If you are reading this, then I want to thank you for doing so. Thank you. I have a lot of things to recommend to you but I wanted to take the time up front to say thank you for checking this out.
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I didn’t get to a lot books this month. I only have two to report here and one them was a bonus pick.
I finished - Pan Wanso’s My Very Last Possession and then my friend, Ken West, asked me to read Xenophon’s Memorabilia with him.
I have done this in the past a few times. I picked Robinson Crusoe, Pascal’s Pensees and Milton’s Paradise Lost out of the wind because Ken was going to read them for his PhD work. These are nice detours from the rigor of the randomized list. The two books I am currently embroiled in are not pleasant books to read and so I was happy to have finished Xenophon and was able to discuss it with Ken while working through the month of autobiographies I have in front of me.
Pak Wanso - My Very Last Possession
Right off the bat, I loved this book. It was a delightfully challenging read. I had not heard of Pak Wanso, a fairly contemporary Korean author, as it was spelled on the cover of the edition of the book I borrowed through I-Share. I pulled this name from the World Lit 1900 to Present List. I am not sure how that name got on my list, and I am deeply grateful for having to read her work.
Apparently, Pak Wanso is one of the most widely read fiction authors in South Korea. She has written for Korean film and television as well. I chose My Very Last Possession because there are only 3 or 4 books of hers that have been translated into English. I tried to get a sense as to which of these she was better known for or to see which text was considered her magnum opus. This was not easy to decipher. So I thought I would leave it to random chance. I requested each one that I could find through the library system, and vowed that I would read which ever text cam first. That book was My Very Last Possession.
So, I have My Very Last Possession which is a collection of ten short stories that seem linked thematically but there is no overarching narrative that holds them together. They seem to be from different time periods in Korean history between the Korean war and contemporary Korean society, which to Park would have been the mid-80s at the time of compiling this volume. These stories were electrifying. I have not read any Korean fiction to my knowledge. I was deeply engrossed in the Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong which was an absolutely delightful though at times deeply disturbing text. Pak Wanso has this sort of twin ability to it, to be utterly delightful in a curious, rich with incident, and humorous way and then all of a sudden comes a hurricane of some of the most distressing imagery I have ever read. This is one thing that I think I would be interested in finding out more about the contemporary writing going on in South Korea at the time of her writing, if her work stacks up with other Korean writing. During the 70s and 80s in American fiction, you have authors like John Updike and Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon and Norman Mailer introducing some very outlandish, violent, and hyper sexualized material that is shocking to the reader, even now. I wonder if this were also true in Korean literature at the time, if there is any crossover there. I am not sure and this is a thing that I would have no idea how to begin to research. I need to reach out to a Korean literature program somewhere and have a conversation I suppose.
My Very Last Possession, as a collection, utterly undid me. Each story, or almost each story, sets your teeth on edge not fully prepared for what may develop in the narrative. From the first story about a truly unusual arrangement for a live in housekeeper and an dying man and the tensions this arrangement causes the family and friends. The Korean city that Pak paints is always these sort of desolate places like the later, longer story, “Three Days in Autumn,” where her cities are inhabited but the people are so isolated and desperate seeming that it haunts me still as I write this.
“Three Days in Autumn” may be one of the best short stories I have ever read but I would caution anyone jumping at the chance to read it that it is difficult reading. The main character that I am not sure if she is ever named is a doctor that performs abortions in a fairly cold and clinical way and is three days away from retiring on her 55th birthday. She has to confront the life she has lived without the regret for the operations she has performed but to have counted the cost of the entire endeavor, what she has denied herself to live this life, what propelled her into it in the first place. It is just a truly fascinating, engrossing tale the likes of what I do not believe I have ever read.
The story “Butterfly of Illusion” has a line in it that took my breath away that I will ask my students for the rest of my life to engage with, “Why can’t you trim your own vegetables? Tut-tut, what have you done with all your years?” that is delivered in a sort of Miyazaki otherworldly way that I loved. Read Pak Wanso. I can only, at this point, advise you to read My Very Last Possession but I will be adding more Pak Wanso to the list and will check back in with this person someday.
Post Rock Jukebox
As you may know by now, I have been working through another set of spreadsheet randomness to reveal some bands from the annals of the Post Rock genre. I have found some buried treasure (at least buried to me). I don’t even to know how I would have missed this band because they have several million plays on Spotify which is a lot for Post Rock.
Sleepmakeswaves is a classic of the genre. This is a post rock band the likes of which you have heard before in Explosions in the Sky or This Will Destroy You. I love this band. If you want a place to start with them, start with their first album, …And So We Destroyed Everything. It is wonderful. I have been listening to sort of the same 10 post rock bands for something like 20 years. Sleepmakeswaves wasn’t one of them. As soon as I heard it I thought, ‘boy I should have been listening to these guys as much as any other.’ They will quickly get into any one of your Big Read Mood playlists. Hey one sec, okay, listen…their music is good.
Xenophon - Memorabilia
I read this text as a favor to a friend. I have a friend who is a philosophy professor who is working on some doctoral work and decided that reading Xenophon would be helpful to him. I am stuck right now with Nickerson’s Loss of the Ship Essex and John Allen Wyeth’s autobiography With Sabre and Scalpel and so I thought a little detour into the Greeks might not be so bad.
I loved this little book. I have not read any Plato so I don’t have a good introduction to Socrates. I am familiar with the historical character, both from whatever you pick up in the classic literature pursuit and also because of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I hate that that is a cultural touch point for me, but it is there nonetheless. Anyways, I am familiar with the Socrates as made famous by the Socratic method of asking students questions to bring about learning moments. Also, I am familiar with the story of Socrates’ death by capital punishment. So, the major contours of this character are familiar to me. Also, Gellius recently in Attic Nights had a lot to say about the person of Socrates and some other major philosophers and sophists of ancient Greece. Apparently, according to Gellius, Socrates exercised by standing completely still for an entire day. The issue of Socrates’ exercise comes up often in Xenophon but not this practice precisely. The subject of Socrates’ wife comes up in Gellius as well and is mentioned obliquely in Xenophon.
Xenophon’s Memorabilia is an excellent short work of a practical philosophy. The things that Xenophon is concerned with seem urgent and practical in a way that philosophy can often feel abstract and difficult to parse. Xenophon captures a sort of persistent Socrates that feels warm but strange, and cunning in a way that I had not expected. There are several passages that I will continue to draw upon throughout the rest of my time as an educator, a few I have already started to use in class before I even finished the book.
Xenophon is concerned with how to address men who want to be in the middle of the Assembly. Xenophon puts Socrates constantly in the midst of politically ambitious interlocutors like Aristippus, Glaucon and Euthydemus.
Here is an example:
“Nay,” replied Aristippus, “for my part I am no candidate for slavery; but there is, as I hold, a middle path in which I am fain to walk. That way leads neither through rule nor slavery, but through liberty, which is the royal road to happiness.”
“Ah,” said Socretes, “if only that path can avoid the world as well as rule and slavery, there may be something in what you say” (Xenophon 89).
The other major theme that Xenophon confronts in his text is the concept of friendship which Socrates is often on his mind.
"For [Socrates] said that he often heard it stated that of all possessions the most precious is a good and sincere friend.
"And yet," [Socrates] said, "there is no transaction most [humans] are so careless about as the acquisition of friends. For I find that they are careful about getting houses and lands and [servants] and cattle and furniture, and anxious to keep what they have; but though they tell one that a friend is the greatest blessing, I find that most [humans] take no thought how to get new friends or how to keep old ones" (Xenophon 123).
I loved this little book. I am sort of sad that I discovered in an out of the way method instead of one that was truly random. Xenophon is on my list, both the Big Book List and the Small Works List. I will have to read 2 more things from him presumably. I took the offer to read a text with my colleague because I felt that someone else’s research process is a fairly random point of entry for my own reading habits. I guess I selected to read it with him but it wasn’t my original idea. I had on the big book list Conversations with Socrates as a title which may be the way Penguin groups these writings. I decided to read the same text as my friend, Memorabilia, which is the text he chose out of the Loeb Classical Library. I love these little books as well. I would like to read only the ancient Greeks and Romans now but I will keep to my process now and see what Wyeth has to say.
Currently Reading
I do not like to carry over a book from one month to another and I have done this with a very short book which at this point I have read most of really, The Loss of the Ship Essex. Like Captain Ahab, of Melville’s retelling, I will finish this book if it kills me.
The other book is a book that I am reading now, or just about to start reading this 600 page behemoth of autobiography, With Sabre and Scalpel. The American authors force me to confront our nation’s history whether I like it or not. Wyeth was a famous Civil War soldier who fought on the side of the South. He wrote the authoratative biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest, called That Devil Forrest. That book is slightly shorter than Wyeth’s autobiography but I believe, though I am not sure, that Wyeth’s retelling of Forrest’s life will be a favorable account and this is not a pool of ideas I am happy to spend much time with. I chose the autobiography after having read two introductions to the Forrest text by different editors and then the Introduction to the Sabre and Scalpel text and chose the latter here. I will let you know what I think of the whole situation soon.
This is a slightly shorter dispatch this time because I only finished two texts this month. Pak Wanso got inserted into the Big Book List. Xenophon was already there but I had a different compilation of his works and I substituted Memorabilia for it. In that way I haven’t fallen behind on my overall goal of 25 Big Books a year but I do feel the compulsion to pick up my pace a bit into the month of May.
If you have read to this point, I really appreciate it. I love writing this document but it is helpful to know that some of you are reading to the end. So, if that is you, thank you. Leave a comment and let you know what you think.