Category: Literary Matters
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Two Fortuitous Finds
After a long and leisurely breakfast this morning with Peter Lupu, Mike Valle, and Richard Klaus, I stopped by Bookman's and got lucky. I found a used copy of Milton Steinberg's 1939 novel, As a Driven Leaf. The title is from Job 13: 24-25: "Wherefore hidest Thou Thy face. . . Wilt thou harass a…
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Leftist Enablers as Useful Idiots
Having lost their heads, they are in danger of losing their heads. ………….. Addendum 1/9. It is a nice literary question whether the above formulation is superior to Having lost their minds, they are in danger of losing their heads. I like both formulations but prefer the first because it exploits an equivocation on 'lose…
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Stoner
John Williams' 1965 novel Stoner with its overcast feel proved to be a perfect read for a deep and dark December. An underappreciated and unfortunately titled masterpiece, it is about one William Stoner, an obscure professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia. At its publication in '65 it pretty much fell still-born from…
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A is A: Monism Refuted
This from The Collected Poems and Epigrams of J. V. Cunningham, Swallow Press, 1971, p. 118, epigram #47: This Monist who reduced the swarmOf being to a single form,Emptying the universe for fun,Required two A's to think them one. Notes 1. The title is Cunningham's own. 2. Poetic license extends to use-mention confusion. 3. It…
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If You Understood Me, You Would Agree with Me!
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 204, Notebook K, Aph. #84: To call a proposition into question all that is needed is very often merely to fail to understand it. Certain gentlemen have been all too ready to reverse this maxim, and to assert that…
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Why Lichtenberg is not on Facebook
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 162, Notebook J, Aph. #168, hyperlink added! As soon as he receives a little applause many a writer believes that the world is interested in everything about him. The play-scribbler Kotzebue even thinks himself justified in telling the public…
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The Art of the Aphorism
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollindale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 156: He despises me because he does not know me, and I despise his accusations because I know myself. Related articles 'I am not a spy. I am a philosopher.'
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William Burroughs, London Ed, Patrick Kurp, and Literary Trash
I own the 1953 first-edition Ace Books paperback depicted to the left. Price in 1953: 60 cents. I must have acquired my copy in the late '60s or early '70s for not much more than that. Originally published under the pen-name of William Lee, the "Old Bull Lee" of Kerouac's On the Road. The foreword…
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Novels
I am nearing the end of Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square, and yesterday I began John Fante's Full of Life. D. G. Myers' review begins and ends like this: In the Manchester Guardian’s book blog, Rob Woodard looks back at John Fante’s Ask the Dust, a 1939 novel which has been described as a masterpiece. Everyone…
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A Commonplace Blog: Uncommonly Good, Now at an End
I headed over to D. G. Myers' high-level literary weblog this afternoon only to find that its penultimate post, dated 22 July, was the last by Myers. The final entry, dated 29 September, by his sister-in-law, records his death. And then I recalled that Myers had written some friendly but trenchant critiques of my amateur…
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Route 66
Jack Kerouac in a letter from 17 January 1962: "Everybody is making money off my ideas, like those "Route 66" TV producers, everybody except me . . . ." (Selected Letters 1957-1969, ed, Charters, Viking 1999, p. 326; see also p. 461 and pp. 301-302.) Here is the Nelson Riddle theme music from the TV…
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Mrs. Hopewell Meets Professor Heidegger
Flannery O'Connor, "Good Country People," in A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Harcourt, 1955, p. 185: One day Mrs. Hopewell had picked up one of the books the girl had just put down and opening it at random, she read, "Science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness and…
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Arguing with Brightly over Ficta
Earlier I wrote that the central problem in the philosophy of fiction is to find a solution to the following aporetic dyad: 1. There are no purely fictional items. 2. There are some purely fictional items. The problem is that while the limbs of the dyad cannot both be true, there is reason to think…
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Flannery O’Connor on Ayn Rand
Flannery O'Connor died 50 years ago today. About Ayn Rand she has this to say: I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw…
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Another Round on Fictional Characters as Abstract Objects
London Ed recommended to me Patrick Hamilton's 1941 booze novel, Hangover Square. It gets off to a slow start, but quickly picks up speed and now has me in its grip. I'm on p. 60. The main character is one George Harvey Bone. Ed gives this argument in an earlier thread: (*) Bone, who is…