hiatus not quietus

It's about time I reported in, prompted by the immanent snarkaeologist Mahendra Singh (whose characterization of me as occluded is rather high-flown, as I have not yet lost contact with the ground; and a tip of the copper-sieved-bateau without my capsize? but I quibble). But while he butchers Carrollian maths, I've been synchronistically having a go at a number of more improbable maths (degaussed randomness, order statistics, entropy optimization — bring in da noise, bring in da functional analysis! — also, delving more deeply into Cosma Shalizi's generously provided guidance, which I've been following for over a decade, sup[thx]) intent upon financial application (recent readings in this area: Bruner/Carr's The Panic of 1907 [speaking of the synchronistical, my parallel line of enquiry just preceded its release and the bicentennial historical reenactment], Donald MacKenzie's An Engine Not a Camera [zoom!], and Mandelbrot/Hudson's The (Mis)behavior of Markets, in which the new ingredient is Mr. Market's Bergsonian time — but hey, timing is the secret to both comedy and finance, though volatility changes meaning — anyway, all well worth the time invested), complemented by philosophical meanderings (Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Keefe & Smith's Vagueness: A Reader). Navigating this parenthetical thicket left little time for novels (and less for the internets), but family vacation last month afforded a break (in reading and merit order: van Gulik's The Phantom of the Temple [do I detect a touch of Roussel?], Yourcenar's Alexis [precociously steeped in melancholy], Aira's Ghosts [an episode in the afterlife of an architectural site], and Abish's How German Is It [primed by the short story "The English Garden" from In the Future Perfect]); another break from the maths and philosophy, Roubaud's The Loop, turned out to be a convolution of both with memory, excellent in its own right and prompting me to finally embark on À la recherche du temps perdu — and to ponder larger matters, like cosmology's missing antimatter (404 [And here time forked.]*) — what if the first broken symmetry was Time, at the instant of the Big Bang? and antimatter preferred the arrow pointing the other way? apparently consistent with Loop Quantum Gravity, and could have driven anomolies of inflation — but don't look back, something may be receding from you ...

add: 3QD reminds that past performance is functionally related to future returns.

*... The screen / In its blank broth evolved a lifelike blur, / And music welled.

Quoth nnyhaven Jill Lepore

This week's New Yorker includes a bicentennial consideration of Edgar A. Poe which pulls together many strands but leaves a few loose ends. As it happens, the opening conceit, along with the confluence over at The Book Bench of decoding Poe and Shakespeare authorship pegs what I was up to last year in "To Assume a Pleasing Shape" (also here in different format):
"[The Philosophy of Composition] is as much a contrivance as the poem itself. Here is a beautiful poem; it does everything a poem should do, is everything a poem should be. And here is a clever essay about the writing of a beautiful poem. Top that."
I tried (but constrained by remaining factual at least in detail).

But Ms. Lepore misses a trick or two:
"If Dupin sounds uncannily familiar, that’s because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, like every other author of detective fiction, not to mention the creators of a thousand TV crime shows, is incalculably in Poe’s debt. [...] All detective stories and police procedurals begin with the intellectually imperious C. Auguste Dupin: methodical, eccentric, calculating—and insulting. We, mere readers, are so many Watsons, Hastingses, and Goodwins. Poe is the only Holmes." Or, earlier on, You love Poe or you don’t, but, either way, Poe doesn’t love you. A writer more condescending to more adoring readers would be hard to find."
Not so, as I've indicated in my reading of "The Purloined Letter": Poe drops clues for the careful reader. Also, buried in comments hereabouts, I've noted many other strands of influence: Nabokov (perhaps even forthcoming?), Borges, Pynchon; OuLiPo, nouveau roman, and surrealism via Roussel via Verne; WBYeats (whose poems similarly exceeded technical requirements, though one of these days I'll have to dig up a parody starting "Hear the whisp'ring of the belles/Southern belles!"); even Eastern Europe & Russia (most markedly Kafka & Dusty, but Bulgakov has a similar tone -- how much Poe how much Gogol how much ETAHoffman I dunno).

Another lost opportunity, in a word, is 'detective'. MobyLives notes that "Poe himself seemed to realize he’d created a genre, too, and would write two more stories featuring Dupin — The Mystery of Marie Roget, and The Purloined Letter. One thing he can’t take credit for, though, is invention of the word 'detective.' There was no such word at the time he wrote the story. Its first appearance seems to have been around 1850 — two years after Poe’s death."
Back to Ms. Lepore:
"In February [1842], Poe wrote an unfavorable review of Dickens’s 'Barnaby Rudge,' a novel about a village idiot and his talking raven that had been published, serially, in The New-Yorker. The next month, Poe met Dickens, who was on his American tour (during which Dickens coined the phrase 'the almighty dollar')."
It happens that the OED's first cite of the noun 'detective' is in Dickens' Household Words (1850), and the first literary usage is in Bleak House (1852). And, the opening words of "The Philosophy of Composition"? 'CHARLES DICKENS, in a note now lying before me, alluding to an examination I once made of the mechanism of 'Barnaby Rudge,' says- "By the way, are you aware that Godwin wrote his 'Caleb Williams' backwards? He first involved his hero in a web of difficulties, forming the second volume, and then, for the first, cast about him for some mode of accounting for what had been done.'"
(addendum 22.4 prompted by MS raising the perennial question, and working backwards: Dickens' writing desk and reupholstered pet raven Grip share the Rare Books room of the Philly Free Library with the only copy of the poem in Poe's hand and a cheesy augmented bust of Pallas. Draw your own conclusions.)

For all that, the New Yorker piece is well worth the time, and occasioned the connecting of several bits I've put together on this here blog.

PS recent reading: Attila Bartis' Tranquility and Walter Abish's In the Future Perfect, the opening story of which ("The English Garden") presages How German Is It ...

diversionary tactics

Andrei Codrescu has performed a signal service in providing The Posthuman Dada Guide: Lenin & Tzara Play Chess (for those in NYC, events next week here), which, arbitrarily alphabetized, pulls together strands of artistic, literary and political history into a cogent gallimaufry of dada: The PhD Guide could in itself be core reading for a collage course, prompting me to pull from the shelf the MoMA Dada catalogue (despite his disdain), Tom Stoppard's Travesties (a curious frame for some excellent set pieces) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Lenin in Zurich (last stop before Finland Station, in a sealed car detached from The Red Wheel), before hurrying to complete Thomas Nashe's Lenten Stuff in season (this last, in similar spirit, being in praise of the red herring). In appreciation, I will cavil at the missed opportunities, foremost being in not exploiting the fact that the two sports most revered in dada, chess and boxing, have merged in chessboxing; also, the omission of Sophie Taeuber in discussion of puppets (or, for that matter, of the Communist conception of their usefulness) or other mannequinistic manifestations; and of the grandmasterly virtual mechanization of chess. I'll give him a pass on sliding over the online presence of Julia Butterfly, and on space limitations preventing further explication of the language crystal, but my bemusement at the extra b Codrescu inserts in kibitz, (obscuring separate etymologies with kibbutz; in chess, an annoying onlooker giving unsolicited and often misleading advice, which often turns out to be correct, thus the chess proverb The kibitzer sees all: I've long listed my occupation, here and elsewhere, as itinerant kibitzer), was tempered when off to the OED I went, to find that the word derives from Yiddish (which I knew) from German (as I would have guessed) kiebitzen, 'to flutter over card-players', in turn from kiebitz, 'lapwing', which Graves elucidated in The White Goddess:
The Greeks called the lapwing polyplagtos, 'luring on deceitfully', and had a proverbial phrase 'more beseechful than a lapwing' which they used for artful beggars. In Wales as a boy I learned to respect the lapwing for the wonderful way in which she camouflages and conceals her eggs in an open field from any casual passer-by. At first I was fooled every time by her agonized peewit, peewit, screamed from a contrary direction to the one in which her eggs lay, and sometimes when she realized I was a nest-robber, she would flap about along the ground, pretending to have a broken wing and inviting capture. But as soon as I had found one nest I could find many. The lapwing's poetic meaning is 'Disguise the Secret' and it is her extraordinary discretion which gives her claim to sanctity. According to the Koran she was the repository of King Solomon's secrets and the most intelligent of the flock of prophetic birds that attended him.
There, I'm glad that's out in the open ... (more serendipity, the very next word in OED is kiblah, the site one faces to address the Deity, the first non-Mohammedean cite being in Stonehenge ...)

In response to Scientific American's Laughing Matters, I'll reprise my older (pre-blogging) commentary:
They say laughter is the best medicine. Now science has proved that laughing is good exercise! You know what I have to say to that? HA! That’s right, HA! I’ll bet those scientists think they’re pretty funny. I can just see them, snickering in their white labcoats: “Hey, doc! How about a sports club called ‘The Laughing Fit’?” You can believe them if you want to, but I was born a skeptic, and I’ll die a skeptic. If I die.

memory playing tricks

Thursday evening, as part of the program for Oulipo in NY, Jacques Roubaud gave a reading from the translation of The Loop, branch 2 of 6 of his 20-year memoiric [re]construction with interpolations and bifurcations, under the constraints of pre-dawn composition, truthfulness of the moment, and non-revision. Here he stuck to the main story, with two excerpts (the second the last, §50; the opening, §1, is excerpted at The Brooklyn Rail, with interpolation), before commenting on the depredations of age (command of both memory and English, in the latter case not knowing where the stress falls) and taking questions from the shop-packing audience. I asked how Memory and History play off against one another from the perspective of the Present, to which he responded that he had left behind such Theoretical Concerns in abandoning the Project (first described in the first branch, Destruction) for more particular, personal recounting. He also commented upon how the first branch had been received, readers seeking to console him for it well afterwards, how the choice of Destruction for an ENS examination was subverted by a bomb scare, and the more particular reader response when what he had recalled was at variance with the facts of the matter: To get a better sense, his translator, Jeff Fort, had travelled to the childhood home described in The Loop, only to find that he'd gotten the wrong house (and that the right one had been altered beyond recognition). Roubaud remains modest about his accomplishments, not just in his novels, but also in mathematics, poetry, and scholarship ("I just read things"), but reserves his intention in putting his prose forward. (My short take on the first branch here, the casebook thereon since moved here.)

Idlewild Books, the venue for this reading, offers about 50-50 travel guides and associated literature (current and classic); I took the opportunity to pick up both The Loop (kindly signed at my request) and Best-Translated-Bookwinner Tranquility by Attila Bartis, who will be reading there next week (I don't know that I'll be able to make it; I did not attend Wednesday's New School Oulipo panel discussion, but fortunately Andrew Hultkrans did; oh, and cf AGNI). Serendipitously, my reading for the train ride to the city was Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller. (Other March reading: Robert Graves' The White Goddess and Collected Poems ['61] [cf WLF], Robert Coover's Pricksongs & Descants, and Raymond Queneau's Eyeseas [Les Zioux] [trans Hurezanu & Kessler], selected poetry '21-'43.)

reading behind the lines

It seems like everybody loves a backstory. This week's New Yorker has Updike on Cheever (and over at the NYTimes blogs Cavett on both on Cavett) and DTMax on DFWallace; the latter, in the entanglement of life and style, reminds of Clive James on F.Scott Fitzgerald in Cultural Amnesia, which prompted me to read The Crack-Up, Edmund Wilson's compilation of FSF's essays, notebook fragments, and letters from the descent (a history in which the first act was farce, the second tragedy); Clive concludes, "... there is a principle that can't be taught in creative writing class and is hard enough to teach in the regular English faculty, but it's worth a try: his disaster robbed us of more books as wonderful as The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, but we wouldn't have those if he hadn't been like that. Fitzgerald's prose style can be called ravishing because it brings anguish with its enchantment. He always wrote that way, even when, by his own later standards, he could as yet hardly write at all. He could still write that way when death was at his shoulder. He wrote that way because he was that way: the style was the man." Nonetheless, I found The Crack-Up but a footnote on the man, placing him more among his peers than among his words. Not that there aren't gems among the essays and fragments ("A girl who could send tear-stained telegrams" will be updated by e-mail). Another thought: will The Pale King be DFW's The Last Tycoon?

Another writer's early self-chronicle, Heinrich Heine's Travel Pictures (trans Peter Wortsman) was wonderfully wicked, traversing the Harz Mountains, the North Sea and Lucca only incidentally for more incisive observations. Heine was my first exposure to lyric poetry (courtesy of Untermeyer's translation in Heritage Press, as part of my extracurricular primary education) so it was surprising to me that the lyric note could be so well maintained against high irony.

Which leads me to poetry I'd almost forgotten was on the shelf, Virginia Hamilton Adair's Ants on the Melon: A Collection of Poems; Alice Quinn had put her on the radar, but it took a reminder from Oliver Sacks in TED Q&A to reopen my eyes:

There was a fine poet called Virginia Adair.
She published a lot as a young woman
But then became a teacher of English.

But then she lost her vision
And started hallucinating in her 80s
And this started up her poetic voice again.

And she published her first book of poems
When she was 83. So she was able to use
Her Charles Bonnet hallucinations
Very creatively—

Quite a lot of her poems are about
The amazing cascade of images
Which would rush through her mind.

Quite a lot of her poems aren't, and her poetic voice was never stilled, it was just that publication was by the by. The selection reflects a life long pondered and wondered at, the writing technically sure, simple and direct, a sense of which can be bracketed by an early and a late poem, the latter the last of the book (in the section "Make Light of Darkness"), both of which appeared in the NYTimes, though in separate articles:

Railway Tempo

Now vanish, nameless village, tossed
Into the oblivion of our wake.

Swiftly, the high road that we crossed
And blotted out, the lake, the thickets,
And the wide meadow, for our sake
—We being arbiters of time
Whose end is punched on one-way tickets—
These idle images must recede
Beyond our sphere of plush and grime.

For we, the here and now, command
Collapse to follow our fierce speed,
And only the final town to stand.

Take My Hand, Anna K.

My mother wept in church, Episcopalian;
Over her far-off town the sun shone bright.
Her New York City child, I felt an alien.
Coming to a crossing the train cried in the night.

My only home is in the poems I write
Who now am exiled by my failing sight.
Words vanish like a flock of birds in flight.
Coming to a crossing the train cries in the night.

Here end my tracks of passion, reason, rhyme
Before the terminal rush and roar of light,
All go together under the wheels of Time.
Coming to a crossing the train cries in the night.

It is in the writing that the writer's life resides, but it's the backstory that seems to bring visitors in train.

Herding chats: assorted notes from all over

Reading is a solitary social activity. But that doesn't mean I don't get out a bit.

Maybe it's an ex-programmer glitch on my part, but I always have an Obi-Wan problem with the year N award for the best being for year N-1. Anyway, as I reported at WLF, last night the inaugural Best Translated Book Winners were announced at Melville House's bookstore in DUMBO. Chad Post opened the proceedings at 8PM, introducing Francisco Goldman, who, after prefactory remarks on the art of translation, announced the winners, first in poetry then in prose (I mean the winners not the presentation). Many worthy books to have to choose among, with Desnos, Castellanos Moya and Bolaño's 2666 among those honorably mentioned (see finalists in poetry and prose; the latter also lists the panelists, one of whom I'd the good fortune to know from Gotham Book days; of the panelists, only Scott Esposito was unable to attend). Attendence was large, the attendees largely in the biz in some aspect, but not unwelcoming to amateurs like myself; it was good to put faces to names, and to celebrate the attention that translations are receiving across a broad spectrum of interest. Nonetheless, thinking global it's imperative to act local: book-providers need more individual support as grants are curtailed by straitened finances (cf next graf). I also procured a copy of one of the finalists, Raymond Queneau's EyeSeas, as well as Heinrich Heine's Travel Pictures (as previously noted) and Gilbert Adair's The Death of the Author ... and thanks to ubuweb downloaded Helen R. Lane's translation of Claude Simon's Properties of Several Geometric and Non-Geometric Figures.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a different sort of wordsmith confab at the Paley Center in Midtown, co-hosted by the Financial Times' blog ftalphaville, on translating dire numbers into words, with an audience predominantly of journalists, bloggers, and relational publicists; it happened that I was alone among the attendees in having previously worked with both of the guest presenters (same department, different times), Rob Passarella (who used to blog but now tweets) and Rick Bookstaber, both of whom had well-informed takes in their respective areas of expertise (in Rick's case more financial than blogging risk, but his was more a descrial of the factoid culture than of the medium).

Back to literary matter(s): I dropped a note to the Nabokov listserv on Clancy Martin's LRB diary entry; I'd like to see Senderovich & Shvarts extend their cross-sectional approach [pdf] on shop-windows as commercial balagan in Nabokov's writings.

Recent reading starts with musical offerings:
Manuel Puig, Heartbreak Tango (Suzanne Jill Levine) Who leads the dance, and with whom? Made up of many monologues, interior to epistolatory to forensic, with the music and the movies in the background.
Dumitru Tsepenaug, Vain Art of the Fugue (Patrick Camiller): Incidental variations on a theme, not unlike but not at all like Queneau's Exercises in Style, like a fish needs a bicycle, narration by path integral:
"As you can see, madam, words are getting staler and staler—you can't do much with them at all." The lady smiled with embarrassment. "And the reason is that idiots have used them like so many wheelbarrows, you know what I mean? They've loaded them up with all kinds of idiotic confessions, with all these ideas, each more stupid than the last—and if not stupid, then certainly destructive—in short, with what people call messages.
cf The Believer, complete's-review, TQC; an interview.
Walter Abish, Minds Meet: Unexpectedly this fit in with the Tsepenaug I just read. Taken individually the stories are sort of not quite Don Barthelme, but combination raises the collection, perhaps, including epigraph, as 13 ways of looking at a blank sheet of paper. cf on Abish, revisited, 5 yrs ago at the NYer; the current issue has Menand revisiting Barthelme, alas reg $ubs only, but there is audio for everyone.
Virginia Woolf, Orlando: I didn't think she had it in him. OK, too glib, but it struck me as too flash, oversumptuous, less profound (esp in style and subtlety) than her other writings of this period. Letting out all the stops let something else out, but then approaches to gender issues were constrained by the times, had to be fantastic, and in turn everything is overdone (she knows she's overdoing and lets you know she does), authorial intrusions included, even what is left unsaid is unsaid loudly (tho often to great comedic effect). For all that, behind Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and The Waves.

Odds & ends

Scott confirms that I tuned in to the right wavelength in the previous post.

Speaking of ephemeral archives, it appears that the NYTimes BookForum has permanently rendered its service temporarily unavailable, even read-only, even barring linkfixes per alumni chatroom. Having been on Usenet's rec.arts.books pre-Sempitember and still being able to follow threads from wayback then, I just don't get it, or should I say they don't. (But with BookWorld being folded into the WashPost, the NYT Book Review is just about the only one left stand-alone.) Meanwhile, NYTBF alumnae, those I know of who have moved on to actively blogging, in traditional reverse chronological order:
Fragmentary Evidence: Oakland ramblings
Snarke: Pugetopulent poetics
Spinozablue: Art & Lit from all over
Jabel: stratified LAer atop the cape and upstate
Diario del hablante lirico: Chilean imagings
Rodney Welch: critical view (books, music, film) from Columbia SC

Moving on, my local used bookmonger is closing his doors for good (and for ill); I've relieved him of 40+ titles at half off this past month (including those asterisked below). So, on to January reader's report, shamelessly lifted from my WLF posts:
Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone linked to longish commentary at WLF in post before last.
Kenneth Rexroth, Love and the Turning Year: One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese, personal interpretations, split evenly between the Six Dynasties and T'ang and Sung, with brief biographical notes on the 60 poets represented. But beyond the usual problems of translation, typography can never adequately reflect calligraphy.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night* was just as good as expected, the intricate psychological observations pared down to the most elegant expression, even though the supporting structure fell apart as the main character did.
Joseph Roth, The Emperor's Tomb (John Hoare) disappointed, despite a similar acuteness, perhaps because it was confined to one character's viewpoint.
Claude Simon, The Georgics (Beryl & John Fletcher) A high degree of difficulty, interleaving or should I say interweaving stories, the didactic point being that history teaches us that we can learn nothing from history (the point being made nonchronologically). The minor cavil is that the homage to Orwell (yes that's as ironic as the title's allusion to Virgil) is not really integral to the tapestry (but it's not superfluous, nor tacked on). I haven't yet been disappointed by Simon, having first stumbled on The Trolley (aka The Tramway) a copula years ago and The Flanders Road last year; now I'm on the look-out for Acacia. cf Reading Claude Simon.
Cristina Peri Rossi, The Ship of Fools (Psiche Hughes) re-engendering the world, strong in concept and excellent in parts but uneven; YMMV.
Tim Krabbé, The Rider (Sam Garrett) should be read in one sitting; see complete's-review.
Victor Pelevin, The Helmet of Horror (Andrew Bromfield) a chatroom should not mean, but be. (complete's-review)
Kurt Tucholsky, Castle Gripsholm (Michael Hofmann) too Thin-Mannish
Nikolai Leskov, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk* (Robert Chandler) just too thin (Hesperus annoys at full price, even half off and half again is still a bit much for a short story)
Carlos Fuentes, The Old Gringo (Margaret Sayers Peden) flawed execution, overdone.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey* not heavy going, but first class fare
Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt* ibid
Shiva Naipaul, An Unfinished Journey* more transporting (now I really must move on to Heinrich Heine's Travel Pictures)
Shusaku Endo, Deep River* (Van C. Gessel), syncretic sermonizing, overlitanized, partially redeemed by plot and character sketch but demonstrating Endo's worst tendencies.
Knut Hamsun, Hunger* (Robert Bly), manic depression's a frustrating mess; I.B. Singer's intro too high in register, it's not Dostoevsky but Gogol who's relevant, very interesting but short of timelessness.
A.S. Byatt, The Matisse Stories*, three shorts, the middle half overtelegraphed though well-executed, the bracketing ones excellent.

Throwaway Anchor

Scott McLemee wins the prize for deepest allusion in an article title for "Here Comes the Flood" (on the deluge of scholarly monographs and the reductio ad absurdum proposed by Hal Draper), and not because of Lindsay Waters (who I've cited before myself, in what is apparently [per Google] itself the most cited bit on this blog). The subreference to one track of Robert Fripp's Exposure expands to take on the relevance of the whole of the second side of that LP.

It opens with the title track, which, as noted by Elephant-Talk on Exposure, "contains the – by now famous – quote from [J.G.] Bennett »It is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering.« In an interview with Ron Gaskin Fripp explains: »[...] the point is, much suffering is unnecessary. Greed, for example. All the suffering involved with greed. It's wholly unnecessary. I'm greedy. If I could give up being greedy, I would have a lot more energy to suffer in a ... in a more appropriate way.« The quote on the album stems from lectures around the idea of »Conscious Labour and Intentional Suffering«".

This is followed by Häaden Two (JGB again opens and closes: »If you know you have an unpleasant nature, and dislike people, this is no obstacle to work.«) and dialogue only on the original '79 version (again per Elephant-Talk [my edits]):
"Eno: »It was an incredible little piece – very, very impressed by it.«
Bennett (& sbd. else): »Ahh, ... (garble [... that's extraordinary]) how wonderful.«
Eno: »It just has none of the qualities of your work that I find interesting. Abandon it.«
Bennett: »More good advice could hardly be packed into one sentence than [there] is there.«
Unknown woman's voice: »Both those things were[n't] true, that's definitely true.«
Deadly laughter and »Oh dear. Oh dear«"

This is followed in turn (after the instrumental Urban Landscape) by I may not have enough of me but I've had enough of you (»That is the way it is because it is that way«), and finally by Here Comes the Flood bracketed by Water Music I & II.

How well this all dovetails with Scott's essay I'll let sink in on its own.

The Bookshelf of Good Intentions

David Lodge is best known for the parlor game Humiliation (in Changing Places), wherein English faculty players score highest for admissions of not having read the most essential literary works. But this is a sport for pros, or those who profess to be, and I'm unabashed by my (lack of) standing, which is the sole confessional aspect to all this; I've never aspired to be scholar, critic, or reviewer; and writer, while more a game for amateurs, was but a faint calling, subordinate to being a reader, as one of the ways of playing along. As such, it is not a competition with other readers, nor with the author, apart from a problematic sense that Nabokov described (as I've elaborated on).

So why take inventory of what I have yet to read? In part to place a marker for what I set out to do, which I'm looking forward to looking back upon, not nearly as much as I anticipate the pleasure of the reading itself. In part to encourage myself (don't need any one else's, thx) and not Look on thine works, ye mighty, and despair! In part to excuse in advance the paucity of postings (but there are other excuses reasons for that) and to provide fodder for one (what better to write about at length but long works long deferred?). Nothing to do with making up excuses; it's more the case that stochastic processes aren't just be about traversing the space by rolling the dice, but may involve calculating waiting times for determined moves. Also not a New Year's resolution, rather an ongoing one, not to be achieved in a mere year's time, nor pre-empting the rest of the literature stacked on the shelf (though not quite so heavily) or its continuing accretion, or for that matter other heavy reading in philosophy, maths, etc. So here's a score or so, tallied up:

Works in progress, which have permitted being taken piecemeal, between other reading:
Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone: Halfway through the middle volume; C-R rates this most high, but so too with Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, which I found to be among the causes (and so, in nonprogress, though someday ...), and in this case is a milder overstatement. I'm hoping that the final volumes, compiled by Gao E, do not fall off in quality. 9.1.09 Done: comments here.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: Through Groups A, B1, D of the A.C. Cawley edition. I'd previously managed not to encounter any of it despite its being standard secondary school fare.

Works demanding more complete attention, and soon:
Vladimir Nabokov, Eugene Onegin: I've been through the first volume, Pushkin's poem, but not in tandem with the annotations, which are the point (and pointed). Spurred on by the recently released Verses and Versions, and not merely in the spirit of completeness; it's not to learn Russian, but to learn Pushkin, and Nabokov, and poetry, and translation, and language, and method. Also, to be read in parallel, Charles Johnston's translation, which claims to take VN's take into account.
Robert Graves, The White Goddess: Still unread, despite many prods (thx johnr). A personal universalist mythology of greater interest to me than that of Freud/Jung/Lacan/et ilk.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: The latest addition weighing heavily on the shelf, though not the latest edition, as the title rendering makes clear.

Others, more patiently waiting their turn:
Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra
Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales
James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover: The longest resident on the shelf (except possibly for Finnegans Wake), joined recently by Collected Poems
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur
E.T.A. Hoffman, The Best Tales of Hoffman
W.H. Auden, The English Auden
Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet
Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed: A long engagement ...
I.A. Goncharov, Oblomov: Somehow putting this off indefinitely seems to be in keeping with the spirit of things.

Rereads (all first read 20 years ago and more):
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita without bits missing
Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Homer, Iliad & Odyssey Fagles' translation

Not yet procured but intended to be on the shelf:
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

Best of the season to all!