So it’s now two weeks since my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine so I’m fully immune apparently. Not that it keeps me from feeling anxious at the grocery store when other customers crowd me or I have to watch people pull their mask down to inspect the salad (🤷🏻♂️). I could start attending mass in person, but I feel like the last twelve months have exposed a large fraction of my co-religionists as people who value outward signs of faith over actually taking care of other people so it doesn’t have a strong appeal to me since I’d almost certainly be surrounded by pharisees. I feel like the biggest damage of the last twelve months has been seeing how many people would rather worship Mammon than the God of life and wondering how I can rebuild a normal life in the face of that.
D. A. Hosek
Sex ❀ Politics ❀ Religion ❀ Art
Dewey Decimal Project: 853 ECO Confessions of a Young Novelist
If I weren’t already a fan of Eco’s 
writing, I would pick this up for the ironic title alone—Eco was 48 when he published his first novel The Name of the Rose, and 79 when he published this slender volume.
Eco playfully explores the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction and gives some insight into his own creative process without fully opening the kimono. Overall a delightful little book.
Dewey Decimal Project: 843 KRI Powers of horror : an essay on abjection
The 840s put me in French literature, 
I spotted Kristeva’s name on the spine and, having read Desire in Language during my MFA, I decided I’d read this. I’d forgotten that I hated Desire in Language, finding her writing incoherent and her uncritical acceptance of Freudian theory laughable. I also had read another Kristeva book along the way on this project, her biography of Hannah Arendt which I liked enough to have forgotten my distaste for her writing in Desire in Language.
My feeling here was that it was more of what I disliked about Desire in Language and less what I liked about Hannah Arendt. I think the biggest issue is just that I’m too turned off by Freud and Lacan to be able to appreciate Kristeva.
Writerly resolutions: March status
Another month has come 
and gone and I continue to make decent progress on the novel. I have yet to miss a day’s work so far this year. I’ve finished the rewrite and revision of chapter 25 and done a lot of writing on chapter 26. I’m pretty sure that this chapter is going to be the longest in the book, I’m guessing around 10,000 words. This month’s graph of the progress ends up looking a lot like a skinny apatosaurus.
I’ve also gotten into a big pile of late research. I stumbled on Nelson Peery’s memoir, Black Fire, by a bit of serendipity and that’s led to a whole host of background research on African-American soldiers during World War II.
Short story work? It progresses, but the story that I’d hoped to have ready to workshop back at the end of January is still not finished although I can see the end of the current draft looming. Right now it’s 7,766 words long and the current draft may hit 9,000 words but I think that this should be a story at most half that length. The rewrite process is going to be a lot of cutting. Meanwhile, I’ll need to dig something up to workshop next week.
Still no acceptances on the stuff that’s been sent out this year. I have gotten at least one tiered rejection from a journal that had previously only ever sent form rejections, so I feel confident that that piece in particular will see an acceptance before the end of this round of submissions.
Dewey Decimal Project: 832 BRE Saint Joan of the stockyards : a drama
After a couple rounds of writing about writing, I 
decided to go for some actual writing when I got to the 830s, “German and related literatures.” Spotting this book, I decided that a bit of Brecht would be good refreshment.
It’s a bit of a “lost” play, one which never saw a theatrical production until after Brecht’s death (although it was presented as a radio drama in 1932). Here, Brecht took the story of Joan of Arc (a figure of some fascination to European writers in the 20s and 30s thanks to her canonization in 1920).
Here, Brecht takes Joan and puts her in a version of the Salvation Army in the midst of disputes between capital and labor in the Chicago stockyards of the 20s and 30s. While it falls into didacticism at times, it’s a great presentation, and I would love to see a production of this sometime.
Dewey Decimal Project: 820.93 GOL Sexual repression and victorian literature
After my disappointment reading Mamet, I decided to go in a direction that was bound not to disappoint because I would come at it with low expectations: An academic approach to some obscure corner of literary study. This is one of those books that I sometimes wonder how it got on the shelves and if they ever left the shelves before I picked it up. My rating on Goodreads is the only rating it has, although there are another eight mysterious figures who’ve added it to their books, some even marking it as “to-read” but none have it marked as “read” besides me. On Amazon, there are no reviews and only a generic cover image.
So I may be the only one to have read Mr Goldfarb’s work in recent memory. In it he makes an argument that the societal mores around sexuality didn’t prevent louche ideas from appearing in literary texts of the era. Of course, even so, things were still discreet and the discretion along with the academic writing make for a not that exciting read.
Dewey Decimal Project: 814 MAM Writing in restaurants
I first heard of this book 
sometime in the late ’90s when I was, on occasion, literally writing in restaurants, sitting at Mitchell’s Diner at Clark and North with a ham and cheese omelet, a 5×8 spiral-bound notebook and a fine-point felt-tip pen.
Mitchell’s is gone now, replaced by an Elly’s Pancake House which Google informs me is permanently closed and I no longer write long-hand, having realized that fetishization of process and tools meant that I was not really actually getting anything written. But Mamet’s book is still on the library shelves so I decided to pick it up and see what, exactly it has to say.
Overall, I found myself unexcited by the book. So much so that when I finally got around to writing this blog post about a year after reading the book, I have little memory of its contents. Even going through Goodreads reviews to refresh my memory does little for me. It’s strange that I have stronger memories of that omelet from more than twenty years ago than this book from last year.
Dewey Decimal Project: 808 DAG The lifespan of a fact
To initiate the 800s—literature—I picked this odd 
ittle book. I first encountered it in excerpts during my MFA and I was curious to read the whole thing, both D’Agata’s essay and Fingal’s fact checking of it. There was some exaggeration in the conflict between the two as it was portrayed on the page, as revealed in this interview not to mention an assortment of odd synchronicities surrounding my reading of the book—I finished the book on my way to the funeral mass for a friend who died by suicide and I learned about the interview linked earlier in this sentence courtesy of an unrelated article I happened to read a few months after I finished the book.
Overall, it made for an interesting look into the process behind writing “facts” and whether something needs to be true in order to be True.
Dewey Decimal Project: 791.092 JAY Jay’s journal of anomalies : conjurers, cheats, hustlers, hoaxsters, pranksters, jokesters, impostors, pretenders, sideshow showmen, armless calligraphers, mechanical marvels, popular entertainments
The 700s conclude with “Sports, 
ames & entertainment.” I had thought perhaps I might read a book about chess or even sports but then I spotted Ricky Jay’s name on the shelves.
I have a vague notion that this might have been something that Jay mentioned in a Fresh Air interview, but even if I’d never heard of it, seeing the magician and actor’s name on the spine would be enough to catch my attention. I first became aware of Jay from his collaborations with David Mamet and he had that rare charisma that made his every moment on screen electric.
This volume is a reprint of all the issues of a quarterly journal that Jay published at the end of the twentieth century looking at historical hoaxes, sideshow acts and other oddities. I noticed that the original was printed by Patrick Reagh, a letterpress printer I knew back when he still had his shop in Burbank (he was active in the Los Angeles book arts community at the same time that I had started a typography magazine and provided the type for an ex-girlfriend’s art book). At a point in history where so many letterpress printers were using Vandercook presses to do production work, he still used them only for proofing, producing larger editions on his enormous Heidelberg press. (Pat, if you happen to self-Google yourself and turn up this page, hi!)
As for the book itself, it’s a journey into the weird and wonderful. Jay managed to put together an encyclopedic knowledge of these odd corners of history along with vintage illustrations which are reproduced here. Jay takes these anomalies apart as only an expert at magic and deceit can.
Dewey Decimal Project: 780.904 ROS The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
I believe I heard about this book 
when it was first published and it was something that intrigued me. I had dabbled in listening to twentieth-century classical music in my twenties, but didn’t really start digging deeply until I began singing with the choir at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago. The choir director at the time, Matt Walsh, programmed a lot of twentieth-century (and twenty-first-century as the millennium turned) music for the masses. It wasn’t necessarily great for the congregation—Poulenc’s choral motets aren’t really the sort of thing that the typical person in the pews is likely to sing along with, even if the music was available to them which it wasn’t—but for the choristers, it was amazing. Nothing really gets one into the heart of the harmony like singing choral music.
Ross, in this book, tends to focus on operatic music, beginning with Richard Strauss’s Salome whose 1906 Graz performance had in attendance a wide variety of contemporary composers from Puccini to Schoenberg to Alban Berg and the widow of Johann Strauss II. He follows the course of “classical” music (really, the term should apply to eighteenth-century music only, rather than the common appellation to anything performed with orchestral instruments and occasional voices) through the twentieth century and its eventual decline in the popular consciousness as first jazz then pop and rock took its place until it became the domain primarily of a small cultural elite. It was a bit surprising to read of American GIs arriving in Germany to find the elderly Richard Strauss and knowing who he was. Few living composers now would be able to claim such currency.
As a finite work, it leaves out a lot that readers might want to know more about. The first half of the century claims more than half the page count, with the fifties arriving roughly two-thirds of the way through the book, but the middle section, comparing the development of music in Stalin’s Russia, Roosevelt’s America and Hitler’s Germany was especially fascinating.