]]>]]>I included books that I read for school, so the list is somewhat biased toward two classes that had a lot of reading: Philip Roth & Company and Ancient Philosphy.
Total books: 50
Unique authors: 33
Living authors: 18
Female authors: 6 [an area for improvement -ed]
Most life-changing book: Humboldt’s Gift
Funniest book: Portnoy’s Complaint
Saddest book: Patrimony
Longest book: The Brothers Karamazov (824 pages)
And, for the curious, the complete list in chronological order:
Today’s “Weekend Arts” section of the NY Times has a great recursive cover. I would link to it, but unfortunately they don’t have an image (or a PDF) of the cover itself on their website, so I’m reproducing it here: Click the image for a full-size PDF:
The associated article, Black, White and Read All Over Over, is also fun, and mentions one of my favorite Borges stories.
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(518 seconds at f/8, click for larger.) My first attempt at capturing star trails, on a night up in Maine with the most stars I’ve ever seen. See Dan Heller for some much more successful examples.
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‘Are you tired, Jacques?’
‘A little, my legs are,’ he admitted.
‘Get on the sled and I will pull you up. See there’s the evening star—how near it looks! Jacques, don’t you love winter?’
She put the sled-rope under her arms, gave her weight to it, and began to climb. A feeling came over her that there would never be anything better in the world for her than this; to be pulling Jacques on her sled, with the tender, burning sky before her, and on each side, in the dusk, the kindly lights from neighbours’ houses. If the Count should go back with the ships next summer, and her father with him, how could she bear it, she wondered. On a foreign shore, in a foreign city (yes, for her a foreign shore), would not her heart break for just this? For this rock and this winter, this feeling of being in one’s own place, for the soft content of pulling Jacques up Holy Family Hill into paler and paler levels of blue air, like a diver coming up from the deep sea.
—Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock
]]>“I want to live, and I do live, even if it be against logic. Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, whom one loves sometimes, would you believe it, without even knowing why; some human deeds are dear to me, which one has perhaps long ceased believing in, but still honors with one’s heart, out of old habit. Here, they’ve brought your fish soup—help yourself. It’s good fish soup, they make it well. I want to go to Europe, Alyosha, I’ll go straight from here. Of course I know that I will only be going to a graveyard, but to the most, the most precious graveyard, that’s the thing! The precious dead lie there, each stone over them speaks of such ardent past life, of such passionate faith in their deeds, their truth, their struggle, and their science, that I—this I know beforehand—will fall to the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them—being wholeheartedly convinced, at the same time, that is has all long been a graveyard and nothing more. And I will not weep from despair, but simply because I will be happy in my shed tears. I will be drunk with my own tenderness. Sticky spring leaves, the blue sky—I love them, that’s all! Such things you love not with your mind, not with logic, but with your insides, your guts, you love your first young strength… Do you understand any of this blather, Alyoshka, or not?”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (t. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)
]]>homoeroticism: dudes being turned on by dudes, or dudes ridiculing other dudes by behaving as they believe dudes who really are turned on by dudes behave with respect to those dudes they are turned on by, under the impression that this is hilarious or otherwise worthwhile. As irritating as this is for dudes who in fact are not turned on by dudes, it must be even worse for those who are.
That’s from the glossary of Frank Portman’s King Dork, which is almost as funny as the book itself.
]]>I rose, anyway, and took away Demmie’s nail file. I tucked her in. Her mouth was naively open as she gave up the file. I got her to lie down but she was disturbed. I could see that. As she laid her head on the pillow, in profile, one large lovely eye stared out childishly. “Off you go,” I said. She shut the staring eye. Her sleep was instantaneous and seemed deep.
But in a few minutes I heard what I expected to hear—her night voice. It was low hoarse and deep almost mannish. She moaned. She spoke broken words. She did this almost every night. The voice expressed her terror of this strange place, the earth, and of this strange state, being. Laboring and groaning she tried to get out of it. This was the primordial Demmie beneath the farmer’s daughter beneath the elegant Main Line horsewoman, Latinist, accomplished cocktail-sipper in black chiffon, with the upturned nose, this fashionable conversationalist. Thoughtful, I listened to this. I let her go on a while, trying to comprehend. I pitied her and loved her. But then I put an end to it. I kissed her. She knew who it was. She pressed her toes to my shins and held me with powerful female arms. She cried “I love you” in the same deep voice, but her eyes were still shut blind. I think she never actually woke up.
—Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
]]>It is nice to know that there is this whole community out there, though I never looked it up before. It is nice to know that things like this can happen. I wish I knew where my CTY lanyard is.
]]>I saw Todd’s mom a few days later, and she asked me if we’d had a good time the other night, while she was gone. I answered—as innocently as possible—that we had. She grinned at me conspiratorially, but said only, “You forgot some limes in the fridge.” She knew all of us as almost as well as our own mothers.
Todd’s mom died this afternoon, after a several-year struggle with breast cancer. It was to be her last day at home with her family before she was moved into a hospice. During the nine years that I knew Ms. Wynn, she never once lost her enthusiasm or sense of humor, even after her diagnosis. I’m grateful to have had her as a role model for so long. Rest in peace.
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