Handwritten Book Journal on Nepali Lokta Paper

This is a book journal I started back in 2009. I couldn't pass on the unique, natural look and feel of the lokta Paper from Nepal.

I thought it would make a perfect book journal, so it's full of reflections based on the books I read.

The cover took water damage from a time it was sitting near an open window and a rainstorm passed through, but it didn't cause too much destruction. It makes it look like an effect the cover is supposed to have on purpose.

The pages are thick and firm. The pulp and plant matter leaves different patterns and indentations on every page.

There's an ongoing meta-struggle in the entries on the nature of the project itself and the relevance of the entries to the books. I may want to post more entries in the future, but as a sample, here's my entry on James Joyce's Ulysses, which I chose because the two open pages covered in tiny text are aesthetically my favorite in this book:

This is an example of the kind of inky Bic pen I used to fill up these pages. It's too inky for most paper and would smear, but the lokta paper is so thick and absorbent that the ink flows smoothly, looks clear, and doesn't smear. This book is one of my few journals that is entirely written in print handwriting. I learned cursive in primary school, but I didn't use it and forgot how to write in script. However, in 2011, when I had just returned from Spain and wanted to document my adventures in a journal, I endeavored to re-teach myself cursive to be able to write faster, so all of my journals from that point are in cursive handwriting. In the future, I'll share some more of my handwritten journals along with some electronically handwritten material from my Moleskine Smart Writing Set.

---See Also---

The Physical Writing Process: James Joyce & Jorge Luis Borges – Writing with Eye Trouble

The Physical Writing Process: My Blue Notebooks

Ulysses: Oxford Worlds Classics

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Joseph Patrick Pascale - How to Get a Promotion When Your Boss Is Trying to Kill You (Accurate Accounts of Office Work: Book 1), a comic literary novel coming from Waldorf Publishing on September 1 2018.

Love of Literature and Hatred of Fellow Man: Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos

I love the poetry of Ezra Pound, but it is unfortunate that he cast the tainted shadow of anti-Semitism over his work, and this is something that his readers must struggle with. This is especially true in The Cantos, and The Pisan Cantos in particular, which still manages to be one of my favorite pieces by him. It seems to me that he was trying to unveil a usurious global banking conspiracy - something we can certainly relate to living through The Great Recession - but that he was sidetracked by the red herring of racial prejudice. 

Pound was a monumental figure in the world of literature during Modernism, and he had prolific correspondence with all of the major writers of his time. Despite this, he seems to be underrepresented in the study of Modernism, mainly because his name was ruined by his anti-Semitism - although it further hurt his reputation that he sided with Mussolini during World War II and was arrested for treason and found insane in the United States. I always feel bad for him when I read Richard Sieburth’s introduction to The Pisan Cantos and he explains that when Pound was taken to the American camp in Italy at gunpoint, he thought he would be a free man when he was turned over to the Americans. Pound told the Americans that they needed to get him in contact with the President as soon as possible because he wanted to be sent to Japan as a diplomat - claiming himself as an expert in Asian cultures because of his translation work - and that he would attempt to get the Japanese to sign a peace treaty ending the war. The soldiers’ response was basically, “What are you, crazy? You’re being arrested for treason!” and they threw him into a cage, in which he had a massive mental breakdown and then began to compose The Pisan Cantos on sheets of toilet paper. I pity Pound’s naïveté, but I also envy his tenacity, and I think about the fact that if by some miracle he had been successful, he might have prevented one of the biggest atrocities in history: the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But I digress - I began with his anti-Semitism because I was thinking of Pound in connection to James Joyce. I posted about Ulysses on here when I read it last summer, but after I finished Joyce’s novel, I found Pound even more enigmatic than before. Pound championed Joyce, helped promote him, and made his work known and respected when no one even knew who James Joyce was. Pound was the first one to publish chapters of Ulysses in America and he wrote glowing critiques of Ulysses in The Dial which pronounce Joyce the latest and greatest in a long line of literary masters. 

What confuses me is that if Pound loved Ulysses so much, why did he not seem to take one of Joyce’s main themes to heart? Joyce made Leopold Bloom Jewish for a reason. Yes, anti-Semitism was a pervasive attitude at the time, but Joyce specifically made Bloom - his new incarnation of Odysseus, one of literature’s greatest heroes - Jewish. There are chapters that deal with anti-Semitism, and we - the reader - are supposed to empathize with Bloom - literature’s ultimate everyman - and realize that the prejudiced people who hate him are unjustified and have no understanding of who Bloom is as a person. Specifically in the “Cyclops” chapter, we see that the prejudiced “I” and the other anti-Semitic people at the tavern are ignorant, narrow-minded, and worthy of our scorn. 

I can’t imagine that Pound wasn’t aware of these running themes throughout the novel, so how did he feel about it? Why was he still prejudiced? I just find Pound so confusing. It seems like he was half-genius and half-crazy.
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Related Posts:
How Much Does Character of the Author Affect the Work? Must We Only Read the Virtuous? 

Ulysses - Oxford World's Classics

Recently, I've been working on my novel The Bookstore Hobos, and I've amused myself by adding a minor, yet impossible, detail. There's a scene when two of the characters are perusing the James Joyce section. One of them, having previously noticed one of the B&N's giant posters for Ulysses on the wall near the bathroom - "The Modern Library's #1 Novel of the Twentieth Century" - takes a copy of the novel from the shelf. As he turns the thick paperback book in his hands, he notes that a quote on the back claims that "Ulysses is a novel to end all novels."

What's impossible in a scene like this? Well, I based the version of Ulysses that the character picked up on my own personal copy - a copy which came to me via abebooks.com that was originally published in England. The scene in The Bookstore Hobos is set in Seattle, Washington, so it seems impossible, or at least improbable, that they'd be selling an English printing of the book in a store that only sells new books. There is an American printing of the Oxford World's Classics version of Ulysses, but it doesn't feature Harry Levin proclaiming it as "a novel to end all novels." The biggest quote on the back of that version is Gerry Dukes exclaiming "this is the one to buy."

If you'd like to find out more about my novel-in-progress, I posted a 23-word excerpt on my Twitter account.

UPDATE - December 5th, 2010: Last week I was in a Barnes & Noble in Paramus, NJ and it was humongous. They had a large selection of used books in the store, which I had never seen in a Barnes & Noble before. It was so tempting that I couldn't resist buying a copy of Notes From The Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky for $3.50. After the experience, I remembered back to this blog post, when I commented that Barnes & Noble doesn't sell used books. Apparently, some of them do. Despite this fact, I'm still proclaiming the scene in my novel to be impossible. First of all because it is most likely that the Barnes & Noble in the novel is like 99% of the Barnes & Noble stores I have gone to and did not feature a used section; second of all because, even if for some reason Zaid fails to tell you about about the used book section as an unreliable narrator, that doesn't change the fact that they were upstairs in the fiction and literature section where they were selling new books and not old versions from England. On a related note, I read a 10-minute excerpt from The Bookstore Hobos at the "Writers on the Rise" event hosted by Centenary College and Warren County Community College (page_8) , and I appreciated the audience's laughter and applause.
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Seven years after this blog post was written, The Bookstore Hobos was published in the Eunoia Review. After numerous revisions, the 90,000 word novel was abandoned, only to be resurrected years later and recreated from scratch as a novella. Now for the first time, the world can read the story of story of Zaid Mohammed--novice philosopher, apostate Muslim, and, most recently, bookstore hobo. He quit his stable office job in too much haste and finds himself sleeping in his aunt's garage in New Jersey. The bookstore seems like his only haven, but New York City is beckoning him to experience the real world beyond his books, discover his future, and finally finish his philosophical treatise. If you're reading this blog, you've probably been a bookstore hobo yourself, so of course you'll want to read The Bookstore Hobos.