A Journey Round My Skull, which informs me that Underwood was “a deipnosophist, clubman, and literary miscellanist with a special interest in tonsorial subjects.”) A score of 10, for example, was “very very weak,” whereas a score of 58 was “very very heavy.” Leaving aside for the moment the particulars of his methodology, let’s see how the poets stack up.

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James D. Houston died last week after a struggle with cancer. I published his In the Ring of Fire: A Pacific Basin Journey at Mercury House in 1997. He was a pleasure to work with.

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Just a week ago a portrait of Shakespeare emerged that was supposedly painted by a contemporary. Now a fellow named John Casson (“an independent researcher and psychotherapist”) who “spent three years studying writings thought to be connected to Shakespeare” (wow! three years!), claims to have discovered six “new” works by Shakespeare.

Considering that there has been a sizeable full-time Shakespeare industry churning away in academia for at least a hundred years, I think this claim must be taken with many grains of salt until verified. It would be interesting to see the works though. English writing has been all downhill since Shakespeare.

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According to a survey conducted by Spread the Word, a UK book advocacy group, two-thirds of respondents admitting lying about having read certain books. Which books do people most often lie about having read? Following are the ten top claimed-to-have-read titles. Orwell is the runaway winner — why?

1. 1984 by George Orwell (42%)
2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (31%)
3. Ulysses by James Joyce (25%)
4. The Bible (24%)
5. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (16%)
6. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (15%)
7. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (14%)
8. In Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (9%)
9. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (6%)
10. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (6%)

I’ve read all but 7, 9, and 10 (no. 2 in translation).

The mysterious thing about this list is why anyone would lie about having read Richard Dawkins. It must be a UK thing.

The picks of this litter, BTW, are 3, 4, 5, and 8.

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Is this really a contemporary’s portrait of Shakespeare?

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Aoccrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny ipormoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed the txet wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

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via hosted.pl
image via Gary McMurray’s photostream

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If in fact they are — but so claims the National Endowment for the Arts.

For the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature, according to a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts. Reading on the Rise documents a definitive increase in rates and numbers of American adults who read literature, with the biggest increases among young adults, ages 18-24. This new growth reverses two decades of downward trends cited previously in NEA reports such as Reading at Risk and To Read or Not To Read.

Why might this be? Several theories have been advanced, but as yet I haven’t heard anyone who shares my take.

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