Wuthering
Expectations

  A Distinguished Crankologist

Thursday, August 6, 2020

Witcraft in 1801 and 1851, starring William Hazlitt and Marian Evans - she came to suspect him of ‘excès de raison’, and began to lose interest

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The 1801 and 1851 chapters of Jonathan Rée’s Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English are both built around writers I do not normal...
5 comments:
Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Witcraft in 1701 and 1751 - leaving the modern philosopher with no excuse for saying ‘things which he doth not understand’

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Onward into Jonathan Rée’s Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English .   I have reached “1701: Politics, religion and the two new phi...
2 comments:
Tuesday, August 4, 2020

every simple shewsay is either a yeasay or a naysay - Jonathan Rée’s Witcraft, 1601 & 1651 - The jokes are not always funny

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The first chapter of Jonathan Rée’s Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English is titled “1601: Philosophy Learns English.”   It is m...
10 comments:
Monday, August 3, 2020

Jonathan Rée’s Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English, some applause - in fact they save us from reading them at all

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I would like to – no, I will – spend some time with Jonathan Rée’s Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English (2019), a history of mo...
2 comments:
Sunday, August 2, 2020

John O'Hara domesticates Hemingway - It had been a very fine experience

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By using such details, O’Hara almost single-handedly invented what came to be known as the New Yorker story.   (Frank MacShane, “Introducti...
9 comments:
Friday, July 31, 2020

John O'Hara's pandemic story "The Doctor's Son" - If you wanted an ice cream soda you had to have it put in a cardboard container

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The first story in Collected Stories of John O’Hara (1984) is “The Doctor’s Son” (1935), about the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.   Several mon...
7 comments:
Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Huxley changes into Huxley - who was speaking, according to a well-authenticated tradition, about his own genius

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Aldous Huxley wrote good literary criticism, travel writing, art criticism, short stories, as well as four novels during the 1920s, all loos...
3 comments:
Monday, July 27, 2020

Huxley and the "pessimism of outlook" of the 1920s, with help from George Orwell and William Pritchard - twelve buttocks slabbily resounding

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Brave New World (1932) was the first book assigned at the University of Kansas, long, oh so long ago, in a course naively titled “Western C...
4 comments:
Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Tender Is the Night has some good writing - Fitzgerald's Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!

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Tender Is the Night , F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel about the decline and fall of a talented psychiatrist, is full of fine writing, begin...
2 comments:
Thursday, July 16, 2020

Georges Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest - a long monologue that I listened to without understanding it

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Finally, I have finished Georges Bernanos’s Journal d'un curé de campagne ( Diary of a Country Priest , 1936), a 285-page novel that ha...
19 comments:
Monday, July 13, 2020

Thomas Mann's The Stories of Jacob - we know the stories in which it all comes to pass

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Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers (1933-43) is on the one hand a 1,500 page monster that decompresses roughly the second half of Genesi...
2 comments:
Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Yourcenar's taxidermy squirrels and Cocteau's Round Table - recent reading in French

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See here – voici – the books I read in French in June that are not Diary of a Country Priest (1937) by Georges Bernanos, which is still in...
4 comments:
Monday, July 6, 2020

Graham Greene walks through Liberia in Journey Without Maps - I had discovered in myself a passionate interest in living.

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Graham Greene spent four weeks in 1935 on vacation in Liberia, with a taste of Sierra Leone and Guinea, walking through the upland forests. ...
8 comments:
Saturday, June 20, 2020

Filling out the thumpety-thump with Nabokov, Waugh, West, and Wang Wei, the last of the "read in May" pile - “It’s a heartbreaking game.”

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Well into June, the last four books I read in May, quickly dispatched. Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark (1932), one of Nabokov’s Be...
18 comments:
Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Woolf's Waves and Faulkner's stories - more books I read in May - I love tremendous and sonorous words

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More books I read in May. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931).   A difficult book.   It pushes Woolf’s ideas about the representation of con...
30 comments:
Monday, June 15, 2020

The enchanted novels of Sigrid Undset and Marly Youmans

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About a year ago I read The Wreath (1920), the first volume of Sigrid Undset’s 14th century Norwegian domestic epic Kristin Lavransdatter ....
2 comments:
Tuesday, June 9, 2020

the rest of my French reading in May - André Breton's war and Jean Giraudoux's peace

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Two authors, aside from Kessel, filled out my May reading in French, André Breton and Jean Giraudoux. Nadja (1928), Breton’s novel-like t...
4 comments:
Monday, June 8, 2020

Joseph Kessel's days of adventure - Abyssinia, Berlin, Barcelona, Kenya

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Joseph Kessel was a real discovery for me when I was in France.   A journalist and novelist, he was a major French writer who barely exists,...
4 comments:
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