tia > Recent Status Updates

I used to cringe when my family members used a simplified language and when I grew up I learn to appreciate those small differences. I am wiser now and realize that even a dumb man can live life as no fool.

Question: does being high mean you're creating creation within your racing bosom or does it mean you're tapping into a hidden well spring of creativity? Who is the one wearing the top hat, is it me or the white rabbit? Are we one in the same?? Who is the one writing love letters in the air with their cane of convenience? Who is Tia? The artistic prodigy or the aged artist tired from protesting against the wind?

"Christianity in the fourth century, patriotism the day before yesterday, Socialism yesterday morning and love with neither phrase nor Art, and even a moderate taste for moderation."

Just wow. Everything about this book: just wow

(Continued)
Being punished for our so-called progress
What has it got us? I hear old man Donovan beyond the grave, laughing maniacally at our doom.

(Continued)
Henry makes me ache with a fondness explained only in part by my understanding of pain and constant illness. Mother Nature seems to be on the side of the weak and wearied towners of Doonhaven with it's mountain side looking like a frowning old man upon the "progress" despoiling her with explosives, no less. Maybe all of mankind are the children and grandchildren of Broderik and we're all paying some

(Continued) strangely familiar, like the first time the dead sea scrolls were read. I appreciate Maurier's sense of humor... Eliza bickering to her sister-mother Barbara that her escort is hanging out with her whimsical minded sister Jane behind a rock. John's youthful, fanatical obsession with the errant femme fatale Miss Flower. The old man Donovan stoking ancient tensions, forever the curse of the vanquished.

I read all the time. Multiple books at a time. Because I saver books like an addict remembers their first hit, but each book is a new drug better than LSD better than med grade ganja. And yet, this book opened before me is even greater than these customary psychedelic experiences. It's opened to page 81 and I'm hovering protectively and yet apprehensively over this tome published in another lifetime 1943 but yet

Rohel. The petty thief, the book thief. At the shepherd's cross, the beginning of vulgar Italian journeys, at the place where scarecrows stand, "all at cross purposes." The breath before Raskolnikov commits his pardonable offense, the cardinal sin never completed, while a nation waits for deliverance.

"It always seemed to him that there had been a nonexistent month in his life, thirty days that oblivion bad eradicated the way vultures gouge out the eyes of dead cattle. and so July disappeared, swallowed up by nothingness."

"A bloody-well-too-bloody cockroach of a depression was sucking the marrow out of his skull."

-swoon-

Fuck you if you don't love this novella.

From Dulce Maria Loynaz's poem "Unexpected Honey"

"The bee came back to my rosebush. I said to it: It's late for honey; my winter wears on. The bee came back. Choose - I said - other sweetness, other innocent freshness. It was the dark bee and it clung in the hollow of the flower... it plunged its thirst into the dry rose. And left me burdened with sweetness."

Sensational

I recently bought a paperback version of this title and have since sworn to keep it on my person so if I die in a freak accident crossing the street (stranger things have happened to me, almost including this) it will be with me as I pass into the next world and hopefully grant me passage into St. James's Library or Alexandria... is it odd that I plan to be buried with this book in my hands?

This is my absolute favorite book, the first love of my life... for this book I swooned and became enlightened, met Louis Sebastian Mercier and made love to Jean Jaures. This is my first reread and I was a little nervous... but almost immediately I was reassured: "He never realized that he had been a necromancer amid the martyrologies of natural selection and the abracadabra of positivism."

I'm 30% through this collection of novellas and I have to find evidence of a Nobel Prize winner. I was intrigued by the Jansen character but didn't Roberto Bolano do the same thing, but better???

Who is the boy-priest Jinen? Why is he throwing blades at defenseless carp? How did he know to climb the tree and look into the kite's nest only to discover the butchered, half alive remains of it's prey? Where is his master Jikai? And what exactly happened between him and Satoku that evening?

I'm only three pages in but already Mizukami has piqued my interest by comparing the delicate woman Sato with the graceful geese painted in the temple by the master Nangaku. The comparison goes beyond her fine features; it beautifully describes the essence of womanhood. Superb.

"The gigantic shadows of my delirium are dim along the bleared horizon. A dwarfed Liberty has ceased to threaten. The fog glistens. The pale air is a stupid resolution. In the deck chairs are rows of sickly quiescent faces. Soon the stony sunshine and the symmetrical palm trees will mark rows of identical graves - the graves of those who masqueraded in differentness."

I'm starting to understand why Clarice's ghosts cannot stop their wandering... because Clarice herself never stopped being displaced, feeling exiled... she remained a fugitive until the very end, trapped in the no-where between fiction and reality.

"A complete life may be one ending in so full identification with the non-self that there is no self to die." Bernard Berenson

I keep telling myself "this is the last book I'm going to buy for awhile" and before I can complete the sentence, I've already bought some other book... what is this mad desire to possess and accumulate? Every voice must be present to conjure the voiceless during the seance...

Now accepting applications for sugar momma/daddy so that I can quit my day job and give my soul to reading and writing. :)

Asylum as safe zone. Asylum as protector of souls from the outside, from the everything else besides.

I am amused and validated: Cuesta thought that homosexuality brought man closer to immortality. As a lesbian, I must agree: I am both a man and a woman with my love and she is both a man and a woman to me.

On the one hand, Moser has demystified Clarice for the common reader while on the other hand, heightened her mystique for her devoted followers. At many points, I feel as if Moser and Clarice are communicating with the ghosts of Latin America and that we, as the readers, are witnessing from afar, as if the two were on a stage. Phenomenal work.