Jonfaith > Recent Status Updates

For Marx and Wagner alike, love and power are irreconcilable.

Wagner is a bum artist. —Ezra Pound

Beyond compelling, simply an extraordinary book.

Behold Satanic Wagner!

I’m finding this to be astonishing.

Feeling a bit conflicted and curious if it would be more impactful as a collection of related stories?

Everyone’s destiny was as inexorable and irrevocable as the course of the river, its sources hidden beyond nothingness, which for want of another name people called time.

American girls
were carrying babies and coins in their wombs,
and the boys stretched their limbs and fainted on the
cross.

Are we supposed to sing as we fall into the mass graves?

My experience has been absolutely surprising which by definition is an achievement. I’m unsure who I’d ever recommend it to with such usurpation of genre.

Exquisite, touching and all the while wrenching.

World Cup or not I finish this tonight.

Delightfully surprised by the masterful grim martial poetry. Nodding to Homer and Virgil our Lord offers a spectacular if horrific set piece.

Canto VI: we’ve spun from shipwreck, cannibalism, and slavery to the comfy confines of transvestism.

Canto IV: I’d give this ten stars if possible.

Truly loved Canto I although I’m curious how such will be sustained?

My markers are of lead, not cork
my trail is salt, not smoke.
—Rene Char

Just discovered the magnificence of Jules Supervielle.

Perhaps without butterflies Nabokov’s life would have meandered in a different direction, or perhaps he would have found another course through the same fertile plain.

I’m not sure I minded the use of Speak, Memory as essentially gospel when I first read this thirty years ago. I admit to being troubled this time.

What a horrific masterpiece!

The exchange between Hitchcock and Nabokov are worth the price of admission.

I’m grateful for the Master’s verdict: I’ve sketched a lengthy list of books to explore over the weekend.

Far too many letters are but negotiations about publishing. It is tempting to mentally compare N’s letters to James Laughlin with the hectoring missives sent by William Carlos Williams to the same.

So begins a monthlong love fest for dear VN

Favorite gossip thus far: according to Flaubert’s niece the servant of the author was forbidden to speak to him except on Sundays. On that day she was allowed to say: sir, it is Sunday.

The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.

I believe I’d forgotten the brilliance of The Trilogy.

Yet still he moves
alert,
invidious,
this serpant creeping
and this shaft of light,

O which of the gifts of the gods
is the best gift?
this,
this,
this,
this;
escape
from the power of the hunting pack
and to know that wisdom is best
and beauty
sheer holiness.