It is snowing and cold, perfect weather for reading. This weekend’s lineup includes assignments in Beowulf, Dante’s Inferno, and Gogol’s Dead Souls. I hope to finish Updike’s Couples for a Library of America seminar with Adam Gopnik and to get a jump on the capacious reading list for Arnold Weinstein’s course at Roundtable, “Fictions of the Self in American Literature.” In the interstices of these studies and music practice, I’m making my way through Carol Tyler’s gorgeous meditation on the nature of grief, The Ephemerata. (Review here.)
Above is my image of Leonora Carrington’s “The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg),” seen at the Art Institute of Chicago on my most recent visit. Isn’t this something? Given the frantic activity at her feet, I suspect we should worry about her, but she seems calm in the face of the potential danger, almost maternal. I aspire to the tranquility of her averted gaze. This oversized protector of birds and eggs reminded me that I had not yet posted about my bird of the year.
As I’ve shared in years past, our family first encountered the idea in Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds. Lyanda Lynn Haupt writes:
There is a game birders play on New Year’s Day called “Bird of the Year.” The very first bird you see on the first day of the new year is your theme bird for the next 365 days. It might seem a curious custom, but people who watch birds regularly are always contriving ways to keep themselves interested. This is one of those ways. You are given the possibility of creating something extraordinary — a Year of the Osprey, Year of the Pileated Woodpecker, Year of the Trumpeter Swan. This game is an inspiration to place yourself in natural circumstances that will yield a heavenly bird, blessing your year, your perspective, your imagination, your spirit. New year, new bird.
We have been playing this game for so long that we now rework the rules a bit to avoid getting the same birds again and again. And again. This year, because my younger daughter and I knew we would be in New Bedford, we determined that our birds would be the first we espied on our walk to dinner after settling in our hotel. Naturally, we encountered gulls, but because we are not quite as quick with our water bird identification, we landed on the peregrine falcon that soared into view, disrupting a previously unseen flock of nearby pigeons.
In late December, I visited the Museum of Science and Industry with my younger daughter. Although I am not particularly invested in the world of Spider-Man, I do count several graphic novels and at least two comic book series as among my favorite books; more, I recently read Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay for a Roundtable course, so I was more than a little enthusiastic about seeing some of the original art that hung in “Marvel’s Spider-Man: Beyond Amazing.”
Above is my photo of the original final page of Issue 10 of The Amazing Spider-Man (1963), famous, apparently, for Jameson’s soliloquy about his hatred of the titular character.
The above is my image of “The Bewitched” (1932) by Mina Loy.
Over the weekend, we headed into Chicago to celebrate my older daughter’s birthday. Our plans were upended when the Museum Campus shut down in anticipation of the cold.
When we relocated to Chicago from Southern California in the early 1990s, my husband and I, both born and raised in the Northeast, were not at all surprised by the number of adults who darted through the city in shorts and flimsy footwear in the most cutting cold and wind, nor by students who walked to class in zippered hoodies (sometimes dragging a coat). It sorted with a type we knew well from childhood — like my father, who could never abide a winter hat, or the president of the Class of 1982, who remained sockless even in six inches of uncleared snow, or the scout leader who would only wear sandals, even in January. So, Chicago, I hardly knew you when I learned that the Shedd, Field, and Adler would not open on Friday — especially in light of the many school closings.
In the Modern Wing, “The Bewitched” put me in mind of Francesca and Paolo, perhaps because I am rereading the Inferno, this time with Samantha Rose Hill and Elias Crim. Among other pursuits this semester, I am also reading The Canterbury Tales with Marion Turner. In Friday’s meeting, she reminded us that the juxtaposition of the stories and, by extension, storytellers — for example, the Miller’s interruption when the Knight has concluded — is part of Chaucer’s rather subversive genius. Wait. A similar rubric undergirds the Inferno, right? (After all, wasn’t it one of Chaucer’s chief influences?) Doesn’t Dante describe the weaknesses of societies through the stories of characters’ sin and limitations, building toward a sort of political treatise or philosophy?
As always, I love the intersections — the serendipity, synchronicity, and synthesis.
After more than two weeks struggling with whatever virus grabbed me during the Moby Dick Marathon, I am feeling a bit better, if still more easily fatigued than I was pre-illness.
A little late posting this… The edition of The Time Machine features the cover design by a contestant on Work of Art, a program my daughters and I enjoyed when it aired more than fifteen years ago.
page 150 You can feel sorry for yourself and not whine about it. Future-you will thank now-you for not giving up when you feel like it. Suffer, but don’t add to your suffering with a whole performance. Write a timetable, stick to it. “Our routes,” I’d told the children when they were small. “Bath, books, bed.” Routine first, because routine is a way to get traction, if nothing else, when all else fails or has failed: handhold, toehold, step. “It’s a question of discipline… When you’ve finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet. I’d written that out for all my children, from The Little Prince.
That’s the great thing about parenting, one of them, all the stuff I wish I’d known; I could learn it and teach it at the same time.
page 211 Even ease takes discipline is the point; you have to participate in your own life, survive enthusiastically whatever happens, or you’ll never rise again. Discipline is borrowed backbone. I’d have been sunk, drunk, gone under without it.
Discipline is the only gift you can give your future self.
page 252 You see, in this way, a child dies — your child, mine — and you think, I thought, I’ll never care about anything else again. Not really. But unbidden, other things shoulder their way into your grief, saturated world; and coincidentally, you should shoulder your way out of it. Apples roll under seats, you drink, tea, and your bladder fills. You register injustice, you feel outrage, you find yourself at a border post looking for the bathroom. You’re ridiculous and human and insufficient, but you’re back in play. Relief filled my chest, blew it open like the steel bands on an oak casket that had been snapped.
Over the holiday, I finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Michael Chabon; 2000) for one Roundtable by The 92nd Street Y course and have nearly finished The Oppermanns (Lion Feuchtwanger; 1933) for another.
My reread of Moby-Dick (Herman Melville; 1851) with Samantha Rose Hill continues. As I mentioned, my daughter and I are registered to read in the Moby-Dick Readathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. This year, the event begins on January 3, exactly 185 years after Melville sailed from New Bedford on the Acushnet. We will return to Boston from the Readathon in time for my daughter to head to work and for me to attend (virtually) the first meeting of the latest iteration of UChicago Graham School’s course on the book.
A friend and I will continue making our way through E.M. Forster’s novels with Howards End (1910), January’s selection. We will also meet to discuss some short stories in December, beginning with the first in Simon Van Booy’s 2009 collection, Love Begins in Winter.
Music lessons resume this coming week; the holiday concert is the following week. With winter holidays and related prep and travel, it’s difficult to say what sort of progress I will make on the two remaining projects in the sidebar.
The morning has run off without me, but I will catch up to it soon enough. In the meantime, I’ve just finished some desk work and tomorrow’s chapters of Bleak House (Charles Dickens; 1853), which I’m reading with APS Together. Other reading this week includes The Dispossessed (Ursula K. LeGuin; 1974) for a short course with NYR Seminars; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Michael Chabon; 2000) and the Stanley Lombardo translation of The Iliad for courses with Roundtable by The 92nd Street Y; and Moby-Dick, this time with Samantha Rose Hill.
Between this week’s lesson and next, I will attend another performance class for adult music students, the focus of which will be music for a holiday concert, but the chief part of my daily practice comprises Marcel Moyse’s 24 Little Melodic Studies and On Sonority, Art, and Technique; Taffanel and Gaubert; and M.A. Reichert’s 7 Daily Exercises. I’m also working out the second movement of Bach’s Flute Sonata in E-flat major.
Before today’s practice, though, I must do a few here-comes-winter tasks in the yards and walk. We raked and walked in snow and temps in the low twenties earlier this week; it’s sunny and 49 as I type this; the daytime highs on Friday and Saturday will be in the sixties. What is that saying about Chicago(land) weather? If you don’t like it, then just wait fifteen minutes.
What have you been reading? Studying? Thinking about? Leave a comment; I would enjoy hearing from you. Looking ahead to 2026, I am wondering if a year of “reading at whim” might not be best — fewer classes and reading groups, more pulling down some of the volumes already on my shelves. I just reached into the shelves behind and drew from them, randomly: The Hummingbird (Sandro Veronesi; 2019/2020) and The Cold Millions (Jess Walters; 2020). Unread. I looked to the left and the first title I made out was The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart (Bill Bishop; 2009). Unread. The bookcase in front of me? Bitch: On the Female of the Species (Lucy Cooke; 2022). Unread. More than half of the books here are. As I’ve said, this once embarrassed me. Now it alternately enlivens and frightens me.
From early in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable:
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
Nerdishly 