Notes on the Joys of Epistolery Novels and Nautical Imagery:
I find something immensely pleasing about reading well-written correspondence, whether to others in the form of letters, or to oneself in the form of diaries. It doesn't seem to matter whether the work is fictional or real.. there's something quite lovely about the form itself.
I was reading Harry Mathews' The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium and these ideas came to me. Mathews is one of the extremely brilliant, but largely unknown French Oulipo (Ouvroir de littrature potentielle) school who wrote their works using constrained writing techniques; a strong mathematical influence. Some Oulipo works like Princess Hoppy make the mathematical investigations of Alice in Wonderland seems like kid's stuff.. but not all the work necessarily rely on mathematical devices to that extent.
The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium is the story of a Asian woman and an overweight American librarian/intellectual working in a joint-venture to recover sunken treasure off the coast of Florida, like many Oulipo novels the plot revolves around an intellectual pursuit. Sinking is far more creative, cohesive, and more substantial than more well known (yet relatively unknown) Mathews books like Tlooth which though delightfully bizarre and entertaning (oh you sports playing dentists in Soviet prison camps!) didn't merit a re-reading or holding on to the book. The story is told through their letters.. the book plays heavily in nautical imagery ... which I'm somewhat of a sucker for. I'll read almost any book if there's the promise of fish.
As I was reading this book at work it got me to thinking of other excellent exchanges of letters, diaries and so on.
The three volumes of Hunter S. Thompson's letters run with a cacophonic sputter to many important figures of the day, James Joyce's erotic letters to Nora which are well-crafted and scatological, Denton Welch's nearly overwrought journals, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, excerpts from Burroughs' magical cut-up journals, Walter Benjamin's magnificent ruin of a survey of Parisian arcades found in Arcades Project these all make for fascinating reading.
Now I'm off to write a letter.
Well, she wrote me a letter
Said she couldn't live without me no mo'.
Listen mister can't you see I got to get back
To my baby once a-mo'--anyway...
I find something immensely pleasing about reading well-written correspondence, whether to others in the form of letters, or to oneself in the form of diaries. It doesn't seem to matter whether the work is fictional or real.. there's something quite lovely about the form itself.
I was reading Harry Mathews' The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium and these ideas came to me. Mathews is one of the extremely brilliant, but largely unknown French Oulipo (Ouvroir de littrature potentielle) school who wrote their works using constrained writing techniques; a strong mathematical influence. Some Oulipo works like Princess Hoppy make the mathematical investigations of Alice in Wonderland seems like kid's stuff.. but not all the work necessarily rely on mathematical devices to that extent.
The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium is the story of a Asian woman and an overweight American librarian/intellectual working in a joint-venture to recover sunken treasure off the coast of Florida, like many Oulipo novels the plot revolves around an intellectual pursuit. Sinking is far more creative, cohesive, and more substantial than more well known (yet relatively unknown) Mathews books like Tlooth which though delightfully bizarre and entertaning (oh you sports playing dentists in Soviet prison camps!) didn't merit a re-reading or holding on to the book. The story is told through their letters.. the book plays heavily in nautical imagery ... which I'm somewhat of a sucker for. I'll read almost any book if there's the promise of fish.
As I was reading this book at work it got me to thinking of other excellent exchanges of letters, diaries and so on.
The three volumes of Hunter S. Thompson's letters run with a cacophonic sputter to many important figures of the day, James Joyce's erotic letters to Nora which are well-crafted and scatological, Denton Welch's nearly overwrought journals, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, excerpts from Burroughs' magical cut-up journals, Walter Benjamin's magnificent ruin of a survey of Parisian arcades found in Arcades Project these all make for fascinating reading.
Now I'm off to write a letter.
Well, she wrote me a letter
Said she couldn't live without me no mo'.
Listen mister can't you see I got to get back
To my baby once a-mo'--anyway...
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Tastes like brains.