BIBLIOGRIND
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Archive for A Commonplace Book
February 10, 2012 at 3:16 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
I came across this snippet from Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” which immediately reminded me of what’s happening (has been happening for 30yrs) in American politics. Rick Santorum has shamelessly used his deformed child to get votes; he’s sidled up to the Religious Right, who, being Fundamentalist Christians and Baptists and Pentecostals (and but for needing to use their religious-political power to make controls on American behavior), wouldn’t otherwise waste time spitting on a Catholic. Meanwhile, Mit Romney’s Mormanism isn’t talked about; at least not publicly. And then there is Newt Gingrich, the poster-boy for everything bad about 1) politics, 2) men, 3) women who like powerful men, and 4) liars.
march 10, 2007
“Precisely because America is legally secular, religion has become free enterprise. Rival churches compete for congregations—not least for the fat tithes that they bring—and the competition is waged with all the aggressive hard-sell techniques of the marketplace. What works for soap flakes works for God, and the result is something approaching religious mania among today’s less educated classes.”
– Richard Dawkins, “The God Delusion”
February 2, 2012 at 12:59 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
Alain de Botton has a feel for capturing an image, spooling the powerful line of dialogue at a key moment, and building a frame around a subject which, often, can be lost in the details. I was not happy with his book “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” … at least not at first. His focus was not what I had expected: a protracted exposé, using multiple interviewees, on what work can and cannot be; what it is and what it is not. But then I realized I had unrealistic, or myopic, expectations; when I opened myself to the possibilities of what he WAS doing (rather than what I had expected him to do), I found those exposés and interviews and “what it all (can) mean” of the work world. His focus was that of a bee sensing the flowers, dodging back to the hive, bringing the swarm, and then depositing all those individual pollen particles into the hive that, eventually, creates the honey. The effect was to weave together several tapestries that produced a far larger map than previously was available on the philosophy of work.
july 18, 2011
“There are few jobs in which years’ worth of labour can be viewed in a quick scan of four walls and even fewer opportunities granted to us to gather all our intelligence and sensitivity in a single place. Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to. We confront our lost energies in the pathos of the retirement party.”
– Alain de Botton, “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” (“painting”)
January 24, 2012 at 8:40 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
Maxwell Perkins discovered, edited, and nurtured some of America’s greatest 20th century novelists: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Tom Wolfe, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Erskine Caldwell, and Ring Lardner, to name but a few. He gave editorial advice, he stroked their egos, he lent them money, and he knew how to get their best writing on the page.
july 3, 2009
“Writing a novel is a very hard thing to do because it covers so long a space of time, and if you get discouraged it is not a bad sign, but a good one. If you think you are not doing it well, you are thinking the way real novelists do. I never knew one who did not feel greatly discouraged at times, and some get desperate, and I have always found that to be a good symptom.”
– Letter from Maxwell Perkins to Nancy Hale, circa 1932
January 18, 2012 at 8:31 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
The best writers know how to make us readers see what’s in a room, and what’s going on in the scene, and where we are at in the world. In this little gem, Bellow finds the details in how one man’s life (or any life?) can be led with purpose. This, my friends, is writing:
january 18, 2012
“And this universal eligibility to be noble, taught everywhere, was what gave Simon airs of honor, Iroquois posture and eagle bearing, the lithe step that didn’t crack a twig, the grace of Chevalier Bayard and the hand of Cincinnatus at the plow, the industry of the Nassau Street match-boy who became the king of corporations. Without a special gift of vision, maybe you wouldn’t have seen it in most of us, lining up in the school-yard on a red fall morning, standing on the gravel in black sheepskins and twisted black stockings, mittens, Western gauntlets, and peeling shoes, while the drum and bugle corps blasted and pounded and the glassy tides of wind drove weeds, leaves, and smoke around, struck the flag stiff and clanked the buckle of the rope on the steel pole.”
– Saul Bellow, “The Adventures of Augie March”
January 9, 2012 at 4:52 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
I began reading José Saragamo in the 1980s. His narrative style was simple, to my understanding, then, of narrative. When I read him I felt as if a wise man, or else an old man who’d seen much in life, was telling me a story over a cup of coffee, his newspaper cast aside, folded into half. His is the voice of someone who enjoys telling stories, and knows how to move himself, the storyteller, in and out of the narrative in just that way where we get humorous, or black, or critical information, and then as seamlessly as we might imagine, brings us back with a mere caress.
Everyone knows “Blindness” but my favorite of Saragamo’s is “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” — we get the life of Christ, with all that we might have thought was missing, as told by the most cryptic character in all of literature.
january, 2005
“I’ll bet if we met the devil and he allowed us to open him up, we might be surprised to find God jumping out. Pastor still liked to provoke Jesus with these outrageous remarks. Jesus had gradually learned that the best way to deal with this was ignore it and say nothing. For Pastor might have gone even further, suggesting that on opening up God one might find the devil inside.”
– José Saragamo, “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ”
December 31, 2011 at 12:39 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
Ian McEwan is, perhaps, the most austere of writers, and one who can pack a single sentence with imagery, meaning, and echoes.
december 31, 2011
The furthest stars of the Milky Way were visible, not as a scattering of fine dust, but as distinct points of light which made the brighter constellations appear uncomfortably close. The very darkness was tangible, warm and cloying. Mary clasped her hands behind her head and watched the sky, and Caroline sat forward eagerly, her gaze moving proudly between Mary’s face and the heavens, as though she were personally responsible for their grandeur. ‘I spend hours out here.’ She seemed to wheedle for praise, but Mary did not even blink.
– Ian McEwan, “The Comfort of Strangers”
December 29, 2011 at 4:15 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
Hermann Broch wrote what I think is the definitive pre-Hitlerian story of how Germany (and Europe, if you care to take the long view) lost its way, from about the time of Wilhelm II to the running brook that became Nazism. Broch’s THE SLEEPWALKERS is a trilogy that takes place some 16-20 years apart, with interrelated stories and characters. The effect is more than chilling, when set against what we have witnessed since post-WW II Europe and America (perhaps also from a post-colonial world-view).
june 14, 2010
” ‘Yes, you see, Europe has already become a pretty dubious field for the Church. But Africa, on the other hand! Hundreds of millions of souls as raw material for the Faith. And you can rest assured that a baptized negro is a better Christian than twenty Europeans. If the Catholics and the Protestants want to steal a march on each other for the winning of these fanatics it’s very understandable; for there’s where the future of their religion lies; there will be found the future warriors of the faith who will march out one day, burning and slaying in Christ’s name, against a heathen Europe sunk in corruption, to set at last, amid the smoking ruins of Rome, a black Pope on the throne of Peter.’ ”
– Hermann Broch, “The Romantic” (THE SLEEPWALKERS trilogy)
December 21, 2011 at 6:13 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
If you haven’t read Iris Murdoch lately, I recommend “The Black Prince” … truly a wonderful farce that carries you from the first line to the last gasp of its twist-turn ending.
october 8, 2011
‘Bradley, I read such an extraordinary theory about the sonnets –’
“Be silent. So Shakespeare is at this most cryptic when he is talking about himself. How is it that Hamlet is the most famous and accessible of his plays?’
‘But people argue about that too.’
‘Yes, but nevertheless it is the best known work of literature in the world. Indian peasants, Australian lumberjacks, Argentine ranchers, Norwegian sailors, members of the Red Army, Americans, all the most remote and brutish specimens of mankind have heard of Hamlet.’
– Iris Murdoch, “The Black Prince”
December 17, 2011 at 12:40 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
I was turned onto this novel by a writer friend, and reading its 100+ pages became a wonderful bath in warm, strange waters. The voice takes you into a story at once meaningful but awful.
july 4, 2009
“Sister Agnes slinks through a gap in the whiteness with a straw basket of underthings that they silently pin up in the hidden world inside the tutting, luffing, campaigning sheets.
Half an hour passes. Wind tears at their work. Sister Agnes aches from reaching. She blows the sting from her reddened fingers. She watches the postulant as the tilting sheets wrap around her and shape her. She watches the girl as she tederly releases herself, as though tugging a ghost’s hands away.”
– Ron Hansen, “Mariette in Ecstasy”
December 13, 2011 at 7:36 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
Truman Capote’s writing can be sharp, it can be original; it will make you understand aspects of life and death you had never considered. Capote the man was as much a talker, in his limelight of success, as he was a writer. Talk is cheap; but what happens when we want to step behind the curtain?
august 15, 2011
“When I was young, I wanted to be rich, terribly, terribly rich. My mother, after divorcing my father, married a rich man, but they were upper-middle-class rich, and that’s worse than being poor. There’s no taste in middle-class rich. You must be either very rich or very poor. There’s absolutely no taste in between. I was sent to some good schools, but I hated the rich boys. They had no taste.”
– Gerald Clarke, “Capote: A Biography”
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