NP: A spontaneous exhortation to read a new great book just published in the US. But available in Europe earlier.

[Mark Kohut]

looks like I lost the line in this THAT SAID THAT, LOL....(self-editing is
like cutting your own hair)

On Wed, Feb 2, 2022 at 8:01 AM Erik T. Burns <eburns at gmail.com> wrote:

> Koincidentally 2/2/22 is the 100th anniversary of the publication of
> *Ulysses*.
>
> To celebrate one hundred years since Sylvia Beach, publisher and
> bookseller, published James Joyce’s ULYSSES, Hay Festival is partnering the
> iconic bookshop Shakespeare and Company, Paris, on a global read-along of
> the complete text to be released as a free podcast between the 100th
> anniversary of the publication on 2 February 2022 and Bloomsday on 16 June
> 2022. https://www.hayfestival.com/ulysses100
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 2, 2022 at 12:35 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On The Books of Jacob on pub day, in which Ulysses plays a role
>>
>> That great modern, modernist, novel Ulysses created and rode a change of
>>
>> human awareness in a myriad of ways. A humanly felt single day in Dublin
>>
>> full of cooking smells and shitting and female desire and all kinds of
>> thoughts, high and low
>>
>> it contains wonders precisely but over-the-toply, newly, expressed.
>>
>> Every time I hear the kids at the Montessori school two doors away play
>> noisily in their playground,
>>
>> I think of a famous line. Those who know, know (and it loses almost
>> everything just being flatly repeated here)
>>
>> "Round about 1910 human nature changed", wrote Virginia Woolf,
>>
>> no fan of Ulysses but another artist who worked the change of
>> consciousness
>> in the culture and in her work fully.
>>
>> Art can do that. Art does that. (He says pretentiously. Swaggering
>> Swaggadocia, as a friend said of this streak. Or was it Staggering
>> Swaggadocia? )
>>
>> Ever since I learned of Ulysses and its publication, my fantasy life
>> contained the fantasy of being
>>
>> part of the publishing, the whole Surround, someway,  as it happened.
>> Stuart Gilbert's pony* for reading it was
>>
>> being written while Joyce was writing and publishing parts of it. There
>> was
>> a circle; there were
>>
>> thousands of waiting interested outsiders to the circle game.
>>
>> Today, Feb 2, it seems that another writer of genius (with her translator
>> as they are getting more recognition
>>
>> in recent years; as partial co-authors in some sense)  with, maybe, the
>> planning of her American publisher has had
>>
>> another masterpiece purposely published on Ulysses' birthday.  That rumor
>> is circulating; I haven't confirmed
>>
>> that that is why Feb 2 was chosen but….. The rumor has circumstantial
>> plausibility since this work, The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk,
>> Nobelist,
>> was published in English in England late last fall. I almost ordered one
>> from England but indie store concerns in this country took over. That no
>> longer matters, the book is out in this country.
>>
>> The opening teems with Joycean, Bosch-Bruegel-like life
>>
>> in a small village and its market in Poland in 1759: all the sights and
>> smells, all levels of society; themes and characters brought forth to
>> capture our attention thematically. With viscerality. "Nerves and endless
>> intrigues. Politics."
>>
>> Books themselves permeate the opening; the worlds they open; a lousy
>> translator scene makes one laugh ...there is this line amidst that talk:
>> "Perhaps it also has to do with the alphabet---that there isn't only one,
>> that there are lots of them; each produces its own type of
>> thinking.".....The Tower of Babel is invoked as are the Tigris and
>> Euphrates. Ms. Tokarczuk is fearlessly ambitious, yes?; who can't love
>> that? ....of a character, "people say ..she has the soul of a man".  But
>> another woman "doesn't see that supposed masculinity. All she sees is a
>> woman who likes to be in charge." A woman punctures the gender stereotype,
>> quietly fine, no?
>>
>> And for one of Ms Tokarczuk's grand important subjects, the meanings of
>> women (I know an earlier-published novel) there is THIS:...."the science
>> of
>> coaxing out bloodstains [women helping a woman during a heavy
>> menstruation]. For centuries it has been taught to future wives and
>> mothers. If a university for women ever came about, it would be the most
>> important subject. Childbirth, menstruation, war, fights, forays, pogroms,
>> raids---all of it sheds blood, ever at the ready, just beneath the skin."
>>
>> Another book as rich as life itself. "If books are not life, then what
>> is?"--as someone once wrote. (If you are on Facebook, like the Group page
>> entitled this for occasional miscellaneous publishing  and bookstore news)
>>
>> I urge, beseech you to read this book. I would like a secret society, a
>> growing circle, that can allude to it together, openly. Make time when you
>> have time to make. It will change your mind. You will live longer, old
>> neurons newly aglow. Gut bacteria improved. (But I won't ask)
>>
>> And, since you won't believe me, ex-salesman, please read Ron Charles's
>> wonderfully appreciative and over-the-top review below.
>>
>>
>> https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/02/01/olga-tokarczuk-books-of-jacob-review/
>>
>> *Also, a "pony" could be a cheat sheet or other material used in a test by
>> students
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> >
>> >
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>