Lori > Recent Status Updates

🤔 to DNF or not to DNF? 🤔. In just 179 pages from 😲 to 🙄 to 😴💤💤

Books and nipples. Nipples and books...The food had long ceased to be interesting, though it was far better than peas...The breast itself was nothing, the nipple was everything. Once I spied my parents engaging in sex, and I saw Inflato sucking away at my favorite nipple. I was not jealous, did not consider that he should not be there, but he was doing it all wrong.

He is moved with lurching love by his son’s sunny contentment, his quiet introversion, his completeness...
Their old house had been flooded when the sea breached a bar of protecting land and now sat waist-deep in the lolling tides that tugged the living room curtains in and out. It took a young boy some time to learn that they were safe from that peril...

It's definitely a comprehensive bio of Coach K. I'm sure there's something the author left out but I can't imagine what.
I planned to listen to it, until I read a lot of reviews that say the narrator mispronounces a lot of names 🤬.
I have many issues with my school's coach but will not hear his name pronounced BO-hem 🤦‍♀️
Obviously Coach K didn't listen to audio. 🤔 Surprising.

(of Emily Dickinson)
To write, scribere, digging in the earth, exhuming, scratching out. She looks up at the trees outside and can’t see them anymore. In the dark, the window has become a mirror.

...is it better to have the knowledge and experience required to describe things as they truly are or the freedom to invent them?

Utterly original. Clever, hilarious, Witt-y, cerebral. In awe of this writer's literary acrobatics. Don't want the show to end! Joao Reis, you are a treasure.

IN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHAT SCENES ONE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE FILMED

Shakespeare in the part of the King’s Ghost. The beheading of Louis the Sixteenth, the drums drowning his speech on the scaffold. Herman Melville at breakfast, feeding a sardine to his cat...The Russians leaving Alaska, delighted with the deal. Shot of a seal applauding.

Q: What is your position in the world of letters?
A: Jolly good view from up here.

Mr. Nabokov does not like to talk off the cuff (or “Off the Nabocuff,” as he said).

What inspired you to dub Lolita’s aging inamorato with such engaging redundancy?
The double rumble is, I think, very nasty, very suggestive. It is a hateful name for a hateful person.

See? I'm so challenged I can't even do a proper status update -- but I'm learning about Wittgenstein. 👍

I don't understand it all -- and this should be titled Wittgenstein for Dummies) -- but I'm loving it. An unexpected pleasure read ahead of Bedraggling Grandma with Russian Snow, for which it's unnecessary to read a book on Wittgenstein, but glad I am. If Philosophy 101 had been this engaging my professor would not have kicked me out of class 🤣

Be still my heart: A series of interviews, many from book tours, in which Nabokov talks about his life and work including the novels. Discusses Vera, which he didn't permit himself (for good reason) when writing Speak Memory. Includes interviews by Alfred Appel, a former student who did the definitive annotated Lolita and does best interviews, and Nab's opinions on others' work.

from Raymond Queneau's preface:
In the beginning, it was clearly his wish to strike a telling blow against human stupidity..."I hope to spit into it the gall that chokes me—that is, to speak some truths. By this means I hope to purge myself…stupidity now crushes me so hard that I feel like a fly with the Himalayas on its back!"

Gus Van Sant and I always joke about the press saying we are “openly” gay. What’s that supposed to mean? It sounds like we’re arriving at a premiere shrieking, “Hey, Mary! Got any Judy Garland records?”

Li Po
701–762

Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain

The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.

Translated from the Chinese by Sam Hamill.

"We will awaken the white marble of a statue with vacant eyes in the marginal world beyond the border of the faded afternoon. We will startle its only lover, the red vampire bat asleep on its bosom with wings folded. It will fly away soundlessly, soft, supple, fluttering, a weak, incorporeal, bright-red scrap without skeleton or substance; it will whirl, flap wildly, break apart without a trace in the motionless air.

"I know that someday, at some late hour, I will stand on the threshold of the garden there hand in hand with Bianka. We will enter those forgotten recesses where, enclosed within old walls are the poisoned parks, the artificial paradises of Poe, full of cowbane, poppy, and narcotic bindweed blazing beneath the dark gray sky of ancient frescoes."

While Father studied his great ornithological compendia and leafed through their colorful plates, the feathered phantasms seemed to fly out from them and fill the room with colorful fluttering, with petals of crimson, scraps of sapphire, verdigris, and silver. During feeding, they created on the floor a colorful, undulating flower bed, a living carpet that..dispersed into mobile flowers, flapping in the air

Trusting unthinkingly in the fertile and inventive genius of their love, they had little by little seen it endow them with a language of their own, as if they were an entire nation to be given weapons, games and laws.

Delightful sketch in which Honore's fairy godmother, his clock, cravat, pen, his books and flowers give Honore advice on how to win the heart of the woman he loves. So lovely to read you, young Marcel! There's treasure in these pages ❤

I adore Twoflower...and my true love is the Luggage ;)