Tag: Literature

Goethe on the Regularities of Life, Being in Tune With, Saul Bellow Reference

It is a narcotic dullness. There are times when I am not even aware that there is anything wrong with this existence. But, on the other hand, there are times when I rouse myself in bewilderment and vexation, and then I think of myself as a moral casualty of the war. I have changed. Two incidents in the past week have shown me how greatly. The first can hardly be called an incident. I was leafing through Goethe’s Poetry and Life and I came upon the following phrase: “This loathing of life has both physical and moral causes. . . .” I was sufficiently stirred by this to read on. “All comfort in life is based upon a regular occurrence of external phenomena. The changes of the day and night, of the seasons, of flowers and fruits, and all other recurring pleasures that come to us, that we may and should enjoy them—these are the mainsprings of our earthly life. The more open we are to these enjoyments, the happier we are; but if these changing phenomena unfold themselves and we take no interest in them, if we are insensible to such fair solicitations, then comes on the sorest evil, the heaviest disease—we regard life as a loathsome burden. It is said of an Englishman that he hanged himself that he might no longer have to dress and undress himself every day.” I read on and on with unacccustomed feeling.

Dangling Man
Saul Bellow

Note – copy I’m reading, above.
From Myopic Books, in Chicago.
One of Atlas Obscura’s:
162 Cool, Hidden, and Unusual Things to Do in Chicago, Illinois
Thereʼs more than wind in the metropolis of the Midwest. Fascinating foods, marvelous museums, and an actual 1957 Cadillac De Ville encased in 15 cubic yards of concrete. This place has everything.

James Baldwin on Disagreement

“We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist”

James Baldwin

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— Literary Pearls (@literarypearls.bsky.social) February 21, 2025 at 9:18 AM

John Cheever – Desultory Quotes

“I know some people who are afraid to write a business letter because they will encounter and reveal themselves.”

“I was brought up in southern Massachusetts, where it was thought that mythology was a subject that we should all grasp. It was very much a part of my education. The easiest way to parse the world is through mythology.”

“These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.”

“Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.”

“The secret of keeping young is to read children’s books. You read the books they write for little children and you’ll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.”

“Like all bitter men, Flint knew less than half the story and was more interested in unloading his own peppery feelings than in learning the truth.”

“The city is full of accidental revelation, half-heard cries for help, and strangers who will tell you everything at the first suspicion of sympathy.”

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/7464.John_Cheever?page=1

A Tip About Shakespearen Soliloquies – Roger Michell to Simon Russell Beale

While I was rehearsing for Richard III, another director, Roger Michell, gave me a tip about soliloquies. ‘When you have to speak directly to the audience,’ he said, ‘always give them a role.’ It’s a simple and brilliant idea. As an example: I said earlier that Iago lies to his audience. If that is true, then he would, presumably, think of them as a pack of gullible idiots. For Hamlet, the only people he can really trust are his friends in the audience; he believes that, whatever happens and whatever he chooses to do, they will understand him. In Richard’s case, he behaves like the leader of the gang. Any challenge that the audience might throw down – seducing a woman over the corpse of a man that he’s just killed, let’s say, or seizing the crown – he will accept. And he will triumph – to his and the gang’s delight.

A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare and Other Stories
Simon Russell Beale

All men’s failings I forgive in actors; no actor’s failings will I forgive in men. – Goethe, Wilhelm Meister

Epigraph to Mephisto, by Klaus Mann

Cities and Memory 3 – Zaira – Italo Calvino

In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.

As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

Cities & Memory 3
Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino

Evocative Descriptions, Three Selections

By the time I graduated from college, however, funk was in decline and my listening was at a dead end. Dan and other friends had spent their college years listening to the Clash, Echo and the Bunnymen, Joy Division, Gang of Four, and R.E.M. They tried to turn me on to these and similar bands, and while I recognized a certain vitality in this music, I could never identify with it. The smart lyrics and melodies could not atone for the frenetic and clunky rhythms, which offended my funk drummer’s ears. It sounded as if this music was being played by people whose glasses were slipping off their noses.

So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star: How I Machine-Gunned a Roomful Of Record Executives and Other True Tales from a Drummer’s Life
Jacob Slichter

Rahel put on her sunglasses and looked back into the Play. Everything was Angry-colored. Sophie Mol, standing between Margaret Kochamma and Chacko, looked as though she ought to be slapped. Rahel found a whole column of juicy ants. They were on their way to church. All dressed in red. They had to be killed before they got there. Squished and squashed with a stone. You can’t have smelly ants in church. The ants made a faint crunchy sound as life left them. Like an elf eating toast, or a crisp biscuit.

The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy

So the phone was left on the little three-legged table beside the sofa, as unsteady as a spider on an ice cube.

Anxious People
Fredrik Backman

Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century

Over the last hundred years African writers have written of their lives, experiences, culture, history and myth; they have written in diverse forms, styles and in many languages. They have been published widely on the African continent, in Europe, the Americas and Asia. They have written in English, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Swahili, and in many other indigenous languages. And they have written with extraordinary originality, flair and great integrity. Nonetheless their work as a corpus deriving from the African continent remains largely unknown and uncelebrated.

To mark the beginning of the 21st century, and encouraged by Professor Ali Mazrui, the Zimbabwe International Book Fair launched the international compilation of “Africa’s 100 Best Books.” This project was organized in collaboration with the African Publishers Network (APNET), the Pan-African Booksellers Association (PABA), African writers’ associations, book development councils, and library associations.

Nominations were sought throughout the African continent and internationally. A comprehensive list of all nominations was published at the ZIBF in August 2001 and during the course of the following year regional panels compiled their own short lists of 100 best books. Closing date for nominations was 30 September 2001.

A jury made the final decision from the short list and the final list of “Africa’s 100 Best Books” was announced on February 18, 2002.
…
In the table below, ** indicates a top twelve title.

Columbia.edu

LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN

Asare, Meshack	Ghana	**Sosu’s Call	Sub-Saharan Publishers
Al-Homi, Hayam Abbas	Egypt	Adventures of a Breath	Atfalna
Mungoshi, Charles	Zimbabwe	Stories from a Shona Childhood	Baobab Books
Tadjo, Veronique	Côte d’Ivoire	Mamy Wata et le monstre	Nouvelles éditions ivoriennes

CREATIVE WRITING

Continue reading “Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century” →

Reading War and Peace in Leningrad, 1942

Spring, Leningrad, 1942 – “though the word ‘spring,”‘ writes Russian literary critic Lidiya Ginsburg in her memoir, Blockade Diary, “had an odd ring to it. The bread ration had been increased, trams made their diffident way along frozen streets. The Germans had halted the bombing raids, but were shelling the city several times each day. The strongest and most vital people had already died – or had survived. The feeble went on belatedly dying. The word ‘spring’ had an odd ring to it.”

As she tells us in this slender but powerful volume, though “the thirst for information was fearful,” with people crowding around street-corner loudspeakers several times a day, the besieged Russians of Leningrad longed for other sorts of “information.” Ginsburg writes:

During the war years, people used to read War and Peace avidly, comparing their own behaviour with it (not the other way round – no one doubted the adequacy of Tolstoy’s response to life). The reader would say to himself… so then, this is how it should be. Whoever had the energy enough to read, used to read war and Peace avidly in besieged Leningrad….

Tolstoy had said the last word as regards courage, about people doing their bit in a people’s war. He also spoke of how those caught up in this common round continued playing their part involuntarily, while ostensibly busy solving problems affecting their own lives. The people of besieged Leningrad worked (while they could) and saved (if they could) both themselves and their loved ones from dying of hunger.

And in the final reckoning that was also essential to the war effort, because a living city barred the path of an enemy who wanted to kill it.

Molloy by Samuel Beckett – Review, Summary

“Beckett was the headmaster of the Writing as Agony school,” says Martin Amis. “On a good day, he would stare at the wall for eighteen hours or so, feeling entirely terrible, and, if he was lucky, a few words like NEVER or END or NOTHING or NO WAY might brand themselves on his bleeding eyes.” This isn’t entirely fair – Beckett was capable of sentences, even paragraphs. Even a 90-page paragraph that comprises the entire first half of this fuckin’ book here, which is about some knucklehead who farts. “One day I counted them,” Molloy says. “Three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an average of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it’s not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. It’s nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes.” Have you, friend, ever counted your farts?

The second half features Moran, the world’s worst dad, as he forces an enema up his kid. They wander through the countryside; he’s looking for Molloy, perhaps to interrogate him for some murky reason. He’s a detective? An assassin? Along the way he murders a guy for no real reason. Molloy killed a guy too. Their voices are similar(ly unhinged). The theory goes that perhaps we’ve skipped backwards, Moran is young Molloy, he’s hunting down his future. That is of course a very college seminar thing to say, a very Lit Major theory, and “It is not at this late stage of my relation,” Moran tells us, “that I intend to give way to literature.” But have we? Given way to literature? If so, how many farts did it take?

Good Reads
Alex
4 Stars

Finnegans Wake Enthusiasts

The Most Challenging Book You’ve Ever Read
byu/MadMaxine666 inbooks

tomchaps
I met a guy in 1992 in St. Petersburg (Russia), who had taught himself English by reading the liner notes to old rock-n-roll records. He had a Elvis-style pompadour, but was more of a Carl Perkins fan.

The first actual book he read was Finnegans Wake. He just got a dictionary, went at it word-by-word, and just let it wash over him. Very, very slowly. He claimed to have loved it.

ej_21
one of my favorite recent stories was the book club that spent almost three decades reading finnegans wake: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/12/california-venice-book-club-finngeans-wake-28-years

flibadab
I took both an undergraduate and a graduate course on Finnegans Wake (different universities), and I loved it. Both professors emphasized that you can’t possible get everything in the Wake, but you can definitely enjoy it.