“True culture is in the mind, the mind,” he said, and tapped his head, “the mind.” “It’s in the heart,” she said, “and in how you do things and how you do things is because of who you are.” “Nobody in the damn bus cares who you are.” “I care who I am,” she said icily. — Flannery O’Connor, “Everything That Rises Must Converge” Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Literature
Genius Takes a Walk
The Conceptualists would answer: It’s not permanence and materials, all that Winsor & Newton paint and other crap, that are at the heart of art, but two things only: Genius and the process of creation! Later they decided that Genius might as well take a walk, too. — Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word Read more →
Hot Enough for You?
All of us tend to think of our own circumstances in terms of a narrow range and to feel that other pastures are greener. . . . My suspicion is that in Heaven the Blessed are of the opinion that the advantages of that locale have been overrated by theologians who were never actually there. Perhaps even in Hell the damned are not always satisfied. — Jorge Luis Borges, “The Duel” Read more →
The Erasers
The Erasers is a combination detective story and Greek tragedy, about a murder investigation in which the victim, unbeknownst to (almost) anyone, is not really dead. It’s also about multiple perceptions of the same events, all of them perfectly reasonable and all of them wrong. And it’s about the inevitablility of fate, which despite your best efforts can lead you to an unimaginable deed (cf. Oedipus). Highly recommended! Read more →
Ode to a Nightingale
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’” Read more →
The Eternal Footman Held My Coat and Snickered
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? Read more →
Books Etc.
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. Read more →
Pride and Prejudice
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.” Read more →
Twitter: 2010-01-21
RT @capricecrane: T.S. Eliot: "The world ends not with a bang, but a whimper." Sadly, so do most of my dates. # Read more →
Out of the Turmoil
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 Read more →
People and Their Silly Principles
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… Read more →
Vanity Fair
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.” Read more →
An Impersonal Recommendation
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.” Read more →
11th Grade Reading List
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… Read more →
HW ‘s Book Reviews: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Gayest. Crime Story. Ever. Read more →
The Death of Ivan Ilych
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… Read more →
Family Happiness
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. Read more →
To Fly is the Opposite of Traveling
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 Read more →
Classification of Books You Haven’t Read
From Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler: Books You Needn’t Read Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading Books Read Before You Even Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First Books Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback Books You Can Borrow From Somebody Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success Books Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment Books You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case Books You… Read more →
Microblog: 2009-04-29
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 # Read more →