Sophie Marceau as Anna Karenina (1997)

Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina

'Alla Tarasova as Anna Karenina in 1937'

'Tatiana Samoilova as Anna in the 1967 Soviet screen version of Tolstoy's novel'

and so, IT BEGINS

Anna Karenina GoodReads schedule

Our reading/discussion schedule will be:

Day to begin discussion
1/06/2010 Part One 1-34 134pp. 1/25/2010
1/13/2010 Part Two 1-35 141 pp. 1/26/2010
1/20/2010 Part Three 1-32 136 pp. 1/28/2010
1/27/2010 Part Four 1-23 94 pp. 1/29/2010
--------------------------
2/03/2010 Part Five 1-33 130 pp. 2/06/2010
2/10/2010 Part Six 1-32 134 pp. 2/07/2010
2/17/2010 Part Seven 1-31 112 pp. 2/08/2010
2/24/2010 Part Eight 1-19 55 pp. 2/08/2010

(argh so far behind already....)

spotted in the wild

While we were buying a new toilet plunger at the big QFC down on Broadway (the things you tell the internet) I scoped out the book table, because I scope out book displays everywhere I go -- QFC, airport, drugstore, it doesn't matter. Walked out with a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed (I KNOW, MISTAKE, I KNOW) but more to the point, saw a stack of Middlemarch in among the "books" by Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck and Leslie Rule and crap like The Time Traveller's Wife and Revolutionary Road. I was so tickled I got T to take a picture for me.

'Enigmas'

"Enigmas," Pablo Neruda

You've asked me what the lobster is weaving there with his golden feet?
I reply, the ocean knows this.
You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent bell? What is it waiting for?
I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.
You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?
Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.
You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal,
and I reply by describing
how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.
You enquire about the kingfisher's feathers,
which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?
Or you've found in the cards a new question touching on the crystal architecture
of the sea anemone, and you'll deal that to me now?
You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean spines?
The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?
The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out
in the deep places like a thread in the water?

I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its jewel boxes
is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,
and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the petal
hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light
and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall
from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.

I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead
of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,
of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes
on the timid globe of an orange.

I walked around as you do, investigating the endless star,
and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,
the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.

-- tr. Robert Bly