My reading corner

 

My book family is an extended one, and ever-growing! I am always ready to adopt superior novelists; Jorge Amado (The War of the Saints) and Ben Okri (The Famished Road), Yangsze Choo (The Ghost Bride) and Ruth Ozeki (A Tale for the Time Being) are most welcome. There’s always room at my table for magical realists and masters of spy fiction and policiers; when I find we get on well together, I devour everything they have written at high speed, as I’ve done recently with Mick Herron and Matt Haig.
     This applies to writers in all genres. I have recently been on a Roberto Calasso binge, savoring everything from Ka and The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and La folie Baudelaire to Tieoplo Pink, Ardor and the (unfortunately disappointing) The Tablet of Destiny. Calasso's The Celestial Hunter is my favorite. Who can resist a book steeped in Ovid's metapmorphoses that opens with this?

In the time of the Great Raven even the invisible was visible. And it continually transformed itself. Animals, at that time, were not necessarily animals. They might happen to be animals, but sometimes they were humans, gods, lords of a species, demons, ancestors. And humans weren’t necessarily humans but could also be the transient form of something else. There were no tricks for recognizing those that appeared. They had to be already known, as one knows a friend or an adversary. Everything, from spiders to the dead, occurred within a single flow of forms. It was the realm of metamorphosis.

     Some members of my book family hold court for a time, then retire into a quiet space. In the late 1980s, when my dreams led me into the world of the Iroquois in an earlier time, my intimate clan, over many months, included the 73 volumes of the Jesuit Relations, an extraordinary collection of the reports of blackrobe missionaries in New France and New York in the seventeenth century. Since a house move they are in storage but I know they are plotting to get back in my line of sight.
     I am a lazy linguist, but I like it when members of our book family speak their own languages because (as the Emperor Charles V said) to know another language is to live a second life. I am currently reading the Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys' book on his pioneering experiments in lucid dreaming in his original language; I read Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger (1867) previously in a clumsy and incomplete translation.
      My current reading includes a quite wonderful book by Lynn Struve on the history of dreaming and dream sharing at the end of the Ming dynasty in China, an age of anxiety that was prime time for dream writers. If I were asked - as customs officers used to ask - if this is for business or pleasure, I would say "both, but for pleasure first."     
      Struve writes in The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World: "Does it matter what people of the remote past thought about their dreams? It certainly should matter to those who study intellectual-cultural history, primarily because dream-writing in general brings us closer than any other kind of writing to the subjective consciousness of the highly literate, who collectively set the major trends of their respective civilizations....Dream-writings can indirectly contribute to a history of consciousness, not in the sense of what people were conscious of over time (such as class identity) but in the sense of what people thought consciousness was and how they experienced it." 
     Elders in my book family, often consulted, include William James, C.G.Jung, Emerson, Robert Graves, C.S. Lewis, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Thomas Mann, Henry Corbin. Marija Gimbutas, the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess, has a place of honor in our book family, and I often call on Jane Roberts and her multidimensional mentor Seth. Every three or four years I ask Joan Grant to tell me again (in Winged Pharaoh) about how Egypt dreamed, and I sit down again with Viktor Frankl, in a quiet corner, so he can remind me (through Man’s Search for Meaning) of how the imagination can get us through the most hellish conditions. I’ll smoke a cigar with Mark Twain, who reminds me that we must not approach anything serious without bringing a sense of humor, or have nightcap with Graham Greene, who is always good for tips on the writer’s trade and how to turn memories and dreams into plot and character. 
    When the poets speak, we need to isten, especially when the poet is W.B. Yeats, who once declaimed to me, “What better guide/to the Other Side/ than a poet?” I open Rumi or Homer - or whatever book is closest to my hand -for daily bibliomancy. I walk with Baudelaire whispering in my ear that the world is a forest of living symbols that are looking at us. I go back again and again to the Odyssey and to Dante’s Divine Comedy. 

Per tornar altra volta
La dov’ io son

So I may return again
To where I am

 

Literary yeast and the mating of books

Reading, even just handling, lots of books puts literary yeast in the air. It means, as anyone who bakes knows, that good things tend to rise faster. If you want to get a book of your own in the oven, make sure you have literary yeast.
     I don't have a reading plan. I am a non-linear reader, jumping from one thing to another, easily driven or distracted by shelf elves, ever ready to take on reading and research assignments suggested by dreams and the play of synchronicity. I have at least twenty books on the go at any given time. I read novels from beginning to end, generally at high speed, but will open anything else where I please and read forwards and back. I am pleased that Montaigne approached reading the same way. "I leaf through one book, now another," he wrote, "without order and without plan, by disconnected fragments." Yet as his biographer Sarah Bakewell informs us, "he took up books as if they were people and welcomed them into his family."   
     Family, yes. And a huge one. This helps to account for the fact that I welcome into my home, on average, at least three new books a day, to mingle with the thousands already there. My books form a very lively society, and their mixer parties are remarkable. Right now, for example, on my desk, a trio of goddesses (books on the Sumerian goddess Inanna) are getting to know Victorian ghost hunters (W.T. Stead, F.W.H. Myers), and some mysterious Romanians  with French accents (in Mircea Eliade's fiction, which I am reading in French). Fairies loosed from several anthologies are dazzling a cohort of neuroscientists, physicists and anthropologists from a mountain of academic works.
     When I'm not looking, the goddesses give the Bull (from Michael Rice's The Power of the Bull) a fine gallop around my study. Jung or Yeats, Robert Graves or Arthur Koestler, swoop down from time to time, from eyries above my desk, William Blake arises, flourishing drawings that he made for Dante's Divine Comedy. Philip K. Dick mutters, "The Empire never ended" and looks for something strong to drink.
    I want to be at these parties for longer than the night allows. I always want another four hours with my books before the sun comes up, winter or summer.
    At some point, I have to leave the books to carry on without me, while I go to bed or head off to an airport. Later there is evidence that carry on they did. The disarray around my desk or reading corner suggests that the Victorian ghost hunters staged a seance, or that the goddesses scared the pants off a neuroscientist. Philip K. Dick has crashed and lies sprawling face down on the floor. There is something in the air that indicates that the strange magician Andronic from Eliade's novella went on making magical passes to raise the serpent. I hear the echo of a lecture I would like to give on how dreaming is the key to understanding quantum reality on a human scale.

     I am pretty sure these nightly book parties turn into orgies when I have gone to bed. The literary sex that goes on may be wild but I think it is also sacred, the hieros gamos of a dozen or a hundred minds slipping in and out of their covers. The proof will come if new books are born, through me, with the DNA of many, many literary ancestors and a character that is all their own, When the mating of books is as wild and free as it is around me, around the clock, I am quite sure of this: What happens in Bookland won't stay in Bookland.

Photo: I took this one in Shakespeare & Co in Paris. I was going to photograph the books on my desk this morning, but they made it clear that some things do need to stay in Bookland.

A book-lover in dreams as well

One of the games I play with dreams is to compare the character and behavior of the dream self with that of the waking self. In at least one respect, I find that my dream and waking personalities are identical; they are both passionate book-lovers.
     I am forever handling, appreciating and reading books in my dreams. Sometimes these are books I have not yet written, and when I am fortunate I am able to bring back a few paragraphs I can turn into a draft. More often, I am inspecting and reading books from a universal library, of authors I know well and those I have not yet discovered in regular life. To those dream researchers who claim (as several have done) that it is not possible to read in dreams and hold a clear impression of text, I say: look again. Some of us do it nightly.
    In one of my dreams last night, I pulled a selection of books from my shelves that included Tolkien's The Silmarillion and several of Michael Grant's histories of Rome. I became tremendously excited by what I re-discovered in these books, especially by Grant's limpid overview of the rise and fall of the Roman empire, and its myths and customs. I resolved, in the dream, to seek out more. I learned that there is a sequel or successor to The Silmarillion I had not yet read, and of course there is always more of Michael Grant to read; this British classicist was immensely prolific, to the chagrin of the plodding pedants in his field.
    I don't know what triggered my dream self's book selections overnight, though I am wondering now whether he was influenced in part by my late-night reading, an excellent historical mystery by Joseph Kanon (Istanbul Passage) set in Turkey right after World War II. Michael Grant was fluent in Turkish, and was in Turkey for part of World War II, and was no doubt involved in secret operations.
    I want simply to note the sheer enjoyment of my dream self as he perused his books. As I stirred into waking consciousness in the golden light of early morning, filtered by the drapes, I stayed with him, in his dream library, relishing this gentle literary recreation.
    Oh yes. I'll see if there is more of Tolkien, published after The Silmarillion (a posthumous collection of his mythopoeic works edited by his son Christopher) that I need to explore; and I have already placed some of Michael Grant's books about Rome at my left hand on my desk. Dreams set assignments.

Like you need another book

"I leaf through one book, now another," wrote Montaigne, "without order and without plan, by disconnected fragments." Yet as his biographer notes, "he took up books as if they were people and welcomed them into his family."
   I treat books in both these ways, and notice - sometimes thanks to the play of the shelf elf - that in hopping from one to another what may at first appear to be "disconnected fragments" weave a rich tapestry of meaning. One of the books I am leafing through now is Sarah Bakewell's How to Live, or, a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. Veryclever to approach the great essayist not in a continuous narrative but in a score of themed biographical essays. I think he would approve.
    I confess that book-hopping doesn't work so well when it comes to reading novels. Most of them ask to be read one page after another; I find that it's easy to lose the thread and scramble the characters if I leave a novel for too long to pursue other bookish temptations. So I generally have no more than three novels on the burner at once. Right now these are Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (on my list because of a recent dream), Jonathan Carroll's The Ghost in Love (picked because I wanted to see where he went after Bones of the Moon, an interesting account of a woman who travels to a dream world that begins to spill over into her regular life) and Aldous Huxley's last novel Island in which, in vivid contrast to Brave New World, he builds a utopia (albeit a threatened one), rather than a dystopia, on an island reminiscent of Bali.
    Nonfiction? I am hopping between the Montaigne book, Betty de Shong Meador's translations of the temple hymns of Enheduanna (Princess, Priestess, Poet), Trevor Hamilton's recent scholarly biography of F.W.H. Myers, the great Victorian ghost-hunter (Immortal Longings), David Abram’s Becoming Animal: An Earthy Cosmology,  Kathleen Raine's The Inner Journey of the Poet, Max Freedom Long’s quirky but wonderful The Secret Science Behind Miracles (revisited in preparation for my Hawaiian adventure next week), Mitch Horowitz's entertaining and eye-opening history of Occult America, the latest issues of Poets & Writers and History and Anthropology and...I'll leave it there, without mentioning the tall stacks related to current research, especially into Goddess traditions, Paleolithic cave art and W.B.Yeats' poetic and mythic quest for reality.
    More than once, a mailman or a UPS carrier has met me at my door with a fresh stack of books that I ordered online and quipped, "Like you need another book." To which the only answer is: Yes, I always do. I am not a Kindle person, and not much of a library person either, since I need my books where I can find them at 4:00 a.m. I buy a lot of books online, but my first call is always to my favorite independents, especially a wonderful used bookshop that is just down the street. This is a dangerous situation, since the stock of that bookshop is constantly migrating to my house. I make the newcomers welcome; they are family, even if - in such an enormous family - I can give them only a few minutes at a time.

In praise of used bookstores

I confess: I am passionately addicted to used bookstores. I am a reluctant shopper under most circumstances, but I'll pull your arm out of its socket if you try to restrain me from going inside a store that offers old books. I find that the benign shelf elf that Arthur Koestler dubbed the Library Angel comes instantly into play when I enter a used bookstore, placing volumes I wasn't looking for - but fulfill a dream, or set the right course for new exploration - exactly where I can't miss them.

On vacation in the Champlain Islands in Vermont this week, I just had to make a run down to Burlington (on a wild, windy day when swimming conditions in the lake weren't optimal) to one of my regional favorites, The Crow. I left with only nine new/old books, which is very moderate for me. One of them was The Death of Freud, a moving study of Freud's last two years that includes an indelible account of the Gestapo calling at the great psychiatrist's apartment on Bergasse ("Hill Street") in Vienna in the immediate aftermath of the Anschluss, Hitler's annexation of Austria in March, 1938. Up to this moment - when the Nazis took his daughter Anna away for questioning - Freud did not appear to grasp that he would need to leave Vienna. Yet he told Arthur Koestler afterward, in the relative safety of London, that the spilling over of the Nazi nightmare from the darkest basements of the unconscious into the world was not surprising but "inevitable".

I'm hesitant to make a list of my favorite used bookshops, because memory is fallible, and I know I'll leave out some of the best. But I'll make a start here, confining myself (for now) to the United States, and will welcome additional suggestions from book-lovers who are following this blog:

Copperfields in Sebastopol, California (with companion new and old bookstores)

Powell's in Portland, Oregon (though I confess the "city of books" downtown scares me in its immensity; I prefer the more human-scaled Powell's on Hawthorne, where I frequently give readings and book-signings)

Twice-Sold-Tales in Seattle (especially the branch at the foot of Queen Anne Hill, where a well-fed cat is often dozing by the cash register)

Easton's in Mount Vernon, Washington (great selection of literature, history, anthropology, mythology)

The Librarium in East Chatham, New York (full of mythic literature)

G.J. Askins in New Lebanon, New York (where I acquired full sets of Conrad, The Golden Bough and - wonder of wonders - the 73 volumes of the Jesuit Relations, containing the reports of blackrobe missionaries from the time of first contact with Northeast Indians)

Dove & Hudson in Albany, New York (0ne of my current "magic bookshops", where I expect the shelf elves to be lively)

The Book Barn in Latham, New York (terrific values, best for popular titles but also a place for discovering the unexpected)

The Strand in New York City (though I am sometimes disturbed that the recipients of review copies recycle them here without seeming to draw breath).

Yellow House Books in Great Barrington, Massachusetts (great for psychology, mythology and children's books)

Barely Used Books in Mystic, Connecticut (shelf elves very active, during my visits, producing - for example - a book of bawdy Scottish ballads at the precise moment I was humming "Oh you take the high road/and I'll take the low road..")

The Frugal Muse in Madison, Wisconsin (I would give it first prize for the best bookstore name that has come to my attention except that I have to award that to Malaprops in Asheville, NC, one of the truly great independents)

To be continued...