Laura > Recent Status Updates

Truths universally acknowledged:
"It is certain that the young girl's love for Stephen received a fanning from her father's opposition which made it blaze with a dozen times the intensity it would have exhibited if left alone."

I read the introduction by Ursula Le Guin in the collection Words Are My Matter, which was a compelling enough reason to give this a try.

Researchers believe that the conscious cultivation of empathy, including through the reading of novels (see S. Keen), will make communication far easier and will save us from future world cataclysms.

Another library discard, this one from College of the Sequoias. And another library book whose spine is uncracked. A library book that was never checked out, was never read, and was then discarded. There is something about unread library books that I find disconsolate, like unfulfilled promises, like "spoons that have fallen behind the stove and are never seen again".

Cusk's gaze pierces the very fabric of reality. She then transcribes that reality for the reader in the most piquiant prose. Eloquent, witty, with just the right amount of humor and just the right amount of heartbreak. How did I ever live without her?

My copy of this book is a library discard from the Ocean County Library in Jackson, NJ. Its spine is uncracked, its pages unturned. It has never been opened.

Reader reviews seem to be widely divergent. But I'm finally ready to dive in.

Picked this up in the little closet of a second-hand bookstore not far from my neighborhood. The name penned inside the cover is Gary L. Jones along with the inscription "I hope you enjoy this." I hope I do, too. I doubt Gary ever read it, though, because the spine is barely cracked. I wonder where it's been sitting since the 60's to be in such perfect condition?

At last year's party, he announced that he'd decided to read nothing but Hölderlin. Nothing else is worth your time.

Been on my shelf for far too long. Time to finally give it a try.

Continuing on my Steinbeck journey...

I want to go slowly. Take my time. I want to stay suspended inside this book for a long time.

I prefer to be selective in my whens and wheres of reading poetry, saving the experience for the rare moments when I'm least likely to be needed or interrupted. Often, I like to pour a glass of wine and leisurely match the pace of my sipping to the pace of my reading, contentedly laying down the book when the glass is emptied.

A good poet gifts the reader greater language with which to describe their world. I've been watching the evening skies all summer for the return of my two favorite visitors: bats and nighthawks. Tonight (while Noah Jones crooned Let It Be on the backyard speaker) the bats finally made their appearance, and I got to recall Ken's expressive lines,
"Above, cheeping brown bats flutter in
insect-dizzy circles..."

...for every language has a yearning for other languages...

I Went
I didn't hold myself back. I gave in completely and went,
went to those delectations that were half real,
half wrought in my own mind,
went into the brilliant night
and drank strong wine,
the way the champions of pleasure drink.
--CP Cavafy

But on the very next page I find myself raging a little. "Durrell tried to get me to read Shakespeare's Sonnets...." Why? Why why why read Shakespeare when in Greece? Reach for Cavafy. He should always be near your fingertips.

I am only a handful of pages in but am uplifted by the language, "Here the palate itself became metaphysically attuned: the drama was of the airs, of the upper regions, of the eternal conflict between the soul and the spirit."

I did NOT expect to love this book so much! Work schmurk. Just let me read.

Oh my goodness. Starting my day with so much laughter!

"I didn't find the answer that afternoon. I found only late yet tolerable melancholy and cold April air. .... Can a person be gathered up like that, piece by piece, through the memories of others, and what would you get in the end? Would some Frankensteinian monster emerge from all that? Something patched together from absolutely incompatible memories and ideas from so many people?"

This feels something like Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." Why is that?

Only a small way in, and already the quality of Damon Galgut's writing just pops!