Derek Bartholomew > Recent Status Updates

“I have tried to rescue from oblivion a subaltern horror: the vast, contradictory Library, whose vertical wildernesses of books run the incessant risk of changing into others that affirm, deny, and confuse everything like a delirious god.”
— “The Total Library”

I wonder how Borges would respond to AI.
It’s a damn shame that he isn’t alive to write about these things.

This is a dense book, packed with pages and pages of exemplary sentences, accompanied with generous grammatical analysis of how and why each sentence possesses a musical quality, an ability to awe the reader.

By far, this is the best book on writing that I have ever read.

“Truth is the father of lies, nothing survives, nothing dies; only the wicked can afford the wise.”

At first, I thought this novel was a comedy; the first few chapters are indeed comical. This novel, however, is a tragedy of the first order, as grand as any of Shakespeare’s, and distinctly American too.

Since graduating college a decade ago, I’ve become rusty, forgetting a lot of the concepts I had learned.

This book is jogging my memory and introducing me to new concepts.

No one ever told that in mid-life I’d be entertained by reading reference books: At night, I read a few pages from Fowler’s Dictionary too, but I doubt that I will ever read it all, although it’s surprisingly funny at times. 😅

This is one of the most frustrating but rewarding, bleak but comical, books I’ve ever read.

If I hadn’t read Joyce’s Ulysses before this I don’t know if I would even try to finish this book. But similarly with Joyce, you have to read onwards, and it all starts to come into focus.

The first two chapters were hilarious. But Jethro Furber’s interior monologues are rageful, hateful, obscene. A real villain.

I’m enjoying reading one essay a day. So far my favorites have been the opening essay, “The Nothingness of Personality,” “A Profession of Literary Faith,” and “The Duration of Hell.”

I’ve only read the section “A World in Decay” so far. But if hadn’t written anything else he’d still be legendary to me.

Akutagawa belongs in the same conversation alongside Gogol, Chekov, and Kafka, the greatest masters of the short form, imo.

An aside: I thought Kurosawa’s Rashomon is based on the titular story of this collection, but it is actually an adaptation of “In a Bamboo Grove.”

This is my first Manchette, and I’m already a fan!

I bought this used, without checking the table of contents. The heavy hitters are not given enough space and the selection seems arbitrary at best.

I’m going DNF this book and read an older Norton Anthology of Poetry instead.

I’ve only read the first few essays, and I am hooked!

Having read Labyrinths a few years ago, I must admit that I was intimidated by Borges, by his erudition, by his at times esoteric style.

But so far his essays are quite accessible, a pleasure to read.

I also bought the Penguin deluxe editions of Collected Fictions and Selected Poems, and I look forward to grazing on these books in the coming years.

I’m reading this for details for my (aspirational) autofiction novel about my deployment in Iraq during 2005-6.

Prior to this, I didn’t know that the US normalized relations with Iraq AFTER they began using chemical weapons against Iran, nor did I know how heavily are Navy’s presence has been in the Strait of Hormuz for the last 50 years, among so many other things. Highly recommend.

This novel is more complex, more deeply rooted in Argentinian history, and stylistically richer than his novel The Tunnel.

While The Tunnel is an existential novel in the vein of Camus, On Heroes and Tombs, for lack of better examples, is what William Faulkner would have penned had he been an Argentine writer.

I also can’t but help wonder if this novel influenced Jose Donoso’s Obscene Bird of Night.

This isn’t the most lively book I’ve read about rhetorical grammar; these no-frills lessons are instructive, however.

Williams’s general principles for writing with clarity and grace are helping me become more analytical not only about writing clearer sentences, with less redundancies and fillers, but also how to best arrange sentences to form more effective paragraphs. (I still need a lot of work, obvs.)

Besides my initial annoyance of Oliver’s sweeping claim that poets are born with natural abilities that others will never possess, this book has been a pleasure.

By the time I finished my MA in US literature, I was more interested in the novel form and thought poetry was a bore.

Relearning the rules of verse, how to scan a poem, I’m starting to enjoy poetry again.

This is a good intro for anyone.

I’m really impressed with these stories so far. Some of them remind me of Borges, while others are closer to literary realism. While I can see the genius of “Blow Up,” my favorites have been “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris,” “Bestiary,” “The Gates of Heaven,” and “The End of the Game,” the former two are examples of Borgesian short stories, the latter of two literary realism.

I’ve been reading one story a day. “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” is my favorite so far. It alone is worth the price of admission. (You can find online for free. It’s about a 15 minutes read.)

I rarely do this. But I am going to bow out on this one and Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel, both of which I have been reading for months, at a glacial pace. I read the first two novellas, but I am just too bored with the plot and Grossman’s sentences are so repetitive: I found this be true of her translation of Don Quixote as well: Smollet’s is by far the best of the 3 translations I’ve read.

This is a superb anthology so far.

I have fallen in love with Neruda all over again, marveled at the poetry and the power of artists I hadn’t heard of before, and discovered that Borges may be a better poet than a prose writer: Don’t attack me! I liked Labyrinths too.

My Spanish is atrocious; but I am pleased with the side-by-side translations because it helps me follow the meter of the original.

I just finished the second novel in this volume, Llona Cones the Rain. What a gut punch!

I know that these novels are well loved, almost universally. But these stories are melancholic, somber, gloomy tales, not I what expected but enjoyable just the same.

I suspect that the subsequent stories will be more upbeat. We shall see.