Eddie > Recent Status Updates

The more I read memoirs of The Great War, the more I am astonished anyone survived, let alone found the wherewithal to conjure up those terrible thoughts years later to pen memoirs. Where Blunden and Sassoon and Graves are more gentrified and poetic, Junger is more savage and sanguine. And yet he still manages to come off sportingly, if not gentlemanly.

Why did Johnson feel the need to confuse readers with two men named Colonel Sands? Why is this a plot point? I've got precious little patience for this book already after the first chapter.

so far, so good.

John Keats John Keats John Please put your scarf on

this book is getting shelved for now. i read maybe 1/3 of it and my patience ran out. maybe one day i will be more receptive to it. or maybe i should have read this while i was in college or high school. for now, it will have to wait.

useless to say what page you're on in this book. i've read about 10 chapters so far and have found it extremely pretentious, boring, fascinating, bewildering, mesmerizing, fantastic, stifling, confrontational, provocative, tiresome, beautiful, trashy, playful...

It's hard to imagine a 604 page (principal text) book feeling rushed, but it did, if only in the end. Mellow was a pointillist for the first half of Papa's career, but gradually fell into using large brush strokes, especially for the last decade of Hemingway's life. In a way, I thank Mellow for that. Hem's mental decline was difficult enough to manage without having to read every sordid, shameful detail. Commendable.

Found out in a Hemingway bio that Papa was a huge influence on Salinger, that he had met Salinger and liked him. Reading these stories, you can see the influence, although the cadence is very different.

Just finished Nigger of the "Narcissus". Despite the awful title, I'm tempted to give this collection 5 stars on the basis of this story alone. It is hands down one of the greatest things I've ever read, and the prose only seems to grow stronger from one page to the next.

And the desire of life kept them alive, apathetic and enduring, under the cruel persistence of wind and cold; while the bestarred black dome of the sky revolved slowly above the ship, that drifted, bearing their patience and their suffering, through the stormy solitude of the sea.

[The tug] resembled an enormous and aquatic blackbeetle, surprised by the light, overwhelmed by the sunshine, trying to escape with ineffectual effort into the distant gloom of the land. She left a lingering smudge of smoke on the sky, and two vanishing trails of foam on the water. On the place where she had stopped a round black patch of soot remained, undulating on the swell--an unclean mark of the creature's rest.

Ferris' Wheel under construction. Fascinating--we take the apparatus for granted but it was a Herculean feat at the time w/their technology.

Just started reading today. Gripping stuff.

Zeller about to spill his guts.

The hiding place behind the hearth.

"Book 3" Part 5: the part about Archimbaldi