Wuthering
Expectations

  A Distinguished Crankologist

Thursday, March 4, 2021

Balzac's "Philosophical Studies" - it will be necessary to defend THE CHURCH

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Balzac retroactively organized the pieces of his evolving “Human Comedy” into big categories, some obvious, like “Scenes from Parisian Life,...
Wednesday, March 3, 2021

Flaubert's aesthetics vis The Temptation of Saint Anthony - “He believes, like a brute, in the reality of things” - not quite!

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I suggested to The Argumentative Old Git that Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony has a lot in common with Goethe’s Faust, Pt. II , and...
8 comments:
Tuesday, March 2, 2021

Flaubert's Saint Anthony - all together these horizontal and perpendicular lines, indefinably multiplied, would resemble a monstrous skeleton

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American and Irish fantasies last week; French this week, beginning with the Gustave Flaubert’s semi-novel, his obsessive folly, La Tentatio...
3 comments:
Thursday, February 25, 2021

Consciousness shuddering in the void - more 1935 fantasy: Joseph O'Neill's Land Under England and C. L. Moore's Northwest Smith

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Two more fantasy books that are exact contemporaries with The Circus of Dr. Lao .  Real period specialists read a lot of third and fourth an...
3 comments:

"The world is my idea; as such I present it to you." - Charles Finney's The Circus of Dr. Lao

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To the left, we see the back cover of the 1964 Bantam edition of Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935), which I purchased for $...
7 comments:
Tuesday, February 23, 2021

a sub-department that sold full-sized Ferris wheels, merry-go-rounds, and roller coasters - Steven Millhauser piles things up

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Steven Millhauser won a Pulitzer for his novel Martin Dressler (1996) and somewhere around that time I read a review that must have impres...
Monday, February 22, 2021

“Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs” - some jolly bits of Richard II

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I fear I need a system, a structure, to get writing again.  What if I work backwards?  Let’s see, what is the last book I finished.  Oh no, ...
14 comments:
Friday, December 11, 2020

Émile Gaboriau's proto-mystery Corde au cou - "What would a policeman be who did not know how to disguise himself"

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“The great Gaboriau said, didn’t he? – ‘always suspect that which seems probable, and begin by believing what seems incredible.’” “If he s...
8 comments:
Tuesday, December 1, 2020

What I read in November, all in one place for some reason

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What I read in November, in list form, with light opinionation.  No idea what good this is to me, except psychologically, and I doubt that, ...
14 comments:
Monday, November 30, 2020

Brecht's great cowards, Mother Courage and Galileo - For war satisfies all needs, even those of peace

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One last gesture towards German Literature Month: Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1941) and Galileo (1947), both read in...
4 comments:
Monday, November 23, 2020

Thomas Mann's Young Joseph - "How well this clod of earth understands me!"

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Young Joseph (1934) is the second novel of four in Thomas Mann’s biblical YA fantasy series Joseph and His Brothers .  It is the cute littl...
11 comments:
Friday, November 13, 2020

“It’s like the bulls, reading, it’s a passion.” - various interesting bits of Joseph d'Arbaud's The Beast of Vaccares

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Some interesting things in or about Joseph d’Arbaud’s The Beast of Vaccares (1926). The framing narrator, a young Camargue cowboy, is giv...
8 comments:
Thursday, November 12, 2020

A return to the Camargue with Joseph d'Arbaud

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We all enjoyed our trip, several months ago, to the Rhone River delta, the Camargue, when we poked around in in Henri Bosco’s Malicroix (19...
6 comments:
Thursday, October 15, 2020

Felipe Alfau's Locos: A Comedy of Gestures - making the butterflies dance

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When I was first learning to root around in literature, Vintage International was the publisher with the spines that caught my attention.  T...
7 comments:
Wednesday, October 7, 2020

Frigyes Karinthy’s brain tumor memoir A Journey Round My Skull - “Who is he, anyhow?”

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John Gunther’s memoir Death Be Not Proud (1949), the account of his teenage son’s illness and death from a brain tumor, was one of the smal...
8 comments:
Wednesday, September 30, 2020

He’ll drink anything and you know it - some drinking in Appointment in Samarra, and some jazz - he was screaming with jazz

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John O’Hara wrote  Appointment in Samarra in 1934, but it is set in 1930.  The main character in 1930 is just about O’Hara’s age in 1934, c...
16 comments:
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