Readers and writers blog

Time again for a little housekeeping, which at our place means just shifting stuff around without throwing anything away. But this time, if they haven’t already been at your fingertips, it means getting out those dictionaries and encyclopedias again.

Because Conrad is back.

Actually, Conrad H. Roth never was away, just stored in the inactive section of our blogroll after he announced the day after New Year’s that he would quit writing his weblog, Varieties of Unreligious Experience. Well, earlier this month, he started Vunex up again.

Sadly, an urbane colleague of his, Aaron Haspel of the weblog God of the Machine, will be taking Roth’s place on our inactive list. Maybe Haspel will come back, too.

Conrad H. Roth isn’t his real name, and since he prefers anonymity, suffice it to say he’s a young Englishman who’s smarter than anyone of any age has a right to be. But everyone ought to know someone like that. We’re glad to.

His first entry back shows Roth still is as mind-bendingly erudite and sesquipedalian as ever. His April 6 post bears a headline in Gaelic — Thanum an Dhul, which is a line from an old Irish song called “Finnegan’s Wake” in which a drunk is mistaken for a corpse until he’s sprayed with whiskey, a revival theme central to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake — and to Roth’s return to blogging. Circuitous, eh?

The man is conversant in Latin as well as some French and German, and the motto on his website is in Italian, supposedly advice given to Goethe in 1786 — Non deve fermarsi l’huomo in una sola cosa, perchè allora divien matto: bisogna aver mille cose, una confusione nella testa — which, as best we can make out, means:

A man shouldn’t stop at just one thing because that will make him crazy. He needs to have a thousand things, a pandemonium, in his head.

In Roth’s case, it’s a lovely pandemonium. Welcome back, o erudite one.

Now, as for Haspel, his website opens very slowly and hasn’t had a new post — actually, most of them are briefs in a center column, the larger entries on the left being much rarer — since Jan. 21. Haspel, a critic and reviewer particularly fond of poetry, quit God of the Machine once before, in 2005, but returned a year later. We hope he does again.

As with everything on our inactive list at the bottom of the blogroll, even if God of the Machine doesn’t start up again, we think what’s written so far is still worth reading.

And speaking of that, here are today’s offerings in our nonfiction and fiction sections that are worth reading:

• Chapter Five: Pacifica of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good in which the author continues moving back in his personal history — a playwrighting triumph cut short by a bitchy teacher in Michigan, a disappointing move to California, an abortive attempt to ship around the world on a yacht — until he has a thespian encounter with a Mormon kid from Salt Lake City who will become his friend.

• Chapter Twelve: Inquests and Inquisitions of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing in which a series of worldwide attacks is launched by a group of religious fanatics stirred into unrest by the presence of an alien spacecraft in New Mexico. The group’s leader escapes into the ship itself and for some mysterious reason knows how to manipulate its complex controls.

So, between these and the resurrected Roth, there’s plenty to read today.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at the top is a work called “Fagin Knew a Sin,” an ink-on-paper anagram on Finnegans Wake by Ben Stack, a Dublin-born artist now living in Australia. His website is at http://www.benstack.com.au/.