In the Bullpen...

For reasons even I don't know, I've suddenly turned to Anthony Trollope after the Paul Bowles novel. In spite of the strife and such of Barsetshire, the experience of reading Victorian novels is in my mind analogue to the image of a ship coursing steadily through a clear ocean. I'm not sure why. This also gives a sense of solace in the reading--with Dickens and Trollope and even Henry James (who is not Victorian), the reader gets a sort of momentum and plows through all those words to the end. It's a very different experience compared to reading the Germans or the Russians. I'm debating reading the Barsetshire sequence of novels (of which I have the first five of six), but, barring that or some other caprice, here's a partial list of what's going down for the rest of the summer:
Lucy Church Amiably--Gertrude Stein
The Making of Americans--Gertrude Stein (only 925 pages)
Pilate's Wife--H. D.
The Guiltless--Herrmann Broch
Complete Stories of Paul Bowles
The Spider's House--Paul Bowles
Molloy--Samuel Beckett
Firebird--Mark Doty
...and the Masochist in me is inclined to throw Lawrence and Henry James in there, too. No Russians, only one German, and, to some extent surprisingly, no poetry.

In other news, I'm officially out of the hellhole methlab shitbox that was my grad apartment for my coursework years. Good riddance. Such quality folks were my neighbors that, in moving my stuff out of the apartment (I had little left--two tables, two lamps, and a chair), the chair was stolen right out of the yard while I was getting things together. And that was the main thing I wanted to keep. Neighbors, though home, refused to answer their door. Creeps.