the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt three)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

Schuyler credited Smeltzer with opening “windows for me on / flowering fields and bays where the water greenly danced, / Knifed into waves by wind: the day he disclosed William Carlos / Williams to us, writing a short and seemingly / Senseless poem on the blackboard.” Smeltzer also piqued Jimmy’s interest with a mention of James Joyce’s Ulysses. However, when Jimmy asked after class for more information about Ulysses, which had been banned in this country as obscene until 1933, Smeltzer chuckled and said, “When you’re in college it will be time enough.” Annoyed by Smeltzer’s coy hypocrisy, Jimmy went to Buffalo and, as he related in “The Morning of the Poem,” bought a copy of the book from Otto Ulrich’s bookshop, where John Bernard Myers, later a prominent figure in the New York art and poetry world, then worked as a salesclerk. Jimmy recalled him as a “big white whale” who loomed over him one day as he was reading in a corner of the shop, and said “You look like an interesting boy,” and gave him a copy of his magazine, Upstate. Jimmy’s rumored possession of Ulysses lent him unwonted status in the eyes of the high school jocks, normally oblivious to his very existence. He managed to get the book into the house, past his suspicious stepfather, by telling Berton it was a socially conscious book “about poor people in Ireland.”

Despite Smeltzer’s introducing him to William Carlos Williams’s poetry, Jimmy did not read him in earnest until he was in college, when he especially loved the “complete freedom” in his work. Through anthologies he also discovered Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, D. H. Lawrence, and other modernist poets. Lawrence and Stevens had probably the most impact, and over the next few years he came to feel he had memorized Harmonium and The Man with the Blue Guitar and Ideas of Order.

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt two)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

For a boy of fifteen living in suburban upstate New York, Jimmy’s reading was both worldly and idiosyncratic. Wilde, Saki, Maugham, Nicholson, Green, Logan Pearsall Smith—in fact, with the possible exception of Evelyn Waugh, all of the male prose writers he and Oshei mention reading in high school were gay. The queer slant of Jimmy’s early reading did not escape his mother’s sophisticated eyes. When, at an unknown age, Jimmy informed Margaret that he was gay, her response was “Just because you like Oscar Wilde, it doesn’t mean you have to do all those things.” Most of his favorite writers were English and wrote with a careful attention to their prose style, which tended to be clear and elegant, if sometimes mannered. Once Jimmy had decided to be a writer (of prose), he consciously modeled his prose on that of his heroes, and his heroes’ heroes. For example, he said, “I was very affected by reading Somerset Maugham’s Summing Up in my teens. In that book he describes how he really tried to learn by copying out long passages of Dryden’s prose. I did the same thing, only I chose Walter de la Mare and Cardinal Newman.” He also traced his habit of stitching together sentences with colons, often in evidence in his long poems of the 1970s, to his high school reading of Harold Nicholson’s Some People.

One afternoon when he was about fifteen or sixteen years old, while lying in his backyard tent and reading Logan Pearsall Smith’s memoir Unforgotten Years, Jimmy experienced a life-changing epiphany. In the first part of the twentieth century, Smith was a well-known literary figure, famous for a book of rather precious short prose sketches called Trivia. Unforgotten Years, published in 1939, tells how when Smith was a young man growing up outside Philadelphia in the early 1880s, he and his family became friends with the aged Walt Whitman, who used to travel from his home in Camden, New Jersey, to stay with them, and how through his friendship with Whitman, the youthful Smith became aware of his own vocation as a writer. While reading this in his backyard tent, as Jimmy later recalled, “I looked up and the whole landscape shimmered, and I said, ‘Yes, that’s it.’” In that moment, he realized that, “rather than an architect, I wanted to be a writer and would be one.”

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt one)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

The name Schuyler (pronounced “SKY-ler”) is of Dutch origin. The Schuyler family were early seventeenth-century settlers of New Netherland, and prominent in New York State before, during, and after the Revolutionary War, lending their name to a number of localities and geographical features. New York State alone has a town of Schuyler, a Schuyler County, Schuyler Lake, and Schuylerville, and there are other Schuyler place-names in the Midwest.

The history of the Schuylers in America begins with two brothers, Philip (1628–1683) and David Pieterse Schuyler (1636–1690), who immigrated from the Netherlands sometime before 1650. After landing in New Amsterdam, they both moved up the Hudson River, became fur traders, and helped establish the city of Albany. By the mid-eighteenth century, the descendants of both Schuyler brothers were wealthy landowners who in some cases exercised almost feudal manorial rights over their extensive properties. The famous General Philip Schuyler (1733–1804), the Revolutionary War hero and member of the Constitutional Congress and one of New York State’s first senators, was a descendant of the older brother, Philip. His daughters, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton and Angelica Schuyler Church, were celebrated for their beauty, wit, and style. Elizabeth married Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, while Angelica married a member of the British Parliament and was close to Franklin, Jefferson, and Lafayette. These historic family associations stirred James Schuyler’s imagination, especially during his difficult adolescence, despite the fact that (as he may or may not have realized) he was descended not from Philip but his younger brother.

the last book I ever read (Olga Ravn's The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century, excerpt thirteen)

from The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken:

STATEMENT 153

Yesterday I saw Cadet 21, a humanoid, standing on her own among the objects in the recreation room. Her eyes were closed. I watched her for a long time. A human being contemplating its creation. She stood quite still, in deep concentration. Eventually, she opened her eyes and looked at me, and her eyes were full of tears. I got the strong feeling that we have failed, and that our time is over.

the last book I ever read (Olga Ravn's The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century, excerpt twelve)

from The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken:

STATEMENT 138

I dream that I’m cooking my dress. I won’t be wearing my uniform today. The dress is covered with blue and silver sequins, and I drop it into a saucepan. By the time I remember it, it’s already burnt. The sequins have turned into fish eggs the size of peppercorns. Some of the eggs are black and shiny, others are the color of egg white, and transparent. The straps of the dress are thin and insubstantial, like warm glue. The dress can no longer be word, but it’s become an item of great beauty. You inform me that together with a handful of selected human employees I have now been tasked with dismantling the humanoid section of the crew via the mainframe in the engine room. I have no hesitation in taking on such a task. It shouldn’t be any problem. The dress in my dream carried with it the knowledge that my former sweetheart on Earth now has three children and has lost his hair, and that he has started wearing a yellow uniform jacket. And that I am here.

the last book I ever read (Olga Ravn's The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century, excerpt eleven)

from The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken:

STATEMENT 099

I heard Dr. Lund made one exactly like a child. But apparently its development went wrong, it killed a lot of chickens and smeared the blood all over its face. No, it does sound a bit exaggerated. I haven’t seen blood in a long time. What I do see are the white walls, the orange floors and the gray floors. I see my coworkers, and I see my keyboard, my joystick and my helmet. Through the outlet, I see the green earth I’ve never known. There are pilots who go out there, and they’re laughing as they exit. How they’ve got the courage is beyond me. It’s not because of orders that they do it. I think they do it just so they can be on their own. I mean, they’re not finding any more objects out there. I’m that humanoid child too, with the chicken blood on its face. I feel ashamed and sit quietly at my controls. Some of us are made to connect with each other, others with no one. If you look at things in the right perspective, all of us here on the Six Thousand Ship are Dr. Lund’s children. Why am I telling you this? I thought it might interest you that they go out there on their own.

the last book I ever read (Olga Ravn's The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century, excerpt ten)

from The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken:

STATEMENT 089

Sometimes the humanoids are very quiet. They’ve started sitting at the same tables together in the canteen. They sit in a row and take in their nourishment. It’s as if without a word being said between them they’ve somehow agreed to be silent. Only a fool should believe that silence is consent. Their keeping quiet seems more like a conspiracy than a willingness to serve. Yes, that’s correct, I’m nervous about it.