Picked up books last week, not needing them, but hey.
A digest of Kafka’s diaries; good stuff, great random reading.
This is a great little anecdote:
Austerlitz is of course the name of a W.G. Sebald novel. From that novel:
I also picked up the sixth issue of Swords of Cerebus by Dave Sim. It’s a second printing and in terrible shape and I already have the issues in other forms (reprint and graphic novel) but it’s still a pretty rare find. And I am a nerd.
The book also includes a short little excellent wordless comic, “A Night on the Town,” where Cerebus parties with a corpse. I have the reprint somewhere else, but still:
“Our Friend Judith”
by Doris Lessing
I stopped inviting Judith to meet people when a Canadian woman remarked, with the satisfied fervour of one who has at last pinned a label on a rare specimen: “She is, of course, one of your typical English spinsters.”
This was a few weeks after an American sociologist, having elicited from Judith the facts that she was fortyish, unmarried and living alone, had enquired of me: “I suppose she has given up?” “Given up what?” I asked: and the subsequent discussion was unrewarding.
Judith did not easily come to parties. She would come after pressure, not so much-on felt-to do one a favour, but in order to correct what she believed to be a defect in her character. “I really ought to enjoy meeting new people more than I do,” she said once. We reverted to an earlier pattern of our friendship: odd evenings together, an occasional visit to the cinema, or she would telephone to say: “I’m on my way past you to the British Museum . Would you care for a cup of coffee with me? I have twenty minutes to spare.”
It is characteristic of Judith that the word spinster, used of her, provoked fascinated speculation about other people. There are my aunts for instance: aged seventy-odd, both unmarried, one an ex-missionary from China, one a retired matron of a famous London hospital. These two ladies live together under the shadow of the cathedral in a country town. They devote much time to the Church to good causes, to letter writing with friends all over the world, to the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren of relatives. It would be a mistake, however, on entering a house in which nothing has been moved for fifty years, to diagnose a condition of fossilized late-Victorian integrity. They read every book reviewed in the Observer or the Times, so that I recently got a letter from Aunt Rose enquiring whether I did not think that he author of On the Road was not-perhaps?-exaggerating his difficulties. They know a good deal about music, and write letters of encouragement to young composers they feel are being neglected!– “You must understand that anything new and original takes time to be understood.” Well-informed and critical Tories, they are as likely to dispatch telegrams of protest to the Home Secretary as letters of support. These ladies, my aunts Emily and Rose, are surely what is meant by the phrase English spinster. And yet, once the connection has been pointed out, there is no doubt that Judith and they are spiritual cousins, if not sisters. Therefore it follows that one’s pitying admiration for women who have supported manless and uncomforted lives needs a certain modification? Continue reading ““Our Friend Judith” — Doris Lessing”
Biblioklept 