-Walter Benjamin, August 25th 1934.
Ha! Is good!
Here's my profile.
- amazon wishlist
- hm, should i read the Dark Is Rising series again, or will it disappoint me?
- the art of looking sideways
- book on the underground railroad
Books to read. I haven't read much of the stuff on this list, but the stuff I have read was good, and none of it was boring, so there.
"That is why Joyce's characters remain artificial constructs, their thoughts and motives -- they cannot properly be said to have feelings ..."
What an asshole thing to say. This essay makes much more sense if you realize that it's mostly about a reader's frustrated desire to conquer a text.
Update: ok ... sorry, I needed some time to breathe. It's a disturbing essay, and it makes a good point about a certain tug the reader experiences towards aborbing and being absorbed by more and more of the book. I'll have to think about it.
Letters from Saul Bellow to Philip Roth, describing how he wrote The Adventures of Augie March and the other '50s books. (If I made a top ten novels list, and I never will, Augie March would be on it.)
bah ... now only an abstract. Liars, you used to have the full text.
Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye
The Art of the Novel by Ian Watt
Art and Illusion by E. H. Gombrich.
Interesting speculation about book seven.
My God, how did I miss this amazing quote from Ovid: "Love yields to business. If you seek a way out of love, be busy; you'll be safe, then."
The trip chronicled in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The most in-depth comparison of their thought I've found yet. Well, mostly it just answers my question "What's wrong with The Myth of Sisyphus?" I always caught a faint whiff of condescension from scholars about it, but I couldn't figure out why.
"I have to take the bus to the doctor's office because some drunk rear-ended me last week on my way home from an after-bar. It's morning rush hour, so of course my DJ and I have to stand. He doesn't have a stable surface to set his turntables on, so his records keep skipping all over the place."
"Thor and Loki decided to travel to Utgard, land of the giants, the enemies of the gods."
First read this story a long time ago.
an interview
"...I'm very often considered part of his generation and writers like Franzen and Moody and people like that. But actually I am from a different generation. I am from a generation that was raised with the Internet, which is quite different. It makes a huge difference. And I was raised with a different kind of television and music. Music for example that depends very much on borrowing from different traditions, sampling pieces of other music and overlaying different rhythms and melodies and I think that is reflected in my writing."
"Part of my desire to switch voices is a kind of impatience. I don't think it is a bad impatience or immature impatience. It has something to do with the way we live now."
"Nobody, I think, can ask them to be optimists."
He wrote drafts for a diary meant for purely private consumption. Invert it: I wonder if this weblog's public nature causes me to censor myself.
I can't figure out if this is called "The Mythical Method" or "Ulysses, Order and Myth".
I didn't dive into the Homeric parallel that much when I read Ulysses. Perhaps I'll read the Odyssey before I read Ulysses again. (Or, maybe Eliot is full of shit.)
If the novelist is less important culturally today, is it because the novel is exhausted as an artistic form, or because the economic substructure of society has changed in a way that - somehow - makes novels less compelling?
(DeLillo thinks authors are independent of these forces - "If we're not doing the big social novel fifteen years from now, it'll probably mean our sensibilities have changed in ways that make such work less compelling to us--we won't stop because the market dried up. The writer leads, he doesn't follow." Readers are a different matter: "if serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talking about when we use the word 'identity' has reached an end." [cite])
(Wow, Mary's right, I am a Marxist. I blame Jared Diamond.)
"...the question 'Do you believe in truth or are you one of those frivolous postmodernists?' is often the first one that journalists ask intellectuals whom they are assigned to interview. That question now plays the role previously played by the question 'Do you believe in God, or are you one of those dangerous atheists?'."
Dennett disagrees.
Haven't read Simon Blackburn's take yet.
my family and other animals
toop, ocean of sound
yoga for people who can't be bothered to do it (?)
burke
wodehouse, uneasy money
Alexander of Macedon, a historical biography by Peter Greene
waugh, decline and fall (?)
schumpeter, 'capitalism, socialism and democracy'
seabiscuit
auerbach, 'mimesis'
walter benjamin, 'illuminations'
Amazon.com wishlist
Michael Chabon's.
Original BBC Audio.
- Don DeLillo, "Mao II"
"The manuscripts are the [Dead Sea Scrolls] of Buddhism...but he adds, 'From the beginning, I've structured this project's strategies to be the exact opposite to the Dead Sea Scrolls. That entails actually doing research and publishing it, rather than dickering around for 40 years, or whatever they were doing.'"
The one who did Winnie the Pooh.
"One of the Trachinians told him, 'Such was the number of the barbarians, that when they shot forth their arrows the sun would be darkened by their multitude.' Dieneces, not at all frightened at these words, but making light of the Median numbers, answered 'Our Trachinian friend brings us excellent tidings. If the Medes darken the sun, we shall have our fight in the shade.'"
I've been looking for a literary version of the All Music Guide for a while now (I know it's a silly idea: "capsule reviews of the century's greatest ideas!") This isn't it, but it's useful, gently opinionated, and has links to reviews on other sites. And a weblog.
As Harlan Ellison said: "His stories are sunk to the knees in maturity and wisdom, in bravura writing that breaks rules most writers only suspect exist. His concepts are fresh, his attacks bold, his resolutions generally trenchant. Thus leading us inexorably to the conclusion that Roger Zelazny is the reincarnation of Geoffrey Chaucer."
All true!
hmm: 1
You know, the problem with writing a link summary after spending twenty minutes perusing the link is that I'm frequently too overwhelmed with enthusiasm to write with a clear head. For example, in this case I'm tempted to write something like "SING, HENRY, SING YOUR HEART OUT" which just wouldn't be right.
Oops, Amazon just made my life more complicated by reminding me about The Dark Is Rising. And I was already planning on re-reading A Wrinkle In Time. Maybe I should just borrow someone's kids and read with them.
Hello, and welcome to the eleventh stop on the "Rainy Day Fun and Games for Toddler and Total Bastard" virtual book tour, the book tour that has ignored every hint you've dropped -- the yawns, the glances at your watch, the insistence that you've got to get up early tomorrow -- and just refuses to leave. My name's Bono and I'm here to talk about third-world debt forgiveness-- No, no. Wait. My name Greg Knauss, and I'm here to shamelessly pitch my book. Sorry for the confusion.
"Rainy Day Fun and Games for Toddler and Total Bastard" is now officially approved by my wife. She lay down on the sofa the other night and read it for the first time, because I had apparently neglected to mention to her that I'd been documenting the most intimate details of our lives on a Web site. When asked for a quote, she said, "I can't believe people pay six bucks for this."
There's an "only" missing from that, the way I figure it.
Today's reading is from James Stegall's "I Don't Care If I Ever Get Paid to Write," because I'm just sick to death of that damnedable "Rainy Day" thing:
I've apprehended homeless men who've shoved telephones down their pants and twelve-year-old girls with backpacks full of make-up. I've caught single mothers pushing out strollers with packages of diapers hidden beneath their babies. I caught a woman who emptied an end cap of three hundred Power Ranger figurines into a cart and attempted to push it out the door. One tall man pushed a television out the front doors with his daughter sitting on his shoulders When he saw me he, tried to run and his little girl hit her head on the doorjamb. She started to scream like a siren. That's how I got him.
I apprehended one fourteen-year-old boy who shoplifted a collectable baseball (barely over the $10 minimum). When I notified his mother she said, "Keep him." I had to call the police.
And now, questions from people with far, far too much time on their hands:
A man in a purple sweater asks: If you were to say, race your children -- and I'm not saying you have or implying that you've thought about it at great length -- but if you were to race your three kids from one end of the biggest room of your house to the other, what do you think the approximate finishing times would be for each child and who would win?
Here at Total Bastard Laboratories, we'll never settle for simple conjecture. It's hard, scientifically justifiable experimentation you're looking for, sir, and it's hard, scientifically justifiable experimentation you're going to get.
At approximately 6:45pm PST, at the Total Bastard Test Area and Living Room, Subjects T, M and P* were lined up along the eastern border of the proving grounds, after the coffee table was moved out of the way. Both Subjects T and M showed pre-test jitters, as they repeatedly attempted to wander away and look out the window. Subject P displayed almost preternatural clam, largely because he had fallen asleep in his bouncy seat. Once Subjects T and M were returned to their starting positions -- after the test administrator threatened to count to three -- and the heats were begun.
Trial One ended in a draw, as both Subjects T and M returned to the window while subject P continued to sleep, possibly passing gas in the process. This last is conjecture, but Subjects T and M both denied responsibility and the test administrator refuses to even consider the possibility that it was him.
Trial Two results were abandoned as flawed, because the test administrator had to push both Subjects T and M across the Test Area, muttering helpful "C'mon! Go! C'mon!"s as they went.
Trial Three presented Subject T as the clear winner, though he refused to stop at the foyer and continued down the hall, through the family room, the kitchen, the dining room and back around to the living room again -- repeatedly, four laps by the official count -- all the while shouting "C'mon! Go! C'mon!" Subject M trailed, after a tentative start, wailing "Eeeeee!" The tests were brought to a conclusion when the test administrator's wife interrupted the fifth circuit by saying, "Calm down! Calm down! It's dinner time! In your seats, now!" And then, to the administrator, "I wish you wouldn't do that to them before we eat." Subject P was left on the proving grounds to finish his nap. He crossed the finish line roughly an hour later, after he pooped and had to be taken upstairs to be changed.
Final times -- Subject T: three seconds; Subject M: four seconds; Subject P: one hour (assisted).
For more scientifically rigorous child-rearing and/or -racing, please join the tour tomorrow, when it stops at Harrumph.
* I just realized that my son's initials spell "tmp," or the common computer abbreviation for "temporary." I refuse to consider what subconscious processes might have led to that. Besides, Joanne picked Pete's name.
About 1983, I asked Marie Jolas about James Joyce's relationship to women. As well as I can recall verbatim, this is what she said:
"He was always polite to women, always. He was always a gentleman, always courteous, gracious to women... And he would ask questions of women that no one else would, no other man would."
What kind of questions, I asked her.
"What is it like to give birth? What is it like to menstruate? Many questions like that."
And women answered? I asked.
"Yes. We all told him. He was so interested and courteous. He listened."
Marie Jolas and her husband Eugene knew Joyce quite well. Eugene published "Work in Progress" in his magazine, transition.
Tweedledee began instantly:
`The sun was shining--'
Here Alice ventured to interrupt him. `If it's VERY long,' she said, as politely as she could, `would you please tell me first which road--'
Tweedledee smiled gently, and began again:
`The sun was shining on the sea...'
