raccolta di citazioni

New Classics

2008-06-27T21:45:00.002-04:00

In bold are the titles I've read from Entertainment Weekly's list of the New Classics; books I own but haven't (yet) read are in italics.

1. The Road, Cormac McCarthy (2006)
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000)
3. Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
4. The Liars' Club, Mary Karr (1995)
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
6. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001)
7. Maus, Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)
8. Selected Stories, Alice Munro (1996).
9. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1997)
10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1997)
11. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (1997)
12. Blindness, José Saramago (1998)
13. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-87)
14. Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates (1992)
15. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers (2000)
16. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (1986)
17. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1988)
18. Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1990).
19. On Beauty, Zadie Smith (2005)
20. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding (1998)
21. On Writing, Stephen King (2000)
22. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz (2007)
23. The Ghost Road, Pat Barker (1996)
24. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (1985)
25. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan (1989)
26. Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984)
27. Possession, A.S. Byatt (1990)
28. Naked, David Sedaris (1997)
29. Bel Canto, Ann Patchett (2001)
30. Case Histories, Kate Atkinson (2004)
31. The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien (1990)
32. Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch (1988)
33. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005) [saw her @ UNC]
34. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold (2002)
35. The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst (2004)
36. Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt (1996)
37. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi (2003)
38. Birds of America, Lorrie Moore (1998).
39. Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (2000).
40. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman (1995-2000)
41. The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros (1984)
42. LaBrava, Elmore Leonard (1983)
43. Borrowed Time, Paul Monette (1988)
44. Praying for Sheetrock, Melissa Fay Greene (1991)
45. Eva Luna, Isabel Allende (1988)
46. Sandman, Neil Gaiman (1988-1996)
47. World's Fair, E.L. Doctorow (1985)
48. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (1998)
49. Clockers, Richard Price (1992)
50. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001)
51. The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcom (1990)
52. Waiting to Exhale, Terry McMillan (1992)
53. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon (2000)
54. Jimmy Corrigan, Chris Ware (2000)
55. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls (2006)
56. The Night Manager, John le Carré (1993)
57. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe (1987).
58. Drop City, TC Boyle (2003)
59. Krik? Krak! Edwidge Danticat (1995)
60. Nickel & Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich (2001).
61. Money, Martin Amis (1985)
62. Last Train To Memphis, Peter Guralnick (1994)
63. Pastoralia, George Saunders (2000) [awesome!]
64. Underworld, Don DeLillo (1997).
65. The Giver, Lois Lowry (1993)
66. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace (1997)
67. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (2003)
68. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel (2006)
69. Secret History, Donna Tartt (1992)
70. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (2004)
71. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Ann Fadiman (1997).
72. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon (2003)
73. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving (1989)
74. Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger (1990)
75. Cathedral, Raymond Carver (1983).
76. A Sight for Sore Eyes, Ruth Rendell (1998)
77. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
78. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert (2006)
79. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell (2000)
80. Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney (1984) .
81. Backlash, Susan Faludi (1991)
82. Atonement, Ian McEwan (2002)
83. The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (1994)
84. Holes, Louis Sachar (1998)
85. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2004)
86. And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts (1987)
87. The Ruins, Scott Smith (2006)
88. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby (1995)
89. Close Range, Annie Proulx (1999).
90. Comfort Me With Apples, Ruth Reichl (2001)
91. Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (2003)
92. Presumed Innocent, Scott Turow (1987)
93. A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley (1991)
94. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser (2001)
95. Kaaterskill Falls, Allegra Goodman (1998)
96. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (2003).
97. Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson (1992)
98. The Predators' Ball, Connie Bruck (1988)
99. Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman (1995)
100. America (the Book), Jon Stewart/Daily Show (2004)

(Summary: 27 read; 29 others owned and as yet unread.)

via Pages Turned and Kristin's Book Log (peer pressure!)

I am the question

2006-10-02T21:12:00.000-04:00

"Hello again," said the Moon.

"Hello," said the Girl. She had forgotten, in her wonder, that she had promised not to talk with the Moon. "You've changed again."

"Is that so?" said the Moon. Its voice was fainter and farther away than ever.

"Unless," the Girl said, "there are three Moons: one fat one, one thin one, and one that shines in the day. Is that the answer?"

"What's the question?" asked the Moon.

The Girl couldn't think just what the question was. She sat down and looked up at the Moon. She thought: I am the question. For a long time she only sat and looked up, thinking: I am the question. But she could not think how to ask it. [93]

from 'The Nightingale Sings at Night'

Crowley, John. Novelties and Souvenirs : Collected Short Fiction. Harper Perennial, 2004. ISBN: 0380731061.

A large wardrobe of Humour's cast-off clothes

2006-09-16T23:16:00.000-04:00

"Dry-goods! What are American dry-goods?" asked the Duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.

"American novels," answered Lord Henry, helping himself to some quail.

The duchess looked puzzled.

"Don't mind him, my dear," whispered Lady Agatha. "He never means anything that he says."

"When America was discovered," said the Radical member, and he began to give some wearisome facts. Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners. The Duchess sighed and exercised her privilege of interruption. "I wish to goodness it never had been discovered at all!" she exclaimed. "Really, our girls have no chance nowadays. It is most unfair."

"Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered," said Mr. Erskine; "I myself would say that it had merely been detected."

"Oh! but I have seen specimens of the inhabitants," answered the duchess vaguely. "I must confess that most of them are extremely pretty. And they dress well, too. They get all their dresses in Paris. I wish I could afford to do the same."

"They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris," chuckled Sir Thomas, who had a large wardrobe of Humour's cast-off clothes.

"Really! And where do bad Americans go to when they die?" inquired the duchess.

"They go to America," murmured Lord Henry. [182]

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. In Aldington, Richard & Weintraub, Stanley (eds). The Portable Oscar Wilde. Viking, 1981. ISBN: 0140150935.

Secret Names

2006-09-14T13:05:00.000-04:00

"Dorian Gray? Is that his name?" asked Lord Henry, walking across the studio towards Basil Hallward.

"Yes, that is his name. I didn't intend to tell it to you."

"But why not?"

"Oh, I can't explain. When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It seems like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it." [143]

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. In Aldington, Richard & Weintraub, Stanley (eds). The Portable Oscar Wilde. Viking, 1981. ISBN: 0140150935.

for Sven, Rik, and Nigel

Cabins on the Cape Fear River

2006-09-10T23:38:00.000-04:00

Mr. Burns had set up a small artistic community down in the Carolinas, on a particularly wild, changing edge of the Atlantic, at the place where the Cape Fear River empties into the sea. He'd sold a little community of about twelve quixotic, sunstruck cabins on spindly stilts to various artists -- novelists, painters, potters, actors, musicians -- most of them from New York City.
[...]
Of course these buildings had been about to fall into the sea. This had been apparent even to the untrained eye. Perhaps Mr. Burns hadn't told this to the artists directly, but they should have noticed. I was surprised actually that the place lasted as long as it did -- over three years. But after a few intersections of the high tide with the full moon, and three small hurricanes, the houses came down, crouching at first like injured, long-legged animals, then fully kneeling, bowing, their shoulders to the earth. The photographs of the buildings that now hung at the front of the courtroom, as the prosecution built its case, were vivid reminders that everything is brought to its knees, everything except the sea. I thought this was exactly the kind of lesson artists were always trying to learn, and I believed they should have all cut their losses and run. [36-37]

Lee, Rebecca. The City is a Rising Tide. Simon & Schuster, 2006. ISBN: 0743276655.

She looked more than ever like Harry Truman

2006-09-09T22:49:00.000-04:00

There was a big brass latch on the wall. Howard jiggled it and finally it slipped free and the bed fell out on top of him. It took him by surprise and almost knocked him down but he kept his footing and managed to push the bed back into the wall. Then he read the barometer and opened and closed the drawers. The upper drawers contained several bars of soap in miniature packets. Howard slipped a few in his pocket and opened the porthole and stuck his head out. Other people had their heads stuck out too. He battened the porthole and read the barometer again, then picked up the intercom.

"Testing," he said. "One two three four testing. Night Raider this is Black Hawk. Testing."
A voice crackled from the speaker. "Steward here."
"It's me, Howard. Just testing. Over and out."
Nora came back into the cabin and made her way to the couch. "It's too small in there. I couldn't breathe."
"I could have told you this wouldn't be any palace."
"I feel awful. I bet I look awful too."
Nora's face had gone white. The burst veins in her cheeks and along her upper lip stood out like notations on a map. Her eyes glittered feverishly behind her spectacles. Sick, she looked more than ever like Harry Truman, for whom Howard had not voted. [89-90]

from 'Maiden Voyage'

Wolff, Tobias. In the Garden of the North American Martyrs : stories. ISBN: 0912946822.

Traceleen Turns East

2006-09-08T23:08:00.000-04:00

While we waited for November we decided to try yoga. Miss Crystal found this young woman named Ruthie Horowitz who agreed to come on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and teach us how to do it. It is the ancient art of India and the kind Miss Horowitz teaches is called Mahayana yoga. These postures, as they are called, are like very slow exercises. The stretch out parts of your body you didn't know you had and call attention to the fact that you are made of flesh and blood. Most people walking around now never give that a thought. They have forgotten they are breathing and think the main thing they are here for is to drive cars and go to the mall. This yoga gets you back to thinking about what you are really made of.

At first I didn't want to do it with them but Miss Crystal insisted that I give it a try. She is always worrying about my blood pressure so the first thing I knew there I was pulling myself into postures and breathing into my chakras, which is what you call the different parts of the spiritual development. This is all from the Hindu religion. My pastor at my church said not to worry, it wouldn't hurt me to see some heathen practices and might give me something to tell my Sunday school class about. [117-118]

from 'Traceleen Turns East'

Gilchrist, Ellen. Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle : stories. Little, Brown, 1989. ISBN: 0316313122.

Let it come to me

2006-09-07T23:53:00.000-04:00

Her voice was as beautiful as the song of birds, more beautiful than temple bells. Her voice was light made manifest. Now Lin Tan's throat was thick with desire. He suffered it. There was nothing in the world as beautiful as her face, her voice, her hands, the smell of her dress. She took a small blue flower from the bouquet on the table and twisted it between her fingers. She looked at him. She returned his look. This was the moment men live for. This was philosophy and reason. Shiva, Beatrice, the dance of birth and death. If I enter into this moment, Lin Tan knew, I will be changed forever. If I refuse this moment then I will go about the world as an old man goes, with no hope, no songs to sing, no longing or desire, no miracles of sunlight. So I will allow this to happen to me. As if a man can refuse his destiny. As if the choice were mine. Let it come to me. [66]

from 'Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle'

Gilchrist, Ellen. Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle : stories. Little, Brown, 1989. ISBN: 0316313122.

I will include my fingerprints

2006-09-06T23:20:00.000-04:00

My name is Rhoda Katherine Manning. I weigh 82. We are in a war. They might come at any minute. I have auburn hair and brown eyes. I was born on a plantation in the Delta and as soon as the war is over I'll be going back. Mrs. Allen's son died in the war. She has a gold star in the window and I go and visit her quite frequently. The pope wouldn't let her be my brother's godmother. She isn't allowed to go inside our church. No one tells me what to do. I am just like my father.

Well, I see I am running out of paper. When you find this think of me. It is summer and the sun is shining and everything is fine around here so far. I will include my fingerprints.

Yours truly,
Rhoda Manning

[18-19]

from 'The Time Capsule'

Gilchrist, Ellen. Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle : stories. Little, Brown, 1989. ISBN: 0316313122.

Life, the Universe and Everything

2006-09-03T23:57:00.000-04:00

There are of course many problems connected with life, of which some of the most popular are Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches? [166]

"Seven and a half million years our race has waited for this Great and Hopefully Enlightening Day!" cried the cheerleader. "The Day of the Answer!"
[...]
"Never again," cried the man, "never again will we wake up in the morning and think Who am I? What is my purpose in life? Does it really, cosmically speaking, matter if I don't get up and go to work? For today we will finally learn once and for all the plain and simple answer to all these nagging little problems of Life, the Universe and Everything!" [176-177]

"You know," said Arthur thoughtfully, "all this explains a lot of things. All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was."

"No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that." [191]

Adams, Douglas. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Harmony Books, 2004. ISBN: 1400052920.

So long and thanks for all the fish

2006-09-02T23:50:00.000-04:00

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.

Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind of the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for tidbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived.

The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop while whistling the "Star Sprangled Banner", but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.

In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioral research laboratories running round inside wheels and conducting frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. The fact that once again man completely misinterpreted this relationship was entirely according to these creatures' plans. [156-157]

Adams, Douglas. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Harmony Books, 2004. ISBN: 1400052920.

There was a terrible ghastly silence.

2006-09-01T22:43:00.000-04:00

Only one man stood and watched the sky, stood with terrible sadness in his eyes and rubber bungs in his ears. He knew exactly what was happening and had known ever since his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic had started winking in the dead of night beside his pillow and wakened him with a start. It was what he had waited for all these years, but when he had deciphered the signal pattern sitting alone in his small dark room a coldness had gripped him and squeezed his heart. Of all the races in all of the Galaxy who could have come and said a big hello to planet Earth, he thought, didn't it just have to be the Vogons. [33-34]

Adams, Douglas. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Harmony Books, 2004. ISBN: 1400052920.

A predilection for little fur hats

2006-08-31T23:11:00.000-04:00

Mr. L. Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words, he was a carbon-based bipedal life form descended from an ape. More specifically, he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn't know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernable Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr. L. Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats. [7]

Adams, Douglas. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Harmony Books, 2004. ISBN: 1400052920.

Yes, I'm finally reading it, Sven!

A Dialogue on Moreau

2006-08-30T10:33:00.000-04:00

Peter Straub: What sort of book is it, this Island of Dr. Moreau? As one races pell-mell through the narrative, moving smartly from one nasty shock to another on the way toward revelation and resolution, it seems like nothing so much as a boy's adventure novel adapted to the field of science fiction. [ix]

Margaret Atwood: 'Science fiction' as a term was unknown to Wells. [...] Wells himself referred to his science-oriented fictions as 'scientific romances' [...] There are several interpretations of the term 'science'. If it implies the known and the possible, then Wells's scientific romances are by no means scientific: he paid little attention to such boundaries. In both 'scientific romance', and 'science fiction', the scientific element is merely an adjective; the nouns are 'romance' and 'fiction'. [xvii-xviii]

Straub: For the most part, the tone of the narrative is that of reliability and assurance, blandly professional in its assumptions about the contract between reader and writer. Dear reader, this tone seems to say, come along with me, for I guarantee an entertaining journey and a safe return to shore. [...] To Wells' enormous credit, [the first readers] did not find anything so reassuring. [R]eviewers recoiled from the book as if it carried a contagious disease, excoriating Wells for the horrors to which he had exposed the tender reader, the chief among them being blasphemy. [x]

Atwood: [I]n Christianity, God is a Trinity, and on Moreau's island, there are three beings whose names begin with M. [...] [Moreau] means 'Moor' in French. So the very white Moreau is also the Black Man of witchcraft tales, a sort of anti-God. [xxii] But he isn't a real God, because he cannot create; he can only imitate, and his imitations are poor. [xxi] [Montgomery] acts as the intercessor between the Beast Folk and Moreau, and in this function stands in for Christ the Son. [...] Is there a hint of the communion service here - blood drink, flesh of the Lamb? [...] [M'Ling] too enters into the communion of blood.... The Holy Spirit as a deformed and idiotic man-animal? As a piece of youthful blasphemy, The Island of Dr. Moreau was even more blasphemous than most commentators have realized. [xxii]

Straub: Since vivisection...was a controversial method of research, a novel with an anti-vivisection bias should have had no problem with general acceptance; but a fable in which religion appears to be a manipulative sham, science a poisonous threat, and mankind in general so thoroughly implicated in a Mad Vivisectionist's savagery that man himself is a ravening beast was another matter. [xii]

Atwood: Borges' use of the word 'fable' is suggestive, for [...] '[f]able' points to a certain fokloric quality that lurks in the pattern of this curious work.... [xiii] The Island of Dr. Moreau is...a work of fantasy, and its' more immediate grandparents are to be found elsewhere. The Tempest springs immediately to mind.... [xx]

Straub: [Prendick] cannot escape the perception that civilization is but a larger version of the island. Wells has so liberated himself from the conventions and underlying consolations of the adventure tale that his subtext floods up onto the page. The optimistic Edwardian world softens and gutters into fresh horrors, gibberish, and intimations of death. Author and narrator have come to the heart of darkness, and it is...London. [xxvi-xxvii]

Atwood: There are no female human being on Moreau's island, but Moreau is busy making one. [...] Like many men of his time, Wells was obsessed with the New Woman. On the surface of it he was all in favor of sexual emancipation...but the freeing of Woman apparently had its frightening aspects. [I]f women are granted power, men are doomed.... Once the powerful monstrous sexual cat tears her fetter out of the wall and gets loose, minus the improved brain she ought to have courtesy of Man the Scientist, look out. [xxiii]

Straub: In various ways, [Wells' late-life pessimism] inhabits Dr. Moreau, and one reason the book continues to be vital is that Wells can be seen throughout to resist and deny the implications suggested by his own imaginiation. [xiii]
_____

Margaret Atwood, Foreword to The Island of Dr. Moreau, Penguin Classics edition, 2005. ISBN: 014144102X.

Peter Straub, Foreword to The Island of Dr. Moreau, Modern Library edition, 1996. ISBN: 0679602305.

for the August Slaves of Golconda reading group, selected by Stefanie

Alaskan summer evening

2006-08-25T23:41:00.000-04:00

It was a beautiful sunny night on the water. Alice was ecstatic about the wilderness she had discovered and the eskimo culture, intertwined in peaceful harmony with the seasons and the mountains and the wind, and all the magazine stories she could write. Warm air blew by our faces. Occasionally we motored through pockets of cold air near shaded cutbanks. Cottonwood cotton floated on the water. The land was dry and wild rhubarb was already beginning to go to seed along the shore, and that meant wild onions would soon be past, too, and the bull caribou would have dark velvety horns, and the bulls would be getting fat but would still taste like summer meat from eating greens; and salmon would be flooding upstream to spawn, and trout would follow, silver-blue and heavy with oil; and it all was truly wonderful, but something irked me about the way this pretty woman -- who might never see the land we called winter -- could swoop in and harvest our world with her camera and words and spoon it back as if only she understood its profundity. [299-300]

Kantner, Seth. Ordinary Wolves : A novel. Milkweed Editions, 2005. ISBN: 1571310479.

Daring to leap into transcendence

2006-08-23T23:55:00.000-04:00

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down in the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue. [73]

from 'Transcendental Etude' (1977)

Rich, Adrienne. The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977. W.W. Norton, 1978. ISBN: 0393045021.

Baptized into the glory of ninja

2006-08-22T13:44:00.000-04:00

Bruce Lee arrived in moving color on the back wall of the Takunak church house in February 1978, the year I turned twelve. Takunak had been converted by missionary Quakers, but everyone under seventy, regardless of whether they spoke English, lined up at the cabin door to be baptized into the glory of ninja. [...] Three glass windows in the school were broken the following night with throwing stars of frozen Cream of Wheat. [44]

Kantner, Seth. Ordinary Wolves : A novel. Milkweed Editions, 2005. ISBN: 1571310479.

for Sven (aka Ken, thwarter of ninjas)

The French disease

2006-08-19T22:43:00.000-04:00

"I had hoped," Karswell continued, his voice the very model of pained disappointment, "that of all my junior colleagues, you might have remained professionally chaste. Your dissertation, while deficient in certain crucial respects, was admirably reasonable for someone your age." He gazed sorrowfully through the blinds, tapping her rolled-up paper against his palm. His face was in shadow, but strips of light fell across his waistcoat and his bow tie.

"But I see that you are, or have become," he went on, "intellectually promiscuous, giving yourself wantonly, like the rest of your thrill-seeking generation, to the vulgar pleasures of postmodernism."
[...]
"And what is the result of your promiscuity, my dear Virginia?" Kaswell seemed to be waiting for an answer, but she would deny him that at least. After an awful moment, he lifted her paper by a corner between his thumb and forefinger, letting it uncurl like a shriveled flower.

"The result," he said sharply, "is that you have become infected with the French disease." [192-193]

Hynes, James. Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror. Picador, 1997. ISBN: 0312156286.

Outlaw women

2006-08-18T16:00:00.000-04:00

View back over the shoulder, crick
in the neck, suspicious of even
that three-legged dog in the road
teetering like a birthing chair.
Hand always at the gun, trigger for a
ghost in window glass. So hyper-
active, you can't keep your hands
to yourself while you sit in your
corner knitting your private angel. [13]

from 'What it is like to be an outlaw'

Messer, Sarah. Bandit Letters : Poems. Western Michigan University / New Issues, 2001. ISBN: 1930974086.

------

we're driving through the desert
wondering if the water will hold out
the hallucinations turn to simple villages
the music on the radio comes clear—
neither Rosenkavalier nor Götterdämmerung
but a woman's voice singing old songs
with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute
plucked and fingered by women outside the law. [31]

from XIII of 'Twenty-one Love Poems' (1974-1976)

Rich, Adrienne. The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977. W.W. Norton, 1978. ISBN: 0393045021.

That modulated cantata of the wild

2006-08-18T15:55:00.000-04:00

What beast would turn its life into words?
What atonement is this all about?
-- and yet, writing words like these, I'm also living.
Is all this close to the wolverines' howled signals,
that modulated cantata of the wild? [28]

from VII of 'Twenty-one Love Poems' (1974-1976)

Rich, Adrienne. The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977. W.W. Norton, 1978. ISBN: 0393045021.

Spies of the apocalyse

2006-08-17T19:39:00.000-04:00

Louis turned in to Pigeon's street and noticed a cat in a bakery window passively taking in the world. He smiled at it: the rescued dog had given him a feeling of communion with animals. Paris was full of cats, he realized, who held that aloofness of looking down from a height. But mostly they were asleep in wine- and cheese-shop windows. They were silent witnesses, spies of the apocalyse. Louis suspected that cats, like the souls of the dead, could not be photographed. [152-153]

Smith, Dominic. The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre. Atria Books. ISBN: 0743271149.

Thanks to Susan for originally typing this in.

Trapezoids of sunshine

2006-08-16T23:27:00.000-04:00

Louis looked at the painting and felt, for the first time, an almost painful sense of pride. It had taken him a full year to paint. He had mixed the colors to match a June dawn, preserving the exact tints of the cornices and the facades of the sky on the backs of envelopes. Using a camera obscura, he had painstakingly copied the shadow lines and the trapezoids of sunshine. There were a hundred shades of yellow and blue trapped inside the painting, a thousand inflections of daylight and shadow. Without knowing it, Louis Daguerre had tried to paint a photograph. [127-128]

Smith, Dominic. The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre. Atria Books. ISBN: 0743271149.

umore Italiano

2006-08-15T17:22:00.000-04:00

ITALIAN STUDENTS WIN PROGRAMMING CONTEST
At the 2006 Imagine Cup programming contest, held in Delhi, India, a team of Italian students took first prize in the Software Design category. The competition, sponsored by Microsoft, brought together teams from more than 100 countries competing in six categories. For its winning entry, the four students from Turin Polytechnic built an application that collects information that patients typically don't disclose to their doctors but is nonetheless an important part of the diagnosis and treatment of their symptoms. The winning team, which pocketed $25,000 for its victory, said their application, called "Hello World," could be especially beneficial for people who suffer from anxiety disorders.

BBC, 14 August 2006, via Edupage

Our Nation's Bounty

2006-08-10T23:50:00.000-04:00

Our Nation's Bounty has a barn façade and a few real tractors and a stuffed farmer, but they've located it next to Riches from the Bowels of the Earth and in my opinion cows aren't stupid. What I mean to say is, certainly they are stupid, but they have sound enough instincts to know that a functioning scaled-down coal mine with collegiate tour guides in hard hats is not part of any farm.

The cow looks up at me kindly as I come in.

I kneel down and pretend to Windex her panel. Inside there's plenty of activity. The idea was to provide schoolchildren insight into the digestive process of a large mammal. They claim the dyes aren't toxic. I would think however that the flesh / Plexiglas junction must be a source of constant irritation. But compassion is not why I've killed six to date. I've killed them because I like to make Mr. Spencer sad. Because of me he's pinned down in Cleaning, and Curation is out of the question. Because of me the see-through cow is a boondoggle and a white elephant and Spencer is a laughingstock.

It feels good to finally be asserting oneself. [84-85]

Saunders, George. "Downtrodden Mary's Failed Campaign of Terror", in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella. Random House, 1996. ISBN: 0679448128.

I plan to be ill for some time

2006-08-09T23:23:00.000-04:00

Holding his eye to the hole in the curtain, he looked out at the late afternoon. The sun was going down behind the grain fields, and as it descended, it shot an orange glow from behind the hedgerows and poplars. Louis held the piece of white linen in front of the small curtain hole and saw, projected on it, the shimmering image of the lone walnut tree that stood by the stone fence. At the time he thought it merely a trick of nature or the convalescing mind, but years later, he would realize the importance of this discovery. The compression of light through the small hole had borne along the image of the walnut tree, projecting it onto the ceiling. Nature could sketch herself. He was growing into a man inside a dark chamber, a camera obscura fashioned by worn curtain fabric and August light. He went back to his bed and wrote in his journal: I plan to be ill for some time. [21]

Smith, Dominic. The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre. Atria Books. ISBN: 0743271149.

recommended by Susan

The continuous movement toward perfection

2006-08-08T18:28:00.000-04:00

When they got out of the carriage at Oreanda they sat down on a bench not far from the church, and looked down at the sea, without talking. Yalta could be dimly discerned through the morning mist, and white clouds rested motionless on the summits of the mountains. Not a leaf stirred, the grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow roar of the sea came up to them, speaking of peace, of the eternal sleep lying in wait for us all. The sea had roared like this long before there was any Yalta or Oreanda, it was roaring now, and it would go on roaring, just as indifferently and hollowly, when we had passed away. And it may be that in this continuity, this utter indifference to the life and death of each of us lies hidden the pledge of our eternal salvation, of the continuous movement of life on earth, of the continuous movement toward perfection.

Chekov, Anton. "Lady with Lapdog." In Matlaw, Ralph E. (ed.) Anton Chekhov's Short Stories (Norton Critical Edition), pp. 221-235. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393090027.

for Kate's short story reading group.

Band names

2006-08-06T23:16:00.000-04:00

The Poles were in from Bayonne, along with Eleven Jewish Korean War Veterans, Films Par Excellence, and the Catlips from Ridgewood, and Those Guys Who Strangled Their Wives, and Associated Traction, and Chrome; The Smirkes; Consuela, Gloria, Judy or June (all the way from Sparta), and another band called the Baedeker Girls, and the Hammerheads, the Leeches, the Fishguards who were really a splinter faction from the Voltaires and had the keyboard guy from Three Days in the Penitentiary playing harmonica for the evening -- Max yelled continuously at Dennis, as they made their first pass around the roof -- and then there was a girl who wanted to do folk songs who had once been the manager of Soldier of Fortune, and there was a real loser who had been like a roady for Gulping First Drinks, and a pair of speed metal bands, Terminello and the Valkyrie. Those guys from D'Onofrio were there. The girls from Critical Ma$$. Only Nick the drummer wasa missing.

What Max was saying was that every rock and roll band in this whole half of the Garden State was at L.G.'s party. [107]

Moody, Rick. Garden State. Pushcart Press, 1992. ISBN: 0916366731.

Cartographies of Silence

2006-08-05T23:51:00.000-04:00

If from time to time I envy
the pure annunciations of the eye

the visio beatifica
if from time to time I long to turn

like the Eleusinian hierophant
holding up a simple ear of grain

for return to the concrete and everlasting world
what in fact I keep choosing

are these words, these whispers, conversations
from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.

from 'Cartographies of Silence' (1975)

Rich, Adrienne. The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977. W.W. Norton, 1978. ISBN: 0393045021.

I can see you with my heart

2006-08-04T21:40:00.000-04:00

I sat down careful and Gloria Dump made me a peanut butter sandwich on white bread.

Then she made one for herself and put her false teeth in, to eat it; when she was done, she said to me, "You know, my eyes ain't too good at all. I can't see nothing but the general shape of things, so I got to rely on my heart. Why don't you go on and tell me everything about yourself, so as I can see you with my heart."

And because Winn-Dixie was looking up at her like she was the best thing he had ever seen, and because the peanut-butter sandwich had been so good, and because I had been waiting for a long time to tell some person everything about me, I did. [65-66]

DiCamillo, Kate. Because of Winn-Dixie. Candlewick Press, 2000. ISBN: 0763607762.

An incident at the Herman W. Block Memorial Library

2006-08-04T21:38:00.000-04:00

"Then what happened?" I asked her.

"Well," said Miss Franny, "I looked at him and he looked at me. He put his big nose up in the air and sniffed and sniffed as if he was trying to decide if a little-miss-know-it-all librarian was what he was in the mood to eat. And I sat there. And then I thought, 'Well, if this bear intends to eat me, I am not going to let it happen without a fight. No ma'am.' So very slowly and very carefully, I raised up the book I was reading."

"What book was that?" I asked.

"Why, it was War and Peace, a very large book. I raised it up slowly and then I aimed it carefully and I threw it right at that bear and screamed, 'Be gone!' And do you know what?"

"No, ma'am," I said.

"He went. But this is what I will never forget. He took the book with him."

"Nuh-uh," I said.

"Yes, ma'am," said Miss Franny. "He snatched it up and ran." [48-49]

DiCamillo, Kate. Because of Winn-Dixie. Candlewick Press, 2000. ISBN: 0763607762.

recommended by Sven

It was simple to meet you

2006-08-03T21:29:00.000-04:00

It was simple to meet you, simple to take your eyes
into mine, saying: these are eyes I have known
from the first....It was simple to touch you
against the hacked background, the grain of what we
had been, the choices, years....It was even simple
to take each other's lives in our hands, as bodies.

What is not simple: to wake from drowning
from where the ocean beat inside us like an afterbirth
into this common, acute particularity
these two selves who walked half a lifetime untouching -
to wake to something deceptively simple: a glass
sweated with dew, a ring of the telephone, a scream
of someone beaten up far down the street
causing each of us to listen to her own inward scream [8]

from 'Origins and History of Consciousness'

I believe I am choosing something new
not to suffer uselessly yet still to feel
Does the infant memorize the body of the mother
and create her in absence? or simply cry
primordial loneliness? does the bed of the stream
once diverted mourning remember wetness? [10]

from 'Splittings'

Rich, Adrienne. The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977. W.W. Norton, 1978. ISBN: 0393045021.

recommended by Stefanie

Memory

2006-08-02T16:45:00.000-04:00

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. [119]

Faulkner, William. Light in August. Vintage, 1991 [1932]. ISBN: 0679732268.

One book...

2006-08-01T09:43:00.000-04:00

from Susan

1. One book that changed your life:

The Solace of Leaving Early. Haven Kimmel

2. One book that you’ve read more than once:

A Wrinkle in Time. Madeleine L'Engle

3. One book you’d want on a desert island:

Desalination for Dummies. Or Calvino's Italian Folktales.

4. One book that made you laugh:

Lunch at the Picadilly. Clyde Edgerton

5. One book that made you cry:

Servants of the Map. Andrea Barrett

6. One book that you wish had been written:

The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor, Vol. 2 (1964-2006)

7. One book that you wish you'd never read (formerly 'One book that you wish had never been written'):

The Grand Complication. Allen Kurzweil

8. One book you’re currently reading:

Continent. Jim Crace

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read:

Blindness. Jose Saramago

10. Now tag five people:

Well, the people whose answers I'd be most interested in seeing have already done it, so if you haven't yet, go look at the responses by Susan, Stefanie, Kate, Dorothy, and Danielle.

Reluctant Gravities 6

2006-07-31T23:43:00.000-04:00

Could it be that loss completes possession? Becomes, like the "with" in "without," a second acquisition, deeper, wholly internal, more intense for its pain? [90]

You think you are taking a clean sheet of paper, and it's already covered with signs, illegible, as if by a child's hand. [93]

The heart has its rhythm of exchange, she says, without surplus or deficit. Mine murmurs your name while conjugating precise explosions with valves onto the infinite. I take it down with me, in the body, to develop in a darkroom of my own. The way the current elongates our reflection in the river and seems to carry it off. [94]

Waldrop, Rosmarie. Reluctant Gravities. New Directions, 1999. ISBN: 0811214281.

The inferno of the living

2006-07-31T23:42:00.000-04:00

And Polo said: "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space." [165]

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities [Le città invisibili]. Translated by William Weaver. Harvest/Harcourt, 1974 [1972]. ISBN: 0156453800.

Reluctant Gravities 5

2006-07-30T23:56:00.000-04:00

Odd, he says, how the road to our neighbor tends to run parallel, past her, out into emptiness. I'd like a space where we would have to intersect. Or else be hyperbolically myself, alone and too tall. As a book may be a book only if, once the voice has abandoned it along with daylight, it is still worth its candle. I lost my father by following him at a mathematically precise interval. Given how young the universe, you could deliver a child and never recover it. [74]

Yet the eye's not a black hole, no matter what its color. Uncluttered by things, it sees inward, into the heart. Which of course may also be empty. [75]

I carry photos of my absent loves but don't set a place for them at the table. [80]

Waldrop, Rosmarie. Reluctant Gravities. New Directions, 1999. ISBN: 0811214281.

Suitable masks

2006-07-30T23:55:00.000-04:00

I thought: "You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask." [95]

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities [Le città invisibili]. Translated by William Weaver. Harvest/Harcourt, 1974 [1972]. ISBN: 0156453800.

Reluctant Gravities 4

2006-07-29T23:51:00.000-04:00

If a pattern of life is the ground for using a word the way tree bark beds columns of ink, then the word must contain some penumbra, some pulp, some that is never born. [68]

Do I love your face because it is yours or because of the way it differs from circle, parabola, ellipse? [63]

And me almost bursting out of my skin, a drop of water, all surface tension. Now I spread more like a puddle, my body relaxing away from me, no matter how firmly I decline its offers of expansion. [60]

Waldrop, Rosmarie. Reluctant Gravities. New Directions, 1999. ISBN: 0811214281.

Transparent cities

2006-07-29T23:50:00.000-04:00

"The empire is being crushed by its own weight," Kublai thinks, and in his dreams now cities light as kites appear, pierced cities like laces, cities tranparent as mosquito netting, cities like leaves' veins; cities lined like a hand's palm, filigree cities to be seen through their opaque and fictitious thickness. [73]

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities [Le città invisibili]. Translated by William Weaver. Harvest/Harcourt, 1974 [1972]. ISBN: 0156453800.

Reluctant Gravities 3

2006-07-28T23:40:00.000-04:00

After bitter resistance the river unravels into the night, he says. Washes our daily fare of war out into a dark so deaf, so almost without dimension there is no word to dive from. Body weight displaced by dreams whose own lack promises lucidity so powerful it could shoot a long take to mindlessness. [41]

I can't distinguish gravity from grace, or other distortions of space. My now begins six billion years ago, when fish stretched their fins onto dry land, or forty, with breasts and monthly bleeding. Always already darkening, the way a sentence anticipates the period it will stiffen in. [44]

Eating from the Tree of Knowledge can't be undone. Only muddied, as by motivation. And the way you thrust out your belly as you walk, with almost shameless indifference, makes a void in the air, but no case for cosmic deceleration. [47]

Waldrop, Rosmarie. Reluctant Gravities. New Directions, 1999. ISBN: 0811214281.

Cities too probable to be real

2006-07-28T23:39:00.000-04:00

"I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all others," Marco answered. "It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real." [69]

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities [Le città invisibili]. Translated by William Weaver. Harvest/Harcourt, 1974 [1972]. ISBN: 0156453800.

Reluctant Gravities 2

2006-07-27T21:47:00.000-04:00

What I think strange: every photo of the old house shows wide open shutters when I remember breathing gloom, the light a mere trickle from a child's pail. Of course I know which one to inhabit: memory loves hunting in the dark. The added light only exacerbates the vertigo of inner stairwells. I see you still on the first step, plucking the word "now" out of the dark thick with resistance, as if time too had forbidden chambers. [27]

Measuring distances in the mind refracts emptiness. As if we could touch the infinite when all we do is study our fingerprints on the lens. And the pain, exacerbated toward the red end of the spectrum till we're left to howl on a cosmic scale. [30]

The tongue surrounds the mouth, so that you answer questions I failed to ask or pass sentence that has not been pronounced. The way radiation bathes the entire universe in a feeble glow and thought chases after the receding galaxies at such speed there is no question of a center and the squeeze of gravity becomes mere alibi. [32]

Hour of glass, pillar of salt. The words come to their senses. It is the lowest point gathers love. Doubt, sometimes called world. It spills your heart. [37]

Waldrop, Rosmarie. Reluctant Gravities. New Directions, 1999. ISBN: 0811214281.

In silent conversation

2006-07-26T23:58:00.000-04:00

A new kind of dialogue was established: the Great Khan's white hands, heavy with rings, answered with stately movements the sinewy, agile hands of the merchant. As an understanding grew between them, their hands began to assume fixed attitudes, each of which corresponded to a shift of mood, in their alternation and repetition. And as the vocabulary of things was renewed with new samples of merchandise, the repertory of mute comment tended to become closed, stable. The pleasure of falling back on it also diminished in both; in their conversations, most of the time, they remained silent and immobile. [39]

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities [Le città invisibili]. Translated by William Weaver. Harvest/Harcourt, 1974 [1972]. ISBN: 0156453800.

Zoe

2006-07-25T23:23:00.000-04:00

In every point of this city you can, in turn, sleep, make tools, cook, accumulate gold, disrobe, reign, sell, question oracles. Any one of its pyramid roofs could cover the leprosarium or the odalisques' baths. The traveler roams all around and has nothing but doubts: he is unable to distinguish the features of the city, the features he keeps distinct in his mind also mingle. He infers this: if existence in all its moments is all of itself, Zoe is the place of indivisible existence. But why, then, does the city exist? What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of wolves? [34]

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities [Le città invisibili]. Translated by William Weaver. Harvest/Harcourt, 1974 [1972]. ISBN: 0156453800.

Reluctant Gravities 1

2006-07-24T17:00:00.000-04:00

She tries to draw a strength she dimly feels out of the weakness she knows, as if predicting an element in the periodic table. He wants to make a flat pebble skim across the water inside her body. He wonders if, for lack of sky, it takes on the color of skin or other cells it touches. If it rusts the bones. [4]

He has put a pebble under his tongue. While her lips explode in conjectures his lisp is a new scale to practice. He wants his words to lift, against the added odds, to a truth outside him. In exchange, his father walking down the road should diminish into a symbol of age. [5]

And my body slopes toward yours no matter how level the ground. [11]

And when I say your name, do I draw water, a portrait, curtain, bridge, or conclusion? [15]

Waldrop, Rosmarie. Reluctant Gravities. New Directions, 1999. ISBN: 0811214281.

Authenticity

2006-07-23T22:14:00.000-04:00

It was a neighborhood bar in a neighborhood where such establishments are not yet celebrated. If it had been located in my part of the East Village, it would have long since achieved cultural-landmark status. I'd been living in Manhattan for five years and still had not adjusted to the large number of people who moved here from other parts of the country, and overlooked the spectacle of the city only to revere the mundane. One of my coworkers, herself a transplant, remarked that the coffee shop on the corner was authentic. In that they served coffee, I suppose that she was correct. [76-77]

McLoughlin, Tim. "When All This Was Bay Ridge." In McLoughlin, Tim (ed.) Brooklyn Noir. ISBN: 1888451580.

One desperate scream

2006-07-22T22:53:00.000-04:00

And sometimes trains would cry in the monstrously hot and humid night with heartrending and ominous plangency, mingling power and hysteria in one desperate scream. [146]

Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated. Vintage Books, 1991. ISBN: 0679727299.

for Stefanie

Pair bonding

2006-07-21T23:37:00.000-04:00

Productive only when wedded to another molecule, the protein relies upon this structure to play the role of matchmaker, embedding an advertisement for a soul mate in the loops, bulges, and trenches created on its outer surface by the folds:

"Are You My Better Half?" -- SFP (single folded protein) with secure position in healthy cell seeks compatible molecule with interest in chemical engineering, architecture, or communication for exclusive short-term relationship. Please reply with details of your chemical structure.

The molecule with the most compatible profile wins the date and enters into a marriage of convenience, arranged by evolution to accomplish a specialized task. Paired with a matching substrate, an enzyme speeds up a vital chemical reaction. A rotor protein and a flagellar protein conspire to move a bacterium. [13]

Niefhoff, Debra. The Language of Life: How Cells Communicate in Health and Disease. Joseph Henry Press, 2005. ISBN: 0309089891.

The conductor

2006-07-20T18:53:00.000-04:00

His face was infinitely sad and yet his smile was kind, as though he waited to conduct her to an afterlife that was better than she deserved, yet not all she might desire. [9]

Crowley, John. The Translator. William Morrow, 2002. ISBN: 0380978628.

The world-wide call for men

2006-07-19T00:09:00.000-04:00

Just then a distant whistle sounded, and there was a shuffling of feet on the platform. A number of lanky boys of all ages appeared as suddenly and slimily as eels wakened by the crack of thunder; some came from the waiting room, where they had been warming themselves by the red stove, or half-asleep on the slat benches; others uncoiled themselves from baggage trucks or slid out of express wagons. Two clambered down from the driver's seat of a hearse that stood backed up against the siding. They straightened their stooping shoulders and lifted their heads, and a flash of momentary animation kindled their dull eyes at that cold, vibrant scream, the world-wide call for men. It stirred them like the note of a trumpet; just as it had often stirred the man who was coming home tonight, in his boyhood. [36]

Cather, Willa. "The Sculptor's Funeral." From The Troll Garden. Plume Books, 1971 (1905). ISBN: 0452250498. (Available free online from the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation.)

Casualties of The Battle of Britain

2006-07-18T00:40:00.000-04:00

Our house was a temple to The Book. We owned thousands, nay millions of books. They lined the walls, filled the cupboards, and turned the floor into a maze far more complex than Hampton Court's. Books ruled our lives. They were demi-gods. Occasionally, I'd come home to a reenactment of The Battle of Britain in the front room. My beloved parents would be flying round like a pair of demented fighter planes, shrieking and spitting venon at one another. My father would be wearing his traditional uniform of socks and moth-eaten dressing gown and my mother her lemon carpet slippers and housecoat. My entrance would make no difference to their dogfight, but when one of them accidentally (and inevitably) knocked over a pile of books, they'd stop instantly and unite to examine the extent of the damage.

Life contined in this pleasant vein until the day my parents got run down by a newspaper van that thoughtlessly mounted the pavement in Islington High St. It sounds heartless, but looking back, I would say that this was my greatest salvation, because at 15 I was whisked off to live with my mother's stepsister in Totness, Devon.

Bantock, Nick. Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence. Chronicle Books, 1991. ISBN: 0877017883.

Too reminiscent of the Stone Age

2006-07-17T19:31:00.000-04:00

Frau Lichtenfeld shone in a gown of emerald green, fitting so closely as to enhance her natural floridness. However, to do the good lady justice, let her attire be never so modest, it gave an effect of barbaric splendor. At her left sat Herr Schotte, the Assyriologist, whose features were effectually concealed by the convergence of his hair and beard, and whose glasses were continually falling into his plate. This gentleman had removed more tons of earth in the course of his explorations than had any of his confreres, and his vigorous attack upon his food seemed to suggest the strenuous nature of his accustomed toil. His eyes were small and deeply set, and his forehead bulged fiercely above his eves in a bony ridge. His heavy brows completed the leonine suggestion of his face. Even to Imogen, who knew something of his work and greatly respected it, he was entirely too reminiscent of the Stone Age to be altogether an agreeable dinner companion. He seemed, indeed, to have absorbed something of the savagery of those early types of life which he continually studied. [17]

Cather, Willa. "Flavia and Her Artists." From The Troll Garden. Plume Books, 1971 (1905). ISBN: 0452250498. (Available free online from the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation.)

Do not be deceived by false obligation

2006-07-16T17:19:00.000-04:00

For just as happiness is more than the absence of sadness, so is peace infinitely more than the absence of war. Even the refugee must do more than flee. He must arrive. He must return at last to a world as it is, however much in conflict with his hopes, and he must then do what he can to edge reality toward what he has dreamed, to change what he can change, to go beyond the wish and the fantasy. 'We had fed the heart on fantasies,' says the poet, 'the heart's grown brutal from the fare.' [...] I urge you to act. Having dreamed a marvelous dream, I urge you to step boldly into it, to join your own dream and live it. Do not be deceived by false obligation. You are obliged, by all that is just and good, to pursue only the felicity that you yourself have imagined. Do not let fear stop you. Do not be frightened by ridicule or censure or embarrassment, do not fear name-calling, do not fear the scorn of others. For what is true obligation? Is it not the obligation to pursue a life at peace with itself? [318]

O'Brien, Tim. Going After Cacciato. Broadway Books, 1999 (1978). ISBN: 0767904427.

Here, Bullet

2006-07-14T22:45:00.000-04:00

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta's opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you've started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel's cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue's explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

Turner, Brian. "Here, Bullet", from Here, Bullet. Alice James Books, 2005. ISBN: 1882295552.

For Sarah in Kuwait, and everyone else serving far from home. Thank you.

What is to happen will happen

2006-07-13T13:56:00.000-04:00

Lifetimes ago, under a banyan tree in the village of Hasnapur, an astrologer cupped his ears - his satellite dish to the stars - and foretold my windowhood and exile. I was only seven then, fast and venturesome, scabrous-armed from leaves and thorns.
"No!" I shouted. "You're a crazy old man. You don't know what my future holds!"
"Suit yourself," the astrologer cackled. "What is to happen will happen." Then he chucked me hard on the head.
I fell. My teeth cut into my tongue. A twig sticking out of the bundle of firewood I'd scavenged punched a starshaped wound into my forehead. I lay still. The astrologer reentered his trance. I was nothing, a speck in the solar system. Bad times were on their way. I was helpless, doomed. The star bled.
"I don't believe you," I whispered.

Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine. Fawcett Crest, 1989. ISBN: 0449219232.

You're hired

2006-07-11T15:55:00.000-04:00

Q: I hear that this is your second encounter with book publishing. What was your first?

A: I worked for Persea Books, this truly fantastic independent press that in retrospect should probably never have hired me. When I said I was "proficient in Excel," what I meant was that I'd seen Excel spreadsheets on other, smarter people's computers. I'm pretty sure I only got the job because of my huge ugly coat, this trash-man coat that could double as a life-saving tent in a blizzard. My boss needed somebody who could walk through blinding snow to the post office, and after pinching the fabric of my coat, he determined that somebody was me. I could have sent that coat in on a hanger to my interview, and it would have gotten me the job.

From: A Conversation with Karen Russell, author of the forthcoming St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.

Marooned

2006-07-10T01:36:00.000-04:00

To be a child in the tall house where I grew up in Statesville, North Carolina, was to live marooned on an island. [...] I did the things marooned children have always done. I made society ladies from kitchen matches -- impaled grapes for their heads, inverted morning-glory blooms for ball-gown skirts. An apple tree became a team of horses, its crooked limbs saddled with old newspapers and bridled with lengths of clothesline. At the beginning of World War II, there was enough soot inside the house chimneys to blacken the faces of a thousand commandos, and there were sharp kindling pieces in the pile to carry sheathed in the belt. There were godlike games to be played with the black ants living at the base of the oak; I blessed and cursed them indifferently, sometimes sprinkling bread crumbs near their hills, sometimes flooding their tunnels with vinegar water. And I fell in love with books. [1-2]

Betts, Doris. "The Spies in the Herb House." In The Astronomer and Other Stories. Louisiana State University Press, 1995 (Harper & Row, 1965). ISBN: 0807120103.

The prose and the passion

2006-07-09T23:11:00.000-04:00

Margaret greeted her lord with peculiar tenderness on the morrow. Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man, With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of those outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy going.
[...]
It did not seem so difficult. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die. [158-159]

Forster, E.M. Howard's End. Penguin, 2000. ISBN: 014118213X.

Dreams on a midsummer's night

2006-07-08T08:00:00.000-04:00

While the moon smoothly shifted the shadows from one side of Edgewood to the other, Daily Alice dreamed that she stood in a flower-starred field where on a hill there grew an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace, their branches intertwined like fingers. Far down the hall, Sophie dreamed that there was a tiny door in her elbow, open a crack, through which the wind blew, blowing on her heart. Doctor Drinkwater dreamed he sat before his typewriter and wrote this: "There is an aged aged insect who lives in a hole in the ground. One June he puts on his summer straw, and takes his pipe and his staff and his lamp in half his hands, and follows the worm and the root to the stair that leads up to the door into blue summer." This seemed immensely significant to him, but when he awoke he wouldn't be able to remember a word of it, try as he might. Mother beside him dreamed her husband wasn't in his study at all, but with her in the kitchen, where she drew tin cookie-sheets endlessly out of the oven; the baked things on them were brown and round, and when he asked her what they were, she said "Years." [96]

Crowley, John. Little, Big. Harper Perennial, 2002. ISBN: 0060937939.

Pilgrim, briefly

2006-07-07T09:19:00.000-04:00

The high creek doesn't look like our creek. Our creek splashes transparently over a jumble of rocks; the high creek obliterates everything in flat opacity. It looks like somebody else's creek that has usurped or eaten our creek and is roving frantically to escape, big and ugly, like a blacksnake caught in a kitchen drawer. [151]

Fecundity is anathema only in the animal. "Acres and acres of rats" has a suitably chilling ring to it that is decidedly lacking if I say, instead, "acres and acres of tulips." [167]

Learning to stalk muskrats took me several years. [192]

Tulips had cast their leaves on my path, flat and bright as doubloons. I passed under a sugar maple that stunned me by its elegant unself-consciousness: it was as if a man on fire were to continue calmly sipping tea. [249]

A chipmunk was streaking around with the usual calamitous air. When he saw me he stood to investigate, tucking his front legs tightly against his breast, so that only his paws were visible, and he looked like a supplicant modestly holding his hat. [251]

A monarch in flight looks like an autumn leaf with a will, vitalized and cast upon the air from which it seems to suck some thin sugar of energy, some leaf-life or sap. [257]

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN: 0060953020.

Obsessions

2006-07-07T09:18:00.000-04:00

I have noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering and, like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt'ring eye and say, "Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?" The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life. I seem to possess an organ that others lack, a sort of trivia machine. [134]

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN: 0060953020.

A holy curiosity

2006-07-06T09:05:00.000-04:00

Somewhere, and I can't find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Eskimo earnestly, "did you tell me?" If I did not know about the rotifers and paramecia, and all the bloom of plankton clogging the dying pond, fine; but since I've seen it I must somehow deal with it, take it into account. "Never lose a holy curiosity," Einstein said; and so, I left my microscope down from the shelf, spread a drop of duck pond on a glass slide, and try to look spring in the eye. [123]

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN: 0060953020.

If I fell in a forest

2006-07-06T09:04:00.000-04:00

Some trees, like giant sequoias, are, practically speaking, immortal, vulnerable only to another ice age. They are not even susceptible to fire. Sequoia wood barely burns, and the bark is "nearly as fireproof as asbestos. The top of one sequoia, struck by lightning a few years ago during a July thunderstorm, smoldered quietly, without apparently damaging the tree, until it was put out by a snowstorm in October." Some trees sink taproots to rock; some spread wide mats of roots clutching at acres. They will not be blown. We run around under these obelisk-creatures, teetering on our soft, small feet. We are out on a jaunt, picnicking, fattening like puppies for our deaths. Shall I carve a name on this trunk? What if I fell in a forest: Would a tree hear? [93]

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN: 0060953020.

A freely given canvas

2006-07-05T09:03:00.000-04:00

The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space and time. The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at any given second is a full field of color-patches scattered just so. The configuration will never be repeated. Living is moving; time is a live creek bearing changing lights. As I move, or as the world moves around me, the fullness of what I see shatters. This second of shattering is an augenblick, a particular configuation, a slant of light shot in the open eye. Goethe's Faust risks all if he should cry to the moment, the augenblick, "Verweile doch!" "Last forever!" Who hasn't prayed that prayer? But the augenblick isn't going to verweile. You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying; it is a canvas, nevertheless. [84]

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN: 0060953020.

What I do is me: for that I came

2006-07-04T12:25:00.000-04:00

for Sven

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves -- goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

From Gerard Manley Hopkins' "As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame".

I had been my whole life a bell

2006-07-04T09:30:00.000-04:00

When the doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw "the tree with the lights in it." It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I'm still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. [35-36]

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN: 0060953020.

I am the arrow shaft

2006-07-03T09:47:00.000-04:00

I am an explorer, then, and am also a stalker, or the instrument of the hunt itself. Certain Indians used to carve long grooves along the wooded shafts of their arrows. They called the gooves "lightning marks," because the resembled the curved fissure of lightning slices down the trunks of trees. The function of lightning marks is this: if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark, streak down the arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a trail dripped on broad-leaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow into whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood. [14]

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN: 0060953020.

The Pirates' Conquest

2006-07-02T14:21:00.000-04:00

In Weitiki Valley, almost everyone is a descendant of the Inland Pirates. Our great-great-grandparents sailed along the glacial river, burned their thieving boats, and then moved inland to meet the locals. The Moa were a peaceful, stationary people who killed only one another. And then our pirate forebears arrived, swilling brandy and sneezing mainland diseases all over them. "The Pirates' Conquest" is a tribute to those invaders, performed every year at the Winter Concert. It's our local anthem, these squirrelly arpeggios that celebrate our forebears' every offense. Verse one: The quick extinction of the Moa's sacred red penguins. Verse two: The depletion of their greenstone quarries. Verse three: The invasion of their mothers' bodies. And what did we bring the Moa in return? Grog and possums. Quail pox. Whores. These are weird things to harmonize about.

Russell, Karen. "Accident Brief." The New Yorker, June 19, 2006.

Lunatic music

2006-07-02T13:16:00.000-04:00

It seems rare to read a writer, particularly one who is just starting out, who is so confidently playful with language. Are there writers who have been an especially strong influence in this regard?

When I was a kid I had short legs and weak vision, and I quickly discovered that it was a lot easier for me to play with language than, say, the soccer ball. I'm grateful to the writers who extended my ideas of what was possible in fiction: Mark Richard, Flannery O'Connor, Kelly Link, George Saunders, Denis Johnson, García Márquez, Aleksandar Hemon, Katherine Dunn. I love their prose because they each play their own kind of lunatic music, strange and funny and sad, often lyrical, sometimes scary.

"Island Girl." Q&A with Karen Russell. The New Yorker [online only], Issue of 2005-06-13 and 20; Posted 2005-06-13.

Heaven and Earth in Jest

2006-07-01T15:45:00.000-04:00

I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.

It was hot, so hot the mirror felt warm. I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I'd purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the passover. We wake, if we wake at all, to mystery, rumors of of death, beauty, violence.... "Seems like we're just set down here," a woman said to me recently, "and doesn't nobody know why."

These are morning matters, pictures you dream as the final wave heaves you up on the sand to the bright light and drying air. You remember pressure, and a curved sleep you rested against, soft, like a scallop in its shell. But the air hardens your skin; you stand; you leave the lighted shore to explore some dim headland, and soon you're lost in the leafy interior, intent, remembering nothing. [3-4]

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper Perennial, 1998. ISBN: 0060953020.

recommended by Amanda

A six o'clock feeling

2006-06-30T16:31:00.000-04:00

It was time for Jenny to go home with her mother, all the way in the tram car through the haunted November twilight of Edinburgh across the Dean Bridge. Sandy waved from the window, and wondered if Jenny, too, had the feeling of leading a double life, fraught with problems that even a millionaire did not have to face. It was well-known that millionaires led double lives. The evening paper rattle-snaked its way through the letter box and there was suddenly a six o'clock feeling in the house. [19]

Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. HarperPerennial, 1999. ISBN: 0060931736.

read for the Slaves of Golconda reading group

Children by force

2006-06-30T16:30:00.000-04:00

From somewhere below one of the Lloyd children started to yell, and then another, and then a chorus. Deirdre Lloyd disappeared with a swing of her peasant skirt to see to all her children. The Lloyds were Catholics and so were made to have a lot of children by force. [108]

Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. HarperPerennial, 1999. ISBN: 0060931736.

Miss Brodie and John Stuart Mill

2006-06-30T16:29:00.000-04:00

On Saturday afternoons an hour was spent on her Greek lessons, for she had insisted that Jenny and Sandy should teach her Greek at the same time as they learned it. "There is an old tradition for this practice," said Miss Brodie. "Many families in the olden days could afford to send but one child to school, whereupon that one scholar of the family imparted to the others in the evening what he had learned in the morning. I have long wanted to know the Greek language, and this scheme will also serve to impress your knowledge on your own minds. John Stuart Mill used to rise at dawn to learn Greek at the age of five, and what John Stuart Mill would do as an infant at dawn, I too can do on a Saturday afternoon in my prime." [86]

Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. HarperPerennial, 1999. ISBN: 0060931736.

My Own Delightful Gordon,

2006-06-30T16:28:00.000-04:00

Your letter has moved me deeply as you may imagine. But alas, I must ever decline to be Mrs. Lowther. My reasons are twofold. I am dedicated to my Girls as is Madame Pavlova, and there is another in my life whose mutual love reaches out to me beyond the bounds of Time and Space. He is Teddy Lloyd! Intimacy has never taken place with him. He is married to another. One day in the art room we melted into each other's arms and knew the truth. But I was proud of giving myself to you when you came and took me in the bracken on Arthur's Seat while the storm raged about us. If I am in a certain condition I shall place the infant in the care of a worthy shepherd and his wife, and we can discuss it calmly as platonic acquaintances. I may permit misconduct to occur again from time to time as an outlet because I am in my Prime. We can also have many a breezy day in the fishing boat at sea.

I wish to inform you that your housekeeper fills me with anxiety like John Knox. I fear she is rather narrow, which arises from ignorance of culture and the Italian scene. Pray ask her not to say, "You know your way up," when I call at your house at Cramond. She should take me up and show me in. Her knees are not stiff. She is only pretending that they are.

I love to hear you singing "Hey Johnnie Cope." But were I to receive a proposal of marriage tomorrow from the Lord Lyon King of Arms I would decline it.

Allow me, in conclusion to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your singing.

With fondest joy,
Jean Brodie

[77]

Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. HarperPerennial, 1999. ISBN: 0060931736.

Spark: An artist and a woman

2006-06-29T18:22:00.000-04:00

Now that I come to write this section of my autobiography I remember vividly, in those days when I was writing Warrender Chase, without any great hope of ever getting it published, but with only the excited compulsion to write it, how I walked home across the park one evening, thinking hard about my novel and Beryl Tims as a type, and I stopped in the middle of the pathway. People passed me, both ways, going home from their daily work, like myself. Whatever I had been specifically thinking about the typology of Mrs Tims went completely out of my mind. People passed me as I stood. Young men with dark suits and girls wearing hats and tailored-looking coats. the thought came to me in a most articulate way: 'How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century.' [25]

Spark, Muriel. Loitering With Intent. Bodley Head, 1981. ISBN: 0370309006.

Spark: Fleur the writer

2006-06-29T18:21:00.000-04:00

Sir Eric was a small, timid man. He shook hands all round in a furtive way. I supposed rightly that he was the Sir Eric Findlay, K.B.E., a sugar-refining merchant whose memoirs, like the others, had not yet got farther than Chapter One: Nursery Days. The main character was Nanny. I had livened it up by putting Nanny and the butler on the nursery rocking-horse together during the parents' absence, while little Eric was locked in the pantry to clean the silver. [36-37].

I had just that day been writing the chapter in my Warrender Chase where the letters of my character Charlotte prove that she was so far gone in love with him that she was willing to pervert her own sound instincts, or rather forget that she had those instincts, in order to win Warrender's approval and retain a little of his attention. My character Charlotte, my fictional English Rose, was later considered to be one of my more shocking portrayals. What did I care? I conceived her in those feverish days and nights of my bout of 'flu, which touched on pleurisy, and I never regretted the creation of Charlotte. I wasn't writing poetry and prose so that the reader would think me a nice person, but in order that my sets of words should convey ideas of truth and wonder, as indeed they did to myself as I was composing them. I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work. I am sparing no relevant facts. [81-82]

Spark, Muriel. Loitering With Intent. Bodley Head, 1981. ISBN: 0370309006.

Spark: The Thoroughly Modern Fleur Talbot

2006-06-29T18:20:00.000-04:00

That shocked look of hers reminded me very strongly of the look on the face of my lover's wife, Dottie, on another occasion. I must say that Dottie was a better educated woman than Beryl Tims, but the look was the same. She had confronted me with my affair with her husband, which I thought was tiresome of her. I replied, 'Yes Dottie, I love him. I love him off and on, when he doesn't interfere with my poetry and so forth. In fact I've started a novel which requires a lot of poetic concentration because, you see, I conceive everything poetically. So perhaps it will be more off than on with Leslie.'

Dottie was relieved that she wasn't in danger of losing her man, at the same time as she was horrified by what she called my unnatural attitude, which in fact was quite natural to me.

'Your head rules your heart,' she said in her horror.
I told her this was a stupid way of putting things. She knew this was true, but in moments of crisis she fell back on banalities. She was a moralist and accused me then of spiritual pride. 'Pride goes before a fall,' said Dottie. In fact if I had pride it was vocational in nature; I couldn't help it, and I've never found it necessarily precedes falls. [28]

I too was a Catholic believer, but not of that sort, not of that sort at all. And if it was true, as Dottie always said, that I was taking terrible risks with my immortal soul, I would have been incapable of caution on those grounds. I had an art to practise and a life to live, and faith abounding; and I simply didn't have the time or the mentality for guilds and indulgences, fasts and feasts and observances. I've never held it right to create more difficulties in matters of religion than already exist. [130-131]

Spark, Muriel. Loitering With Intent. Bodley Head, 1981. ISBN: 0370309006.

read for the Slaves of Golconda reading group

Cosmogony, Cloned

2006-06-28T23:29:00.000-04:00

Nothing is too clear by nature, least of all language. Connotation: foolhardy replication. This form is called not yet unfolded Grace.
[...]
Would you make replication a style, a pocket coffin? She is awake to bake a cake. Thus identical twins were formed by the division of one fertilized egg. White folded into the same river. Two forms: written and oral.
[...]
Such foolhardy ambition. Under tissue culture conditions. Therefore the written cannot be understood. Never once have I stepped twice. In God's right hand. unpenetrated.

Waldrop, Rosmarie. "Cosmogony, Cloned."

Two voices

2006-06-28T23:28:00.000-04:00

Two voices on a page. Or is it one? Now turning in on themselves, back into fiber and leaf, now branching into sequence, consequence, public works projects or discord. Now touching, now trapped in frames without dialog box. Both tentative, as if poring over old inscriptions, when perhaps the wall is crumbling, circuits broken, pages blown off by a fall draft. [3]

Waldrop, Rosmarie. "Prologue: Two Voices", from Reluctant Gravities. New Directions, 1999. ISBN: 0811214281.

thanks, Amanda!

A Short List of Books and Stories That Can't Possibly be as Good as Their Titles, but Are

2006-06-19T15:09:00.000-04:00

Everything That Rises Must Converge
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
The Wind From a Burning Woman
Purity of Heart is To Will One Thing
If on a winter's night a traveler
The Way That Water Enters Stone
Tepper Isn't Going Out
The Solace of Leaving Early
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

add your favorites in the comments

Balancing

2006-06-17T23:40:00.000-04:00

"Say you have a dream." He spoke earnestly. "In that dream you know that you are dreaming. If you become too aware you are dreaming, you wake up. But if you are just enough aware, you can influence your dream."
"So that's balancing?"
"Pretty much."
He breathed out, relieved and empty. She thought for a while.
"And what is it," she asked, at last, "when you fall?"
Cyprian caught his breath back, almost despaired, but again -- because, in spite of who he was, he loved Delphine -- he dug for an answer. It took so long that Delphine almost fell asleep, but his mind was working furiously, shedding blue sparks.
"When you fall," he said, startling her awake, "you must forget that you exist. Strike the ground as a shadow strikes the ground. Weightless."
"I think I'll leave you," said Delphine.
"Please don't leave me," said Cyprian.
And so they lay balanced on that great wide bed. [28]

Erdrich, Louise. The Master Butchers Singing Club. Harper Perennial, 2005. ISBN: 0060837055.

To crave and to have

2006-06-16T23:11:00.000-04:00

Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water - peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing - the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smoothes our hair, and brings us wild strawberries [152-153].

Robinson, Marilyn. Housekeeping. Bantam Books, 1982. ISBN: 055327872X.

Revelation

2006-06-15T11:11:00.000-04:00

That magician, for instance, wandering through Palestine, performing his feats and rattling the bones of all who looked upon him. He was great! He was fantastic and doomed and he took it on the chin, We could hardly have loved A Man more. But every time he spoke or raised his hand, sometimes even when he blinked the veil grew more sheer; sometimes a corner grew tattered and lifted off the earth like a circus tent in an electrical storm, the carnival of that man! All around him people were puzzling over yeast or no yeast, cloven hooves (not good, they were right), what to do about beards and tattoos, The Law, The Law, The Law, and here He is, a sudden Baal Shem, and everywhere He steps the world flips! upside down. [...] (You didn't understand about Him at all then, You understand less now. He was an impatient man, driven. Imagine Him boarding a train right now, a train you are on, the sinister cut of his suit, the look in his eyes. Maybe he is dangerous, or maybe he is just a man to share a dry martini with: He passes you, you cannot say which He is, and then He's gone. A sexy, impossible, impertinent man not prone to suffering fools.) [...] Never in the history of You Know What have people grieved so mightily, and for so long. You're grieving still, aren't you? You wouldn't know Him if He tipped His hat to you on the street. He would terrify you. [267-277]

Kimmel, Haven. "Revelation." In Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible, edited by Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet. Free Press, 2004. ISBN: 0743232763.

Natural disorder

2006-06-14T13:02:00.000-04:00

The sky was whited by a high, even, luminous film, and the trees had an evening darkness. The shore drifted in a long, slow curve, outward to a point, beyond which three steep islands of diminishing size continued the sweep of the land towards the depth of the lake, tentatively, like an ellipsis. The point was high and stony, crested with fir trees. At its foot a narrow margin of brown sand abstracted its crude shape into one pure curve of calligraphic delicacy, sweeping, again, toward the lake. We crossed the point at its base, climbing down its farther side to the shore of the little bay where the perch bit. A quarter of a mile beyond, a massive peninsula foreshortened the horizon, flung up against it like a barricade. Only out beyond these two reaches of land could we see the shimmer of the open lake. The sheltered water between them was glossy, dark, and rank, with cattails at its verge and water lillies in its shallows, and tadpoles, and minnows, and farther out, the plosh now and then of a big fish leaping after flies. Set apart from the drifts and tides and lucifactions of the open water, the surface of the bay seemed almost viscous, membranous, and here things massed and accumulated, as they do in cobwebs or in the eaves and unswept corners of a house. It was a place of distinctly domestic disorder, warm and still and replete [112-113].

Robinson, Marilyn. Housekeeping. Bantam Books, 1982. ISBN: 055327872X.

Practicing the arts of peace

2006-06-13T22:39:00.000-04:00

"I was asked by somebody back at the time of the invasion of Iraq how we could all just go on writing our funny little stories, especially we fantasists, and I said that in my opinion what we were doing is practicing the arts of peace. What we want is a world in which funny fantastical stories are possible and are valued. In which there is nothing so dreadful or urgent that it causes the writing of such things to stop or to be stopped. worlds where the arts of peace can't be practiced are wounded worlds, and that's why we have to go on practicing those arts, so that our worlds don't die."

-John Crowley, "Practicing the Arts of Peace", Branigin Lecture, Institute for Advanced Study, Indiana University, December 1, 2005.

Blogging mandatory @ Penn

2006-06-12T17:58:00.000-04:00

PENN TAKES NEW APPROACH WITH BLOGS
Beginning this fall, all incoming students in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania will keep blogs of their academic interests and development. Unlike typical blogs, the Penn blogs will not be public. Access is limited to the student, the student's advisor, and, under certain circumstances, authorized university officials. Penn has a long-standing practice of requiring students to complete questionnaires to help guide their academic careers, and the popularity of online forums such as Facebook prompted university officials to introduce the blog format for the questions. Students will be required to make a small number of entries. Beyond that, they can keep the blog as current as they choose. The blog entries will be part of a student's academic record and cannot be changed later. The introduction of the blogs follows a pilot program last year involving 300 freshmen.
Inside Higher Ed, 9 June 2006

from Edupage, June 09, 2006.
"Edupage is a service of EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology."

Reading speed

2006-06-11T15:19:00.000-04:00

RB: I do wonder why there is this limiting thing about reading your stories - maybe it's that the density of a story is as if it were a novel. And I only have so much head space available -

GS: When I am imagining it, I will have a longer description and my feeling is that I'd have the physicality in my mind, then it will kind of unpack for the reader - but only at a certain pace of reading. If it's too fast, my experience is that the physicality doesn't have time to unpack, but if you take a story - the story, if you read it slow enough, then you are supplying physicality to it.

Interview with George Saunders at identity theory, June 2006.

Hoboes at the lake

2006-06-10T23:51:00.000-04:00

We in our plaid dresses and orlon sweaters and velveteen shoes and they in their suit coats with the vestigial collars turned up and the lapels closed might have been marooned survivors of some lost pleasure craft. We and they alone might have escaped the destruction of some sleek train, some flying shuttle of business or commerce. Lucille and I might have been two of a numerous family, off to visit a grandmother in Lapwai. And they might have been touring legislators or members of a dance band. Then our being there on a bitter morning in ruined and unsuitable clothes, wordlessly looking at the water, would be entirely understandable. As it was, I thought of telling them that our grandfather still lay in a train that had slid to the lake floor long before we were born. Perhaps we all awaited a resurrection [96].

Robinson, Marilyn. Housekeeping. Bantam Books, 1982. ISBN: 055327872X.

Retrieving Sorrow

2006-06-09T21:17:00.000-04:00

The dictum was connected with Iowa Bob's theory that we were all on a big ship -- "on a big cruise, across the world." And in spite of the danger of being swept away, at any time, or perhaps because of the danger, we were not allowed to be depressed or unhappy. The way the world worked was not cause for some sort of blanket cynicism or sophomoric despair; according to my father and Iowa Bob, the way the world worked -- which was badly -- was just a strong incentive to live purposefully, and to be determined about living well.

"Happy fatalism," Frank would speak of their philosophy, later; Frank, as a troubled youth, was not a believer.

And one night, when we were watching a wretched melodrama on the TV above the bar in the Hotel New Hampshire, my mother said, "I don't want to see the end of this. I like happy endings."
And Father said, "There are no happy endings."
"Right!" cried Iowa Bob -- an odd mixture of exuberance and stoicism in his cracked voice. "Death is horrible, final, and frequently premature," Coach Bob declared.
"So what?" my father said.
"Right!" cried Iowa Bob. "That's the point: So what?"

Thus the family maxim was that an unhappy ending did not undermine a rich and energetic life. This was based on the belief that there were no happy endings. Mother resisted this, and Frank was morose about it, and Franny and I were probably believers of this religion -- or if, at times, we doubted Iowa Bob, the world would always come up with something that seemed to prove the old lineman right. We never knew what Lilly's religion was (no doubt it was a small idea, kept to herself), and Egg would be the retriever of Sorrow, in more than one sense. Retrieving Sorrow is a kind of religion, too [168].

Irving, John. The Hotel New Hampshire. Pocket Books, 1982. ISBN: 0671440276.

Lemony Snicket says 'stay indoors and read'

2006-05-23T08:29:00.000-04:00

"Mr. Snicket believes that summertime is such a dangerous season, what with sunburn and melted ice cream and the possibility of summer camp, that it's best to stay indoors and read," said Snicket's "representative," Daniel Handler, who still denies the overwhelming evidence that he is in fact the author of the million-selling Snicket books, "A Series of Unfortunate Events."

Handler said that Mr. Snicket has his own reading suggestions, including books by Beverly Cleary, Adele Griffin and John Blair.

"Lemony Snicket says 'stay indoors and read'." Hillel Italie, AP National Writer, Mon May 22, 2:48 PM ET (MSNBC via Google News).

Carl and I

2006-05-21T21:17:00.000-04:00

Three nights after I married Carl Peterson, we watched Sarah Bernhardt die of consumption on a bed strewn with camellias. She was very beautiful, her face a sad white mask, her eyes enormous and dark, her voice rising from the the stage and filling the Lyric Theatre, as though as the courtesan Marguerite Gautier she was capable of barely a whisper, dying as she was from the tubercular bacilli breeding in her lungs. Her sins had been cleansed, Marguerite Gautier's, by her suffering and by the goodness of her heart and by the sacrifice she had made, giving up for his own sake the one man she had ever loved. I grasped my Carl's arm on the seat next to me as Marguerite died, for he was the one man I had ever loved and now we were married, on the previous Saturday, December 16, 1905, and the church was filled with red camellias. The newspapers said that Sarah Bernhardt slept in her own coffin, transporting it with her wherever she went, and she had died nearly twenty thousand times in her life, just as she as dying before us, and she took a cloth from her bosom as she lay on her deathbed, and she coughed terribly into it [59].

Butler, Robert Olen. Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards. Grove Press, 2004. ISBN: 0802142044.

My next stop was at the clownery

2006-05-19T23:48:00.000-04:00

...where I wandered invisible down long hallways, watching the inhabitants at their work or play or whatever it was they were doing. One inmate was packing cockroaches, one hundred to the bag. I do not think the insects were dead, though they were very quiet. Another inmate was constructing a large bust of the Viceroy, so the label said, out of what appeared and smelled to be dung. A third inmate, with the aid of a tall ladder, was writing her autobiography on the walls of the place. She had covered four stories of one stairwell and had extended her tale out into the reception area, where two walls were already covered with obscenities. I followed her story back in time until I reached a door to the roof, where a group of attendants were having morning coffee. Even read in reverse, it had been a novel of violence, abuse, incest, and horror [146].

Tepper, Sheri S. Beauty. Doubleday / Foundation, 1991. ISBN: 0385419392.

Summer reading

2006-05-17T19:04:00.000-04:00

Meme from Susan

Butler, Robert Olen: Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards [recommended by David Carr]
Saramago, Jose: Blindness [recommended by Stefanie and many others]
Drabble, Margaret: The Gates of Ivory [recommended by Haven]
Tepper, Sheri S.: Beauty [recommended by Sven]
Lodge, David: Thinks [recommended by LabLit folks]
Spark, Muriel: Loitering with Intent and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie [for the Slaves of Golconda]
Erdrich, Louise: The Master Butchers Singing Club [recommended by David Carr]
Oates, Joyce Carol: A Garden of Earthly Delights [May garden book]
Lesser, Wendy: The Pagoda in the Garden [June garden book; recommended by Susan]
LeCarre, John: The Constant Gardener [July garden book; recommended by David Carr]
O'Brien, Tim: Going After Cacciato
Glass, Julia: The Whole World Over
Forster, E.M.: Howard's End
Appelt, Kathi: Down Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky

Madness and towers

2006-05-16T23:55:00.000-04:00

My next thought was that Elladine had said she had left me the means to find her, though I could not imagine what she meant. The contents of the box included only the ring, the packet of needles and the three hanks of thread. Which led to the fleeting suspicion that Mama, however lovely, might not have had all of her wits about her. This would explain the aunts' attitude, certainly. Even women as reconciled to the holy will as the aunts might bridle at having a madwoman in the family. It would also explain papa's locking her in the tower, since such is known to be the fate of madwomen and madmen wherever madness and towers occur in appropriate contiguity. Towers, or, in a pinch, attics [28].

Tepper, Sheri S. Beauty. Doubleday / Foundation, 1991. ISBN: 0385419392.

Model organism origins

2006-05-15T21:57:00.000-04:00

The concept of selecting a common system for in-depth study emerged slowly. In some disciplines it was once considered poor etiquette to work on a colleague's system: if he or she used the toad, you used the frog. That practice led to great inefficiency, because the details of manipulating any system--how to grow the organism, the chemistry of the cell wall, mating habits--had to be worked out over and over again.
[...]
Gradually certain systems became preferred models for biological systems in general, a tendency which has been accentuated as molecular approaches have become the lingua franca of modern biology [1385].

Koshland, Daniel. (1988). Biological Systems. Science 240(4858):1385. PMID: 3375819.

Fighting the Crippler

2006-05-12T11:07:00.000-04:00

While the metaphors of military mobilization were as central to the organization and funding of cancer research as they had been to the fight against polio, analysis of the two campaigns also reveals interesting differences. The critical years for the establishment of the March of Dimes were during World War II; the organization was founded in 1938 and managed to raise increasing amounts of money throughout the war. (In like manner, with the lay activist takeover of the leadership of the ACS, public campaigns raised millions of dollars, increasing each year through the 1940s.) There is a sense in which the rhetoric of the NFIP was the rhetoric of war; the obvious enemy was polio, which crippled American children at the same time as American soldiers were being maimed and killed in Europe and the Pacific. Perhaps even more significant than any symbolic resemblance between the campaigns against the Axis forces and against polio was the fact that both efforts shared the same spokesperson, Franklin Roosevelt. In a public letter in 1944, Basil O'Connor, President of the NFIP, wrote Roosevelt that only "unremitting research will provide the key which will unlock the door to victory over infantile paralysis." Roosevelt's response, written in the closing year of World War II and only four months before his death, called for the deployment of all-out research:

We face formidable enemies at home and abroad.... Victory is achieved only at great cost -- but victory is imperative on all fronts. Not until we have removed the shadow of the Crippler from the future of every child can we furl the flags of battle and still the trumpets of attack. The fight against infantile paralysis is a fight to the finish, and the terms are unconditional surrender [178-179].

Creager, Angela N. H. The Life of a Virus : Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930-1965. University of Chicago Press, 2002. ISBN: 0226120252.

Harry, Carrie, and Garp

2006-05-10T14:16:00.000-04:00

"I am excited to announce that on the evenings of August 1st and 2nd, I will be reading with the creators of Potter and Garp at Radio City Music Hall. This came about because two good people agreed with me that it might be possible to do one gigantic reading to benefit two charities. One is Doctors Without Borders, an international independent medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural or man-made disasters, or exclusion from health care in more than 70 countries, and the other is The Haven Foundation, a charity [founded by SK] that supports writers and artists who can no longer support themselves because of accidents or illness. We are doing this at Radio City Music Hall because it is the biggest, brightest venue we could find and we are hoping we can fill it on both nights. We hope to see you there--this is going to be very cool!" -Stephen King

Diagramming books

2006-05-01T21:03:00.000-04:00

Kathleen Rooney: Why are some people so into labels? Like wanting to label things fantasy, or sci fi or literary? What do you make of these categories and how do you deal with/avoid being put into them, especially insofar as you've been in Conjunctions and McSweeney’s, but have also won Nebula and World Fantasy awards?

Kelly Link: Labels aren't nearly as useful as, say, Venn diagrams. Wouldn't it be great if bookstores could arrange their stock in a sort of enormous, elaborate, interlocking system of Venn diagrams?

Interview with Kelly Link, in Redivider, a journal of new literature, Spring 2006: Volume 3, No. 2.

In the Nursery

2006-04-28T11:11:00.000-04:00

At Blesford Ride, what most schools would have called the Sanatorium was called the Nursery. It was presided over by a stout Sister in not quite clean starched white, who wore a cap like a winged helmet, a row of scissors and pens across the swell of her breast, and a vigorous greying moustache. Her prescription for most upsets was darkness and starvation, which she called giving the brain and stomach a little rest. Most boys, after an hour or two of privation, more or less miraculously recovered and asked for release. Marcus was often in, with asthma and headaches. He did not ask to be let out [144].

Byatt, A.S. The Virgin in the Garden. Vintage International, 1978, 1992. ISBN 0679738290.

The Fly People

2006-04-23T21:12:00.000-04:00

The fly lab was as distinctive a domestic ecology for its human inhabitants, the fly people, as for its dipteran denizens. There drosophilas were reconstructed as "standard" flies, and there, too, students and visitors were transformed into drosophilists and assimilated into a working community with its peculiar customs, ways of life, and moral economy. The fly group's rules of communal behavior constituted the design of an intricate piece of social technology, much as linkage maps constituted the design of a laboratory instrument. Drosophila and the drosophilists evolved symbiotically, and the customs of the fly people were adapted to the special qualities of their breeder reactor. Drosophila was designed to take advantage of its potential for abundant, fast-paced production, and so, too, was the fly group. The fly group's rules of ownership, access, and credit were shaped by the peculiarities of the creature they had adopted -- or that had adopted them. Fly and fly people became dependent on each other for their identities and livelihoods, bound together in doing experiments [91].

Kohler, Robert E. Lords of the Fly : Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life. University of Chicago Press, 1994. ISBN 0226450627.