Biblioklept

Book Acquired, 9.28.2012

October 3, 2012October 2, 2012 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Foundation, a history of England from Peter Ackroyd. From a recent Guardian profile:

Ackroyd’s trademark insight and wit, and the glorious interconnectedness of all things, permeate each page. One thing that struck me was the realisation that history isn’t nearly as linear as we thought. Something is invented, or discovered, or philosophised, and we tend to think that that’s knowledge known from then on, but even in this single volume there are endless forgettings.

“Absolutely,” comes his fast answer, spoken, as ever, gently and with a strange mix of confidence and self-effacement. “One thing which most interested me was the fact that neglect, or our genius for forgetfulness, occurs at every level of social and political activity. The same mistakes, the same confusions, occur time and time again. It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences – there’s no real pattern.”

What he discovered, or rediscovered, is that “what underlines that random happenstance are the deep continuities of national life that survive, uninfluenced by the surface events. In this book, I have little chapters on, say, medieval medicine, or punishment, or medieval humour, simply to convey the broad continuities that underlie this bewildering range of events. Continuities of the soil, the land, the earth.” And these help create human – English – sensibilities? “Yes. As I said in my London book, it’s a sort of territorial imperative, the landscape; the shape of the geology, almost, has a definite though not comprehended effect on human behaviour, human need. So that’s one of the things I was trying to explore I suppose.”

“I have been reading about Dickens” (Kafka)

October 3, 2012October 2, 2012 Biblioklept2 Comments

(From Kafka’s Diaries).

Man Seated by Radiator — Norman Rockwell

October 3, 2012September 27, 2012 Biblioklept1 Comment

Glen Baxter Comic

October 2, 2012October 2, 2012 Biblioklept2 Comments

Robert Hughes’s Nothing If Not Critical (Book Acquired, 10.1.2012)

October 2, 2012October 1, 2012 Biblioklept1 Comment

Collection of Robert Hughes essays, Nothing If Not Critical.

I also found this butterfly on the ground an hour before finding the book:

Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita, Languages, Lepidoptera (1964 LIFE Magazine Profile)

October 2, 2012October 1, 2012 BibliokleptLeave a comment

(From a 1964 LIFE profile; my favorite line: “It is odd, and probably my fault, that no people seem to name their daughters Lolita anymore. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.”)

Self-discovery (Kafka)

October 2, 2012October 1, 2012 Biblioklept2 Comments

(From Kafka’s diaries).

In the Boat — Konstantin Korovin

October 2, 2012September 27, 2012 Biblioklept2 Comments

BBC Documentary on Goya’s Third of May 1808

October 1, 2012 Biblioklept1 Comment

Dying Centaur — Giorgio de Chirico

October 1, 2012 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Read “Bobok,” a Short Story by Fyodor Dostoevsky

October 1, 2012September 30, 2012 BibliokleptLeave a comment

“Bobok,” a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky:

Bobok — From Somebody’s Diary

Semyon Ardalyonovitch said to me all of a sudden the day before yesterday: “Why, will you ever be sober, Ivan Ivano- vitch? Tell me that, pray.”

A strange requirement. I did not resent it, I am a timid man; but here they have actually made me out mad. An artist painted my portrait as it happened: “After all, you are a literary man,” he said. I submitted, he exhibited it. I read: “Go and look at that morbid face suggesting insanity.”

It may be so, but think of putting it so bluntly into print. In print everything ought to be decorous; there ought to be ideals, while instead of that…

Say it indirectly, at least; that’s what you have style for. But no, he doesn’t care to do it indirectly. Nowadays humour and a fine style have disappeared, and abuse is accepted as wit. I do not resent it: but God knows I am not enough of a literary man to go out of my mind. I have written a novel, it has not been published. I have written articles – they have been refused. Those articles I took about from one editor to another; everywhere they refused them: you have no salt they told me. “What sort of salt do you want?” I asked with a eer. “Attic salt?”

They did not even understand, For the most part I translate from the French for the booksellers. I write advertisements for shopkeepers too: “Unique opportunity! Fine tea, from our own plantations… ” I made a nice little sum over a panegyric on his deceased excellency Pyotr Matveyitch. I compiled the “Art of pleasing the ladies”, a commission from a bookseller. I have brought out some six little works of this kind in the course of my life. I am thinking of making a collection of the bons mobs of Voltaire, but am afraid it may seem a little flat to our people. Voltaire’s no good now; nowadays we want a cudgel, not Voltaire. We knock each other’s last teeth out nowadays. Well, so that’s the whole extent of my literary activity. Though indeed I do send round letters to the editors gratis and fully signed. I give them all sorts of counsels and admonitions, criticise and point out the true path. The letter I sent last week to an editor’s office was the fortieth I had sent in the last two years. I have wasted four roubles over stamps alone for them. My temper is at the bottom of it all.

I believe that the artist who painted me did so not for the sake of literature, but for the sake of two symmetrical warts on my forehead, a natural phenomenon, he would say. They have no ideas, so now they are out for phenomena. And didn’t he succeed in getting my warts in his portrait – to the life. That is what they call realism.

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Sebald’s After Nature (Book Acquired, 9.21.2012)

October 1, 2012September 30, 2012 Biblioklept2 Comments

W.G. Sebald’s poetry collection After Nature. Not really poetry. Or maybe it is poetry. I don’t know what poetry is.

Honesty of Evil Thoughts (Kafka)

October 1, 2012September 27, 2012 Biblioklept2 Comments

From Kafka’s Diaries.

Mrs. Cassatt Reading to Her Grandchildren — Mary Cassatt

October 1, 2012September 27, 2012 Biblioklept2 Comments

“Los Angeles” — Frank Black

September 30, 2012 Biblioklept1 Comment

Does Bret Easton Ellis Consider Himself a Serious Novelist?

September 30, 2012September 30, 2012 Biblioklept8 Comments

INTERVIEWER

Do you not consider yourself a serious novelist?

ELLIS

I recently got into one of those weird, terrible fights writers can find themselves in with a friend who has for a long time been writing novels he can’t get published. For twenty-five years I’ve been trying to help him. He can’t rise to the occasion. He can’t write a novel because he doesn’t have the passion to write a novel. He’s writing a novel to make the money, get the film rights, become famous, whatever—all the wrong reasons. When he asked me to read the latest one, I told him, “Look, if this novel is superpassionate, and it really is about shit you’re going through, and pain, and it means the fucking world to you, by all means send it to me.” He said, “Yeah, it’s totally all those things,” and he sent it to me, and it was absolutely like all the others. I flipped out. I went ballistic on him. I said, “You never took this seriously! From the time you were twenty-three, it was always some kind of sterile exercise, like an imitation of a novel. And you never talk passionately about writers. I never hear you talk about books you’re reading. You just saw that a young writer in the eighties could make some cash from a literary novel. It was moneymaking to you.” And my friend was shocked, or pretended to be. “You know, it’s really amazing to hear you say that, Bret, because looking at your career and reading your books, I never thought you actually took it seriously. I saw your books as trendy knockoffs. I saw you as kind of a hack. I never thought you were really serious.” I mean, he’s not representative of the kind of person anyone should take seriously in literary matters, but when my friend said that, I’ll admit it gave me pause. I thought, What does it mean to be a “serious” novelist? Regardless of how my books have turned out, or how some people might have read them, I clearly don’t think I write trendy knockoffs. My books have all been very deeply felt. You don’t spend eight years of your life working on a trendy knockoff. In that sense I’ve been serious. But I don’t do lots of things that other serious writers do. I don’t write book reviews. I don’t sit on panels about the state of the novel. I don’t go to writer conferences. I don’t teach writing seminars. I don’t hang out at Yaddo or MacDowell. I’m not concerned with my reputation as a writer or where I stand relative to other writers. I’m not competitive or professionally ambitious. I don’t think about my work and my career in an overarching or systematic way. I don’t think about myself, as I think most writers do, as progressing toward some ideal of greatness. There’s no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me.

From Ellis’s Paris Review interview.