November 2016 – Biblioklept

My whole existence has always been simulated (From Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters)

November 30, 2016November 30, 2016 Biblioklept1 Comment

Sitting in the wing chair, I reflected that I had pretended to be shocked by Joana’s suicide and pretended to accept the Auersbergers’ invitation to their artistic dinner. When I accepted it I was only pretending, I now thought, yet in spite of this I had acted upon it. The idea is nothing short of grotesque, I thought, yet at the same time it amused me. Actually I’ve always dissembled with the Auersbergers, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, and here I am again, sitting in their wing chair and dissembling once more: I’m not really here in their apartment in the Gentzgasse, I’m only pretending to be in the Gentzgasse, only pretending to be in their apartment, I said to myself. I’ve always pretended to them about everything—I’ve pretended to everybody about everything. My whole life has been a pretense, I told myself in the wing chair—the life I live isn’t real, it’s a simulated life, a simulated existence. My whole life, my whole existence has always been simulated—my life has always been pretense, never reality, I told myself. And I pursued this idea to the point at which I finally believed it. I drew a deep breath and said to myself, in such a way that the people in the music room were bound to hear it: You’ve always lived a life of pretense, not a real life—a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real. But I must put an end to this fantasizing lest I go mad, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, and so I took a large gulp of champagne.

From Thomas, Bernhard’s novel 1984 Woodcutters; English translation by David McLinktock.

Woman in Profile — Richard Diebenkorn

November 30, 2016 Biblioklept1 Comment

Hemingway X-ray

November 30, 2016November 30, 2016 Biblioklept1 Comment

Via Bonhams’ auction lot/my buddy Dave (who should’ve been working instead of looking at Hemingway auctions online).

Bonhams’ description:

ORIGINAL HOSPITAL RECORD AND X-RAYS FOR HEMINGWAY’S WARTIME INJURIES sustained on the Italian front on the evening of July 8th, 1918, as well as one contemporary developed x-ray photograph and original hospital file folder. Hemingway was apparently handing out chocolates to Italian soldiers along the front when an Austrian mortar shell exploded, burying him in a dugout. Despite shrapnel tearing through his right foot and knee, he managed to carry an Italian comrade also wounded in the blast to the nearest medical station, for which he was awarded the Croce de Guerra. This episode (minus the heroism) and experience in the Milan military hospital is memorably recorded from the point of view of Frederic in A Farewell to Arms (1929).
This lot includes an original black folder with a printed paper label of the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan, Istituto Foto-Radioterapico A. Bertarelli, Servizio Sanita Militare, filled out in manuscript for Hemingway and dated 7/8/1918. The three glass negatives of his right foot, ankle, and knee are accompanied by a contemporary developed photograph of the knee x-ray, as well as modern developed photographs of the other two plates. The bullet is clearly seen in Hemingway’s knee.

Family Tree — Wangechi Mutu

November 30, 2016November 30, 2016 Biblioklept1 Comment

Two lovely Kafkas (Books acquired, 11.29.2016)

November 29, 2016 Biblioklept2 Comments

Two volumes of Franz Kafka’s letters are forthcoming next month from Schocken: Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors; and Letters to Felice.

Both covers are designed by Peter Mendelsund (as are all those lovely Schocken Kafka editions).

Schocken’s blurb for Friends, Family and Editors:

Collected after his death by his friend and literary executor Max Brod, here are more than two decades’ worth of Franz Kafka’s letters to the men and women with whom he maintained his closest personal relationships, from his years as a student in Prague in the early 1900s to his final months in the sanatorium near Vienna where he died in 1924.

Sometimes surprisingly humorous, sometimes wrenchingly sad, they include charming notes to school friends; fascinating accounts to Brod about his work in its various stages of publication; correspondence with his publisher, Kurt Wolff, about manuscripts in progress, suggested book titles, type design, and late royalty statements; revealing exchanges with other young writers of the day, including Martin Buber and Felix Weltsch, on life, literature, and girls; and heartbreaking reports to his parents, sisters, and friends on the declining state of his health in the last months of his life.

And Felice:

Franz Kafka met Felice Bauer in August 1912, at the home of his friend Max Brod. Energetic, down-to-earth, and life-affirming, the twenty-five-year-old secretary was everything Kafka was not, and he was instantly smitten. Because he was living in Prague and she in Berlin, his courtship was largely an epistolary one—passionate, self-deprecating, and anxious letters sent almost daily, sometimes even two or three times a day. But soon after their engagement was announced in 1914, Kafka began to worry that marriage would interfere with his writing and his need for solitude.

The more than five hundred letters Kafka wrote to Felice—through their breakup, a second engagement in 1917, and their final parting in the fall of that year, when Kafka began to feel the effects of the tuberculosis that would eventually claim his life—reveal the full measure of his inner turmoil as he tried, in vain, to balance his desire for human connection with what he felt were the solitary demands of his craft.

“Panic Fears,” a short story by Anton Chekhov

November 29, 2016 Biblioklept2 Comments

“Panic Fears”

Anton Chekhov

DURING all the years I have been living in this world I have only three times been terrified.

The first real terror, which made my hair stand on end and made shivers run all over me, was caused by a trivial but strange phenomenon. It happened that, having nothing to do one July evening, I drove to the station for the newspapers. It was a still, warm, almost sultry evening, like all those monotonous evenings in July which, when once they have set in, go on for a week, a fortnight, or sometimes longer, in regular unbroken succession, and are suddenly cut short by a violent thunderstorm and a lavish downpour of rain that refreshes everything for a long time.

The sun had set some time before, and an unbroken gray dusk lay all over the land. The mawkishly sweet scents of the grass and flowers were heavy in the motionless, stagnant air.

I was driving in a rough trolley. Behind my back the gardener’s son Pashka, a boy of eight years old, whom I had taken with me to look after the horse in case of necessity, was gently snoring, with his head on a sack of oats. Our way lay along a narrow by-road, straight as a ruler, which lay hid like a great snake in the tall thick rye. There was a pale light from the afterglow of sunset; a streak of light cut its way through a narrow, uncouth-looking cloud, which seemed sometimes like a boat and sometimes like a man wrapped in a quilt….

I had driven a mile and a half, or two miles, when against the pale background of the evening glow there came into sight one after another some graceful tall poplars; a river glimmered beyond them, and a gorgeous picture suddenly, as though by magic, lay stretched before me. I had to stop the horse, for our straight road broke off abruptly and ran down a steep incline overgrown with bushes. We were standing on the hillside and beneath us at the bottom lay a huge hole full of twilight, of fantastic shapes, and of space. At the bottom of this hole, in a wide plain guarded by the poplars and caressed by the gleaming river, nestled a village. It was now sleeping…. Its huts, its church with the belfry, its trees, stood out against the gray twilight and were reflected darkly in the smooth surface of the river. Continue reading ““Panic Fears,” a short story by Anton Chekhov” →

A love of great music, great art and great literature does not provide people with any kind of moral or political immunization against violence, atrocity, or subservience to dictatorship

November 27, 2016 Biblioklept5 Comments

The fact that Germany had produced a Beethoven, Russia a Tolstoy, Italy a Verdi, or Spain a Cervantes, was wholly irrelevant to the fact that all these countries experienced brutal dictatorships in the twentieth century. High cultural achievements across the centuries did not render a descent into political barbarism more inexplicable than their absence would have done; culture and politics simply do not impinge on each other in so simple and direct a manner. If the experience of the Third Reich teaches us anything, it is that a love of great music, great art and great literature does not provide people with any kind of moral or political immunization against violence, atrocity, or subservience to dictatorship.

From: Richard J. Evans’s The Coming of the Third Reich (2003).