EppsNet

Already with thee! tender is the night . . .
. . . But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

— John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale’”

Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a longtime fixture on the House subcommittee that oversees Pentagon spending, died after complications from gallbladder surgery, according to his office. He was 77.

The Democratic congressman recently underwent scheduled laparoscopic surgery at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, to remove his gallbladder. The procedure was “routine minimally invasive surgery,” but doctors “hit his intestines,” a source close to the late congressman told CNN.

— CNN.com

OMG I HAD THAT SAME OPERATION I COULD HAVE DIED!!!

On a lighter note, how ironic is it that the president loses a pro-ObamaCare vote due to medical error in a government-run hospital?

Thanks to the annual Super Bowl Sunday Buy One Get One Free sale at Books Etc. in Laguna Hills, the works of Bellow, Borges, Bukowski, Brautigan, Cheever, Eco, Grace Paley, Dennis Potter, Pynchon, Robbe-Grillet, Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe have found their way onto my bookshelf for a capital outlay of only 32 dollars American.

As my son comes downstairs for dinner, he says, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune –”

I finish it with him: “– must be in want of a wife.”

“We spent 45 minutes in class today analyzing that one sentence,” he says.

“It’s a very famous sentence,” I say. “The next sentence will probably go faster.”

• RT @capricecrane: T.S. Eliot: "The world ends not with a bang, but a whimper."
  Sadly, so do most of my dates. #

Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling, when a day of our life comes and we say, “To-morrow, success or failure won’t matter much, and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

If every person is to be banished from society who runs into debt and cannot pay–if we are to be peering into everybody’s private life, speculating upon their income, and cutting them if we don’t approve of their expenditure–why, what a howling wilderness and intolerable dwelling Vanity Fair would be! Every man’s hand would be against his neighbour in this case, my dear sir, and the benefits of civilization would be done away with. We should be quarrelling, abusing, avoiding one another. Our houses would become caverns, and we should go in rags because we cared for nobody. Rents would go down. Parties wouldn’t be given any more. All the tradesmen of the town would be bankrupt. Wine, wax-lights, comestibles, rouge, crinoline-petticoats, diamonds, wigs, Louis-Quatorze gimcracks, and old china, park hacks, and splendid high-stepping carriage horses–all the delights of life, I say,–would go to the deuce, if people did but act upon their silly principles and avoid those whom they dislike and abuse. Whereas, by a little charity and mutual forbearance, things are made to go on pleasantly enough: we may abuse a man as much as we like, and call him the greatest rascal unhanged–but do we wish to hang him therefore? No. We shake hands when we meet. If his cook is good we forgive him and go and dine with him, and we expect he will do the same by us. Thus trade flourishes–civilization advances; peace is kept; new dresses are wanted for new assemblies every week; and the last year’s vintage of Lafitte will remunerate the honest proprietor who reared it.

— William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

— George Santayana

“Is that a fact?” she said. “Well–I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana: we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re ten.”

“Santayana was a famous philosopher at Harvard,” said Slazinger, a Harvard man.

And Mrs. Berman said, “Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard to be misinformed.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard

Reading a few pages of Vanity Fair — the book, not the magazine — before retiring for the evening . . . I say to my wife, “Man, this Thackeray guy is really funny.”

“Funnier than you?” she asks.

“He must be.”

“Why?”

“Well, this book is almost 200 years old and people are still reading it.”

“Imagine at the time he wrote it,” she says. “People probably laughed till they choked.”

“Exactly.”

I had a 40-percent-off coupon for Borders that expired today so we stopped by to see if they had any good computer books in stock, which they did.

At the checkout, the woman asked me if I’d like to get a recommendation for a novel.

“Yeah sure,” I said. I was pretty excited about the idea because I thought they’d look at my purchase history and figure out something I might enjoy.

Instead she recommended Home by Marilynne Robinson, which was displayed on the counter right in front of me.

“Are you recommending that just for me,” I asked, “or you recommend it to everyone?”

“We recommend it to everyone,” she said.

What a sham! “I’m going to pass on that,” I said. “There really hasn’t been a good female novelist since Jane Austen.”

My son, who was standing next to me, added, “And even she was kind of boring.”

My son and I went to Barnes and Noble in Irvine this weekend to buy the books on his 11th grade Euro Lit reading list: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, Candide by Voltaire, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and The Stranger by Albert Camus.

“Have you read any of these books?” I asked the checkout girl.

“I’ve read Candide and Pride and Prejudice,” she said.

“Candide is fun. Virginia Woolf is kind of a downer though, isn’t she? Didn’t she kill herself?

“She did,” the girl admitted.

“Doesn’t that set a bad example for the kids?”

The Irvine store didn’t have the edition of Ivan Denisovich that the boy needed but the guy at customer service was able to call around and find a copy at the Aliso Viejo store.

The boy was beside himself: “We’re going to drive all the way to Aliso Viejo?!” (Aliso Viejo is a 9-mile drive from Irvine.)

“This will help you when you read the book,” I said. “You’ll have an appreciation for what suffering is all about.”

Gayest. Crime Story. Ever.

It occurred to him that what had seemed perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend.

“But if that is so,” he said to himself, “and I am leaving this life with the consciousness that I have lost all that was given me and it is impossible to rectify it — what then?”

— Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

I was reading a Tolstoy story called “Family Happiness” in bed last night. It was close to midnight when I finished it.

“Good story,” I announced to my wife, although she was 90 percent asleep by that time.

Without opening her eyes, she asked, “What was it about?”

“A man and a woman fall in love and get married. They’re very happy for a while but then the marriage starts to come apart.”

“Because the husband spends too much time on Facebook?” she asked.

“No, they didn’t have Facebook in 1860. What I didn’t see coming though is that the story turns out to have a happy ending after all.”

“Perfect,” she said. “What did you learn from it?”

“The past is gone, but you can still find a new life and a different kind of happiness.”

“With the same wife?”

“Yes.”

“Perfect,” she said.

To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.

— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

• A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding — Marshall McLuhan #
• Reading _Love in the Time of Cholera_ to prepare for the swine flu epidemic #

• RT @TinaFey: It’s so nice out. It almost makes me want to go for a walk.
  Almost. #
• Philip Roth: “The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy — that is every man’s tragedy.” #

Master of his days,
Could Sisyphus be happy?
Camus says he is.

I posted something on Twitter about helping my son with The Great Gatsby and got what you might call a spam reply from this girl, who said “have u tried http://shmoop.com for The Great Gatsby?”

Evidently Shmoop, which I’d never heard of, has people hanging out on Twitter waiting for someone to mention a book, at which point they send back a “have u tried …” reply.

Lest you think that’s a totally ineffective thing to do, I actually did click over to the Shmoop entry on The Great Gatsby, which starts off like this:

The Great Gatsby is a delightful concoction of MTV Cribs, VH1’s The Fabulous Life Of…, and HBO’s Sopranos. Shake over ice, add a twist of jazz, a spritz of adultery, and the little pink umbrella that completes this long island iced tea and you’ve got yourself a 5 o’clock beverage that, given the 1920’s setting, you wouldn’t be allowed to drink.

So it’s a little bit more hip than Cliffs Notes. I haven’t seen enough of it yet to know if I really like it, but I like it . . .

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

— V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

This book would be a great gift from a parent to a child who is interested in becoming a writer. When Junior discovers that winning the Nobel Prize in Literature at age 69 entails spending most of one’s decades depressed, impoverished, ignored, and bitter, he will likely knuckle under and agree to pursue radiology.

— Philip Greenspun