Now and again, Geiser finds himself wondering what he really wants to know, what he hopes to gain from all this knowledge.  (Man in the Holocene, Max Frisch, tr. Geoffrey Skelton, p. 90) An uncomfortable sentence there. A reminder that I will return to non-Shakespeare plays any minute now, with Volpone up next Monday and The Revenger’s Tragedy a couple of weeks after that.   VICINITY OF SHAKESPEARE Utopia (1516), Thomas More – Ahead of its time. Poems (1633), John Donne – Well, I read Donne’s collected poems in a modern edition, so a later, accretive version of the 1633 book, a landmark, the first publication of most of its contents.  How Donne fell out of favor is beyond me.  His emotional, imaginative and formal range is extraordinary.  I meant to read a short selection of his hits but just kept going.   FICTION The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Ernest Hemingway – Late, or really mid, and possibly early, Hemingway has a kitsch or self-parodic tendency.  I got a taste of that early in this famous book, which I last read well over forty years ago, but soon enough Hemingway’s precision overwhelmed any reservations.  How is he going to catch that fish?  A great argument not for simplicity, since by the end the book is plenty complex, but for reduction.  How few elements are needed to tell a great story? Swords in the Mist (1968), Fritz Leiber – Various Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, particularly the 1947 novella Adept’s Gambit.  Leiber is more playful with language, funnier, than most of his post-pulp peers, and is as good with weird imagery and sublime moments as any of them. Man in the Holocene (1979), Max Frisch – A Swiss man alone in his own head, the roads blocked and the electricity out.  He obsessively reads about geology and paleohistory, and clips bits out of his encyclopedia to paste on the wall.  In the centerpiece scene, he goes for a long walk.  Very very Swiss. Margarita (A Memory) (2012), César Aira – Aira at his most sentimental, or simulating the sentimental.  Newly Englished by Chris Andrews in a collection titled Five.   ART CRITICISM The Grand Valley (2025), Morgan Meis – A book about Joan Mitchell and a series of her paintings.  I will write about it soon.   POETRY A Letter from Li Po & Other Poems (1955), Conrad Aiken Journey to Love (1955), William Carlos Williams The Boatman (1957) & Welcoming Disaster (1974), Jay Macpherson – Canadian, quite funny, a bit in the vein of Stevie Smith but more formalist and more referential – lots of myths and old stories here.  Much to my taste. The Gavin Ewart Show (1971), Gavin Ewart – Some of the heaviest light verse I have ever read.  Man as animal, sexual, mortal.  Also much to my taste.  I was, and am, enjoying his Selected Poems when I thought I would try one of his books as such, which had more of the same, just as good.   IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE La recherche d l'Absolu (The Search for the Absolute, 1834), Honoré Balzac – This obscure Balzac novel caught my attention a decade ago because it is available in a school edition in France.  The story is about a merchant who is destroying his fortune due to his obsession with the new-fangled science of chemistry, which in his hands is not far removed from alchemy, and his devoted wife and later daughter who do what they can to save the family.  I do not think it is a great novel a Balzac goes, perhaps not even a good one, and I am curious how it is used in French schools.  It seems the history of science angle has pulled it into the curriculum.  I hope the young people on what we would call the STEM track have been enjoying it. This is the 47th Balzac work I have read. Memorial de Aires (1908), Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis – Long ago, when I had a Portuguese Literature Challenge going, I read four of the last five Machado de Assis novels, the amazing run (the short stories of the period are classics, too) when Machado somehow converted from a Romantic to something more original.  I was nervous about trying this last novel in Portuguese because the earlier novels, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and Dom Casmurro and so on, are full of subtle narrative tricks, just the kind of thing I am likely to miss in my clumsy Portuguese reading.  And I did miss them!  Or they are not there.  I think they are not there.  Presented as an authentic diary, digressive and full of ironic comments, occasionally tedious, the narrator tells the story of the romance between a young couple he knows.  On the minor side compared to the earlier masterpieces, but well worth spending more time with Machado. This and the Raul Brandão novel I read last month are at, or beyond, my reading level, so now I am reading something easier, partly to make sure I can actually “read” Portuguese.

Soon I will put up a fall schedule for my plunge back into non-Shakespearian plays, from say 1604 to 1614, an exciting stretch.  Middleton, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher will dominate.   SHAKESPEAREAN The Adventures of Lady Egeria (1585), W. C. – Half tedious, half confounding, this is an early English novel in a modern edition, lovingly edited by Steven Moore as part of his project to read every old novel ever written.  For a long stretch it is kind of a prosified Gorboduc, speeches in various rhetorical modes warning rulers against flatterers.  And then suddenly the character I though was the main villain is, along with his army, devoured by an enormous flock of ravens.  The novel grows more gruesome and Gothic – necromancers, incest, so much incest, what is it with the Elizabethans and incest.  The author has no idea what he is doing; his tone becomes increasingly objective, or deadened, as if he is stunned by his own story.  An amazing artifact. Antony & Cleopatra (1606?), William Shakespeare – I thought about using lines from Act IV, Scene 4 in the title of the post: “False, false.  This, this.”  What seems to be happening is that his assistant Eros (!) is putting Antony in his armor before battle, and doing something wrong.  What is psychologically interesting is that similar repetitions occur in Antony’s lines seven times in a few minutes (“Well, well,” “Rarely, rarely”) a brilliant expression of his pre-battle jitters.  He appears to shake it off and return to his confident self once his armor is on.  The pleasures of Shakespeare at his plainest. Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (2007), Tiffany Stern – Only the first 40% of the book, covering the Shakespearian theater. Those early theater companies were putting on a new play or two every week, alongside constant rotation of older plays.  I wanted to know how that worked.  Stern squeezes everything about of the abundant but extremely fragmented evidence about rehearsals and performance.  You have read some of that evidence yourself, in the rehearsal scenes in Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Someday I may finish the sections on Restoration and 18th century theater, especially since the book is outstanding, a model of argument and the use of evidence. FICTION Darker than You Think (1940/1948), Jack Williamson – Williamson is one of the Grand Masters of science fiction, I read here and there, but I could not name another of his books.  This one, much more of a horror novel with some science sprinkled in, I know since some later writers admire it for its genuine weirdness.  Every ordinary novelistic element of the book – characterization, exposition, pacing, prose – has problems but sometimes Williamson finds some original imagery built on a disturbing tone.  Are there evil books?  Is this one of them? Rocannon's World (1966), Ursula K. Le Guin – Her first novel, almost a light science fiction parody of The Lord of the Rings. Assumption (2011), Percival Everett – A true postmodernist, Everett loves genres, and this is a genuine mystery novel, or really three novellas, a series, as is standard in the genre, handily collected under one cover.  True mystery fans may not be so happy with where Everett ends up.  I was happy.  Aside from his short story “The Fix,” this novel is Everett’s most direct interrogation of his – I mean, his characters’, but really his – “savior complex.” Artificial Condition (2018), Martha Wells – The second Murderbot story.  Maybe a little too much about our pal Murderbot for my tastes, as opposed to just accompanying him on a sardonic adventure, but that is I suppose the cost of creating a series. Fulgentius (2020), César Aira – About a Roman general, pacifying the provinces, who is also somehow an avant-garde playwright.  Someday I may tire of Aira’s fiction about the fictionality of fiction, but not yet.  The sentence in the post’s title is on p. 152. A Flash of Darkness (2023), M. M. De Voe – A collection of weird stories, many of them in the genre we have been calling “horror” for some reason.  Smartly written and conceived.  If only I liked horror more. NOT FICTION Confluence: Merrymeeting Bay (2006), Franklin Burroughs – I live near Merrymeeting Bay and have been exploring it a bit, but I would recommend this book of essays about various aspects of this unusual meeting place of rivers and the sea to anyone who likes books about, say, Sand County, Wisconsin or places like that.  Anyone who likes turtles or ducks. The British Are Coming (2019), Rick Atkinson – It has been so long since I read a big narrative history, a history without a methodology section.  Outstanding at what it does – personalities, battles – but comfortable with the bigger picture.  At some point, long ago, I exhausted my interest in the American Revolution, but enough time has passed that it has returned, I guess.  One amusing detail is that in this big history in the tradition of Gibbon, Gibbon himself appears occasionally, commenting on events in his letters.   POETRY The Desert Music and Other Poems (1954), William Carlos Williams Ars Poeticas (2025), Juliana Spahr   IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE & I GUESS SPANISH A Farsa (1903), Raul Brandão – A miserable novel about an old servant, a maid, whose life is consumed by resentment and hatred.  But it’s a life!  Full of purpose.  Brandão is a superb and unusual writer, something of a Symbolist, more concerned with image and symbol and emotional movement than narrative.  How sad this has not been translated, but who would read it? Los versos del Capitán (1952), Pablo Neruda – To my surprise I found myself reading the Spanish side of the facing-page translation.  Studying Portuguese has been good for my Spanish.  This is the Il Postino period of  Neruda’s life, in exile, in love, the ambitious Canto General completed.  These poems are extremely easy.  Maybe I should look for more easy Spanish poems. Les heures heureuses (The Happy Hours, 2023), Pascal Quignard – One of those books that is going to connect all of the things, through fiction, essay, aphorism, memoir, whatever he’s got.  Possibly too French for my tastes, meaning the rhetoric gets pretty gassy.

Oh right, I can pretend I am writing something.  Some notes on books I read in the distant past. NOT SHAKESPEARE The Dutch Courtesan (1604), John Marston – Discussed long ago. Poems (1594-1612), George Chapman – A superb, innovative poet, somehow an Ovidian and an anti-Ovidian, attracted to but also shocked by human sensuality, which may be a good part of why he had much presence for a long time.  I mean, compare to sexy John Donne.  Please see Chapman’s long poem Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595) for a demonstration.  There is the other problem – rather than write sonnets and epigrams and other things we, for some sense of we, still like to read, he wrote long, complex philosophical about aesthetics. FICTION The Unnamable (1953), Samuel Beckett – The fragment in the post’s title is from the last page. Officers and Gentlemen (1955), Evelyn Waugh – The second volume of Waugh’s trilogy about World War II, including a long account of the defense and retreat from Crete that is especially good, although the earlier scenes of pointless training on a remote Scottish island are outstanding in an older Wavian comic vein.  Put Out More Flags (1942), written immediately after the Cretan disaster, stills looks to me like the greater work of art. The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Shirley Jackson – A neurotic young woman puts herself in an environment, nominally a haunted house, perfectly made to maximize her neuroses.  Not at all what I was expecting.  Not much of a reader of ghost stories, I long ago was surprised by how often they are comic, so it was not surprising when, about two-thirds in, this ghost story takes a huge comic swerve. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1970), George V. Higgins – Checking in with my neighbors in Boston. Nine Princes in Amber (1970), Roger Zelazny – Something I should have read when I was ten years-old, but I do not remember ever seeing a copy.  Superhero heroic fantasy. A History of the Afircan-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond (as told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid) (2004), Percival Everett & James Kincaid – That title (which is accurate).  It sounds like a satire of the racial politics of twenty years ago, but is really mostly a satire of publishing twenty years ago, and for both the jokes are either outdated or timeless; I am not sure.  It’s the funniest Evertt novel I have read so far.   SOMEHOW NOT FICTION No Picnic on Mount Kenya (1953), Felice Benuzzi –  An Italian prisoner of war in Kenya is so bored that he and some pals break out of prison, climb a mountain, and then break back into prison.  Benuzzi eventually writes this marvelous book about crazy people, and becomes an important Italian diplomat.   POETRY Pleasing the Diners (86-103), Martial, tr. R. L. Barth – Barth has been working on Martial for decades, his whole life as a poet.  These are the ones he thinks he got to work.  They do work.  The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (1959), James Merill The Boy in the Well and Other Poems (1995), Daniel Mark Epstein – I read a poem in a magazine and then went to see what my library had.  Smart formal allusive poems.   ARTY Research (2025), Charles Fort Library of the Paranormal (2025), Jackie Gleason – More art book esoterica. IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE A Sereia Verde (The Green Mermaid, 1941), Dinah Silveira de Queiroz – Short stories by an author famous in Brazil for at least a couple of stories (not these) that have had multiple film and television adaptations.  A bit melodramatic for my tastes.  The title novella is about a pair of cousins who, competing for the affections of their grandmother, develop a lifelong conflict.  Or perhaps the one just hates the other.  The title refers to a sublime moment when the protagonist learns that a dream-like childhood memory was actually in some sense real.  Best part of the book. Le square (1955), Marguerite Duras – Two characters on a park bench discuss the meaning of life.  Mostly dialogue.  Dry.  I find it dry. Les trésors de la mer Rouge (The Treasures of the Red Sea, 1971), Romain Gary – A tiny little travel book to Djibouti and then Yemen.  The Yemen trip is mostly filler, but at that point Djibouti was the last bit of colonial French Africa, governed by Dominique Ponchardier, among other unlikely things author of dozens of spy novels starring “The Gorilla,” so there is a lot for Gary to do.  He visits the future setting of Beau Travail (Denis, 1999), for example. Next month, meaning this month: more of the same.

NOT SHAKESPEARE Poems and a Defence of Ryme (1592-1605), Samuel Daniel – Author of the “Delia” sequence of fifty sonnets, a genuine sequence, with for example lines ending one poem and beginning the next.  For some reason Thomas Campion, a writer of the most beautiful songs, wrote an essay arguing that English poetry should exclude rhyme, inspiring Daniel’s great defense of rhyme.  Rhetorically great – the argument as such is something like rhyme sounds great and English poetry should sound like English no matter what the Romans did and isn’t poetry wonderful?  Simplifying a bit. The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (1604?), Elizabeth Cary – This one is over here. All Fools (1604?), George Chapman – And this one over there.  One more play coming up soon, John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, and I take a break for the summer.   FICTION Tales of Hulan River (1942), Xiao Hong – A year ago I read Xiao Hong’s earlier novel The Field of Life and Death (1935).  Both her novels are quite short, so they are published together in English, and I assumed I would scoot through both of them, but The Field was so relentlessly violent and miserable that I took a break.  This later, superior, novel is about the author’s childhood in a small town, presumably fictionalized.  The child’s point of view vitiates the grimness to a small degree, yet the penultimate part of the book is I think the most awful child abuse story I have ever read in a novel.  It is not the narrator who is abused, but the twelve-year-old child bride purchased by a neighbor family.  Terrible, terrible stuff. The Family Moskat (1948), I. B. Singer – And then for a month I read Singer’s great, Tolstoyan family saga about Jewish Warsaw, beginning in 1913 and ending the minute before the Germans set foot in Warsaw. How to describe my sense of dread as 1939 approached, and then as September approached.  I tried to imagine the emotions of the original audience, reading The Family Moskat as a serial in the Forward, just a couple of years after the catastrophe, after the total destruction of almost everything in the novel, but I do not think I succeeded.  It is a bleak, bleak novel, and what else could it be? Festival (2011), César Aira – So for a while I plan to read a lot of short, jolly nonsense, like another of Aira’s amusing explorations of the meaning of conceptual art, this time at a film festival. Papa Bach & Other Stories (2026), Doug Skinner – The line in the title of the post is from “The Market for Typos,” p. 114.  Doug is a Friend of the Blog, often featured here, at one point, for his valuable translations of Alphonse Allais.  This is the first time I read his short fiction, and, well, see that line I quoted.   POETRY Pigeons and Moles: Selected Writings (1945-72), Günter Eich – Damaged by Nazi ideas, striving for the mystic, a curious follow-up to Doctor Faustus. Things My Grandmother Said (2026), Amit Majmudar – Perhaps a bit goopy and too wisdom-driven for my tastes, but this must be, formally, in its range, and perhaps even in its wisdom, this is an outstanding collection.  Majmudar is also a radiologist.   ARTY Snapshots in Sound (2026), Tony Schwarz – More conceptual art.  Documents about an obsessive New York City tape recorderist.  The sample from his catalogue become a prose poem: Holdup witness Homage to New York Home Remedies Horse Sounds  (35) The Fate of the Animals (2022), Morgan Meis – Here Meis writes about, or takes leaps from, a Franz Marc painting.  One more book to go in his trilogy before I write something about them.   IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE L'homme révolté (The Rebel, 1951), Albert Camus – Too abstract for my tastes, but does Camus ever capture his moment, or perhaps the later rebels, Vonnegut’s hero ending Cat’s Cradle with a permanently frozen obscene gesture at the universe, are just cribbing from Camus.  Good literary criticism, anyway, even if the history has likely been superseded.  Go to Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty (2025), for example, for a better treatment of the Russian rebels. Momentos de aqui (Moments from, or of, Here, 2001), Ondjaki – An early book by the Angolan writer, more difficult than some of the later ones I read, more slippery.  A number of the stories for my tribute to a story-telling grandmother, so with Majmudar’s poems that was two grandmother-centered books this month.  The grandfathers dominated he Xiao Hong and Singer novels.  What does it mean? Next month: shorter, sillier books.

I have called Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle hacks, but Thomas Heywood was the greatest hack of the Age of Shakespeare, having “an entire hand or at least the main finger” in “two hundred and twenty” (!) plays (Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies, p. 38).  He is more like a television writer.  His most famous play, A Woman Killed by Kindness (1603), is like a television melodrama, a weepy. It even has a clear A plot and B plot, which only connect in the first and last scenes.  A gentleman in trouble – in prison – for debt tries to prostitute his sister.  Somehow this story works out for the best for everyone.  I suppose this is the B plot.  In the A plot, another gentleman catches his wife with another man but refrains from murdering them, instead killing her with kindness. FRANKFORD:  My words are register’d in Heaven already; With patience hear me.  I’ll not martyr thee, Nor mark thee for a strumpet, but with usage Of more humility torment thy soul, And kill thee, even with kindness.  (IV.4, 251) Against the title of the Penguin collection, Heywood’s play is domestic but not really a tragedy.  It is if anything a deliberate move from the tragic to the pathetic, and from a pagan to a Christian ethos.  It makes me wonder what a Puritan accommodation with the London theater might have looked like.  It is an ancestor of Samuel Richardson novels and Douglas Sirk movies. Only the last couple of acts, maybe just the last, are especially interesting, as the melodrama really ramps up to an absurd level. NICHOLAS:  I’ll say you wept, I’ll swear you made me sad. Why, how now eye?  What now, what’s here to do? I am gone, or I shall straight turn baby too.  (V.3, 262) Almost an instruction to the audience to burst into tears.  Although Heywood does include a surprising joke from this same servant at the end of the play, where the poor wife is about to die, and her husband says he wishes to die with her: FRANKFORD:  As freely from the low depth of my soul As my Redeemer hath forgiven His death, I pardon thee.  I will shed tears for thee, Pray with thee, and in mere pity Of they weak state, I’ll wish to die with thee. ALL: So do we all. NICHOLAS [aside]:  So will not I; I’ll sigh and sob, but, by my faith, not die.  (V.4, 268) Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies also includes Arden of Faversham and The Yorkshire Tragedy (1605-8, somewhere in there), both of which are domestic true crime plays featuring shocking murders.  Where Arden is about an old murder that for some reason was written up in a popular history book, The Yorkshire Tragedy is ripped from the headlines, and feels like it.  Simple, quick, short – less than half the length of a regular five act play.  Socially interesting but artistically null.  I suspect that a large number of plays like this have been lost, never published or published in throwaway editions. I wonder how much Heywood-style melodrama there was.  Is A Woman Killed by Kindness a rare beast, or were there dozens of these kinds of plays?  Was Heywood working from an established model, or was he an innovator, the hack who outdoes himself?  No way to know. The next play will be The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (written c. 1603, published 1613) by Elizabeth Cary.  More interested in the world of the theater, I have been avoiding closet dramas, but this one is a special case.  I know very little about it.  We’ll see.