Noah Damski > Recent Status Updates

lol she was going to physical therapy and felt inspired by her fellow patients to see how her own progress would turn out, to soon learn they were the New York Yankees.

“It was a time of my life during which I actually believed that somewhere between frying the chicken to serve on Sara Mankiewicz’s Minton dinner plates and buying the Porthault parasol to shade the beautiful baby girl in Saigon I had covered the main ‘motherhood’ points.” Was just the beginning.

I have the poor habit of reading 10 pages of a book and then forgetting it for months. Anyway, I still love Joan Didion, and this one is proving a good compliment to “Notes for John.”

It’s not as dramatic, but I feel about John Williams similarly to how I feel about the Sopranos. It’s tough reading anything else, because nothing else quite compares.

One man filled with disgust by his office job and his house, while another woman enjoyed by both. The same man made giddy by his wife and kids, while another man brought to contempt. Everybody in this book has so much hate.

“How’s the war today?”
“Mellow—a nice smooth war today.”

This makes a lot of sense, but I didn’t know the cultivation of Hochdeutsch came about initially through the spread of the Luther Bible.

An early example towards the argument that most of 19th-century nationalism movements took off due to the novel printing of vernacular materials, whether in Polish or Czech, or otherwise.

Joseph II “was obsessed with the idea of exchanging the distant Austria Netherlands for neighboring Bavaria.”

Oh what an alternate history this would’ve been.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve preordered a physical copy of a book. I’ve been following Luka Ivan Jukic’s writings for years, and now I’m super excited to have his debut book.

“Permanently, from that morning on, Seymour was hooked. By the time he was fourteen, one or two of us in the family were fairly regularly going through his jackets and windbreakers for anything good he might have jotted down during a slow gym period or a long wait at the dentist’s.

“It’s an exceedingly weighty matter when six naturally profuse verbalizes and expounders have an undefeatable champion talker in the house.”

“We must also renounce the past and the future, for the self is nothing but a coagulation of past and future around a present which is always falling away.”

“We can offer nothing short of ourselves. Otherwise what we term our offering is merely a label attached to a compensatory assertion of the ‘I.’”

“My existence does not come from my antecedents, nor from my physical and social surroundings; it moves out toward them and sustains them. For I am the one who brings into being for myself—and thus into being in the only sense that the word could have for me.”

“I am not the result of the intertwining of multiple causalities that determine my body or my “psyche.” I cannot think of myself as a part of the world…Everything that I know about the world, even through science, I know from a perspective that is my own or from an experience of the world without which scientific symbols would be meaningless.”

Begins with elucidating how Alexander’s conquests with great speed faced the diverse religious practices of the world against each other.

“It is horrible to see oneself die without Children. Napoleon Bonaparte said that.

What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead. Euripides said that.

When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children. I said that.”

“The next time I was in Los Angeles and drove past the house it was gone, a teardown, to be replaced a year or two later by a house marginally bigger. Some years later in a Washington bookstore I met the buyer’s daughter. I grew up in your house, she said. Not exactly, I refrained from saying.”

I’m stupid, but when a book gets too long, I just get tired. I finished the earlier James Baldwin books because they were all about this length, but I’m only halfway done with this one. I’m taking a break and going back to Joan Didion.

“the secrets of everyone were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world’s experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished.”

I am grateful to never experience this sort of hell. A world beaten black-and-blue.

The James Baldwin train carries on, book #4 now. He has returned to being “semi-autobiographical,” but to reflect a very different era of his life as was in “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”

“The train rocked, he held me closer, and a kind of sigh I’d never heard before stifled itself in him.

It’s astounding the first time you realize that a stranger has a body—the realization that he has a body makes him a stranger. It means that you have a body, too. You will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life.”

“And everything was different. I was walking through streets I had never seen before. The faces around me, I had never seen. We moved in a silence which was music from everywhere.”

“Fonny loved me too much, we needed each other too much. We were a part of each other, flesh of each other’s flesh—which meant that we so took each other for granted that we never thought the flesh.”

“By now, Mama had poured herself some gin and orange juice and was sitting at the table, opposite him. She was swinging her foot; she was thinking ahead.”

“All I really remember is the pain, the unspeakable pain; it was as though I were yelling up to Heaven and Heaven would not hear me. And if Heaven would not hear me, if love could not descend from Heaven—to wash me, to make me clean—then utter disaster was my portion.”

It’s nice reading this at the same time as the James Baldwin book, because they explore the same topic, but this though philosophy and the other through narration.

Courage is self-affirmation in-spite-of anxiety. Existence is being gained in-spite-of nonbeing.

Happy New Year, my dear Kindle family.

I’m not going to be able to finish this book before the New Year, bc I’ve the festivities to attend to, but man oh man, I miss reading such page-turning fiction.