First two paragraphs:
The handsome Senator from Texas, the Capitol’s leading heartthrob, a former astronaut, and a likely future President, was in bed with two ladies, a young intern and the more mature Secretary of the Interior (the Senator called her the Secretary of the Posterior and had just made several charming off-color but complimentary remarks about hers, bringing an embarrassed flush to all four of her cheeks, and giggles from the intern, who was playing with two of them), when his private security phone chimed with the news: “The Martians have landed! In Texas!” He kissed the ladies, donned his spacesuit and helmet, and sprang into action.
The Senator flew his private jet directly from his ranch to the Martians’ landing site, not at all surprised that they had chosen the great state of Texas for this historic occasion. There, in an internationally televised address, he welcomed them to the once sovereign Republic of Texas, the last best place on earth and the heartland of the American nation, to which it also presently owed allegiance. The Martians poured out of their pear-shaped spaceship like spilled soup. They were pea-green, as anticipated, but with fluid bodies and multiple limbs that appeared and disappeared in the sticky flow. A random scattering of startled eyes blinked like tree lights. It wasn’t easy to see what separated one Martian from another.
[Editorial note: The following citations come from one-star Amazon reviews of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise. I’ve preserved the reviewers’ original punctuation and spelling. More one-star Amazon reviews].
quips
UGH
rubbish
chubby wife
Verble sparing
Love the cover
nothing happens
frequently witless
watching paint dry
orgasmic experiences
Barak Hussein Obama
supremely unamusing
my daughter hated this
rampant commercialism
trying to be ironic but failing
it’s not clear what the point is
hated this book with a violent passion
he goes to the grocery store about 4 times
slobbering self appointed literary pillocks
Fred Flintstonesque postmodern hectoring
some generic non-descript mid-western city
ultra trite unimaginative obsession about death
Theme is supposed to emerge from a work of fiction
desperately avoids any of the conventional trappings of fiction
a silly trick by a critic’s darling to help us feel more self-rightous
A left wing hipster might relate to the message the book is trying to communicate
It has good ideas and themes for a literature class if you look at it from that perspective
Feels false, like the author was trying to make sublime points about human nature and the direction of society
The cartoonish characters are about as credible as the windbag Biden is on foreign policy
felt like the author was just using the characters and the plot as puppets
I invested almost six minutes reading this book before I threw it out
I read this book so I’m smarter than the rest of you
Even allowing for the mid 1980’s publication date
entire pages go by and nothing really happens
moaning middle class left wing academics
they go through an airborne toxic event
the Sopranos and Anne of Green Gables
dated technology/consumer references
Droned on and on and on about death
wasn’t a single character I cared about
a Hannah Montana puke fest
tossed it into the trash
watching grass grow
I prefer life to death
local supermarket
A Seinfield book
literary (as if?)
he goes crazy
anal vacuity
it bore me
dullardish
it just ends
“Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty”
by
Anne Sexton
Consider
a girl who keeps slipping off,
arms limp as old carrots,
into the hypnotist’s trance,
into a spirit world
speaking with the gift of tongues.
She is stuck in the time machine,
suddenly two years old sucking her thumb,
as inward as a snail,
learning to talk again.
She’s on a voyage.
She is swimming further and further back,
up like a salmon,
struggling into her mother’s pocketbook.
Little doll child,
come here to Papa.
Sit on my knee.
I have kisses for the back of your neck.
A penny for your thoughts, Princess.
I will hunt them like an emerald.
Come be my snooky
and I will give you a root.
That kind of voyage,
rank as a honeysuckle.
Once
a king had a christening
for his daughter Briar Rose
and because he had only twelve gold plates
he asked only twelve fairies
to the grand event.
The thirteenth fairy,
her fingers as long and thing as straws,
her eyes burnt by cigarettes,
her uterus an empty teacup,
arrived with an evil gift.
She made this prophecy:
The princess shall prick herself
on a spinning wheel in her fifteenth year
and then fall down dead.
Kaputt!
The court fell silent.
The king looked like Munch’s Scream
Fairies’ prophecies,
in times like those,
held water.
However the twelfth fairy
had a certain kind of eraser
and thus she mitigated the curse
changing that death
into a hundred-year sleep.
The king ordered every spinning wheel
exterminated and exorcised.
Briar Rose grew to be a goddess
and each night the king
bit the hem of her gown
to keep her safe.
He fastened the moon up
with a safety pin
to give her perpetual light
He forced every male in the court
to scour his tongue with Bab-o
lest they poison the air she dwelt in.
Thus she dwelt in his odor.
Rank as honeysuckle.
On her fifteenth birthday
she pricked her finger
on a charred spinning wheel
and the clocks stopped.
Yes indeed. She went to sleep.
The king and queen went to sleep,
the courtiers, the flies on the wall.
The fire in the hearth grew still
and the roast meat stopped crackling.
The trees turned into metal
and the dog became china.
They all lay in a trance,
each a catatonic
stuck in a time machine.
Even the frogs were zombies.
Only a bunch of briar roses grew
forming a great wall of tacks
around the castle.
Many princes
tried to get through the brambles
for they had heard much of Briar Rose
but they had not scoured their tongues
so they were held by the thorns
and thus were crucified.
In due time
a hundred years passed
and a prince got through.
The briars parted as if for Moses
and the prince found the tableau intact.
He kissed Briar Rose
and she woke up crying:
Daddy! Daddy!
Presto! She’s out of prison!
She married the prince
and all went well
except for the fear –
the fear of sleep.
Briar Rose
was an insomniac…
She could not nap
or lie in sleep
without the court chemist
mixing her some knock-out drops
and never in the prince’s presence.
If if is to come, she said,
sleep must take me unawares
while I am laughing or dancing
so that I do not know that brutal place
where I lie down with cattle prods,
the hole in my cheek open.
Further, I must not dream
for when I do I see the table set
and a faltering crone at my place,
her eyes burnt by cigarettes
as she eats betrayal like a slice of meat.
I must not sleep
for while I’m asleep I’m ninety
and think I’m dying.
Death rattles in my throat
like a marble.
I wear tubes like earrings.
I lie as still as a bar of iron.
You can stick a needle
through my kneecap and I won’t flinch.
I’m all shot up with Novocain.
This trance girl
is yours to do with.
You could lay her in a grave,
an awful package,
and shovel dirt on her face
and she’d never call back: Hello there!
But if you kissed her on the mouth
her eyes would spring open
and she’d call out: Daddy! Daddy!
Presto!
She’s out of prison.
There was a theft.
That much I am told.
I was abandoned.
That much I know.
I was forced backward.
I was forced forward.
I was passed hand to hand
like a bowl of fruit.
Each night I am nailed into place
and forget who I am.
Daddy?
That’s another kind of prison.
It’s not the prince at all,
but my father
drunkeningly bends over my bed,
circling the abyss like a shark,
my father thick upon me
like some sleeping jellyfish.
What voyage is this, little girl?
This coming out of prison?
God help –
this life after death?
December 1st.–It is curious to observe how many methods people put in practice here to pick up a halfpenny. Yesterday I saw a man standing bareheaded and barelegged in the mud and misty weather, playing on a fife, in hopes to get a circle of auditors. Nobody, however, seemed to take any notice. Very often a whole band of musicians will strike up,–passing a hat round after playing a tune or two. On board the ferry, until the coldest weather began, there were always some wretched musicians, with an old fiddle, an old clarinet, and an old verdigrised brass bugle, performing during the passage, and, as the boat neared the shore, sending round one of their number to gather contributions in the hollow of the brass bugle. They were a very shabby set, and must have made a very scanty living at best. Sometimes it was a boy with an accordion, and his sister, a smart little girl, with a timbrel,–which, being so shattered that she could not play on it, she used only to collect halfpence in. Ballad-singers, or rather chanters or croakers, are often to be met with in the streets, but hand-organ players are not more frequent than in our cities.
I still observe little girls and other children bare-legged and barefooted on the wet sidewalks. There certainly never was anything so dismal as the November weather has been; never any real sunshine; almost always a mist; sometimes a dense fog, like slightly rarefied wool, pervading the atmosphere.
An epitaph on a person buried on a hill-side in Cheshire, together with some others, supposed to have died of the plague, and therefore not admitted into the churchyards:–
“Think it not strange our bones ly here,
Thine may ly thou knowst not where.”ELIZABETH HAMPSON.
These graves were near the remains of two rude stone crosses, the purpose of which was not certainly known, although they were supposed to be boundary marks. Probably, as the plague-corpses were debarred from sanctified ground, the vicinity of these crosses was chosen as having a sort of sanctity.
“Bang beggar,”–an old Cheshire term for a parish beadle.
Hawthorne Hall, Cheshire, Macclesfield Hundred, Parish of Wilmslow, and within the hamlet of Morley. It was vested at an early period in the Lathoms of Irlam, Lancaster County, and passed through the Leighs to the Pages of Earlshaw. Thomas Leigh Page sold it to Mr. Ralph Bower of Wilmslow, whose children owned it in 1817. The Leighs built a chancel in the church of Wilmslow, where some of them are buried, their arms painted in the windows. The hall is an “ancient, respectable mansion of brick.”
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.
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.
Biblioklept 