"the fork"

In his youth, Kierkegaard earned the nickname “gaflen,” or “the fork,” for his ability to discern the weaknesses in other people and to stick it to them. All his writing life, Kierkegaard wielded his red-hot stylus to stick it to bourgeois Christendom.

'I would rather see her lovely step'

Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot
and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing
on this black earth. But I say it is
... what you love.

-- Sappho, Fragment 16, tr. Anne Carson

Ο]ἰ μὲν ἰππήων στρότον οἰ δὲ πέσδων
οἰ δὲ νάων φαῖσ᾽ ἐπὶ γᾶν μέλαιναν
ἔ]μμεναι κάλλιστον ἔγω δὲ κῆν᾽
     ὄττω τὶσ ἔπαται.

'But colour returns'

Sunlight strikes in upon shaving-glasses; and gleaming brass cans; upon all the jolly trappings of the day; the bright, inquisitive, armored, resplendent, summer's day, which has long since vanquished chaos; which has dried the melancholy mediaeval mists; drained the swamp and stood glass and stone upon it; and equipped our brains and bodies with such an armoury of weapons that merely to see the flash and thrust of limbs engaged in the conduct of daily life is better than the old pageant of armies drawn out in battle array upon the plain.

- Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

oh, Elliott Bay

EBBC STILL didn't have The H.D. Book. GROAN. It was maybe going to be there on Friday? Not over the weekend, no. Possibly Tuesday. Wednesday by the latest. The guy on the phone was v young and super-apologetic and even put me on hold (no music!) to go look and make sure it hadn't come in.

This is me not getting the book a helluva lot faster from the Evil Nile, Elliott Bay.


....well yes I did get some other books. Maybe. Possibly.

happy late Caturday

Leonard Woolf, "Downhill All The Way"

'She would promise never never to forget.'

Then Katherine died, horribly and sadly, at the age of thirty-four, in the Gurdjieff commune near Fontainebleau, on 9 January 1923. Virginia heard the news at breakfast on the 16th, from Nelly, who'd seen it in the morning paper. Immediately, she began another relationship with her, which continued, and revised, the unsatisfactory failed living friendship. This posthumous relationship began in memory and remorse. At once she wished she had not let things go, had not taken offence when Katherine didn't write, had not found it all 'too difficult.' For the first time she realised that she had 'never given her credit for all her physical suffering & the effect it must have had in embittering her.' She felt depressed, disappointed, flat: there seemed 'no point in writing any more.' The echo had gone: 'Katherine won't read it. Katherine's my rival no longer.' The loss of the rival was as important as the loss of the friend. 'There's no competitor. I'm cock -- a lonely cock whose crowing nothing breaks -- of my walk.'

- Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf

"We have got the same job"

The memory of that last evening is so curious: your voice & Vanessa's voice in the dark, as it were -- white rings of plates floating in the air -- a smell of strawberries and coffee....My God I love to think of you, Virginia, as my friend. Dont cry me an ardent creature or say, with your head a little on one side, smiling as though you knew some enchanting secret: 'Well, Katherine, we shall see....' But pray consider how rare it is to find some one with the same passion for writing that you have, who desires to be scrupulously truthful with you -- and to give you the freedom of the city without any reserves at all.

- Katherine Mansfield to Virginia Woolf, June 1917 (quoted in Hermione Lee biography)

we are the hollow men

"Mount Corona" - the Corona Ash Dump in Queens along the Flushing River. via

“This is the valley of ashes, a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.”

old sport

“For Christ’s sake don’t give anyone that jacket you’re saving for me. I’ve written it into the book."

F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Hunter S Thompson used to type out The Great Gatsby to experience what it was like to write “possibly the Great American Novel, if you look at it as a technical achievement. It’s about 55,000 words, which was astounding to me,” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “Not a wasted word. Shoot, I couldn’t match 55,000 no matter how I chopped. There are few things that I read and say, ‘Boy, I wish I could write that.’ Damn few. The Book of Revelation is one. Gatsby is one” - Grauniad

what I'm reading

books read in May 2013

Fiction is in red.

83. Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf
84. The Good Nurse, Charles Graeber
85. Call Me Zelda, Erika Robuck
86. Beautiful Fools: The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, R. Clifton Spargo
87. Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee
88. Murder as a Fine Art, David Morrell
89. Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Occupied Paris, David King
90. The Wine of Angels, Phil Rickman
91. Midwinter of the Spirit, Phil Rickman 
92. A Crown of Lights, Phil Rickman
93. The Lamp of the Wicked, Phil Rickman

2013 booklist

Wild Flag Live In Concert: NPR Music At SXSW 2011

Wild Flag - Romance (Live on KEXP)

Wild Flag performs Black Tiles on Sound Opinions

SXSW 2011: Wild Flag performs Future Crimes

don't save

"The Gallop," Jane Hirshfield

There are days the whole house moves at a gallop.
Bookshelves and counters, bottles of aspirin and oil,
chairs, saucepans, and towels.
I can barely encircle the neck
of a bounding pen with my fingers
before it breaks free of their notions;
open the door before the dog
of lop-eared hopes leaps through it;
pick up the paper before it goes up as kindling.
Barely eat before something snatches
the toast from my plate,
drains the last mouthfuls of coffee out of my cup.
Even these words
before the blue ink track has dried on the paper,
they’ve already been read
and agreed to or flung aside for others I don’t yet know of,
and well before
I have dressed or brushed out the braid of my hair
a woman with my own shadow
has showered and chosen her earrings, bought groceries
and fallen in love, grown tired, grown old.
Her braid in the mirror shines with new ribbons of silver,
like the mane of a heavy warhorse.
He stands in the silence as if after battle, sides heaving, spent.

what you miss by not following me on GoodReads

The sun is shining (yeah shutup it gets sunny in Seattle), birds are chirping on the fire escape outside my window, my cats want to play with them, and I'm reading about giant Swiss industrial corporations killing the environment and giving little kids horrible neuroblastomas. 

Heh.

The review on GoodReads that made me cry today

I think I was about 14 pages in before I said to myself, "wow, Patricia Highsmith was a talented writer."


YOU DON'T SAY.

To die—takes just a little while—

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.  
“Hope” is the thing with feathers / To die — takes just a little while
Fascicle 13, Sheet 2, Pages 2–3. Dickinson, Emily, 1830–1886. MS Am 1118.3 (46b–c)

http://www.edickinson.org/

"On Ovid," Anne Carson

I see him there on a night like this but cool, the moon blowing through black streets. He sups and walks back to his room. The radio is on the floor. Its luminous green dial blares softly. He sits down at the table; people in exile write so many letters. Now Ovid is weeping. Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing. In his spare time he is teaching himself the local language (Getic) in order to compose in it an epic poem no one will ever read.

-- Plainwater

Fragment 1, Mimnermus

What I'm (actually) reading

What I'm reading (or at least, what I just bought!)

conversion

Does anyone else have the urge to say "And now off with you to the bet din!" when clicking on the "Convert books" button in Calibre? No? Just me then? OK.

gpoy

From the time he was eighteen, he would spend at least an hour a day working on his book. He kept it in a box that once held blank paper. He would sit in a park or at a table in the library, composing one paragraph each day. He had more than two hundred carefully handwritten pages but was still on chapter five.

- A Certain Slant of Light, Laura Whitcomb

The Women Dwight Garner Doesn't See

Dwight Garner wrote a heartwarming little essay in the NYTBR about packing up picture books he used to read to his children -- heartwarming, that is, if you're not a feminist bitch like me. It just gave me heartburn.

VIDA count!

His recommendations:

HANS DE BEER “Little Polar Bear”

TOMIE DE PAOLA “The Knight and the Dragon”

JULES FEIFFER “Bark, George”

JULES FEIFFER “I Lost My Bear”

NEIL GAIMAN AND DAVE MCKEAN “The Wolves in the Walls”

ARTHUR GEISERT “The Giant Ball of String”

STEVE GOODMAN AND MICHAEL MCCURDY “The Train They Call the City of New Orleans”

RUSSELL HOBAN AND LILLIAN HOBAN “Bread and Jam for Frances”

MUNRO LEAF AND ROBERT LAWSON “The Story of Ferdinand”

ASTRID LINDGREN AND HARALD WIBERG “The Tomten and the Fox”

PEGGY RATHMANN “The Day the Babies Crawled Away”

COLEEN SALLEY AND JANET STEVENS “Epossumondas”

MAURICE SENDAK “In the Night Kitchen”

MARK ALAN STAMATY “Who Needs Donuts?”

SANDRA STEEN, SUSAN STEEN AND G. BRIAN KARAS “Car Wash” 

For those of you playing along at home: that's fifteen books, seven female authors. The numbers go down even further if you filter the list:  one solo female author, one female duo, three coed collaborations. Even better -- he brags about how great Eden Ross Lipson's book recs were. Surely she might have recommended more books by women? (Some of his omissions just baffle me personally. No Stone Soup? No Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs? No Curious George? Do kids even know who Curious George is anymore?)

"Someday my kids will open these boxes, gasp with delight, and eagerly read them to their own."

Or they might gasp with something other than delight -- surprise at the missing women.