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Just as the street lamps came on the streetcar paused and went dark half a block down. It had slipped its trolley and against the last light of evening the pole groped blindly for the wire overhead, found it at last and came on again, slowly, but with all self-confidence gone; yet bearing its precious load of light caught from that magic wire with ( Read more... ) -
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I remember finding out you had access to the elevator that led down to the secret stacks. And the first elevator ride. You gave me no sign you had a thought in your head about me. Meanwhile my mind was racing. Some places that house books are clean and bright, and you could eat off the floor. Others are bleak cellars that entomb the dust that old ( Read more... ) -
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Might The Wolf of Wall Street give us a picture of what we can imagine Gatsby did during his five lost years? -
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I always question the intelligence of people who tell me stories *I* told them as if breaking news to me. But really I should be questioning my ability to read people, to know when people are listening. I was reading some of Gibbon, and I can't not hear in his tone (don't use that tone with me) something I never heard before. I think Boswell knew ( Read more... ) -
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Something is happening to me. I think I may have passed from the aesthetic to the ethical stage of life. How old were you when this happened? At the same time, I'm feeling sad-- these tiny knives-under-the-rib of nostalgia for places and what I thought were permanent situations I knew as a child. Getting old. Reading Beloved again and also loving ( Read more... ) -
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Slave-making instinct ( Read more... ) -
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"Pulp is an art of extreme possibility."
Totally readable essay on True Detective as murder ballad in LA Review of Books.
http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/bayou-far-road# -
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Reading Proust is a singular experience. It's slow. I find myself pausing after some paragraphs to consider some point or description, trying to decide if I agree or can locate some experience of my own that justifies or contradicts the idea. Few writers do this to me. Very few. I think the slowness is what has over the years allowed me to get ( Read more... ) -
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I read and tried to enjoy (but really didn't) Philip K. Dick's novel Ubik. The book describes some interesting things-- technology that allows communication between the living and the barely living cryogenically frozen -- and also a woman with powers of time travel who is employed to defeat or frustrate the powers of precogs, you know, those who ( Read more... ) -
How Proust is your Downton Abbey?
After the amazingly extravagant suggestion of the burrowing wasp; this is from page 95 in my antique Random House two-volume edition of the Moncrieff translation:
... in the same way Francoise had adopted to minister to her permanent and unfaltering resolution to render the house uninhabitable to any other servant, a series of crafty and pitiless ( Read more... )