Monday, December 23, 2024
Sunday, December 22, 2024
Saturday, December 21, 2024
Friday, December 20, 2024
Joan Didion
I've now read most -- if not all -- of Joan Didion's major collections of essays. But having just finished The White Album, I feel that I've experienced another side of Didion, another angle into her thinking. The White Album is, in my reading, the most heavily focused on California: on what it means to be from the state, to live there, to experience it, to drive through it. And more: there are lively, moving essays on California's citizens and politicians and activists. What I most appreciated about The White Album, though, was less its range and more its honesty: Didion has a keen sense of smell, and anything contrived or stilted -- or both -- is subject to her immediate inquiry. Didion has some admiration for the later 1960s, but she's not entirely enthralled: so much of that idealism landed flat five years later: as if it never really had a chance -- because, according to Didion, it did not. But this does not make Didion a pessimist or a social conservative: instead, it makes her a realistic with a good sense of humor, and an even better appreciation for California: namely, its state as a dream, its state of dreaming. The White Album was a pleasure to read: in particular the parts about Nancy Reagan and the Reagan gubernatorial mansion in Sacramento. I won't say more about these: that's for you to read and enjoy!
Thursday, December 19, 2024
Wednesday, December 18, 2024
Q&A …
A Complete Unknown: Director James Mangold on Bob Dylan - Perfect Duluth Day (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Tuesday, December 17, 2024
Monday, December 16, 2024
Hmm …
(2) Catholics for Choice on X: "This holiday season, remember that Mary had a choice, and you should, too." / X
Yes. she was given a choice. And she made it. Stick to the facts.
Sunday, December 15, 2024
Hmm …
UPDATE 1-US Officials Say Most Northeast Drone Sightings Are Actually Manned Aircraft | Newsmax.com
Why not hop in a light aircraft and take a photo of one or another of them? A greater degree of certainty is altogether possible.
Saturday, December 14, 2024
Friday, December 13, 2024
Thursday, December 12, 2024
A poem …
There goes my delicious gingerbread man.
Can I nip you on your ginger-brown shoulder?
Can I lick you on your gum-drop buttons?
Hot from the oven, you seem to smolder.
Here's my delicious gingerbread man.
You can fit perfectly against my heart.
I won't let you go, you might run away.
You're the sweetest man ever to run, and be caught.
I love you my sweet gingerbread man.
Our ill-fated love may never grow stale.
I'll explore you all over with my tongue.
Just now you are my favorite male.
So is this the true love that then got away?
Or is this the one love that with love will stay?
Jennifer Knox
Wednesday, December 11, 2024
God help us …
Professors%20%u2018not%20sad%u2019%20about%20murder%20of%20health%20insurance%20CEO%20%7C%20The%20College%20Fix
When I was in college, professors were tole models, not assholes.
Tuesday, December 10, 2024
Ted Hughes
I'm not much for poetry and I've never felt fully confident in my reading. But for whatever reason, I picked up Crow, the celebrated collection of Ted Hughes's poetry from the early 1970s. Again, I won't offer much by way of analysis here, but I will say that a few themes are clear: the world in this collection is a broken place, but not that emptiness is less the product of war than it is of isolation and decline. Several poems in Crow chart the this idea, taking idea of blackness as their guide. There's a memorable line about the "still-warm, stopped brain of a just-dead god." That sentiment seems to define much of the Hughes's collection, which reserves a special place, oddly, for whose have have never "been killed." The inevitability of death hangs over Crow: indeed, that sense of decline becomes pronounced that it functions as an unspoken assumption, as an entry into the poems. With that darkness comes moments when there is "no weeping left" -- when water, like people, "lay at the bottom of all things." Water, continues Hughes, was "utterly worn out" and yet, with a glimmer of hope, "utterly clear." In Hughes's world, that clarity seems the best we can hope for: and when we find it, we ought to channel its effects, lest we become -- as in a poem about Oedipus -- "the rag" of ourselves.
Why me want to think twice …
… before sending our kids to college …
Professors%20%u2018not%20sad%u2019%20about%20murder%20of%20health%20insurance%20CEO%20%7C%20The%20College%20Fix
college professors in my day were role models, not assholes.
Monday, December 09, 2024
Sunday, December 08, 2024
Searching for the real guy …
Finding the Historical Vergil | The Russell Kirk Center (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Not for the reason you might think …
We%20can%u2019t%20forget%20about%20Covid%20-%20The%20Spectator%20World
i was not vaccinated against Covid and i never caught it. But I was tested for it often, because I had to be if I wanted to visit Debbie. Result was always negative. i was never vaccinated against polio and i never got that.
Saturday, December 07, 2024
Interesting …
i've recieved lots of mail today about things that have taken place on this date. notably missing has been any mention of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Humble start …
Front Row Seat: When Bob Dylan was first noted in hometown paper - Duluth News Tribune | News, weather, and sports from Duluth, Minnesota (Hatip,
Dave Lull)
I first heard of a year later, when my classmate Phil Magitti played an early record of his for me.
Friday, December 06, 2024
Thursday, December 05, 2024
A poem …
Here I go singing sweet nothings to you
The tree-tops are waving in time to our tune
And all the grass waving, this glad afternoon,
As if we are royals passing by arm in arm.
Here I go singing sweet nothings to you
Our minds render passion, filling our sights
We dance through the passion, this is our time
To love and be loved more than ever, entwined.
Here I go singing sweet nothings to you.
To have and to hold I am yours, you are mine.
Until the small hands of night close our eyes
Then a crowd of small babies will carry us on.
Though we'll end, our love, immortal, goes on.
The apples of our eyes shine forever, live on.
—
Jennifer Knox
Jennifer Kno
Classic recommendations …
like%20squirrels%20in%20a%20wheelcage%20%u2013%20IWP%20BOOKS. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Wednesday, December 04, 2024
L P Hartley
I've just finished L P Hartley's The Go-Between -- and wow, this is an exceptional novel.
First, Hartley was a first-class stylist: this novel is perfectly crafted. Sentence by sentence, page by page: the book unfolds with enviable symmetry. The narration is steady, precise, and knowing. It would be hard to imagine a more fitting structure.
But more than that: this is novel that builds with emotional intensity; this is a book that thrives on plot, action, and character. This is not a novel lurking in the ether, focused only on ideas. Instead, it is one with ideas in mind, but which is fueled by the interactions between people: their dialogue, their sensitivities, their missteps.
For a book about a child (and a child of the British elite, at that), it is one which is terribly brutal in the end: what Leo Colston experiences that summer of 1900 would be traumatic under any lens; but to return to the site of the trauma decades later adds a further layer to the emotional quality of the novel.
I must say that I found The Go-Between to be refreshing in any number of ways: not least, its grounding in literary tradition. I enjoyed the slow gathering of forces, the confrontation, the culmination and decline. I found all of this to be as a novel should: this was not a book in search of philosophical concepts; nor was it one in which the narrator served as a foil for the author. No, this is just a great literary accomplishment full of pathos, tears, and recognition. Layer memory on top of that you have something truly lasting.
Tuesday, December 03, 2024
Monday, December 02, 2024
A poem for today …
Today%u2019s%20Poem%3A%20Confused%20about%20the%20Ivy%20League (Hat tip,mDave Lull.),m
Sunday, December 01, 2024
Saturday, November 30, 2024
Friday, November 29, 2024
Thursday, November 28, 2024
What a discovery …
15 Thanksgiving leftovers recipes, including soup, sandwiches and strata - The Washington Post
i'm 83 years old. I remember my grandmother — and everybody else — doing this in the 1940s.
Tuesday, November 26, 2024
Monday, November 25, 2024
Sunday, November 24, 2024
Saturday, November 23, 2024
Friday, November 22, 2024
Claire-Louise Bennett
Pond is not a collection about which I can claim to have been aware: but after having read a review, I was convinced to pick it up. And I'm glad that I did: Claire-Louise Bennett's stories are not only funny, not only poignant, they announce a novel literary style, one that's self-conscious without being paralyzed by that heightened sense of awareness. This is a collection with a voice all its own.
Part of what I enjoyed so much about Pond is its self-deprecating tone: the main character is gifted, but wayward, intelligent without drive. The result are scenarios which are comical, where the nameless character confronts the limits of her ambition, knowing that more is possible, but unable to navigate that potential.
There are laughable sections about sexuality, gender relations, social expectations -- even about food and real estate. Taken together, there's almost an absurd quality to the stories: and yet, they are not silly; they are profound, and lonely, and sometimes sad.
Not all of this collection reaches the same height: some stories are stronger or more comprehensible than others. But several, including those focused on the local environment -- on the nearby 'pond' -- succeed in transforming the banal into something more than that: into a complex mixture of details, of characters, of comedy, and of loss.
What Pond is about I couldn't really say: but as a collection of stories loosely tracing modern themes of alienation, ambition, and ambivalence, it succeeds in a significant way.
Thursday, November 21, 2024
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
Tuesday, November 19, 2024
Monday, November 18, 2024
Sunday, November 17, 2024
Saturday, November 16, 2024
Jon Fosse
I'll be the first to admit that I'd not heard of Jon Fosse until he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Of course, I was curious, and so I recently read Aliss at the Fire.
Praise for the novella -- which has been positioned as an entry point into Fosse's larger oeuvre -- focuses on its fragmentation: the degree to which time itself becomes a malleable thing. Fosse abandons traditional grammar in favor of another sort of fragmentation: one in which sentences run indefinitely as time is presented a force without beginning or end. And then, of course, there's the complexity of Fosse's narration, which transitions from one character to another, often in the middle of a phrase or thought.
Who am I to critique this approach? Fosse has won the Nobel after all.
But I must say, I found the novella to be, well, to be sort of gimmicky: the shift in perspective, or narrative tone, or time is awakening at first, but becomes predictable by the end. And more: Fosse seems to bend the concept of time, but without building three dimensional characters. For me, there were elements of Stein and Faulkner here; and yet, I felt that both American authors explored these themes with greater effect: the layered quality to Faulkner's novels, in particular, far exceeds Aliss at the Fire.
I agree that there is an emotional impact to Fosse's novella, and that he is able, in very few pages, to develop a competing sense of poignancy and pain. But for me, I was never quite convinced by the style: it seemed unnecessary or strained -- like a trick that would have better served as the basis for a thought experiment than for a published work of fiction.
Friday, November 15, 2024
Thursday, November 14, 2024
Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Sad …
Theodore Olson, RIP - The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator | USA News and Politics
i am sure I met Ted and soent very afternoon chatting with him.
Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Monday, November 11, 2024
Rachel Cusk
I've now finished the third of Rachel Cusk's "Faye" novels, Transit. And let me say at the start: this novel, like the others in the trilogy, is excellent: I mean absolutely excellent. (I read the novels out of order.)
Part of what I liked so much about Transit -- and Outline and Kudos -- is that it occupies a rare literary space: it auto-fiction without the narcissism. It is a book about questions: about how we pose them, and what we expect to hear or receive in response.
If Cusk is the main character in this experiment, that seems secondary: because her role in the novel is primarily to listen, and to endow conversations -- as I've written on the blog before -- with a universal quality. That is magic of Cusk: her ability to transcend the banal, to mold it into something great, with a lesson to impart.
What Transit is about exactly is not the point: you might say it is a novel about transitions, about spaces, about homes, about London, about loss. And all of these themes are indeed addressed. But they're explored less by way of character, and more by way of memory, discussion, and reconnection.
In Transit -- more than in Outline or Kudos -- Cusk orients her reader: she is in London; this is her builder; his name is X; he is this way or that. But now having read a few of Cusk's novel, I know that these details are less important than what the builder recounts to Cusk and how she structures those remembrances. This is a novel in which each section, each chapter, represents the transformation of the ordinary into something weighty, something transcendent.
It had been a while since a trilogy like this caught my attention, but these three novels are exceptional: they demand thought and reflection, and a new way -- it is no exaggeration -- of processing literature.
Blogging note …
I am awaiting the arrival a nurse and may be taken to the hospital. So I may not be posting today.
Sunday, November 10, 2024
Saturday, November 09, 2024
Friday, November 08, 2024
Thursday, November 07, 2024
Wednesday, November 06, 2024
Tuesday, November 05, 2024
For what it’s worth …
… everyone I spoke with today, wherher black or white, thought that Trump is going to win. they seemed quite sanguine about it. Well, we shall see.
'They're Targeting Voters Under the Guise of a News Org': Inside a Soros-Funded 'Fake News' Network's $9 Million Digital Ad Blitz
'They're Targeting Voters Under the Guise of a News Org': Inside a Soros-Funded 'Fake News' Network's $9 Million Digital Ad Blitz
They ought to deport Soros. The only thing he has done since coming here is try to undeermine our demoocracy. Throw the bum outl
Monday, November 04, 2024
Saturday, November 02, 2024
Thursday, October 31, 2024
A poem
Living With An Ogre
My man's like living with an ogre I think:
“Let's get romantic. I'll just make
A candle out of some of my ear-wax.”
It's laughable, that's just my take.
I sit on the couch like a Chinese princess.
He lumbers in, dick and beer in hand.
He grabs me and throws me over his shoulder
Yeah, well he's an ogreish kind of man.
It's November, our pear tree has tiny little pears
Its twisted branches are otherwise bare.
It's like our love, there's nothing left
But love's fruit hanging in the air.
Jennifer Knox
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
A poem …
Living With An Ogre
My man's like living with an ogre I think:
“Let's get romantic. I'll just make
A candle out of some of my ear-wax.”
It's laughable, that's just my take.
I sit on the couch like a Chinese princess.
He lumbers in, dick and beer in hand.
He grabs me and throws me over his shoulder
Yeah, well he's an ogreish kind of man.
It's November, our pear tree has tiny little pears
Its twisted branches are otherwise bare.
It's like our love, there's nothing left
But love's fruit hanging in the air.
What will it be, my sweet daddy ogre?
You don't love my poems, you're glad when they're over.
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Monday, October 28, 2024
Sunday, October 27, 2024
Saturday, October 26, 2024
Friday, October 25, 2024
Thursday, October 24, 2024
Wednesday, October 23, 2024
Tuesday, October 22, 2024
Monday, October 21, 2024
Remembering …
… https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xny7G9YrrBU&si=72YZ_VrK1v0oa-bK
Mitzi Gaynor at her best.
George and Weedon Grossmith
When it comes to The Diary of a Nobody, all I can say is: if it's good enough for Evelyn Waugh -- and evidently it was -- then it's good enough for me. This novel by the Grossmith brothers, George and Weedon, is everything a playful book should be: mischievous, comical, enlightening. But more than that: Diary of a Nobody is very well conceived: it's perfectly written, with a rhythmic style very much of its time. No surprise that Three Men in a Boat, another work of similar scope and ambition, was published within a year of Nobody.
What I enjoyed most about Nobody -- beside is humor and wit -- was the question it seems to pose just before the surface: which is whether the Victorian fashion for published diaries had to be limited to those of social elites. Here is an upper middle class family -- with the habits and preferences to suit. And yet, in the predictability of their daily routine, in the formulaic nature of their aspirations, there is an epic quality. The Grossmith brothers have done two things very well: first, they have endowed middle class life with humor and levity, without demeaning that life; and second, they have positioned middle class tropes and hopes as items worthy of publication.
Diary of a Nobody is, of course, just that: but that seems to be exactly the point. This nobody -- this Mr Pooter -- is endlessly interesting and comical and human. Which is the moral, perhaps: humanity can be comical and serious at the same time. Embracing these in equal measures results in the sort of illumination you might otherwise expect from a 'somebody.'
Saturday, October 19, 2024
Friday, October 18, 2024
Thursday, October 17, 2024
The political scene …
… Run, Writer, Run! - The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I never met Vidal or Mailer, but I got to know Bill Buckley pretty well. A remarkably nice man.
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
A poem …
I love you, dying man under a train,
Your pretty, pretty face bored with ennui.
I won't think: “Can I save you from this dream?”
My love is like a moth flying near flame.
I love you bug that always goes upside-down.
I will keep righting you and righting you.
You are like my pretty, pretty beau.
Who thinks of his demise at slightest let down.
He has died, but maybe he was right.
Maybe things should be perfect beyond belief:
Gorge on ambrosia and filet mignon,
While climaxing wonderfully all day and night.
Yes, everything should be perfect beyond belief.
Or maybe not being bothered easily is key.
Monday, October 14, 2024
Someone besides me born on this date …
… someone fae more imortant than I.
Short bio of president long on leadership skillsPlus ça change …
Today I officially reached the age of 83. Yes, it’s my birthday. I feel the same as I did yesterday, which may not be great, but isn’t all that bad either. Since you inherit your longevity from your mother and mine made it to the cusp of 90,:I may be around for a bit. But I’ll leave all that to God.
Sunday, October 13, 2024
Saturday, October 12, 2024
RIP …
Gratitude, sorrow, suffering and mercy: R.I.P. Greg Hillis | America Magazine, (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Friday, October 11, 2024
Thursday, October 10, 2024
Anniversary …
… Bobby Short at 100: A Swinging Steward of the American Songbook - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
He was truly great.
Wednesday, October 09, 2024
Rachel Cusk
I've written about Rachel Cusk before on the blog, but having recently finished another of her novels -- Kudos -- I wanted to offer some additional commentary.
Cusk seems to have been located within the contemporary genre of auto-fiction: that space carved out, most notably, by Knausgaard. And to a certain extent, that is right: the thin line between character and self is certainly blurred.
But I think Cusk has developed her own literary space, too: her narrative style -- which has a primary character recount the story of another, more tangential figure -- is very effective. Often, her way of constructing this sort of narration reads like a novel by Sebald: the central character speaks to the reader about a story involving a second character, whose story is invoked by way of memory, or by way of Cusk's signature "he said" or "she said" construction, which regularly appears in the midst of an extended sentence.
Like Knausgaard, Cusk takes as her content the banal or the expected, but she has a way of universalizing it: of turning it into something existential, or transnational, or profound. Cusk does this in the most unassuming fashion: she recounts a dialogue between one character and another -- and then, before long, the discussion has assumed a quiet gravity, a sense in which what's being discussed between the characters is actually an exchange between the reader and the ideas being invoked.
What Kudos is about seems beside the point: it is a novel comprised of a series of discussions, which reveal a range of characters, who are themselves ephemeral. This is a novel about ideas, and the ways we, as people -- as characters -- interact with them. There are not many books like this one, and I heartedly recommend it -- as a fresh angle into what literature can be.
Sounds like Lionel at her best …
… Lionel Shriver and the Resistance to Satire. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Blogging note …
I am currently in a rehab facility. This involves going to gym and other activities relating to my getting well. Friends and family come to visit from time time. I will blog when I can.
Place your bets …
… Here are the bookies’ odds for the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Tuesday, October 08, 2024
Monday, October 07, 2024
Sunday, October 06, 2024
Saturday, October 05, 2024
Friday, October 04, 2024
Thursday, October 03, 2024
I don’t get this …
… Garth Brooks Sued By Former Makeup Artist Who Claims He Raped Her In Hotel Room.
If someone does this sort of thing to you, why wait. Why not call the police. It’s a crime
Wednesday, October 02, 2024
Tuesday, October 01, 2024
Monday, September 30, 2024
Sunday, September 29, 2024
Saturday, September 28, 2024
Friday, September 27, 2024
Thursday, September 26, 2024
Wednesday, September 25, 2024
Tuesday, September 24, 2024
Saturday, September 21, 2024
Friday, September 20, 2024
Thursday, September 19, 2024
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