Source Materials, Odyssey, Experience

There can only be so many plots, right? If you listen to Christopher Booker, there are seven to work with. So in rocking a plot, choose wisely. The farther back you reach, the more likely you'll get to the good stuff. Homer's Odyssey seemed to fascinate James Joyce, as well as Matt Fraction.

Homer hit the ball out of the park (sorry) in such epic fashion the title of his Odyssey now has its own meaning in modern English:

1. a long wandering or voyage usually marked by many changes of fortune.

2. an intellectual or spiritual wandering or quest.

If I stick with the second definition, I feel like that's a description of my daily life. Booker fits Homer's Odyssey into the "Voyage and Return" category, "the protagonist goes to a strange land and, after overcoming the threats it poses to him/her, returns with nothing but experience." He cites "Alice in Wonderland" as another example.

I can relate to that aspect as well--I return from most of my voyages with empty pockets and a full soul.

Fraction has the balls to take on Homer and re-make the Odyssey into something totally new. Turn Odysseus into a girl. Change the setting to sci-fi and rock out a smart, psychedelic comic that visually and viscerally spins your brain. Those that follow along at home may remember that I blame Matt Fraction for pulling me back into comics and graphic novels.

There is something both epic and daunting and maybe terrifying about building on one of the most revered works in the canon of western literature. Joyce more than pulled it off, and took his Odyssey into the mind, and inside a single day in Dublin. The possibilities are endless.

My own odyssey is only partially literary at the moment. It's a personal wandering, a personal quest to figure out myself, life, the Universe, vocation, etc. It's what you do when you are 42.

Lately I have sequestered myself into my Baileys Neck crib. Gone ghost, fled to interior life, and close surroundings. I could feel a pull to change scenery. Pull together a quick and easy overnight, a voyage and return. Shenandoah National Park is a sub-three hour trek. Mary's Rock at Thornton Gap provided about a four-mile hike (up and back) full of snow, ice, slush and views you won't find on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

A proper odyssey can't be contained in a day or four miles. But for a flatlander surrounded by water, not mountains, it can be just enough to screw my soul on a bit differently. A spiritual wandering, returning with nothing but experience. And a smiling sanctuary in the mind.

Already Read 'Em, An Experiment

This is not my bookshelf. This is not my house. This is not my to be read pile. But it could be if I let it. Bibliophiles are a dangerous lot, always pulling in new books around us. We can't wait to read the next book, before we are even finished the current book.

There is a great scene/line in the remake of the movie "Cape Fear," where Max Cady (played by Robert De Niro) is getting out of prison. When he is sent to prison, he can't read. So Nick Nolte isn't worried about Cady realizing that he let him hang, so to speak. But Cady/De Niro teaches himself to read. And he reads like crazy. And figures shit out. And along the way he develops a collection of books, which he is leaving in his prison cell as he walks to be released. So he is walking out with the guards and another guard calls out:

"Hey Cady, what about your books?"

"Already read 'em."

The ultimate utilitarian. They have served their purpose. Later, bitches. A bibliophile, Cady is not.

There is a funny thing about my bookshelves and my books. I haven't already read them all. I'm a tangential reader--I'll have books lined up to read next and some stray thought from something I am reading runs me down a mental rabbit hole, I pick up a new book and the book that was next in line gets backburnered. Rinse, repeat.

So I own some kickass books that I haven't read. And it is time to read them. Because some of them are beyond classic. And they are already here, living with me, untapped.

Here is the experiment: no new books. No new books so that I get to, and stick to, reading some of what is here. My goal is to go for a year. That would be some shit. But I will try six months, and then take the experiment's pulse. The goal is not to read all of my unread books. That would take more than a year. The goal is to spend the next six months to a year reading only books I already own. No new books.

But it hardly limits my reading. I am a slow reader. I am not saying I will get through this list, or that I won't modify it by swapping out one book for another off the shelf. But with a little thought, here is what an opening salve:

Fiction

"Ulysses," James Joyce
"The Old Man and the Sea," Ernest Hemingway (haven't read since high school)
"Far Tortuga," Peter Matthiessen
"Cathedral," Raymond Carver (short stories, have read a few of them)
"The Once and Future King," T.H. White (have read part)
"V.," Thomas Pynchon

"The Sound and the Fury," William Faulkner

Non-Fiction

"The Spell of the Sensuous," David Abram
"The Poetics of Space," Gaston Bachelard
"Travels with Herodotus," Ryszard Kapuscinski
"Forests," Robert Pogue Harrison
"The Golden Bough," Sir James George Frazier

A formidable list. I am first finishing Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian," and Tony Horwitz's "Confederates in the Attic," before embarking, but buying no new books begins today, Sept. 15, 2014. Vegas odds aren't good that I can complete this experiment; that I won't cave like a book junkie and have a book binge, but I am going to give it a shot.

The book selling industry may feel a slight pinch. And I guess there are at least a couple reasons behind this experiment. One would be not spending money I don't have to spend, when the riches are already here. It frees up more cash for craft beer :)

But I think the bigger point is that reading isn't always about reading the next thing or the new thing. If your mind is actively engaging what it is encountering, and adding its own thoughts and depth, then the right stuff finds it and even more mundane reading (which this list is not) can turn into big stuff. Sometimes it is the reader, not the book. Books are the stimulus, not the result. You are the result, what you do with or from or because of the stimulus/book.

And that isn't to reduce books, literature, or art to just being stimuli. But that is in effect what it is. A painting is experienced by a viewer, a book by a reader, who reacts to it. Who takes it in. Who studies it. Who feels it. Who relates it to their own experience. And in that respect, art, to the viewer, the reader, the audience, is to be experienced, to stimulate us. To make us think; to make us cry; to make us laugh; to make us create; to make us question; to make us wonder; to make us love.

We have to change ourselves. I have to change myself. The lesson, perhaps, is to look at what is around me, the things I already have, rather than continually looking for new and next. And I am excited for the books that are here.

And why not start with a literary mountain to climb? Next up, Ulysses. Let's talk, JJ.