Category: Literary Matters
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Kerouac at the End of the Road
A week or so and then I'll be through with Jacking off until next October. So bear with me, ragazzi. Here is a NYT piece from 1988 by Richard Hill that gets at the truth of Jack. Excerpts: He seemed uncertain of his friends from the 50's. Ginsberg was lost; he hadn't found the answers…
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Should There be University Courses on Beat Generation Authors?
From a longer essay: I've read my fair share of [William S. ] Burroughs and I concur [with Patrick Kurp] that his stuff is trash: Junkie, Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Exterminator. All in my library. But there is a place for literary trash. It has its uses as do the pathologist's slides and samples. But…
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The Relativity of Lived Time
Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), This Business of Living, Diaries 1935-1950, Transaction Publishers, 2009, p. 126, from the entry of 10 December 1939: Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours seem short and the years long. A very sharp observation. Unfortunately, most of Pavese's diary is not at this level of objective insight.…
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Abstain the Night Before, Feel Better the Morning After
Do you regret in the morning the spare supper of the night before or the foregoing of the useless dessert? Do you feel bad that you now feel good and are not hung over? You missed the party and with it the ambiguity and unseriousness and dissipation of idle talk. Are you now troubled by…
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Even Misfits Find Their ‘Fit’
I have a longstanding interest in 'marginal types': the characters, oddballs, misfits, Thoreauvian different-drummers, wildmen, mavericks, weirdos, those who find an adjustment to life, if they find it at all, at the margins, on the fringes of respectability, near the edge of things. Those who were not stamped out as by a cookie cutter, but put…
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Bob Dylan on Moby Dick
Bob Dylan finally gave his Nobel Prize for Literature lecture. I'm impressed. Besides his musical he mentions his literary influences. He cites many of the books I read as assigned readings in high school, books he claims to have read as assigned readings in grammar school! I'm talking about some serious tomes: Moby Dick, Ivanhoe,…
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George Orwell on Julian Green
A footnote in Paul Tournier's The Meaning of Persons sent me to Julian Green, Personal Record 1928-1939. Here is George Orwell's review in Time and Tide, 13 April 1940: Julian Green's diaries, which ten years ago or even five years ago might have seemed comparatively commonplace, are at this moment of the greatest interest. What…
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Virtue and its Exhortation
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 72: Virtue is not hateful. But speeches on virtue are. Without a doubt, no mouth in the world, much less mine, can utter them. Likewise, every time somebody interjects to speak of my honesty . . . there is someone who quivers…
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Once More on the Bogus Aristotle ‘Quotation’
The indefatigable Dave Lull delivers again. But first Uncle Bill's lessons for the day: 1) Be skeptical of all unsourced quotations. 2) Do not broadcast unsourced quotations unless you are sure they are correct. 3) Verify the sources of sourced quotations. 4) Correct, if you can, incorrect 'quotations.' 5) Do not willfully mis-attribute! Or, like…
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Nulla Dies Sine Linea: Bad Medieval Latin?
No day without a line. Should it be nullus dies sine linea? I don't know. The maxim in the form nulla dies sine linea entered my vocabulary circa 1970 from my study of Kierkegaard. The Dane had taken it as the motto for his prodigious journals in the sense of 'No day without a written…
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“No Man is a Hypocrite in His Pleasures”
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 95: Johnson: "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures." The Johnson in question is Samuel Johnson. Translator Bloom informs us that James Boswell's Vie de Samuel Johnson (Life of Samuel Johnson) was published in France in 1954. So it looks as…
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Patrick Kurp on Arthur Krystal
Long-time friend of this weblog, and an accomplished blogger himself, Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence has an article out in the Los Angeles Review of Books entitled "Literature with a Capital L": On Arthur Krystal's "This Thing We Call Literature." (HT: Dave Lull) Krystal was a protégé of Jacques Barzun, editing the late polymath’s The…
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John Updike, Seven Stanzas at Easter
Seven Stanzas at Easter Make no mistake: if He rose at allit was as His body;if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the moleculesreknit, the amino acids rekindle,the Church will fall. It was not as the flowers,each soft Spring recurrent;it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddledeyes of the eleven apostles;it was…
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John Updike’s Christianity
Gerald R. McDermott (emphases added): In Updike’s religion, then, there are no commandments we are meant to keep except the obligation to accept what is: “Religion includes, as its enemies say, fatalism, an acceptance and consecration of what is.” Our only responsibility is to “appreciate” the great gift that life represents. He learned from Barth…
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Do You Speak English?
Then you are guilty of 'cultural appropriation' unless you are English. Addendum 4/12: A philosophy professor comments: The claim in your post today, strikes me as clearly false. Just because someone speaks a language (even as a primary language) doesn't mean they are cultural appropriators guilty of something. Imagine the English colonize your land…