Doug Bruns

Posts Tagged ‘Reading’

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Off and running

In Adventure, Books, Travel on May 1, 2012 at 6:00 am

Thorung la pass, Annapurna Circuit

I’m heading out today for a three week trip to Nepal. It will be my second visit to Nepal, but my first into the mountains there. The schedule calls for two days in Kathmandu, then into the western Himalayas. I’m trekking the Annapurna Circuit with son Tim and nephew Scott. Scott and I jump off the trail at day seventeen, spending a day and evening in beautiful Pokhara, followed by a night in Kathmandu, then the long journey home. Tim is staying behind to continue trekking, returning home ten days later.

This will be my sixth long-haul to that part of the world. After the fifth trip in 2009, I vowed never again. But here I go. The logistics are painfully simple: A one-hour flight from Portland to Baltimore, where I will catch up with Tim and Scott. In the evening we head to Dulles, outside of DC. There we board a non-stop flight to Doha, Qatar. That flight is fourteen hours and forty-five minutes. We have ten hours on the ground in Doha, in an airport we are not allowed to leave. Then we catch the shuttle to Kathmandu. Four hours, forty minutes.

The return trip stretches out an additional five hours and change, due to the earth’s rotation and headwinds.

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I’ve queued up a number of posts. Some are new, a few are re-posts, and a smattering are drawn from my Gentlemen of Baltimore project. I hope you enjoy the offerings. I don’t anticipate updating …house… while traveling. However, I do hope to put up an occasional trip report and photo(s) on Facebook. Please feel free to “friend” me (what an odd thing to write), if you want a peek or two from the trail.

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Should you be interested, my travel reading is:

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Lastly, I’m not sure how that post marking the death of Henry David Thoreau popped up Sunday. That is a repost and I had, I thought, scheduled it for publishing on the day of his death, May 6th. Please, let’s all remember Henry on that date. If you feel compelled, whisper moose then Indian and take a moment to remember the zen master of Walden.

Thanks for reading.

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My “coffee-thing”

In Books, Creativity, Literature, Memoir, Thinkers, Writers, Writing on April 16, 2012 at 6:34 am

I wrote an essay a year or so ago for the The Nervous Breakdown. Yesterday I received an email from a woman who read the piece and felt compelled to write. The reader had, several years previously, suffered brain trauma in a car accident and was now worried it was catching up to her. She wrote, “I managed to cope fairly well, considering, untill some years ago: I started to think I was going barking mad, dementia/alzheimer a family condition, thinking it was my turn now. Having been reassured I’m just sufffering normal 60ýears memory-loss, I can happily reassured go on living… Thanks to…Doug Bruns for writing about this “coffee-thing”. (My piece was called, Like Burnt Coffee.) I found some comfort in her experience and wanted to pass along (most of) the essay.

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“…the books from which entire literatures have flowed, like Homer, Rabelais, are encyclopedias of their time,” wrote Flaubert to Colet. “They knew everything,” he said.

Flaubert was writing in 1854 and grappling with a momentous, essentially silent, event in human history: books had surpassed the human brain for universal capacity. The encyclopedic individual to which Flaubert referred–Homer, Rabelais and their ilk–had been eclipsed by the summation of knowledge as contained in the book. The course of flowing knowledge had reversed–no longer would it flow from individual to book. Rather, the book, the compilation and accumulation of knowledge, would forever inform the individual. (In modern life, the flow has again transitioned: book to computer–and most recently, computer to internet.)

It is related that Gottfried Leibniz was the last man to know everything that could be known; that after he died in 1716, the knowledge the world contained was greater than what one individual was capable of knowing. There is no fact to support either of these notions, Leibniz’s omniscience or the quantity of knowledge in the world at his time. Regardless, it is a concept that gives me pause.

I want to know everything. Realistically, not everything, just more. I read Guy Davenport, Isaiah Berlin, Christopher Hitchens, Susan Sontag, Robert Nozick; I read them–and so many others–and am reminded immediately and precisely how stupid and thick I am. Obtuse… I might as well be illiterate…There is nothing I retain. I forget everything…I go to dinner parties and afterward am told that I had previously entertained those same polite people with that same tired story. I submit an essay only to discover that I’d published it a year previously, a month previously. I look at my library and wonder, who read all these books? I am, I fear, seriously and irredeemably lacking. There will no make-up class. This is not Groundhog Day, the movie.

Unlike Leibniz, I know nothing. If I am the sum of the collected existences which preceded me–what Octavio Paz called, “the living tissue of the current situation”–then I am but a fragment, a single cell even, of a human self. The whole is a futility. It rests in my mouth like the bitter taste of burned coffee.

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A note on schedule and thoughts on re-posts.

In Books, The Examined Life, Travel, Writing on March 22, 2012 at 7:00 am

My intention here,  at …the house I live in… , is to write twice a week. I have settled into a schedule of posting mid-week and weekend.  That is working well. I am a slow writer. Enough said. But I’ve been doing this–this blog–quite a while now, a surprisingly long while. The archive is deep. So, in an effort to keep things rolling, I will periodically be re-posting pieces I think fit the current course of things. I’ll call them out as re-posts, as I’ve done below. You can treat them as old news if you wish and simply wrap the fish up in them.

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RE-POST FROM OCTOBER 2004:

Thoughts from a hammock in Antigua, Guatemala

The sun is out and this day is weather perfect with low humidity and a clean breeze. Going to a place without a car is a good thing. There is something to be said about walking, how it immediately closes you in upon your own efforts. That is refreshing, but likely unremarkable to folks just a few generations ago. I’ve been in this hammock for three hours, reading, dozing off, then reading again, successfully fighting the urge to be doing something more, to get up and about and be busy. I like the lessening of potential this affords me: it forces a question of scope and perspective.

Years ago, I had a college course, a biology class, where we were instructed to find a square yard of campus somewhere, in the woods, on the bluffs, somewhere, anywhere and stake it out. We had to study it for the course semester and our research paper would be written about our square yard. The constraint of vision, loss of depth of field, as it were, gets very limiting until you realize, as the proverb says, that the world is contained in a grain of sand. That is what today in Antigua is like, with nothing to do and nowhere to go, but hang in this hammock. It is wonderfully refreshing.

I’ve only reread a few books in my life, most recently Walden, and now Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I have on this trip. I am reminded of how bad a reader I have been in the past, plowing through a book like a ship crossing the ocean at night. No view of the horizon and little patience for the trip except for making the destination. A common reader needs a life to learn the trick of being a good reader. It is, again, the focus thing. Stake out your square and understand your turf. Derrida died a few days ago, and though I could not comprehend him, I am given to understand he knew this.

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The Year in Reading – 2011

In Books, Literature, Writers, Writing on December 3, 2011 at 3:03 pm

Two years ago I wrote a piece for The Millions called Literature is a Manner of Completing Ourselves–A Reader’s Year. The title is a quote from Susan Sontag. (If you’re a reader you should bookmark The Millions. It’s perhaps the best of the general lit blogs out there.) I came to write that essay because I had for the first time taken note of the books I’d read that year. It–the reading list–was nothing more than a simple spreadsheet, a record, the transcript of a twelve month journey turning pages. (Yes, all the reading was analogue, real paper pages.)

I have below pasted the reading list for 2012. It is interesting to compare the years. This year I read twenty-seven books, not counting the current book which I will finish before year’s end. In comparison to last year, 27 is less by a full 16%. And last year included one thousand page beast, Infinite Jest. No thousand pagers this year.  The really interesting comparison is to 2009, the list I wrote about in The Millions. This year by comparison is less 2009 by 27%. That is to say that in three years my reading pace has dropped by 25%. (Too, that year included two books over a thousand pages, Bolaño’s 2666 and Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen.) A quick calculation brings me to the conclusion that at this pace in about five years I will have stopped reading altogether.

Speaking of reading lists. Are you aware of Art Garfunkle’s? He’s a serious reader who has been keeping tally of books read since the 1960s. Here’s a link. To really drive it home, he goes another step to list his favorite books. Browsing through his list is almost as good as studying the library of a dinner host. (Which beats looking into their medicine cabinet any day.)

Here’s my list of books read in 2011. (I’ve linked the books I reviewed.)

  • Jan 7    Bound to Last, 30 Writers on their Most Cherished Book — Sean Manning, Ed.
  • Jan 8   The Maine Woods — H.D. Thoreau
  • Jan 24   A Widow’s Tale — Joyce Carol Oats
  • Feb 19   Portrait of a Marriage — Sándor Márai
  • Feb 28   The Foremost Good Fortune — Susan Conley
  • Mar 5    Moby Dick — Herman Melville (This was a third reading.)
  • Mar 21   The Sweet Relief of Missing Children — Sarah Braunstein
  • Mar 28   Tinkers — Paul Harding
  •  Apr 5    Seeds — Richard Horan
  • Apr 25   Fire Season — Phillip Connors
  • Apr 30   The Pale King — David Foster Wallace
  • May 7    The Mind’s Eye, Writings on Photography and Photographers — H. Cartier-Bresson
  • May 15   The Ongoing Moment — Geoff Dyer
  • May 30  The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore — Benjamin Hale
  • Jun 15    Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself — David Lipsky
  • Jun 21    The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas  — Gertrude Stein
  • Jul 10     The Tao of Travel — Paul Theroux
  • Aug 3     Feathers — Thor Hanson
  • Aug 15   The Surf Guru — Doug Dorst
  • Aug 20  The Story of Charlotte’s Web — Michael Sims
  • Oct 1      Disaster was my God — Bruce Duffy
  • Oct 20   The Great Leader — Jim Harrison
  • Nov 3     Blue Nights — Joan Didion
  • Nov 9     Beautiful & Pointless — David Orr
  • Nov 19   Swimming to Antarctica — Lynne Cox
  • Nov 29  The Triggering Town — Richard Hugo

Two last notes, should lists be your thing. Here are two that I’ve studied for years. The first is the reading list of St. Johns College in Annapolis, MD. St. Johns is better known as the Great Books School. The entire college education at St. Johns is based on the readings of original texts. Here is the undergrad reading list. It’s heavy duty. A little lighter and less intimidating is the Modern Library list of 100 best: Nonfiction & Fiction. One could do worse than read a few of these.

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The Millions: A Harbored Notion

In Books, Reading, Writing on August 4, 2010 at 1:31 pm

“I have long harbored the notion, no doubt foolishly, that incarceration wouldn’t be all that particularly bad. To the contrary. It would give me time to catch up on my reading. In this fanciful scenario I place myself in a minimum security facility. Anything other than that and the advantages quickly disappear.”

Please visit The Millions to read this complete essay. Thanks!

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…the meaning of doing a thing seriously…

In Creativity, Literature, Music, Photographers, Photography, Thinkers, Writers, Writing on May 16, 2010 at 5:26 am

I was considering an application to grad school last week. I’m 54 and too old (or disinterested?) for school. Maybe. I dropped out of graduate school three times. That was many years ago, when the kids were younger. I think, really, I used them–the kids–as an excuse. Actually, I’m not very good at taking direction. I like to do what I want to do. I’m spoiled that way. And I have authority issues. Graduate school was too confining. But as I was explaining to a friend recently, I’m scattered, I’m all over the place and think some focus would serve me well. He took issue with my logic. He’s a recently retired academic, so he has some perspective. He argued that there are not enough people who simply are curious and pursue their curiosities, wherever they may lead. Academia is good at giving people direction, sometimes too good, he suggested. He has a point. I am a genius at self-imposed discipline. But I am a rebel at other-imposed discipline. I am curious and want to chase my curiosities down the rabbit hole. As I confessed, I’m spoiled that way.

I was saying, I was considering an application for a graduate program and one of the questions asked that I list my influences, intellectual and scholarly influences specifically. It was a good question. It gave me pause. I read a lot and always have. But, as I said, I’m all over the place. As an essayist, I’d have to list Montaigne, E.B. White and Guy Davenport, as influences. Thinkers include Nietzsche and Thoreau. I’m a photographer too, and in that discipline I consider Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander and Eugene Smith as top drawer influences. Years ago, I studied classical music and counted Villa-Lobos, Sor and Segovia as influences. No matter the activity, I’ve attempted to recognize who has gone before me and learn from them.

Aside from the list making, the question gives one a chance to think about the meaning of doing a thing seriously–to write, or read, compete, compose, study, invent, discover–and how to measure that activity. If history is a progressive continuum, we are all subject to being measured against it. Has history made itself known personally? If you’re a photographer, whether you realize it or not, you take pictures with an established image-making knowledge. You’re a landscape photographer: Ansel Adams. A journalist: Cartier-Bresson, And so forth for all the disciplines. The application made me take notice of the voices whispering through the fog of the past.

For me, books are the most visual reminder of history’s influences. When I look at my shelves, the names and titles comfort me, like a friend’s hand on my shoulder. Above I used the phrase,  if history is a progressive continuum. When I see books on a shelf, or listen to a Beethoven sonata, history becomes the present, the wafer becomes the body and the wine the blood. If history is a continuum, I am, in these moments, one with it, one with the river in which I am wading. That is the nature of art. That is what makes a thing lasting and the opposite of the ephemeral. The influences of history, when we recognize and manifest them, cease to be passed. They become present. When we embody them, they are the end of history.