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Juleson reached over and picked up a piece of blue-lined binder paper where Lorin was writing out a list of words.
He read the first few: Crystalline, Gelid, Nascent, Alluvial, Fracto-nimbus …
“What’s this?” he asked.
“I’m conducting an experiment to determine if poetry can be constructed on mathematical principles.” He indicated a thesaurus sitting at the back of his desk. “I’m taking the words from Roget. He understood categories.”
“Is he your new hero?”
“I admire him.”
“And Hegel’s out?”
Lorin frowned. “There were certain inconsistencies.”
A discussion from Malcolm Braly’s prison novel, On The Yard
The publication of Hilary Mantel’s new book, Bringing Up the Bodies, sequel to Wolf Hall, has sparked a resurgent interest in historical fiction. One of the titles that she has frequently recommended is The Year of the French by Thomas Flanagan. The Year of the French is about the Irish Rebellion of 1798 (Éirí Amach 1798) when a band of Irish patriots, with a company of French Republican troops, land in County Mayo in western Ireland, defeat the English at Castlebar, set up the short lived Republic of Connaught, and then eventually lose at the battle of Ballinamuck.
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These lists have been floating around for a while, but we still enjoy looking through them and getting in virulent literary arguments that don’t go anywhere. And you can too! We have one book in each of the Modern Library’s lists: Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica (#71) in the 100 Best Novels, and Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination (#56) in 100 Best Nonfiction books. What do you think of these lists? Too conventional? Are some of our other books missing?
And so it was that the two of us, out of a shared and confused hatred, performed an act that looked like love, but while our bodies sought each other and came together we were both thinking and speaking of him all the time, of nothing but him. Sometimes what she said hurt me, and I was ashamed to be involved with what I disliked. But my body no longer obeyed my will, and instead wildly sought its own pleasure. Shuddering, I kissed the lips which were betraying the person I most loved.
—another quotation from Stefan Zweig’s Confusion, in honor of its publication day. It was reviewed last week in the blog The Mookse and the Gripes, if you are interested read it here.
“That is all very senseless, but this senselessness has a pretty mouth, and it smiles.” — Jakob von Gunten, Robert Walser (via bestreadamerican)
‘All phenomena, all humanity is to be recognized only in its fiery form, only in passion. For the intellect arises from the blood, thought from passion, passion from enthusiasm—so look at Shakespeare and his kind first, for they alone will make you young people genuinely young! Enthusiasm first, then diligence—enthusiasm giving you the finest, most extreme and greatest tutorial in the world, before you turn to studying the words.’
—from Stefan Zweig’s Confusion, which publishes today. The speech is made by a professor of English language and literature at a university in a provincial German town. His student, the protagonist has spent his first semester philandering in Berlin, and has been sent to a smaller town to dedicate himself to his studies. We also think it’s a pretty good introduction to the themes in all of Zweig’s works.
Garm magazine cover by Tove Jansson
The politically liberal satirical magazine Garm of Swedish-speaking intellectual circles began to publish Tove’s drawings in 1929, and this collaboration continued until 1953. Tove drew several hundred pictures and approximately one hundred covers for the magazine. Garm attacked dictatorship and tyranny of all descriptions, and Tove´s biting drawings of Hitler and Stalin alike were sometimes censored.
source: Design Forum Finland
any time I see “NYRB Classics” I parse the acronym as Now You Read Book
— bw (@bwolo) May 29, 2012
Cossery’s heroes are usually dandies and thieves, unfettered by possessions or obligations; impoverished but aristocratic idlers who can suck the marrow of joy from the meager bones life tosses their way. They are the descendants of Baudelaire’s flâneur, of the Surrealists with their rejection of the sacrosanct work ethic, of the Situationists and their street-theater shenanigans, not to mention the peripatetic Beats or the countercultural ‘dropouts’ of the 1960s. Henry Miller, who raised dolce far niente to an art form, praised Cossery’s writing as ‘rare, exotic, haunting, unique.’ Whether Cossery’s merry pranksters wish merely to have a good time or, as in The Jokers, to wage an all-out campaign of raillery against the powers that be, there is one belief they all share: the only true recourse against a world governed by ‘scoundrels’ is an utter disregard for convention, including the convention of taking anything seriously.
—from a review by Mark Polizzotti of Albert Cossery’s work in The Nation. With new “scoundrels” being voted on in the recent Egyptian election, Cossery provides his readers with a lighter, more surreal look at politics and life in the streets of Cairo.
Dawn in 2012, or the last sentence of a Sheckley story from 1953 or so, are whistle-blowers on anyone who jumps cover, commits to an Attempted Escape, forgets that the House Always Wins. Unlike most Utopias—unlike all those doomed Five-Year Plans Guaranteeing Purchasers an out from the Law of Answered Prayer—most of the great Sheckley stories, bar a few cheerier tales featuring aliens or humans who are safely off-planet, are about what happens to human beings when the future stops teasing us. The heart of his best work is all about comeuppance, what happens in the latter years of the Age of Anxiety when the spell fails and you hit vacuum like Casey, what happens when the gods grant your wish. The heart of a Sheckley story is how it ends.
—from John Clute’s, co-author of The Encyclopedia of Science-Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, review of Robert Sheckley’s Store of the Worlds on the blog Strange Horizons.
“He began to resent the time he had spent at work on the Foote farm. Having come to his studies late, he felt the urgency of study. Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.” — Stoner by John Williams, via Nick Recommends: Recommended Reading [158]
Damion Searls will be at Harvard Book Store tonight to talk about the Dutch author Nescio. Damion recently selected and translated much of Nescio’s work—there wasn’t a lot, and none of it was ever translated into English before—for the recently published Amsterdam Stories. Nescio wrote most of his short stories and novellas in the first part of the 20th century: the characters are youthful, filled with idealism about their art and ability to change the world, and a little bit mad. Also included in this collection is the story “Insula Dei” written in 1942 about surviving during the Nazi occupation of Holland. One could make many author comparisons with Nescio, he has often been called the “F. Scott Fitzgerald of Holland”, but also with J.D. Salinger and his European contemporaries Robert Walser and Kafka. Whatever gets you into him, he is a writer worth discovering. For full details of the event go here.
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