Saturday, August 31, 2024

Books I read in August 2024

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My ambition this summer was to read extensively in Arabic literature.  Eh, I did all right, but I will have to save Ibn Battuta’s Travels a...
11 comments:
Monday, August 26, 2024

You drool from it. You are happy. - Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit

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Finally, I have finished Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), known in English as Journey to the End of Night .  That...
3 comments:
Saturday, August 17, 2024

Jeremy Denk plays Charles Ives and Blind Tom Wiggins - a pleasing conjunction of Wuthering Expectations stuff

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More Massachusetts semi-literay adventures. Last weekend I was at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts, enjoying Jeremy Denk’s performance of ...
2 comments:
Friday, August 9, 2024

Books I read, and desks I saw, in July - hoping he might tell me, / tell me what the waves don't know

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Right, July, July, so long ago.  I was on the road a little bit, making literary pilgrimages.  Pittsfield, Massachusetts, for example, to He...
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Tuesday, July 2, 2024

Books Read in June 2024 - "Why can't we steal the calm vegetable clairvoyance of these great rooted lives?"

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Three weeks in Portugal meant less and different reading. FICTION Wolf Solent (1929), John Cowper Powys – among the most eccentric nove...
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Monday, July 1, 2024

Three weeks in Portugal

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I was in Portugal for three weeks in June.  Five hours a day for four days I was in this inlingua classroom in Porto , or one much like it: ...
6 comments:
Wednesday, June 5, 2024

The Making of Americans as conceptual art - I have already made several diagrams

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Sometime I will be able to make a diagram.  I have already made several diagrams.  I will sometime make a complete diagram and that will be ...
3 comments:
Tuesday, June 4, 2024

Stein's style - Mostly no one will be wanting to listen, I am certain

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Not many find it interesting this way I am realizing every one, not any I am just now hearing, and it is so completely an important thing, i...
Monday, June 3, 2024

everything in a being is always repeating - reading Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans

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Since I actually read the thing for some reason I will write some notes on Gertrude Stein’s enormous The Making of Americans: Being a Histor...
8 comments:
Saturday, June 1, 2024

Books Read in May 2024 – Some are certainly knowing what they are meaning, some are certainly not knowing what they are meaning.

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A month without writing anything.  Plenty of reading, though. FICTIONS The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), James Weldon John...
2 comments:
Wednesday, May 1, 2024

Books I Read in April 2024 - this irritation passes over into patient completed understanding

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Grinding away at Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925), a genuine monster.  “As I was saying it is often irritating to listen to ...
Monday, April 22, 2024

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's La plus secrète mémoire des hommes - one of his objectives was to be original without being original

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La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (2021) by Senegalese novelist Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, published in English as The Most Secret History of M...
1 comment:
Thursday, April 11, 2024

Books I read in March 2024 - Literature was a game of pillaging, and this book showed it.

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A nice little run at Persian literature this month.  And I am reading in Portuguese again, slowly, slowly. PERSIAN LITERATURE, MOSTLY CLAS...
4 comments:
Monday, April 8, 2024

Ferdowsi's Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings - No one has any knowledge of those first days unless he has heard tales passed down from father to son

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My little Persian literature syllabus in March was built on Aboloqasem Ferdowsi’s gigantic epic Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (1010)...
2 comments:
Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Metamorphoses, Books XI to XV - The whole of it flows

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I had better finish up Ovid’s Metamorphoses before I forget what was in it.  It is full of memorable things, but I have limits.  Books XI t...
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