Ben

I've read the book. I love it. If there is some hint of how to find you in it, I've missed it. As GK Ashe probably isn't available, let's go get dinner some other ridiculous place!

The Road Home by Rose Tremain is to Strawberry Fields by Marina Lewycka
as
House of Meetings by Martin Amis is to Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart

When a man exalts one woman, and one woman only, "above all others," you can be pretty sure you are dealing with a misogynist. It frees him up for thinking the rest are shit.

I want to visit Spetsai.

       

It is (the age of 25), I think, the most difficult and irritating age of all. Both to be and to behold. One has the intelligence, one is in all ways treated as a grown man. But certain persons reduce one to adolescence, because only experience can understand and assimilate them.

I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.

I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn't found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love.

Elliot Bay has remaindered Vonnegut's latest book, Man Without a Country. I know it's in no way their fault that even Vonnegut's book can't find readers, but it still bothers me.

Me: "Do you know where the Isabel Allende reading is?"
Him: "The Town Hall, 8th and Seneca. It used to be a Christian Science church."

It is true that many young people who love falsely, i.e., simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude (the average person will of course always go on doing that--), feel oppressed by their failure and want to make the situation they have landed in livable and fruitful in their own, personal way--. For their nature tells them that the questions of love, even more than everything else that is important, cannot be resolved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are question, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case require a new, special, wholly personal answer--. But, how can they, who have already flung themselves together, and can no longer tell whose outlines are whose, who thus no longer possess anything of their own, how can they find a way out of themselves, out of the depths of their already buried solitude?

...ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity...

...if you feel yourself becoming too familiar with it [irony], if you are afraid of this growing familiarity, then turn to great and serious objects, in front of which it becomes small and helpless.

Read as little as possible of literary criticism--such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view.

What language does Murakami read Dickens in?

1971 was the Year of Spaghetti.

In 1971 I cooked spaghetti to live and lived to cook spaghetti. Steam rising from the aluminum pot was my pride and joy, tomato sauce bubbling in the saucepan my one great hope in life.

I’d gone to a cooking specialty store and bought a kitchen timer and a hug aluminum cooking pot, big enough to bathe a German Shepard in, then went round all the supermarkets that cater to foreigners, gathering an assortment of odd-sounding spices. I picked up a pasta cookbook at the bookstore, and bought tomatoes by the dozen. I purchased every brand of spaghetti I could lay my hands on, simmered every kind of sauce known to man. Fine particles of garlic, onion, and olive oil swirled in the air, forming a harmonious cloud that penetrated every corner of my tiny apartment, permeating the floor and ceiling and walls, my clothes, my books, my records, my tennis racket, my bundles of old letters. It was a fragrance one might have smelled on ancient Roman aqueducts.

This is a story from the Year of Spaghetti, 1971 A.D.

I've been thinking for a while about a books that should be banned course. Right now the right bans books like Huckleberry Finn and The Color Purple. Clearly they have no idea what sort of literature actually exists or they wouldn't bother attacking such classics.

I propose a one semester course that would give conservatively educated college students an idea of just how liberal philosophy can be. The idea is to shake them, shock them into realizing that what they regard as the left or right is in fact only a tiny part of the social and political spectrum.

We regard Bush as a conservative... our government is routinely compared to the Nazi government by well meaning morons, when even the most egregious elements of the right are in favor of social security.

Programs such as social security, medicare and welfare would have been unthinkably socialist a century ago, yet now most of the left and right accept these as useful programs that benefit society as a whole.

Democrats and Republicans have a lot in common, they must to function in our form of democracy. And, that's fine, but we ought to recognize it. We need to recognize that there are forms of government vast and varied, most of which have never been attempted on any scale.

I think the best way to acknowledge that is to read free thinkers who attacked the moral grounds of our society and most previous societies. By understanding their criticism, we can get a better idea where our philosophy, where our subconscious beliefs fit in the realm of political thought as a whole.

Sexus, Henry Miller
Journey to the End of Night, Louis Ferdinand Celine
The Immoralist, Antoine de Gide
Justine, Lawrence Durrell
Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
Justine, Marquis de Sade
Venus in Furs, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Thus Spake Zarathustra, Frederick Nietchzsche
The Stranger, Albert Camus

       

Terkel doesn't really lend well to quoting. I have Division Street: America and "The Good War," and both are more about zeitgeist than a particular philosophy. The stunning part about Terkel is that the philosophy falls directly out of what he describes. Read a few stories about industrial workers in Chicago and you can't help but become a socialist...

I recognize that his work is brilliant, but I can't decide if it's still relevant. The industrial economy he built his career describing doesn't exist anymore... Do the human interest stories still apply?

I've been asking this question about much of my reading lately. Look Homeward Angel is a particularly potent example. I'm certain that 50 years ago it was quite poignant. It hasn't dated that well though... much of the plot centers around a form of institutionalized racism that doesn't exist anymore.

I had a much better time reading Sophie's Choice, where WWII figures largely. Somehow WWII has stayed more in our minds than segregation. I suppose there's the simple explanation that we like to think about WWII because we did largely good things and prefer to forget about segregation for the opposite reason.

All things that we love and cherish, Like ourselves, must fade and perish; Such is our rude and mortal lot-- Love itself would, did they not. -Percy Shelley, from "Death", pg. 398

I believe that I'm starting to understand the Romantics. This has been an ongoing process... I think this stanza sums up the part of the philosophy I've been noticing. The movement seems to be characterized by an almost humanist regard for life and purpose, tempered by a more playful attitude than humanists seem to have.

In short, Romantics have a romance with life.

Yes?

I probably ought to read "Prometheus Unbound." I have a thought that Shelley and Byron are more thoughful versions of Miller and Celine, who I've recently become very disillusioned with.

When Apology was first published in 1940, Graham Greene hailed it alongside Henry James's notebooks as 'the best account of what it was like to be a creative artist'.