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editor
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 Posted: Sat Aug 02, 2008 7:40 am Post subject: |
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Kill 'em with kindness.
The Best of Wodehouse
An Anthology
Hardcover
With an excellent introduction by that literary swell himself,
Sir John Mortimer
| Quote: | The Gestapo interrupted a game of cricket Wodehouse was playing with fellow inmates and removed him from prison. He was taken to Berlin, where he was confined, under constant supervision, in more luxurious quarters in the Hotel Adlon. There followed the series of broadcasts that had such dire consequences for the author. Their tone was, of course, far from serious. ... He told his listeners that there was a good deal to be said for internment as it allowed you to get on with your reading; 'the chief drawback is that it means your being away from home a good deal'. He described the sergeant in charge of internees at Le Touquet as 'a genial soul ... infusing the whole thing [with] a pleasant atmosphere of the school treat.' His general attitude was self-deprecating and he showed his determination to make the best of things. He joked that in prison all he had wanted was for the guards to look the other way 'and leave the rest to me', in return for which he offered to hand over 'India [and] an autographed set of my books'. The price he had to pay turned out to be much higher. ...
... The attack was led by a journalist, William Connor, who wrote under the name of 'Cassandra' in the Daily Mirror. In a broadcast, Connor accused Wodehouse of selling his country to the Nazis for the price of a soft bed in a luxury hotel. He said that Wodehouse was a traitor and compared him, unfavourably, to many anti-Nazis confined in prisons who hadn't sold their souls for 'thirty pieces of silver.' Connor continued his attack in the Daily Mirror and by the end of the war Wodehouse's reputation was at its lowest ebb. Trying, as usual, to take the light-hearted view, he wrote that he had not experienced such unusual displeasure since, as a boy, he broke the curate's umbrella. ...
I learnt a most astonishing thing from Edward Cazalet's archive. After the war Wodehouse met William Connor, his principal persecutor. They had lunch, 'Cassandra' was unable to resist the Wodehouse charm and they became friends. This fact also seems to prove that P.G. Wodehouse was a very nice man indeed.
In time, England forgave his broadcasts. He was made a knight and, to his great amusement, his effigy was exhibited in Madame Tussaud's. (-- pgs. xiv-xv) |
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editor
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| Posted: Sat Aug 02, 2008 7:46 am Post subject: |
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Don't neglect the classics, which may provide excellent grist for the literary mill later on.
The Best of Wodehouse
An Anthology
Hardcover
With an excellent introduction by that literary swell himself,
Sir John Mortimer
| Quote: | I've had the privilege of looking through the Wodehouse archive in the home of Sir Edward Cazalet, a retired High Court judge whose grandmother married Wodehouse. So I've been able to see Plum's school reports, all excellent, which show that he not only studied Shakespeare but Greek drama and Latin poetry. In time, these great works would echo through his books. He also read Browning and Tennyson and the works of Jerome K. Jerome, and was captivated by the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. When he saw Patience he was, he wrote, 'absolutely drunk with ecstasy'. Gilbert's lyrics not only had a profound effect on Gershwin's songs, but also inspired Wodehouse when he came to write for the musical theatre.
In his excellent Life of Wodehouse Robert McCrum identifies the masters at Dulwich who most influenced the author. Among them was Philip Hope, who could rattle off sentences in Greek and Latin. Wodehouse apparently shared this ability, and was able to construct the most complicated sentences with grammatical accuracy.
...
Jeeves is not only a richly comic character, he fulfills a desperate need in all of us. What would we not do for an enigmatic presence to glide in with a cup of early-morning tea, solve all our problems, correct our mistakes and even give us sound advice on the choice of shirts.
Jeeves is also a walking dictionary of quotations, and as such very useful to his employer who is partial to a literary allusion but whose graspe of the classics is rather tenuous. In an early story, 'Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest,' Bertie has an amusing slant on the role of unexpected doom in Greek drama: 'I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare - or, if not, it's some equally brainy lad - who says that it's always just when a chappie is feeling particularly tophole and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.' In Thank You, Jeeves, his recollection of poetry learnt at school is even more vague. After he meets a striking girl he says, 'Jeeves, who was the fellow who on looking at something felt like somebody looking at something?' Of course Jeeves knows the quotation: 'I fancy the individual you have in mind, sir, is the poet Keats, who compared his emotions on first reading Chapman's Homer to those of stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific.' (-- pgs. ix-xi) |
| Quote: | Chapman's Homer
Paperback
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| Posted: Sat Aug 02, 2008 9:03 am Post subject: |
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Collect at least a few of Hemingway's 'five-dollar words' and give them latitude. Start your collection here.
From Losing Streak:
The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
Tits-Up in a Ditch
By Annie Proulx
June 9 and 16/08
| Quote: | "Had me some luck today. Goddam cow got herself tits-up in the ditch couple days ago. Dead, time I found her," he said in a curiously satisfied tone, squinting through faded lashes, winking his eyes, the same aquamarine as those of the wayward Shaina.
"Not every man would say that is luck," Bonita said wearily. She went to the sink, stepping over Bum, Verl's ancient heeler crippled by cow kicks, and began scrubhbing out the only pot large enough to boil potatoes in quantity, a pot she washed and used several times a day.
"It is, in a way of speakin."
She couldn't have puzzled that one out even if she had had the time. With Verl, it was one thing after another. He went into the national forest to cut wood every fall, and she knew that he someday would cut himself in half with his cranky old chain saw. She almost hoped he would.
For Verl Lister everything turned on luck, and he had experienced very little of the good kind. ... (-- p. 82) |
| Quote: | | They passed the Match ranch, unchanged, and turned onto Sixteen Mile. The days were shortening, but there was still plenty of light, the top of Table Butte, layered bands of buff, gamboge, and violet, gilded by the setting sun. The shallow river, as yellow as lemon rind, lay flaccid between denuded banks. The dying sun hit the willows, transforming them into fiery wands. Light reflected off the road as from glass. They seemed to be travelling through a hammered red landscape in which ranch buildings appeared dark and sorrowful. She knew what blood-soaked ground was, knew that severed arteries squirted like the back-yard hose. A dog came out of the ditch and ran into a stubble field. They passed the Persa ranch, where the youngest son had drowned in last spring's flood. She realized that every ranch she passed had lost a boy, lost boys early and late, boys smiling, sure in their risks, healthy, tipped out of the current of life by liquor and acceleration, rodeo smash-ups, bad horses, deep irrigation ditches, high trestles, tractor rollovers, and unsecured truck doors. Her boy, too. This was the waiting darkeness that surrounded ranch boys, the dangerous growing up that cancelled out their favored status. The trip along this road was a roll call of grief. Wind began to lift the fine dust, and the sun set in haze. (-- p. 95) |
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editor
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| Posted: Sat Aug 16, 2008 9:44 am Post subject: |
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Work to eat, yes, but 'reduce no Human Spirit/To Disgrace of Price.'
Good Poems
Selected by Garrison Keillor
Hardcover
| Quote: | Emily Dickinson
Publication -- is the Auction
Of the Mind of Man --
Poverty -- be justifying
For so foul a thing
Possibly -- but We -- would rather
From Our Garret go
White -- Unto the White Creator --
Than invest -- Our Snow --
Thought belong to Him who gave it --
Then -- to Him Who bear
Its Corporeal illustration -- Sell
The Royal Air --
In the Parcel -- Be the Merchant
Of the Heavenly Grace --
But reduce no Human Spirit
To Disgrace of Price --
(-- p. 279) |
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| Posted: Sat Aug 16, 2008 10:29 am Post subject: |
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Poetry readings, book clubs - ugh!
Good Poems
Selected by Garrison Keillor
Hardcover
| Quote: | poetry readings
Charles Bukowski
poetry readings have be some of the saddest
damned things ever,
the gathering of the clansmen and clanladies,
week after week, month after month, year
after year,
getting old together,
reading on to tiny gatherings,
still hoping their genius will be
discovered,
making tapes together, discs together,
sweating for applause
they read basically to and for
each other,
they can't find a New York publisher
or one
within miles,
but they read on and on
in the poetry holes of America,
never daunted,
never considering the possibility that
their talent might be
thin, almost invisible,
they read on and on
before their mothers, their sisters, their husbands,
their wives, their friends, the other poets
and the handful of idiots who have wandered
in
from nowhere.
I am ashamed for them,
I am ashamed that they have to bolster each other,
I am ashamed for their lisping egos,
their lack of guts.
if these are our creators,
please, please give me something else.
a drunken plumber at a bowling alley,
a prelim boy in a four rounder,
a jock guiding his horse through along the
rail,
a bartender on last call,
a waitress pouring me a coffee,
a drunk sleeping in a deserted doorway,
a dog munching a dry bone,
an elephant's fart in a circus tent,
a 6 p.m. freeway crush,
the mailman telling a dirty joke
anything
anything
but these.
(-- pgs. 277-278) |
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2008 8:58 am Post subject: |
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Protect your grift. Lie if you have to. Whine.
From Losing Streak:
Harper's
Magazine Subscription
Paper Pushkin
[Resignation]
September, 2008
| Quote: | From two 1824 letters by Aleksandr Pushkin to Aleksandr Kaznacheev. The first is in response to an assignment to investigate the extermination of locusts that Pushkin refused to undertake; the second concerns his resignation from the Russian Foreign Ministry, where he worked for seven years. The letters are included in Pushkin: Documents Toward a Biography 1799–1829, published last year in Russia by Iskusstvo. Count Woronzof, the deputy authority of the province of Bessarabia, was Pushkin’s boss. Kaznacheev was the head of Woronzof’s chancellery. Pushkin later admitted to a friend that he lied about his aneurysm in order to gain his freedom. Translated from the Russian and the French by Simona Schneider.
Esteemed Aleksandr Ivanovich,
Bureaucratic procedure is entirely foreign to me. I don't even know if I have the right to respond to His Higness's orders. Whatever may happen, I trust in your indulgence and must dare to give an honest explanation of my situation.
For seven years I was remiss in my duties: I did not author a single paper, I did not communicate with any superior. These seven years, as you well know, were totally wasted. Complaints would be inappropriate on my part. I set obstacles in my own path and chose a different goal. For God's sake, don't think that I looked upon poetic creation with the childish vanity of a rhymester or as a sensitive man's respite: it is simply my craft, an honest type of industry, which earns me my livelihood and independence. I think Count Woronzof won't wish to deprive me of either the former or the latter.
I'll be told that because I receive 700 rubles a year I am obliged to serve. You know that it is possible to be part of the book trade only in Moscow or Saint Petersburg, as the journalists, censors, and booksellers are there; I constantly have to decline the most advantageous offers for the sole reason that I am located far away from the capital. It suits the government to compensate me for my losses in some way, and thus I receive those 700 rubles not as a functionary's salary but as the allowance of an exiled prisoner. I am prepared to refuse them if I cannot be in control of my own time and occupation. I'm going into these details because I value the opinion of Count Woronzof, as I do yours, as I do the opinion of any honest person.
I know this letter is enough to destroy me, as they say.
(If the Count orders me to send in my resignation, I am ready; but I feel that I am losing a lot and am not expecting to gain anything.)
One last word: you perhaps are not aware that I have an aneurysm. For eight years already I have been carrying death with me. I can show evidence from my doctor. Is it really not possible to leave me in peace for the remainder of my life, which surely won't be prolonged?
Please accept my deepest respect and heartfelt devotion.
Staff Secretary
Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
(-- pgs. 27-28) |
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| Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2008 12:26 pm Post subject: |
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America, I Like You
Hardcover
By P.G. Wodehouse
Practise your speaking with a few notable tongue-twisters.
| Quote: | I have always had only the most rudimentary gift of speech. I was reading a book the other day entitled How to Become a Charming Conversationalist, and it took all the heart out of me.
"Are you audible?" it asked me. "Are you clear? Pleasant? Flexible? Vigorous? Well modulated? Acceptable in pronunciation? Agreeable in laughter?" And the answer was No. I was husky, hoarse, muffled, thick, indistinct, glottal, monotonous, jumbled, unacceptable in pronunciation and disagreeable in laughter - in short, the very opposite of Thomas Lomonaco, the courteous and popular Brooklyn taxi driver who was driving his taxi one afternoon not long ago at Jamaica Avenue and Seventy-fifth Street when he was hailed by Elmer Hinitz.
"Gimme about fifty cents' worth," said Elmer Hinitz.
At Eightieth Street he produced a switch knife and, leaning forward, tapped Thomas Lomonaco on the shoulder.
"This is a stick-up," he announced.
"No. Really?" said Mr. Lomonaco, interested.
"Yah. Slip me your money or I will expunge you."
"I see your point," said Mr. Lomonaco, "and I can fully appreciate your desire to add to your savings, with times as hard as they are in this disturbed postwar era. But your whole plan of campaign is rendered null and void by the fact that I have no money. Would it soften your disappointment if I offered you one of my cigarettes? They are mild. They satisfy."
Mr. Hinitz accepted a cigarette and the conversation proceeded along pleasant lines as far as 118th Street and Jamaica Avenue, when Mr. Lomonaco said, "Say, look. Do you know the police station.?"
Mr. Hinitz said he did not.
"Most picturesque," said Mr. Lomonaco. "You'll like it. Let's drive there."
And his talk was so convincing that Mr. Hinitz immediately agreed. A good idea, he said, and he is now in custody, held in $1,000 bail.
... Obviously a man who must have spent months, if not years, standing in front of a mirror, stretching his muscles, raising himself on tiptoe, rolling the head from side to side and repeating a hundred times the words "Give me a box of mixed biscuits, a mixed biscuit box, and sell me some short silk socks and shimmering satin sashes."
For this - in addition to lying on your back with a heavy wieght on your stomach and shouting "Li-yah! Li-yah!" - is apparently what you have to do to become a convincing talker ... (From Thanks for the Memory, Such As It Is, pgs. 5-6) |
Fight writer's block with the latest volume of Bartlett's Familiar.
| Quote: | Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
Paperback
By John Bartlett
... To seize pen and paper and mail my resignation to the Globe was with me the work of an instant. Then, bubbling over with hope and ambition, I took a room at the Hotel Duke down in Greenwich Village and settled in with a secondhand typewriter, paper, pencils, envevlopes and Bartlett's book of Familiar Quotations, that indispensable adjunct to literary success.
I wonder if Bartlett has been as good a friend to other authors as he has been to me. I don't know where I would have been all these years without him. It so happens that I am not very bright and find it hard to think up anything really clever without assistance, but give me my Bartlett and I will slay. How many erudite little article of mine could not have been written without his never failing sympathy, encouragement and advice. ...
One rather unpleasant result of this continual bulging process is that Bartlett today has become frightfully mixed. It is like a conservative old club that has had to let down the barriers and let in a whole lot of rowdy young new members who lower the tone. ... (From Hi, Bartlett!, pgs. 55-56) |
Know thyself, yes, and know thy public, such as it is.
| Quote: | ... I should describe myself as a sort of fair to medium, not on the one hand a socko and yet, on the other, not laying a definite egg. The books I write seem to appeal to a rather specialized public. Invalids read me. So do convicts. And I am all right with the dog stealers. ...
My popularity with invalids puts me in something of a quandary. Naturally I like my stories to be read as widely as possible, but, kindhearted by nature, I do not feel altogether happy when I gather that some form of wasting sickness is an essential preliminary to their perusal. And such seems to be the case. ...
It is not difficult to see what a dilemma this places me in. I need readers, and in order to have readers I must have invalids. And as soon as they become convalescent, I lose them. If you want to see a mind in a ferment of doubt and indecision, take a look at mine when the papers announce that another epidemic has broken out and hundreds are taking to their beds. One moment I am thinking how sad it all is, the next saying "My Public!" and wondering what the royalties will amount to. ...
I have had so many letters over the years from convicts that I have begun to think that the American criminal must look on one or more of my works as an essential part of his kit. I seem to see the burglar's mother sending him off for the night shift.
"Another glass of hot milk, Clarence?"
"No, thank you, Mother. I must be going."
"Yes, it is getting late. Are you well wrapped up?"
"Yes, Mother."
"Have you everything you need? Gat? Brass knucks? Wodehouse novel? Oxyacetylene blowpipe?Trinitrotoluol? Mask?" ... (From Put Me among the Earls, pgs. 75-79) |
Even one's adversaries may be foiled by le mot juste!
The Swoop! and Other Stories by P.G. Wodehouse
Hardcover
| Quote: | | In this connection it is interesting to note that in the 1939-45 war the German Intelligence - the Abwehr - used Wodehouse's novels as source material in equipping and briefing agents destined to be dropped by parachute in England. Their instinct here was sound enough, but as so often happened with them, the execution was faulty, and an unfortunate agent was actually launched on an under-cover mission in Cambridgeshire wearing spats, which, of course, led to his almost immediate apprehension. It was as though we had dropped in Bavaria an agent arrayed in leather shorts, decorated braces and smoking an enormous meerschaum pipe. (From Appreciation by Malcolm Muggeridge, p. x) |
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| Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2008 10:11 am Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet
Paperback
Translated and with a Foreward by Stephen Mitchell
| Quote: | | No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. (-- pgs. 6-7) |
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| Posted: Tue Nov 04, 2008 1:57 pm Post subject: |
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Working at Dairy Queen may be preferable to battling the blank page.
The New York Times Magazine
Subscription
Those who write, teach
But can an artist survive success in the academy?
By David Gessner
Sept. 21/08
| Quote: | A typical creative-writing professor has four months of summer vacation; teaches passionate young people a subject they actually want to learn about (and often enjoy); carries a light two-class load per term that is the envy of professors in other departments; and gains both a sense of belonging and ego satisfaction as a pillar — even a star — of a small, intense community of writers and readers. Furthermore, in a time when it is increasingly difficult for literary writers to support themselves through their writing, professorships provide an attractive alternative to working as a bookstore clerk, carpenter’s helper or busboy. The benefits have proved appealing enough to draw thousands of writers into the university fold, and while a couple of generations ago it might have been a surprise to find a writer who taught at a college, now it’s a surprise to find one who doesn’t.
Writers who have been lucky enough to land these gigs are inclined to talk — when we aren’t grumbling — about their good fortune in sensible language, citing all that is sane, healthy, balanced and economically viable about their jobs. But another question is discussed less. What exactly does all this teaching do to our writing? And what, if anything, does it mean for a country to have a tenured literature? ...
For most of us, the options aren’t teaching or writing all day in a barn but teaching or working at the Dairy Queen. It’s not just a question of success or even genius, but temperament and discipline. Young writers think all they need is time, but give them that time and watch them implode. After all, there’s something basically insane about sitting at a desk and talking to yourself all day, and there’s a reason that writers are second only to medical students in instances of hypochondria. In isolation, our minds turn on us pretty quickly. I have two writer friends, successful novelists who could afford not to teach, who insist that rather than detract from their writing, their lives as professors are what allow them to write, and that given more free time, they would crumble. The job provides a safety net above the abyss of facing the difficulty of creating every day, making an irrational thing feel more rational. (-- pgs. 66-68) |
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| Posted: Sun Nov 16, 2008 12:34 pm Post subject: |
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Harness misery and celebrate its expression by others as a bit of luck!
The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
Works on Paper
The letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
By Dan Chiasson
Nov. 3/08
| Quote: | Bad childhoods are a human misfortune, but for writers they are often a stroke of luck. Both Lowell and Bishop were aware that growing up lonely sponsored their imaginative lives. In the seventies, Lowell, in his great poem “Ulysses and Circe,” chose a baffled and emasculated Ulysses for his self-portrait. A few years earlier, Bishop, in “Crusoe in England,” had picked, for hers, a retired Robinson Crusoe nostalgic for his island days.
Both were ways of representing an essential strandedness that had its origins in childhood. Lowell was the unwanted only child of a belittling mother and a father who grew, in Lowell’s eyes, “apathetic and soured.” Bishop’s father had died when she was eight months old. When she was five, her mother was placed permanently in a sanitarium. Bishop never saw her again, though her mother lived nearly twenty more years. Bishop was then subjected to several experiments in child rearing. She was happy in Nova Scotia with her mother’s parents, but her father’s parents, burghers in Worcester, Massachusetts, felt they could provide better for her. That arrangement soon failed, and she was sent to live with her aunt Maud, in Revere, Massachusetts. Maud nursed her back from the ailments she suffered in Worcester: asthma, bronchitis, eczema, symptoms of St. Vitus’ dance, and allergies to practically everything in her grandparents’ house. (Later, reading Proust, she discovered a voluble fellow asthma sufferer and decided wryly that she hadn’t “capitalized” enough on her condition.) Aunt Maud had pet canaries and Italian neighbors with beautiful surnames that Bishop never forgot.
Poets live on two tracks: on one, life chugs along in the usual ways. On the other, art, which starts late but soon catches up, has its own landmarks and significant episodes. Interiority isn’t mapped by biographical fact; that happens on the other track. And so “life” is an exceedingly difficult and unpromising subject for art. Bishop aimed for a dispassionate, even eerie objectivity, an effect that was incompatible with autobiographical writing. Lowell, the gifted parodist of persons and manners, found it comparatively easy to turn to his own person and manners, but in doing so he risked giving up the dazzling special effects of his early, Miltonic poems.
Compared with all the grand things that people have done with poems—justifying the ways of God to men, shoring fragments against their ruins, and so on—telling one’s life story in more or less factual terms might seem to be a very modest goal. But Lowell was obsessed by the idea that this could be done without sacrificing poetry’s ambition, its power and sweep. “Confessional” poetry—a brand inadvertently launched by Lowell’s groundbreaking 1959 book, “Life Studies”—is in his practice really self-satire with the sadness left in. Bishop had a distaste for the “suffering business” of confessional poetry, but she loved “Life Studies,” and thinking about why she loved it helped her define her own, very different method:
I am green with envy of your kind of assurance. I feel that I could write in as much detail about my Uncle Artie, say—but what would be the significance? Nothing at all. He became a drunkard, fought with his wife, and spent most of his time fishing . . . and was ignorant as sin. . . . Whereas all you have to do is put down the names! And the fact that it seems significant, illustrative, American, etc., gives you, I think, the confidence you display about tackling any idea or theme, seriously, in both writing and conversation. In some ways you are the luckiest poet I know!
No poet wants to hear that he is lucky, and Lowell never responded to this rather damning praise. What makes him a great poet isn’t confidence about his own centrality but his yearning, brilliantly expressed throughout his work, for rest, for peace, for an integrated life. “I am tired,” he wrote. “Everyone’s tired of my turmoil.” (-- p. 108) |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Feb 17, 2009 3:28 pm Post subject: |
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Write what people are really interested in: cards, money, gold and things like that.
From Punters:
COUNTRY LIFE
Magazine Subscription
Licence to Thrill
This is the year of James Bond. Michael Murray-Fennell visits two new exhibitions showing the reality, fantasy and imagery of 007's world
April 17/08
| Quote: | Ian Fleming grew up in the shadow of his older brother. After a scandal with a prostitute at Sandhurst, he flitted from journalism to banking. The Second World War saved him from a life indulging in the typical Bond pursuits of philandering and gambling.
Unlike his fictional alter ego, Fleming saw out the war from behind a desk, as assistant to Admiral John Godfrey - director of naval intellligence, a surrogate father figure, and prototype for Bond's boss, M. Deep within the Admiralty's nerve centre, Fleming planned raids and operations with the same meticulous detail that he would bring to his thrillers.
But the world was a different place in 1952 when he sat down in his Jamaican retreat to write the 'spy story to end all spy stories.' Gone were the 'Red Indian days' of the Second World War. Instead, the cloak-and-dagger world of the Cold War looms large over the series.
Actual accounts of defections and assassinations inspired several Bond plots. Sometimes Fleming even appeared to forecast events: Thunderball's threat of nuclear attack of Miami anticipated the Cuban missile crisis of two year later.
However, the politics wasn't the real appeal of Fleming's novels. 'We're the only two writers,' he confided to Somerset Maugham, 'who write about what people are really interested in: cards, money, gold and things like that.'
He was being kind to Maugham - nobody does it better than Fleming. His connoisseur's account of Bond's drink of choice puts the cinematic 'shaken not stirred' version to shame: 'A dry martini. In a deep Champagne goblet. Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it well until it's ice cold, then add a thin slice of lemon peel."
Fleming was clear about his target audience - 'warmblooded heterosexuals in railways, airplanes or beds.' For a 1950s Britain, in the grip of rationing, aware of its diminishing role on the world stage, and with the sexual licence of the 1960s not yet on the horizon, the Bond books were escapist fantasies of exotic food, locations, thrills and women. (-- p. 119) |
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editor
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| Posted: Thu Feb 26, 2009 11:45 am Post subject: |
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Familial discord may be useful later on. In the meantime, read the world.
From Mortal Gambles:
Alfred and Emily
Hardcover
By Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing
| Quote: | So much has been written about mothers and daughters, and some of it by me. That nothing has ever much changed is illustrated by the old saying, 'She married to get away from her mother." Martha Quest was, I think, the first no-holds-barred account of a mother-and-daughter battle. It was cruel, that book. Would I do it now? But what I was doing was opart of the trying to get free. I would say Martha Quest was my first novel, being autobiographical and direct. My first novel, The Grass is Singing was the first of my real novels. ...
I hated my mother. I can remember that emotion from the start, which it is easy to date by the birth of my brother. Those bundling, rough, unkind, impatient hands: I was afraid of them and of her, but more of her unconscious strengths.
I was six when I ran away for the first time. ... I knew that when - if - I got to the station, they would not allow me on to a train. I was afraid and went meekly back home and into bed without anyone knowing. I did it again. This was a cry for help, like cutting one's wrists or taking an overdose. My mother's way of dealing with it was to ring up neighbours and, with fond laughter, tell them of my exploits. 'She got as far as the Matthews turn-off. What a silly child.'
It would never have occurred to her to think that she might be at fault. ...
And then I was thirteen and something very good happened, the best. I got measles, and with ten or so other girls was put into an empty house, without supervision, with medicines, meals brought in from the hospital and a nurse dropping in every day or so to look us over.
In those days quarantine for measles took six weeks. They put us on our honour not to go near any unathorized person.
Towards the end of the time some girls fretted, but if you are covered with a rash and feeling low there is little inducement to be seen by anyone. A couple of girls put on bathing costumes, lay around on the lawns and practised a haughty indifference to the boys who sometimes leaned along the fences, jeering. But all around the garden were big notices: 'Quarantine for Measles, Keep Out.' That was such a good time. Perfect isolation, peace, no pressures. I understood how I could be, how life might be. Letters came in. My mother wrote every day, saying she was arranging tutoring for this, lessons in that. Her letters made me wild with anger. Then she arrived at the perimeter fence, and gesticulated: she was leaving food parcels. We were stuffing ourselves with the good food they sent in, and did not need cake and sweets.
As usual, when I actually saw my mother, a lonely, unhappy, ill-looking woman, and her pleading eyes, I was wild with pity for her, and I wished, oh, wished, she would not come into town, send food, write letters. We were supposed to be doing homework; exercises of all kinds arrived regularly. I don't remember doing any. We sat about, tried on each other's clothes ... We talked, we did nothing, we dreamed. Of all the lucky things that have happened to me in my life, this dose of measles counts as one of the best. ...
Now I watch the struggles of adolescents with such feeling: their efforts to be themselves are often pathetic, foolish and misguided; they often know as little of what they are doing as I did, but they have to try, struggle, get free.
I had to get free. My battles with my mother with titanic. What were they about? Everything, nothing, but she was going frantic as I escaped her.
You won't let me live through you, you won't let me be you, you are killing me.
And I: No, I won't. Let me go. No, I won't - do whatever it was she had planned for me. (FromPart Two, Alfred and Emily; Two Lives, pgs. 178-183) |
Martha Quest
Paperback
The Grass Is Singing
Paperback
What's changed:
| Quote: | Now fast forward to the war years, and the problems of young women, fifteen or so of us. ...
What has to strike one is that they were all so well-read - compared with now, remarkably so. Nowadays, minds rotted by TV or the Internet, it is not rare to read a reviewer saying, apparently with pride, that he, she, cannot read War and Peace because it is long; or Ulysses, because it is difficult. Then it would not occur to readers to confess incapacity. (From A Women's Group, Informal, Casual, p. 189) |
What's missed:
| Quote: | Writers and poets have all claimed that the impact of the great Russian writers changed them. This was true of all Europe. I don't remember why I knew enought to order Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev and the rest, but I had the news from somewhere and I read and was amazed. No books have ever had such an effect on me as the great Russians. I think the perennial cry, 'The novel is dead,' is because none of us has written anything as good as War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Dostoyevsky. Quite simply they represent the peak and glory of literature. There have been a thousand learned articles explaining the reasons for this, but for me the fact of it is enough.
... From the Russians, then, to the French, with Stendhal my great love, and Balzac, and Zola.
The American writers were almost as much of a thrill as the Russians. Theodore Dreiser - but it seems no one reads him these days, yet he has written great novels - Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Hemingway, ... Scott Fitzgerald ... Faulkner, but he came later, and then the English writers ... Hardy has ever been a favorite, George Meredith ... Daniel Defoe, George Eliot, the Bronte Sisters, Jane Austen, and the mad, wonderful Tristram Shandy. (-- p. 185) |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2009 1:49 pm Post subject: |
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There is little value, if any, in the small presses.
From the Will to Win:
THROB
Number Two
* Collector's Item
| Quote: | | a magazine os suppurating poetry edited by F.A. Nettelbeck and published whenever there is some money on the table - hopefully quarterly by The Horseheard Nebula Press, mailing address: 15930 Kings Creek Rd., Boulder Creek, Calif. 95006 - 75 cents a copy, $2.50 per year's subscription, (be a patron for $50.00, fucker!) ... |
Charles Bukowski Answers 10 Easy Questions
("10 Easy Questions" shall be a regular feature of THROB and will envelop a different poet each issue. We hope to give you the clearer, more defined picture of the poet and his "excuse" and will continue with more bemusing questions in the future) ...
Summer-Fall, 1971
| Quote: | 3.) Do you think the small press scene really does any good?
It's a crutch for 9th rate talents, allowing them to build their prejudices and hatreds and dreams and to continue their bad writing. By "small press" I mean little magazines and little magazine editors who push publication of 9th rate talents into book form, mimeo or otherwise. The small press scene is particularly difficult upon wives and mothers who must support these 9th rate talents while they write 9th rate poetry. Of the poets I knew personally, 19 out of 20 are supported by either a wife or a mother. If these "poets" didn't have their little books and their little to magazine to point to, they'd be out digging ditches or pimping or doing something far more healthy than they are doing now. It's time for the wives and mothers to find out that their darlings have shit in their drawers.
4.) Who has been the most influential poet in regards to your own work?
Robinson Jeffers, especially in his longer narrative poems. However, poets really don't lift me too much. Some wild bird like Céline is really much better -- he knew how to laugh through the fire and the stink.
5.) How come you're so ugly?
I presume you're talking more about my face than about my writing. Well, the face is the product of 2 things: what you were born with and what has happened to you since you were born. My life has hardly been pretty - the hospitals, the jails, the jobs, the women, the drining. Some of my critics claim that I have deliberately inflicted myself with pain. I wish that some of my critics had been along with me for the journey. It's true that I haven't always chosen easy situations but that's a hell of a long ways from saying that I leaped into the oven and locked the door. Hangover, the electric needle, bad booze, bad women, madness in small rooms, starvation int he land of plenty, god knows how I got so ugly, I guess it just comes from being slugged and slugged again and again, and not going down, still trying to think, to feel, still trying to put the butterfly back together again...it's written a map on my face that nobody would ever want to hang on their wall.
Sometimes I'll see myself somewhere ...suddenly...say in a large mirror in a supermarket...eyes like little mean bugs...face scarred, twisted, yes, I look insane, demented, what a mess...spilled vomit of skin...yet, when I see the "handsome" men, I think, my god my god, I'm glad I'm not them. (-- p. 57)
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| Quote: | 8.) Does your cock still get as hard as you would like it to?
More on the aging of male, er, nether regions by novelist Philip Roth.
Nobody's cock gets as hard as they would like it to. But, being 51 this August 16th, I can't complain. I still go 2 pieces a day sometimes, maybe 4 pieces in 3 days, then a couple of days off. Of course, there are dry periods when I don't have a girl friend or don't look for one. I don't search women out. If they don't come to my door then it doesn't happen. A writer, of course, should have experience with women. There's much pain involved with me as I am sentimental and get quiite attached. I am not much of a lady's man and unless I get some help from the lady, not much happens. I'm not married now, have one child, 6. I've been lucky to have 4 long term relationships with 4 unusual women. They all treated me better than I deserved and they were very good on the love bed. Should I stop loving, fucking right now I believe I have been far more fortunate than most men. The gods have been good, the love has been fine, and the pain, the pain has arrived in boxcar loads. (-- p. 58) |
Apply the art of substitution liberally as required.
| Quote: | 10.) What would you say is the best brand of American beer on the market today?
Beer was much better before world war 2. It had tang and was filled with sharp little bubbles. It's wash now, strictly flat. You just do the best you can with it.
Beer is better to write with and talk with than whiskey. You can go longer and make more sense. Of course, much depends upon the talker and the writer. But beer is fattening, plenty, and it lessens the sex drive, I mean both the day you are drinking it and the day after. Heavy drinking and heavy loving seldom go hand in hand after the age of 35. I'd say a good chilled wine is the best way out and it should be drunken (drank) slowly after a meal, with just perhaps a small glass before eating.
Heavy drinking is a substitute for companionship and it's a substitute for suicide. It's a secondary way of life. I dislike drunks but I do suppose I take a little drink now and then myself. Amen. (-- p. 59) |
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editor
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 1:13 pm Post subject: |
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Follow the masters before you to the city of love, the city of light.
From Omens and Lucky Charms:
With the Skin
Poems of Aleksander Wat
Hardcover
Translated and edited by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan
| Quote: | Paris Revisited
At every new return
my first day in this city -
like the first day of creation:
and I see, I see that it's good.
Here a thousand voices
sound reveille to life!
The memory of places sings,
a pathetic cantatrice -
and her voice is not getting old
and her echo never fades
refracted from venerable stones
in eternal repetition
ever the same, not the same,
live, never dying,
woven into a frivolous
tune in the street.
Here a thousand voices
sound reveille to life!
Call and forbid you to die!
Summon, restore to life!
A thousand lips entice you!
A thousand charms cast spells:
fulgurant reason
in eyes met by chance,
a smile that opens lips
like a flower after the night,
sweet tenderness of the air
in the avenue of trimmed chestnuts,
a call of a wandering tune
and the smell of earthly foods
and a rainbow on the pavement
of an old church across the square ...
And a young man's faded shadow
who - so long ago! - was discovering
this world for the first time.
Here a thousand voices
sound reveille to life!
Rise from the dead,
son of misfortune!
Bow humbly to this land,
kiss the calloused hand
of the old city of Paris.
(-- pgs. 40-41) |
On the poet as visionary:
| Quote: | Poet
Is the poet, I thought, the one who, uninvited,
came to the feast of the Philistines?
And stood there, at the head of the table,
his hair piled up as a helmet.
Oh, how he towers over the council of armed Philistines!
He arrives from the lands where none of them wandered
and never will.
Where the final things clash against each other
and break like icebergs
and sink
or float away
toward new risings and settings of the sun,
which no one of them will see.
He could have carried before him his scorn like two torches -
but ignited love in one eye,
in the other, anger.
He could have, out of birds steaming on golden platter,
prophesied their triumph or defeat. Defeat, multiple defeat.
He could have yelped and with his stony fist
split in half bronze armor.
For he arrived and yet refused to be invited ... Or
he could have charmed himself into a white teal
and by one movement of wings
soared away, then falling stonelike down
on black waters
on carmine waves
of Styx ... Or, or
on pure waters
native
distant.
(-- p. 31) |
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editor
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Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Tue Apr 21, 2009 11:46 am Post subject: |
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Hold to the odd ancient fancy and await double vison.
From Losing Streak:
Changing on the Fly
The Best Lyric Poems of George Bowering
Paperback
| Quote: | JUST AS WE LOSE
Just as we lose the last innocence
one comes to tell us there's more;
her date of birth is unimaginable,
no one has seen her before.
Goodness and mercy are such temptations,
love is a bear in the street;
all our old friends are resting their angers,
shuffling their cards and their feet,
shuffling their hands and their feet -
calling off war with the last of our innocence
one swaggers down to defeat.
(-- p. 82) |
| Quote: | ... When you are a young poet you might not be clear about what a lyric poem is, except that it has something to do with sounding good accompanied by the poet's fingers on a lyre. M.H. Abrams, who assigned himself the task of defining literary terms for undergrads, said that a lyric poem is "any short poem presenting a single speaker (not necessarily the poet himself) who expresses a state of mind involving thought and feeling." That's not bad for a description that values a combination of terseness and clarity. In fact, I would argue only with the very "expresses." I hold to the ancient fancy that my poems are permitted from elsewhere, not squeezed from inside.
So here follows a collection of my lyric poems. They have dates on them - that's how it works. Time receives our signatures, and leaves its own on us and our work. These were occasions, as Rilke put it, when the poet was lucky enough to see the visible and the invisible at once.
George Bowering, 2004 (From Preface: Years of Lyrics) |
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