Tag: Literature

Límites / Boundaries – Borges Poetry

Límites
Hay una línea de Verlaine que no volveré a recordar,
Hay una calle próxima que está vedada a mis pasos,
Hay un espejo que me ha visto por última vez,
Hay una puerta que he cerrado hasta el fin del mundo
Entre los libros de mi biblioteca (estoy viéndolos)
Hay alguno que ya nunca abriré,
Este verano cumpliré cincuenta años;
La muerte me desgasta, incesante.
—de Inscripciones (Montevideo, 1923), de Julio Platero Haedo

Boundaries
There is a line by Verlaine that I will not remember again.
There is a street nearby that is off limits to my feet.
There is a mirror that has seen me for the last time.
There is a door I have closed until the end of the world.
Among the books in my library (I’m looking at them now)
Are some I will never open.
This summer I will be fifty years old.
Death is using me up, relentlessly.
—from Inscriptions (Montevideo, 1923) by Julio Platero Haedo

Poems of the Night: A Dual-Language Edition with Parallel Text (Penguin Classics)
Jorge Luis Borges

John Updike Interview on The Connection

A Conversation with John Updike

John Updike’s Rabbit, Harry Angstrom, has been powdered ashes in a Bakelite box for more than ten years now. But the faithless old ne’er-do-well and charmer, downhill all the way from his high-school basketball days, has magic yet to conjure with, from the grave, in the fifth Rabbit novel about Updike’s American times. There’s no halo over the self-centered old showboat–who his son Nelson thought was “narcissistically impaired.” Yet there’s more than just the aura of memory around Harry: he’s a real ghost, clicking off practice chip shots under Nelson’s window in the gray-blue moonlight….

Rabbit’s still bugging Ronnie Harrison, whom he beat out in basketball and in the bedroom game-no matter that Ronnie has married Rabbit’s widow. In “Rabbit Remembered” he has dispatched from the grave a real daughter Annabelle that almost nobody new he had as an emissary and a balm for the world he left behind. Rabbit lives this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:
Author John Updike. His new book is entititled, “Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, ‘Rabbit Remembered.’”

you can listen here: The Connection

I hate when I am picturing an area and the author describes something that contradicts what I envision – Reddit

I hate when I am picturing an area and the author describes something that contradicts what I envision from books

BuddhaBliss
I just keep my imagination’s version.

sonedoyaar
Haha yes, I’m always thinking “You may be God of this world but I am God of mine”

Naerwyn
A book is a two way street

EchidnaLunar
I do that most of the time, but when the change affects the plot, ~~I burn the book and start doing drugs~~ have to make a compromise.

Michael Dirda (Book Critic, Well Read Guy) – Reddit AMA

HeavyMeddle
have you read twilight? it’s pretty good right

MichaelDirda
A masterpiece of marketing.

[deleted]
What’s Michael Dirda’s favorite book of all time?

MichaelDirda
An impossible question. The Odyssey, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Walden, Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, Njal Saga, Les Fleurs du Mal, The Tale of Genji–all these are favorites. My favorite writer, though, is probably Stendhal, especially his autobiographical works as Henri Beyle.

TheDiarrheaAnneFrank
alternatively, worst book he ever read?

karmicmoondreams
LOL at your username.

TooSmalley
What was the most controversial book review he has ever give? as example did he ever get major backlash for one of his reviews ?

MichaelDirda
My two most famous “negative” reviews were pretty mean, but with good reasons. About Judith Krantz’s “romance” novel “Dazzle” I opened with this lede: “I read Dazzle in one sitting. I had to. I was afraid I couldn’t face picking it up again.” I ended by pointing out that critics sometimes lament that good trees were felled to produce a book, but in the case of Dazzle I even felt bad for the book’s ink and glue. The other was a very dispassionate demolition job of Daniel Boorstin’s The Creators, a really flawed book about the arts.

StonedTom420
If I were her I would just cut out all of that and put
“I read Dazzle in one sitting.” – Michael Dirda on the back of the book

Meditation – Julian of Norwich

Meditation
Prayer unites the soul to God. For though the soul be ever like to God in nature and substance, restored by grace, it is often unlike in condition by sin on man’s part. Then is prayer a witness that the soul wills as God wills, and it comforts the conscience and enables man to grace. And He teaches us to pray and mightily trust that we shall have it. For He beholdeth us in love and would make us partners of His good deed. And therefore He moves us to pray for that which it pleases Him to do.

Prayers (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series)

Julian of Norwich (c. 8 November 1342 – c. 1416) was an English Christian mystic and theologian. Little is known of her life. Even her name is uncertain, the name “Julian” probably originated from the Church of St. Julian, Norwich, where she was an anchoress.

Wikiquote

Gift – Czeslaw Milosz

GIFT
A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle
flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not
embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

CZESLAW MILOSZ
Poems of Gratitude, edited by Emily Fragos
Amazon

From a Railway Carriage – Robert Louis Stevenson

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And there is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone for ever!

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/railway-carriage/

Where to Find Free ebooks – a list of lists

From this reddit post:

Project Gutenberg is a site that uploads free public domain ebooks to make them available to the public. It’s a great resource for free ebooks but it can be hard to find books you might be interested in picking up if you don’t know what you are looking for. I make these collections for r/FreeEBOOKs periodically to make it easier to find something to read.

I will be uploading new lists as often as I am able to on more topics or expanding some of the existing lists. Click the “follow” button on this post to be notified when they are uploaded.

50 free books on etiquette – trust me these are very entertaining

115 free fairy tale books

100 free mythology books

250 free kids and YA books

200 free sci-fi books

100 free classics

100 free Christmas ebooks

100 free poetry ebooks

100 free history ebooks

100 free memoirs and autobiographies

50 free mysteries

100 free books about pirates

70 books about space and astronomy

200 books about cooking and housekeeping

50 historical books about childbirth and sexual health

175 medical books

50 free craft books

100 free gardening books

Free assigned summer reading books

60 free ebooks about adventure and exploration in the Arctic and at the South Pole

100 free books of ghost stories

100 more free mythology ebooks

50 free horror books

30 free Arthurian legends

180 free Christmas ebooks

100 free books of essays

50 free ebooks about inventions and inventors

Free audiobook collections from Librivox:

50 free classic audiobooks

50 more free classic audiobooks

If you want to read ebooks on your kindle, here’s my how-to on that:
https://edhawkes.com/2019/04/21/send-an-e-book-to-your-kindle

Miss Amelia’s Whiskey – Carson McCullers

“For the liquor of Miss Amelia has a special quality of its own. It is clean and sharp on the tongue, but once down a man it glows inside him for a long time afterward. And that is not all. It is known that if a message is written with lemon juice on a clean sheet of paper there will be no sign of it. But if the paper is held for a moment to the fire then the letters turn brown and the meaning becomes clear. Imagine that the whisky is the fire and that the message is that which is known only in the soul of a man—then the worth of Miss Amelia’s liquor can be understood. Things that have gone unnoticed, thoughts that have been harbored far back in the dark mind, are suddenly recognized and comprehended.”

Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: and Other Stories

“Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced – Even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it” – John Keats

Letter to George and Georgiana Keats
http://www.john-keats.com/briefe/140219.htm

Wonders and Epiphanies – Michael Dirda

My Pleiade edition of Gérard de Nerval’s works is inscribed “en toute sympathie” from its French editor to Enid Starkie, the noted Oxford eccentric and biographer of Baudelaire and Flaubert. I found the slightly worn volume in a secondhand bookshop in Arlington for $6, and have often wondered how it got there.

The most restful place in the world is the periodicals reading room of any public library.

In eleventh grade we studied Oedipus the King in a translation for students by Bernard M. W. Knox. Fifteen years later I became friends with Knox, then director of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies here in Washington. It was almost like meeting Sophocles.

From the essay Talismans, in the book Readings, by Michael Dirda
Amazon

William S. Burroughs Talks With Tennessee Williams | The Village Voice

Although they were both born in St. Louis within three years of each other, William Burroughs did not meet Tennessee Williams until 1960, when they were briefly introduced at a table in the Cafe de Paris in Tangiers, by Paul and Jane Bowles. Burroughs had read and admired Williams’s short stories, and later in the ’60s Tennessee was known to quote at length from Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. But despite their mutual acquaintances (including the Bowleses and the painter Brion Gysin), they were not to meet again until 1975, at a gathering of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Their first conversation of any length took place at a party after a Burroughs reading at Notre Dame University earlier this year, and there they talked and carried on like old friends.

Tennessee’s new play, Vieux Carre, opens tonight on Broadway. Burroughs and I attended a preview two Saturdays ago. The next day we visited him at the Hotel Elysee, where he has maintained a spacious flat on the 12th floor for some time. It was late afternoon, and as I arrived, a few minutes after Burroughs, they were already seated at the opposite ends of a sofa. Tennessee seemed chipper; he got up to show us a pastel gouache he had just completed on his terrace that morning. Two bottles of wine arrived, and Burroughs and Williams resumed their talk.

— James Grauerholz

Orpheus Holds His Own: William Burroughs Talks with Tennessee Williams May 16, 1977, https://www.villagevoice.com/2020/02/16/william-s-burroughs-talks-with-tennessee-williams/

The Superfluous Man

The superfluous man (Russian: лишний человек, líshniy chelovék, “unnecessary person”) is an 1840s and 1850s Russian literary concept derived from the Byronic hero. It refers to an individual, perhaps talented and capable, who does not fit into social norms. In most cases, this person is born into wealth and privilege. Typical characteristics are disregard for social values, cynicism, and existential boredom; typical behaviors are gambling, drinking, romantic intrigues and duels. He is often unmindful, indifferent or unempathetic with society’s issues and can carelessly distress others with his actions, despite his position of power. He will often use his power for his own comfort and security and will have very little interest in being charitable or using it for the greater good.
…
Russian critics such as Vissarion Belinsky viewed the superfluous man as a byproduct of Nicholas I’s reign, when the best educated men would not enter the discredited government service and, lacking other options for self-realization, doomed themselves to live out their life in passivity. Scholar David Patterson describes the superfluous man as “not just…another literary type but…a paradigm of a person who has lost a point, a place, a presence in life” before concluding that “the superfluous man is a homeless man”.

The superfluous man is often in contrast politically with the great man.