"The Tempest allows us to be washed free of images, one of the comedy's many gifts. We are Miranda, who is adjured to "Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow." If the sea values nothing, and swallows all, it also keeps nothing, and casts us back again. Ariel's best song makes our drowned bones into coral . . . It is a sea fiction, a drenching that at last leaves everyone dry. No one is harmed in the play, and forgiveness is extended to all by Prospero, in response to Ariel's most human moment. Everything dissolves in The Tempest, except the sea. From one perspective, the sea is dissolution itself, but evidently not so in this unique play."
-Harold Bloom, you're a cranky old codger, but you sure have your moments of beauty.
Meanwhile, declining from the noon of day,
The sun obliquely shoots his burning ray;
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches that hang jurymen may dine'
The merchant from the Exchange returns in peace,
And the long labors of the toilet cease.
-Pope
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Things I'm Stoked About
1.
Mervyn Peake:
"A ritual, more compelling than ever man devised, is fighting anchored darkness. A ritual of the blood; of the jumping blood. These quicks of sentience owe nothing to his forbears, but to those feckless hosts, a trillion deep, of the globe's childhood. -- The gift of the bright blood. Of blood that laughs when the tenets mutter 'Weep.' Of blood that mourns when the sere laws croak 'Rejoice!' O little revolution in great shades!"
And, also Peake:
"If ever a man was destined to fill in the gap of his own absence with his own ghost it is he. For excommunication is a kind of death."
Also Peake, but just a fragment here:
"the talons of adventure, the antlers of romance"
2.
John Berryman: "Come & diminish me, & map my way."
3.
Homer:
"There was a world . . . Or was it all a dream?"
Mervyn Peake:
"A ritual, more compelling than ever man devised, is fighting anchored darkness. A ritual of the blood; of the jumping blood. These quicks of sentience owe nothing to his forbears, but to those feckless hosts, a trillion deep, of the globe's childhood. -- The gift of the bright blood. Of blood that laughs when the tenets mutter 'Weep.' Of blood that mourns when the sere laws croak 'Rejoice!' O little revolution in great shades!"
And, also Peake:
"If ever a man was destined to fill in the gap of his own absence with his own ghost it is he. For excommunication is a kind of death."
Also Peake, but just a fragment here:
"the talons of adventure, the antlers of romance"
2.
John Berryman: "Come & diminish me, & map my way."
3.
Homer:
"There was a world . . . Or was it all a dream?"
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Poetics
"Berryman is a poet so preoccupied with poetic effects as to be totally in their thrall," James Dickey wrote. "His inversions, his personal and often irritatingly cute colloquialisms and deliberate misspellings, his odd references, his basing of lines and whole poems on private allusions, create what must surely be the densest verbal thickets since Empson's."
In his 366th "Dream Song" Berryman himself wrote, "These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort." "And understood many have not been," Phillips wrote. "Packed with private jokes, topical and literary allusions (Berryman's reading and personal library are legendary), they boggle many minds. When the first 77 Dream Songs...were published, Robert Lowell admitted, 'At first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder and oddness. After a while, the repeated situations and their racy jabber become more and more enjoyable, although even now I wouldn't trust myself to paraphrase accurately at least half the sections.'"
(Wikipedia)
In his 366th "Dream Song" Berryman himself wrote, "These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort." "And understood many have not been," Phillips wrote. "Packed with private jokes, topical and literary allusions (Berryman's reading and personal library are legendary), they boggle many minds. When the first 77 Dream Songs...were published, Robert Lowell admitted, 'At first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder and oddness. After a while, the repeated situations and their racy jabber become more and more enjoyable, although even now I wouldn't trust myself to paraphrase accurately at least half the sections.'"
(Wikipedia)
Monday, January 12, 2009
Was There A Time
Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles
In children's circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books,
But time was set its maggot on their track.
Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
What's never known is safest in this life.
Under the skysigns they who have no arms
Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.
-Dylan Thomas
"Today I saw a great pavement among the clouds made of gray stones, bigger than a meadow. No one goes there. Only a heron. Today I saw a tree growing out of a high wall, and people walking on it far above the ground. Today I saw a poet look out of a narrow window. But the stone field that is lost in the clouds is what you'd like best. Nobody goes there. It's a good place to play games and to dream of things. I saw today a horse swimming in the top of a tower. I saw a million towers today. I saw clouds last night. I was cold. I was colder than ice. I have had no food. I have had no sleep."
-Mervyn Peake
In children's circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books,
But time was set its maggot on their track.
Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
What's never known is safest in this life.
Under the skysigns they who have no arms
Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.
-Dylan Thomas
"Today I saw a great pavement among the clouds made of gray stones, bigger than a meadow. No one goes there. Only a heron. Today I saw a tree growing out of a high wall, and people walking on it far above the ground. Today I saw a poet look out of a narrow window. But the stone field that is lost in the clouds is what you'd like best. Nobody goes there. It's a good place to play games and to dream of things. I saw today a horse swimming in the top of a tower. I saw a million towers today. I saw clouds last night. I was cold. I was colder than ice. I have had no food. I have had no sleep."
-Mervyn Peake
Sunday, January 11, 2009
New Books and Movies
I made a list of every new book I read and every new movie I saw in 2008. Here it is:
Movies I've Seen In 2008 (first-time movies only)
1. Hitch
2. La Vie Est Belle
3. Punch-Drunk Love
4. Sweeney Todd
5. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
6. Twelve Monkeys
7. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
8. The Shining
9. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
10. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
11. Talk Radio
12. City of Lost Children
13. No Country for Old Men
14. Delicatessen
15. Be Kind Rewind
16. Little Shop of Horrors
17. A Streetcar Named Desire
18. Long Day's Journey Into Night
19. Cabaret
20. 1776
21. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
22. Dumbo
23. Atonement
24. Network
25. Machuca
26. Of Mice and Men
27. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
28. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
29. Lonesome Dove
30. Brokeback Mountain
31. Being There
32. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
33. Repo Man
34. 1/2 of Into the Wild (BUT IT SUCKED SO BAD)
35. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
36. Milo and Otis
37. Death Lends A Hand (Columbo)
38. There Will Be Blood
39. Wall-E
40. Futurama II - The Beast With A Million Backs
41. The Muppet Movie
42. I'm Not There
43. A Little Romance
44. Pee Wee's Big Adventure
45. MST3000: Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders
46. MST3000: Santa Claus
47. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
48. Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
49. Koko the Talking Gorilla
50. Tremors
51. They Live
52. Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex (1992)
53. W.
54. When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
55. Aliens
56. Aguirre The Wrath Of God
57. The Seventh Seal
58. The Future of Food
59. Synecdoche, New York
60. Hatley High
61. After Hours
62. In Bruges
63. Sunshine
64. Labyrinth
65. Bringing Up Baby
66. Holiday
67. Slumdog Millionaire
68. The Philidelphia Story
69. Vertigo
70. The Devil Wears Prada
71. Field of Dreams
72. Sullivan's Travels
73. Eight Men Out
Books I've Read In 2008 (first-time books only, and only books I fully read cover-to-cover)
1. Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen
2. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
3. The Persian Letters by Montesqueiu
4. As You Like It by William Shakespeare
5. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
6. Contact by Carl Sagan
7. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
8. Henry IV, Pt. I by William Shakespeare
9. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
10. Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
11. Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware
12. Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill
13. Henry IV, Pt. II by William Shakespeare
14. Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
15. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
16. Paradise Park by Charles Mee
17. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
18. The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno
19. Antony & Cleopatra by William Shakespeare
20. Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen
21. Master of Reality by John Darnielle
22. The Lover by Marguerite Duras
23. The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare
24. Lila the Werewolf by Peter S. Beagle
25. The Line Between by Peter S. Beagle
26. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
27. Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
28. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
29. Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich
30. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen
31. Homegrown Democrat by Garrison Keillor
32. The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber
33. The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
34. The Favorite Game by Leonard Cohen
36. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
37. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
38. The Misanthrope by Moliere
39. Tartuffe by Moliere
40. The Problem of Nature by David Arnold
41. Tastes of Paradise by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
42. Rameau's Nephew by Denis Diderot
43. The Marriage of Figaro by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
44. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
45. Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster by Michael Eric Dyson
46. Hind Swaraj by M.K. Gandhi
47. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
48. Waverley by Sir Walter Scott
49. In the Solitude of Cotton Fields by Bernard-Marie Koltes
50. Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute
51. It's Beautiful by Nathalie Sarraute
52. Liberty by Garrison Keillor
53. The Waltz of the Toreadors by Jean Anouilh
54. Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
55. Lazarillo de Tormes (Anonymous)
Movies I've Seen In 2008 (first-time movies only)
1. Hitch
2. La Vie Est Belle
3. Punch-Drunk Love
4. Sweeney Todd
5. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
6. Twelve Monkeys
7. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
8. The Shining
9. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
10. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
11. Talk Radio
12. City of Lost Children
13. No Country for Old Men
14. Delicatessen
15. Be Kind Rewind
16. Little Shop of Horrors
17. A Streetcar Named Desire
18. Long Day's Journey Into Night
19. Cabaret
20. 1776
21. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
22. Dumbo
23. Atonement
24. Network
25. Machuca
26. Of Mice and Men
27. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
28. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
29. Lonesome Dove
30. Brokeback Mountain
31. Being There
32. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
33. Repo Man
34. 1/2 of Into the Wild (BUT IT SUCKED SO BAD)
35. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
36. Milo and Otis
37. Death Lends A Hand (Columbo)
38. There Will Be Blood
39. Wall-E
40. Futurama II - The Beast With A Million Backs
41. The Muppet Movie
42. I'm Not There
43. A Little Romance
44. Pee Wee's Big Adventure
45. MST3000: Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders
46. MST3000: Santa Claus
47. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
48. Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
49. Koko the Talking Gorilla
50. Tremors
51. They Live
52. Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex (1992)
53. W.
54. When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
55. Aliens
56. Aguirre The Wrath Of God
57. The Seventh Seal
58. The Future of Food
59. Synecdoche, New York
60. Hatley High
61. After Hours
62. In Bruges
63. Sunshine
64. Labyrinth
65. Bringing Up Baby
66. Holiday
67. Slumdog Millionaire
68. The Philidelphia Story
69. Vertigo
70. The Devil Wears Prada
71. Field of Dreams
72. Sullivan's Travels
73. Eight Men Out
Books I've Read In 2008 (first-time books only, and only books I fully read cover-to-cover)
1. Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen
2. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
3. The Persian Letters by Montesqueiu
4. As You Like It by William Shakespeare
5. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
6. Contact by Carl Sagan
7. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
8. Henry IV, Pt. I by William Shakespeare
9. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
10. Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
11. Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware
12. Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill
13. Henry IV, Pt. II by William Shakespeare
14. Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
15. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
16. Paradise Park by Charles Mee
17. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
18. The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno
19. Antony & Cleopatra by William Shakespeare
20. Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen
21. Master of Reality by John Darnielle
22. The Lover by Marguerite Duras
23. The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare
24. Lila the Werewolf by Peter S. Beagle
25. The Line Between by Peter S. Beagle
26. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
27. Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
28. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
29. Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich
30. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen
31. Homegrown Democrat by Garrison Keillor
32. The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber
33. The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
34. The Favorite Game by Leonard Cohen
36. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
37. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
38. The Misanthrope by Moliere
39. Tartuffe by Moliere
40. The Problem of Nature by David Arnold
41. Tastes of Paradise by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
42. Rameau's Nephew by Denis Diderot
43. The Marriage of Figaro by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
44. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
45. Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster by Michael Eric Dyson
46. Hind Swaraj by M.K. Gandhi
47. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
48. Waverley by Sir Walter Scott
49. In the Solitude of Cotton Fields by Bernard-Marie Koltes
50. Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute
51. It's Beautiful by Nathalie Sarraute
52. Liberty by Garrison Keillor
53. The Waltz of the Toreadors by Jean Anouilh
54. Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
55. Lazarillo de Tormes (Anonymous)
Friday, January 9, 2009
On Philological Scholarship
'Alas for the lost lore, the annals and old poets,' wrote Tolkien, referring indeed to Virgil but by analogy to the sources of Beowulf. Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell, editing the Corpus Poetisum Boreale, the whole poetry of the North, in the 1880s, might look back on past ages and see the 'field of Northern scholarship' as 'a vast plain, filled with dry bones,' up and down which there walked 'a company of men, doing their best to set these bones in order, skull by skull, thigh by thigh, with no hope or thought of the breath that was to shake this plain with the awakening of the immortal dead.' But though philology did come and breathe life into the dry bones of old poems, filling history with the reverberations of forgotten battles and empires, still there was a point beyond which it could not go.
-T.A. Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth
-T.A. Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth
Thursday, January 1, 2009
2008 books/movies list
2008
Movies I've Seen
In 2008 (first-time movies
only)
1. Hitch
2. La Vie Est Belle
3. Punch-Drunk Love
4. Sweeney Todd
5. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
6. Twelve Monkeys
7. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
8. The Shining
9. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
10. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
11. Talk Radio
12. City of Lost Children
13. No Country for Old Men
14. Delicatessen
15. Be Kind Rewind
16. Little Shop of Horrors
17. A Streetcar Named Desire
18. Long Day's Journey Into Night
19. Cabaret
20. 1776
21. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
22. Dumbo
23. Atonement
24. Network
25. Machuca
26. Of Mice and Men
27. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
28. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
29. Lonesome Dove
30. Brokeback Mountain
31. Being There
32. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
33. Repo Man
34. 1/2 of Into the Wild (BUT IT SUCKED SO BAD)
35. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
36. Milo and Otis
37. Death Lends A Hand (Columbo)
38. There Will Be Blood
39. Wall-E
40. Futurama II - The Beast With A Million Backs
41. The Muppet Movie
42. I'm Not There
43. A Little Romance
44. Pee Wee's Big Adventure
45. MST3000: Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders
46. MST3000: Santa Claus
47. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
48. Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
49. Koko the Talking Gorilla
50. Tremors
51. They Live
52. Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex (1992)
53. W.
54. When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
55. Aliens
56. Aguirre The Wrath Of God
57. The Seventh Seal
58. The Future of Food
59. Synecdoche, New York
60. Hatley High
61. After Hours
62. In Bruges
63. Sunshine
64. Labyrinth
65. Bringing Up Baby
66. Holiday
67. Slumdog Millionaire
68. The Philidelphia Story
69. Vertigo
70. The Devil Wears Prada
71. Field of Dreams
72. Sullivan's Travels
73. Eight Men Out
Books I've Read In 2008 (first-time only, and only books I fully read cover-to-cover)
1. Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen
2. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
3. The Persian Letters by Montesqueiu
4. As You Like It by William Shakespeare
5. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
6. Contact by Carl Sagan
7. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
8. Henry IV, Pt. I by William Shakespeare
9. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
10. Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
11. Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware
12. Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill
13. Henry IV, Pt. II by William Shakespeare
14. Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
15. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
16. Paradise Park by Charles Mee
17. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
18. The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno
19. Antony & Cleopatra by William Shakespeare
20. Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen
21. Master of Reality by John Darnielle
22. The Lover by Marguerite Duras
23. The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare
24. Lila the Werewolf by Peter S. Beagle
25. The Line Between by Peter S. Beagle
26. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
27. Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
28. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
29. Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich
30. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen
31. Homegrown Democrat by Garrison Keillor
32. The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber
33. The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
34. The Favorite Game by Leonard Cohen
36. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
37. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
38. The Misanthrope by Moliere
39. Tartuffe by Moliere
40. The Problem of Nature by David Arnold
41. Tastes of Paradise by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
42. Rameau's Nephew by Denis Diderot
43. The Marriage of Figaro by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
44. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
45. Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster by Michael Eric Dyson
46. Hind Swaraj by M.K. Gandhi
47. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
48. Waverley by Sir Walter Scott
49. In the Solitude of Cotton Fields by Bernard-Marie Koltes
50. Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute
51. It's Beautiful by Nathalie Sarraute
52. Liberty by Garrison Keillor
53. The Waltz of the Toreadors by Jean Anouilh
54. Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
55. Lazarillo de Tormes (Anonymous)
1. Hitch
2. La Vie Est Belle
3. Punch-Drunk Love
4. Sweeney Todd
5. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
6. Twelve Monkeys
7. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
8. The Shining
9. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
10. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
11. Talk Radio
12. City of Lost Children
13. No Country for Old Men
14. Delicatessen
15. Be Kind Rewind
16. Little Shop of Horrors
17. A Streetcar Named Desire
18. Long Day's Journey Into Night
19. Cabaret
20. 1776
21. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
22. Dumbo
23. Atonement
24. Network
25. Machuca
26. Of Mice and Men
27. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
28. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
29. Lonesome Dove
30. Brokeback Mountain
31. Being There
32. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
33. Repo Man
34. 1/2 of Into the Wild (BUT IT SUCKED SO BAD)
35. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
36. Milo and Otis
37. Death Lends A Hand (Columbo)
38. There Will Be Blood
39. Wall-E
40. Futurama II - The Beast With A Million Backs
41. The Muppet Movie
42. I'm Not There
43. A Little Romance
44. Pee Wee's Big Adventure
45. MST3000: Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders
46. MST3000: Santa Claus
47. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
48. Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
49. Koko the Talking Gorilla
50. Tremors
51. They Live
52. Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex (1992)
53. W.
54. When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
55. Aliens
56. Aguirre The Wrath Of God
57. The Seventh Seal
58. The Future of Food
59. Synecdoche, New York
60. Hatley High
61. After Hours
62. In Bruges
63. Sunshine
64. Labyrinth
65. Bringing Up Baby
66. Holiday
67. Slumdog Millionaire
68. The Philidelphia Story
69. Vertigo
70. The Devil Wears Prada
71. Field of Dreams
72. Sullivan's Travels
73. Eight Men Out
Books I've Read In 2008 (first-time only, and only books I fully read cover-to-cover)
1. Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen
2. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
3. The Persian Letters by Montesqueiu
4. As You Like It by William Shakespeare
5. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
6. Contact by Carl Sagan
7. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
8. Henry IV, Pt. I by William Shakespeare
9. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
10. Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
11. Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware
12. Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill
13. Henry IV, Pt. II by William Shakespeare
14. Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
15. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
16. Paradise Park by Charles Mee
17. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
18. The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno
19. Antony & Cleopatra by William Shakespeare
20. Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen
21. Master of Reality by John Darnielle
22. The Lover by Marguerite Duras
23. The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare
24. Lila the Werewolf by Peter S. Beagle
25. The Line Between by Peter S. Beagle
26. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
27. Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
28. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
29. Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich
30. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen
31. Homegrown Democrat by Garrison Keillor
32. The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber
33. The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
34. The Favorite Game by Leonard Cohen
36. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
37. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
38. The Misanthrope by Moliere
39. Tartuffe by Moliere
40. The Problem of Nature by David Arnold
41. Tastes of Paradise by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
42. Rameau's Nephew by Denis Diderot
43. The Marriage of Figaro by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
44. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
45. Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster by Michael Eric Dyson
46. Hind Swaraj by M.K. Gandhi
47. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
48. Waverley by Sir Walter Scott
49. In the Solitude of Cotton Fields by Bernard-Marie Koltes
50. Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute
51. It's Beautiful by Nathalie Sarraute
52. Liberty by Garrison Keillor
53. The Waltz of the Toreadors by Jean Anouilh
54. Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
55. Lazarillo de Tormes (Anonymous)
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Little-known Anouilh play
GENERAL. The ideal, my friend, is the life-buoy. You're in the ocean, splashing about, doing your damndest not to drown, in spite of whirlpools and cross currents. The main thing is to do the regulation breast-stroke and if you're not a clod, never let the lifebuoy out of your sight. No one expects any more than that of you. . . .
SECRETARY. But does one ever reach the lifebuoy, General?
GENERAL. Never. But if your heart's in the right place, you never lose sight of it either. Fanatics who try a faster stroke to reach it at all costs, deluge everybody else and always finish up by drowning. . . . Do you see what I mean? . . .
SECRETARY. I am twenty years old, General. I would rather try to go fast and drown.
-Jean Anouilh, The Waltz of the Toreadors
SECRETARY. But does one ever reach the lifebuoy, General?
GENERAL. Never. But if your heart's in the right place, you never lose sight of it either. Fanatics who try a faster stroke to reach it at all costs, deluge everybody else and always finish up by drowning. . . . Do you see what I mean? . . .
SECRETARY. I am twenty years old, General. I would rather try to go fast and drown.
-Jean Anouilh, The Waltz of the Toreadors
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Nathalie Sarraute
"Remain silent, look at them; and right in the middle of the grandmother's illness, rise and, making an enormous hole, escape, knocking against the lacerated walls, and run shouting amidst the crouched houses standing watch all along the gray streets, flee, stepping over the feet of the concierges seated in front of their doors taking the air, run with her mouth contorted shouting incoherencies, while the concierges looked up from their knitting and their husbands lowered their newspapers to their knees, to press their gaze along the length of her back, until she had turned the corner.
Sometimes, when they were not looking at him, to try and find something that was warm and living around him, he would run his hand very gently along one of the columns of the sideboard . . . they would not see him, or perhaps they would think that he was merely "touching wood" for luck, a very widespread custom and, after all, a harmless one. When he sensed that they were watching him from behind, like the villain in the movies who, feeling the eyes of the policeman on his back, concludes his gesture nonchalantly, gives it the appearance of being offhanded and naive, to calm their apprehension he would drum with three fingers of his right hand, three times three, which is the really effectual lucky gesture."
-Nathalie Sarraute, Tropisms
Sometimes, when they were not looking at him, to try and find something that was warm and living around him, he would run his hand very gently along one of the columns of the sideboard . . . they would not see him, or perhaps they would think that he was merely "touching wood" for luck, a very widespread custom and, after all, a harmless one. When he sensed that they were watching him from behind, like the villain in the movies who, feeling the eyes of the policeman on his back, concludes his gesture nonchalantly, gives it the appearance of being offhanded and naive, to calm their apprehension he would drum with three fingers of his right hand, three times three, which is the really effectual lucky gesture."
-Nathalie Sarraute, Tropisms
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
To Begin With
This space is devoted to the collection of phrases that strike me for their truth, their beauty, their clarity, and occasionally their wit. Here are some:
"on one knee in a fortress by the green sea"
-the last line of a poem that was submitted to the literary magazine at my school. the rest of the poem was terribly, terribly mediocre, but this line stood alone.
"secure and beautiful and adequate"
-Darius I
"visitings of awful promise, when the light of sense goes out in flashes that have shewn to us the invisible world"
-Wordsworth, The Prelude
"I am stretched on the rack of doubt."
-Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
"The deeds of Wilibert of Waverley in the Holy Land, his long absence and perilous adventures, his supposed death, and his return in the evening when the betrothed of his heart had wedded the hero who had protected her from insult and oppression during his absence; the generosity with which the Crusader relinquished his claims, and sought in a neighboring cloister that peace which passeth not away; -- to these and similar tales he would hearken till his heart glowed and his eye glistened."
-Sir Walter Scott, Waverley
"humble, squalid, time-marking human thought"
-Nathalie Sarraute, Tropisms
"History provides a lot of exits from our particular prisons."
-Henry Shapiro, one of my professors
"She's irreplaceable. She's not perfect, but she's irreplaceable."
-Hatley High, a wonderful farce of high-school movies that everyone who grew up in the '90s with a light heart should possibly watch
"It's the living that are interesting not the way of killing them."
-Gertrude Stein's response to the development of the A-bomb
"Every friendship has its private library and private footnotes."
-Rose Rejouis, one of my professors
"The saddest words of pen or tongue: I meant to go when I was young."
-Garrison Keillor, Liberty
"an accumulation of unknowns"
-Ariana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl
"In every parting there is an image of death."
-George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life
"on one knee in a fortress by the green sea"
-the last line of a poem that was submitted to the literary magazine at my school. the rest of the poem was terribly, terribly mediocre, but this line stood alone.
"secure and beautiful and adequate"
-Darius I
"visitings of awful promise, when the light of sense goes out in flashes that have shewn to us the invisible world"
-Wordsworth, The Prelude
"I am stretched on the rack of doubt."
-Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
"The deeds of Wilibert of Waverley in the Holy Land, his long absence and perilous adventures, his supposed death, and his return in the evening when the betrothed of his heart had wedded the hero who had protected her from insult and oppression during his absence; the generosity with which the Crusader relinquished his claims, and sought in a neighboring cloister that peace which passeth not away; -- to these and similar tales he would hearken till his heart glowed and his eye glistened."
-Sir Walter Scott, Waverley
"humble, squalid, time-marking human thought"
-Nathalie Sarraute, Tropisms
"History provides a lot of exits from our particular prisons."
-Henry Shapiro, one of my professors
"She's irreplaceable. She's not perfect, but she's irreplaceable."
-Hatley High, a wonderful farce of high-school movies that everyone who grew up in the '90s with a light heart should possibly watch
"It's the living that are interesting not the way of killing them."
-Gertrude Stein's response to the development of the A-bomb
"Every friendship has its private library and private footnotes."
-Rose Rejouis, one of my professors
"The saddest words of pen or tongue: I meant to go when I was young."
-Garrison Keillor, Liberty
"an accumulation of unknowns"
-Ariana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl
"In every parting there is an image of death."
-George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life
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