For the Love of _______: The Traveling Library

The insanity which claims me manifests within the leather luggage heirloom with a map of the world printed on its skin. It is my traveling, growing, heavy, ambitious library. And this is what it contains:

italics: read; bold: unread; plain text: currently reading; underlined: partially read

The Portable Poe edited by Philip Van Doren Stern, in English
Poe: Nouvelles Histoires Extraordinaires, translated into the French by Charles Beaudelaire
Modern Poets of France: A Bilingual Anthology edited by Louis Simpson
The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty by Gary Brent Madison
On Suffering by Gary Brent Madison
L'Oeil et L'Esprit by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Phenomenologie de la Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
La Nausee by Jean-Paul Sartre
Romans & Contes de Voltaire, edition nationale de 194, en Francais
Selected Essays of Montaigne edited by Lester G. Crocker in English
Le Horla et Autre Contes Fantastiques by Guy de Maupassant
Le Petit Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery in both English and French
La Garconne by Victor Margueritte
La Mare au Diable by George Sand
La Petite Fadette by George Sand
Les Carnets de Malte Laurids Brigge

by Rainer Maria Rilke
Orlando by Virginia Woolf in both English and French
My Life in France by Julia Child
Fiction in the Archives by Natalie Zemon Davis
In the Heart of the Country by J.M. Coetzee
Grendel by John Gardner
Sept Contes Gothiques by Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen (in French)
Last Tales by Isak Dinesen
The Basic Kafka
a mini french-english dictionary and a guide to grammar

I know, I know, who travels like this?

What's This?

I suppose introductions are in order?
Not much is needed by way of describing myself, anything of significance will assert itself eventually, so I'll prefer to keep my door mostly closed, though, a light knock or insistent gust of wind will usually bear it open regardless.

This record, however, assumes the right of identification, and I will do my best to give it some sense of self from the start. It has become an object of some fascination to render unreflected and often impulsive personal details public; with this I will flatly refuse engagement. The small things in our lives are indeed rich, and the oft-glossed-over is also worth peeking under, within. To do so without respect for possible readership, for propriety, or for the simple fact of what is and is not interesting, is plainly disrespectful. Discernment between the idiosyncratic and the neurotic will be of the highest importance, for with a goal of humbly sharing the experiences gleaned, as is only possible, from only one life, we tread such a line as requires continual checks in balance.

The chores and tasks of maintaining a survival that pays some homage to the torturous glory of being human and to the dignity which we must grant ourselves will be the articles placed in this armoire. You will, as a reader, be asked to follow, as only a true reader can, with patience, curiosity, skepticism, and vicarious, or perhaps even genuine feeling. I can only hope to lay down here what can be picked up with other hands; wrinkled or gnarled or polished, in another place, at another time.

----
As I said, it is your duty, reader, to humor me in the many moods that you shall have the privilege and curse of witnessing in my writing. The world is my oyster, delicious and slippery.
Let's have at it, shall we? Straight, now.

Plans are nebulous and always making and remaking themselves along with me, but I assure you and I commit to you, reader, that I will, upon pain of bankruptcy and stomachaches and migraines: I will eat, and drink, and I will cook, and I will speak French, and I will read in French, and I will write (perhaps) in French, and later (perhaps), in Spanish, but certainly en Anglais. My exploits and enterprises in language and food, or les affaires de la bouche, as well as my reflections on travel, growing up, identity, time, and space (as ya do) will be here for your foraging pleasure.

mwah

For the Love of _______

Pages

The Traveling Library

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