these 4 bring the years total to 13.

Anne Truitts last book of memoirs, which manage to be odd in there scope, obsessed with things like arctic exploration but also v. tender, discussions of her husbands sucidie abut memories of Clem Greenberg, academic politics work with the intricacies of displaying her work, sadness about work destroyed by others carelessness and by accident is placed, with out irony or even notice, next to descriptions of her destroying her metal sculpture made under unhappy conditions in japan and I notice things like how she destroyed almost everything done before 1962, which she considers the beginning of her mature work---and she also (romanticizes?) the nature of material, of wood and paint and the naturalness, which seems to make her work far apart from the other minimalists of her age…a haunting book. (also note, she made her living as a scholar, a teacher, an academic, an administrator, a writer, a critic, and on family inheritances and good luck, not as an artist). I look forward to reading the second volume.

A French study on the history of attitudes towards masturbation (Anne Van Nede and Jean Stegnets) starting from a book called Onania written by a quack attempting to sell remedies, and continuing through Troitt (sp—the writer and academic, first doctor od the enlightenment), and across the pond into England…not much on the Americans, but in its recordings of hygiene and terror, and finding an initial beginning of these things, it reminded me of A History of Shit, the classic text on these things—taught me stuff like clitordectomies were preformed in paris hospitals until the 1900s, and barbed rings that shred erect penile flesh were placed on boys as young as 6, until the 1920s….and had quotes like this one from st benedict “If while committing this sin, someone imagines himself with a married woman, it is a sin of adultery, if he desires a virgin, it is debauchery, if he desires a nun it is sacrilege”

Our Father, a chronology of the scandals in the church, esp. the paedophillia and queer priests, was too long, a mess of conflations, lack in its theology, filled with cheap scandal and boring reptetions of crimes that may have occurred and may not have…the story of celibacy and place has been told a million times, but this was obv. a newspaper quickie intended to be something longer and more deliberate…really a pass.

AS Byatt ‘s haunting book The Little Black Book, which had 4 or 5 small stories of such gruesome ordinarness, which managed to combine the fear of faries w. the fear of being lost, the fear of trolls with the fear of death and the fear of little things under the stairs with the the big things in my head—it should be taken as seriously, or more seriously then the dull domestic drudgery of someone like Munro—but because of her brilliance as a fabulist it will not be. (esp, brilliant are the first story and the fifth story, where two girls in the woods, on loan to the country from the city because of WWII;s blitz have there lives changed by seeing a dragon and the fifth where a woman slowly moves from lonely abandonment to joyus reclamation when her body becomes stone, when the troll self reclaims its prize.