It’s been a 19th century kind of year…
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
(1853): it took me a year to finish. Because I had to keep putting it
down in order to teach contemporary American poetry, at a certain point I
found myself watching
the PBS version in order to keep the characters straight. In
consequence, “Shake me up Judy” and “he was wery good to me” are said
far too often in my household.
The Quaker City by George Lippard (1845): a completely sensationalist fiction about the corrupt upper classes
in 19th century Philadelphia. Lippard was good friends with
E.A. Poe, but his writing hasn’t received nearly the same attention.
This book is messy (in good and bad ways), wacky, and completely over
the top. It features a lot of heaving bosoms,
a secret clubhouse for the elite called Monk Hall, a paranormal cult
leader named Ravoni and much much more!
The Diary of Sidney George Fisher Covering the Years of 1834-1871:
I kept ordering this book through inter-library loan the last year or
so; I wish I owned it. Fisher was trained as a lawyer, but
ultimately his main activity seems to have been writing in his diary.
The diary presents an extremely detailed account of everyday life in
Philadelphia for a member of a particular class. The epigraph Fisher
uses to precede the entries for 1864:
If a man keeps no diary, the path
crumbles away behind him as his feet leave it; and days gone by
are
little more than a blank broken by a few distorted shadows. His life is
all confined with the
limits of today.
He described his diaries as his “artificial
memory,” and kept writing in them until 1871…the very last entries
remind me a lot of Beckett’s
Krapp’s Last Tape:
April 3, 1871
The doctor here. Better. Yesterday and Saturday very sick in bed. Constant nausea
& vomiting.
April 27, 1871
Read diary of 1837. Have been rereading those of 1836 etc with extreme interest.
April 29, 1871
Read diary of 1839. It brings back those days of youth very
vividly. Strange that I
could not then see all that I might have done
& been, almost without effort.
I don’t keep a diary, although I have a number
of computer files titled “Records” where I have tried to record what
happens in my life with not much constancy. At the beginning of 2012, my
friend
Stacy Doris
died. I’ve been thinking about her poetry a lot this year, and was glad
there was a tribute to her work at the Poetry Project at the beginning
of 2013. After she died, I found myself scanning all
of my "Records," looking for some mention of her—the things we did
together, the things we spoke about. I was so relieved to find her
there. I pledged to be a better record keeper in 2013. I failed.
Other significant things 2013:
Visiting Jennifer Moxley and Steve Evans and sitting on their sun porch in Maine. (I know from Moxley’s
The Middle Room
that Steve is also a diarist extraordinaire) I also really enjoyed reading Moxley’s
There Are Things We Live Among.
Finally reading all of Thalia Field’s
Ululu.
Discovering the music of
Ted Hearne
Seeing Geoff Sobelle’s
The Object Lesson at the Philadelphia Live Arts festival
Jena Osman's recent books include Public
Figures (Wesleyan 2012), The Network (selected for the
2009 National Poetry Series by Prageeta Sharma and published by Fence Books in 2010), and Corporate Relations (Burning Deck
Press, 2014). For 12 years she co-edited the magazine Chain with
Juliana Spahr, and now they co-edit the ChainLinks book series
together. Jena teaches in the MFA writing program at Temple University
in Philadelphia. More of her work can be found at jenaosman.com.
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