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.” # Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Literature
Haiku on The Myth of Sisyphus
Master of his days, Could Sisyphus be happy? Camus says he is. Read more →
Shmoop
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,… Read more →
So You Want to Be a Writer
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 Read more →
Then Wear the Gold Hat
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!” — Thomas Parke D’Invilliers This is the epigraph to The Great Gatsby, which my son is reading for school. So beautiful, so sad . . . (Thomas Parke D’Invilliers is a character in Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, used by him here as a nom de plume.) Read more →
Art and Technology
We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly. The time for a real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue. — Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Read more →
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
My son sees a book I’m reading lying on a table . . . “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” he says. “What kind of a title is that?” I say, “It’s hard to explain.” “Life,” he says in a mystical voice, “is like a motorcycle. You must maintain your motorcyle.” He makes a gong sound . . . I am in an enormous vault, dead, and they are paying their last respects. It’s kind of them to come and do this. They didn’t have to do this. I feel grateful. Now [my son] motions for me to open the glass door of the vault. I see he wants to talk to me. He wants me to tell him, perhaps, what death is like. I feel a desire to do this, to tell him. It was so good of him to come and wave I will tell him… Read more →
Footsteps
He looks up the trail trying to see what’s ahead even when he knows what’s ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He’s here but he’s not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be “here.” What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant. — Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Read more →
Father-Son Conversations
FATHER: Would you take out the trash please? SON: Are you KIDDING?! I’m doing homework! I’ll take out the trash if you read To Kill a Mockingbird and tell me what each chapter is about. FATHER: I’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird. You want to know what it’s about? ‘Racism is Bad.’ Now take out the garbage. SON: Mom said my dinner was going to be ready by now and she hasn’t even started cooking it yet. FATHER: You’re a big boy. Why don’t you make something yourself? SON: I’m really not happy with the service I’m receiving here. SON: So was Mom pretty horny when you first met her? FATHER: Oh Jesus . . . Read more →
To Kill a Mockingbird
I took my son to the bookstore to buy To Kill a Mockingbird for his English class. They had two paperback editions available — one with a fancy binding for $15.95 and another one for three dollars less. I pulled the cheaper one off the shelf and my son asked, “Why are we getting that one?” I said, “Because it’s three dollars less for the same book.” “I like the other cover better,” he said. “Gimme three dollars.” Read more →
Huck Finn Uses the N-Word
My son had an assignment this weekend to write an essay on cultural values vs. personal values in Huckleberry Finn. The teacher didn’t assign the whole book, just an excerpt in which Huck has to decide whether or not to send Jim, the escaped slave, back to Miss Watson. So I read through the excerpt and sure enough, it includes multiple uses of what’s now known as “the N-word.” I asked the boy, “Did Mr. Murano discuss with you guys about Mark Twain’s use of the word ‘nigger’?” “No,” he said. “But in case you hadn’t noticed, our school is mostly Asian. Now if Mark Twain had overused the word ‘chink,’ then we’d have a problem.” Read more →
Who Says Creativity is Dead in Tinseltown?
It was a sickness: this great interest in a medium that relentlessly and consistently failed to produce anything at all. People became so used to seeing shit on film that they no longer realized it was shit. — Charles Bukowski, Hollywood I keep seeing commercials during the NBA Finals for The Incredible Hulk. Wasn’t there an Incredible Hulk movie out just a few years ago? Why do we have to keep making Incredible Hulk movies? Way to reach for the stars, thespians. Shit . . . Read more →
A 9th Grader Reviews the World Literature Canon
For his English class this year, my son read Antigone, A Doll’s House, Romeo and Juliet, Things Fall Apart, and just finished All Quiet on the Western Front. “Everybody died,” he said. “I knew that was going to happen. All the books we read this year, everybody died. Except A Doll’s House, and that sucked more than kids in a lollipop factory.” Read more →
You’re My Dad
Will you come to see me Jack When I’m old and very shaky? Yes I will for you’re my dad And you’ve lost your last old lady Though you traveled very far To the highlands and the badlands And ripped off the family car Still, old dad, I won’t forsake you. Will you come to see me Jack? Though I’m really not alone. Still I’d like to see my boy For we’re lonesome for our own. Yes I will for you’re my dad Though you dumped me and my brothers And you sizzled down the road Loving other fellows’ mothers. Will you come to see me Jack? Though I look like time boiled over. Growing old is not a lark. Yes I will for you’re my dad Though we never saw a nickel As we struggled up life’s ladder I will call you and together We will cuddle up and… Read more →
In Fair Verona
My son and I are in the kitchen looking for something to eat. He finds a bag of Pepperidge Farm Verona cookies (I prefer the Raspberry Milanos myself), holds the bag up to my face, and says In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean Two hours traffic on our stage blah blah blah Then he eats the cookies. So who says Shakespeare has no relevance for the modern student? Read more →
Marcus Aurelius on Sean Penn
The dictator and the useful idiot Keep before you the swift onset of oblivion, and the abysses of eternity before us and behind; mark how hollow are the echoes of applause, how fickle and undiscerning the judgements of professed admirers, and how puny the arena of human fame. For the entire earth is but a point, and the place of our own habitation but a minute corner in it; and how many are therein who will praise you, and what sort of men are they? — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV.3 Read more →
Obviously Aurelius
I’m reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations when my son, referring to the cover photo above the author’s name, says, “Who’s that? Zeus?” “No,” I say. “Caesar?” “No. It’s Marcus Aurelius.” “Hmmm. That seemed too obvious.” Read more →
What is the Use of Knowing the Evil in the World?
And often you asked me, “What is the use of knowing the evil in the world?” I am out of your way now, Spoon River, Choose your own good and call it good. For I could never make you see That no one knows what is good Who knows not what is evil; And no one knows what is true Who knows not what is false. — Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology, “Seth Compton” Read more →
One Grows Out of That Kind of Thing
‘Now it might be a very romantic sight to some chaps, a light burning in a tower window. I knew a poem about a thing like that once. Forgot it now, though. I was no end of a one for poetry when I was a kid — love and all that. Castle towers came in quite a lot. Funny how one grows out of that kind of thing.’ — Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall Read more →
Self-Reliance
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Speak what you think now… Read more →