A Momentary Taste of Being

I should preface the bulk of my comments by saying that I finished this book on the way home from a trip to Austin.  When I completed it my initial impulse was to hurl it across the room.  My secondary impulse was to want to shred--eviscerating it, destroying it page by painful page--to inflict upon it some of the relentless damage it inflicted upon my psyche in the reading of it.  All of which is to say I had a very personal and substantial reaction to it.  If one follows Harold Bloom's notion that great literature "reads the reader" then I am left with the interesting quandary of wondering whether I want to know what it found out in the reading. Crossing to Safety is the chronicle of two couples.  They meet in depression era America in a university setting and the story follows them as one couple, affluent and gracious, welcomes the other couple into their family circle. We see the couples in good times and in bad for each of them--through loss of job and su...

While called the story of the week, this weeks offering is actually a poem from the LoA collection of "religious verse."  In the instance--Wallace Stevens's magnificent "Sunday Morning." "Sunday Morning" is a gorgeous, rich, lush meditation on matters religious and otherwise and as with another poet of my acquaintance it perfectly enunciates the inner struggle some have conducted in search of truth--whether or not it comes from faith.

An interview with George Saunders Saunders is author of some amazingly funny short stories and a marvelous collection of essays titled The Brain Dead Megaphone.

Travels with Charley Steinbeck's book examined as a heavily fictionalized memoir.  This doesn't rise to the height of even notability.  If one thinks that a memoir does not contain heavily ficitonalized or even large stretches, one is being somewhat naive about human nature.

A kind friend gave me the gift of an Kindle copy of Fr. Stinissen's magnificent book Into Your Hands Father.   Being a Kindle edition, my highlights and notes are made available online (another fact that I owe a great debt to my friend for making clear to me.) Having my highlights available online makes it so much easier to write and comment about the book.  One of the point that Stinissen makes is that God speaks to us in the ordinary events of life, even those events with which we are not so pleased. from Into Your Hands Father Fr. Wilfrid Stinissen If God is the creator of heaven and earth and the great director guiding the drama of the world and mankind, then I can encounter him everywhere. He pours out his love upon me in and through all that happens. “Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it” (Ps 81:10). I do not need to consider when it is wise to open my mouth and when it is better to close it. I will always have my mouth wide open. I live in a land where...

Describing the indescribable--Styron's Darkness Visible The prose in such a dark memoir is, if I recall correctly, luminous and exact.  Worth your time.

And for my own commonplace book: “To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda or even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery; it means to live in such a way that  one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist .” -- Cardinal Emmanuel Célestin Suhard , Archbishop of Paris 1940-1949

See what happens when you're away from blogging for a day? Zeno's Conscience 1 Zeno's Conscience 2 A book I have long meant to take up along with Robert Musil's incomplete epic.

Heart of the City --Ariel Sabar Despite my own expectations, I'm slowly reading through and enjoying this compendium of true love stories sparked by a New York setting.

Received a wonderful gift yesterday in the mail,  Heart of the City by Ariel Sabar.  What is most wonderful about it is that if I read only the introduction  (I won't, I'll read the whole thing), it will be enough to make the entire book worthwhile. Working under the principles of environmental psychology author Ariel Sabar shares nine different love stories that begin and sometimes center around the city of New York.  But he starts with an essay that tells how he became interested and what he looked into before compiling the case studies that make up the rest of the book.  Relating his own parents' love story, he notes that if his mother had not stepped into Washington Park, their romance might never have started: from the Introduction to Heart of the City Ariel Sabar "So wait a second," I said, turning to my father. "You mean if she'd never gone into the park, you wouldn't have tried to talk to her?" "Correct." The streets...

The Woman in Black To the best of my knowledge this is the only novel by Madeleine St. John that I have not read or even been able to get a copy of. It is great news to me to know that it is available.

Not one I'd go to for poetry, but some of this is quite fine: His eye is subtle, but his heart is blind,

George Saunders speaks to the issue

I post this sonnet because a line popped into my head that would head a poem that would be nothing at all like this one.  But this one is always work a revisit. Sonnet 130 William Shakespeare My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damask'd, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:    And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare    As any she belied with false compare.

Who Wrote the Book of Love --Lee Seigel So far these have been high-quality and worthwhile reading.

"Stowaways" by Lawrence Sail

Stuart Jeffries on The Rings of Saturn

A poet wins the Costa award for Of Mutability

Why the popularity of Catcher in the Rye is a BAD thing--Salinger's Other Works

Haslett on Fish on Strunk and White