Happy Birthday Gabbie.92 ;-)
Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?
-Solzhenitsyn asks.
No
we are not ready
to
go skinny dipping
in
one another's souls.
For years now I haven’t read any newspapers: - I shall not go into the reasons. This often leads to bizarre conversations:
Other: What do you think of Barack Obama?
Dragon Comes to Town: I don’t know who you’re talking about.
Other: How are you coping with the recession?
Dragon Comes to Town: What recession?
If you spend all your time reading books you won’t have any experiences. Of course it may give you some idea about what experiences to have. There's more to life than books you know, but not much more … History must be written of, by and for the survivors. Learn to write with pain. It may come as a great shock to my readers to discover that I wasn't always the elegantly dressed, highly attuned citizen of the world they have come to know. Far from it. In fact, for some time I was a quite clearly deranged wild-haired youth dressed in motley and living in hippie squalor in the gatehouse to a castle on the Hudson, in company with three dogs and three glowing specimens of my own species. Cold River: A good title is a work of genius
The places I go are never there Read, read, read and then read some more
To begin, let us take the Japanese literally in the last line so it reads "water of sound." Let that roll around a few minutes in your imagination. The water of sound. Sound as water. Sound moving as water does. Sound rippling outward as water does when disturbed. If the narrative of this book is even half as good as the artwork, this one looks like a real keeper.
Being with you is
like swimming in the sun on
a warm Summer's day.
• Write, but live a little first The fact that the smallest literary form - haiku - has the most rules never ceases to amaze and astound; [Nothing prepares a writer better than reading the works of accomplished writers. It helps you find your own voice. Read: old pond / a frog jumps in / the sound of water; The old is new again: Crazy I think I'll dive into the band much further Blurred Vision: One Woman’s Memoir of Looking Beyond Abuse and Alcoholism The title The Truth About Lies has a 10.2% chance of being a bestselling title!]
• · Do you remember the first book you ever bought? One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a mere 144 pages long; Ooooooo K. Let’s get a couple of things straight here before we start. If kisses fail, how about licks? Seeker, Fool with a short Prologue and an Epilogue
• · Genrification? Very unique? Publishers today! Honestly! Splutter. Cough. Scents of tweed and pipe tobacco, sounds as of choking on whisky All commercial fiction needs to be like Dan Brown; The Espresso Book Machine is billed as the biggest thing to hit the book world since Gutenberg invented the printing press Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine; It was also an article I never wanted to read, but here I am, Media Dragon and I, making the best of a bad situation. While being a bookworm may not be a precondition for becoming a mass murderer, it’s certainly no impediment. Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life
• · · We are seeing the impact on readers and neighborhoods, with 5 million readers now behind on their reading. Some are just walking away from novels they should never have been reading in the first place. What began as a sub-prime reading problem has spread to other, less-risky readers, and contributed to excess inventories. These troubled novels are now parked, or frozen, on the shelves of libraries, bookstores, and other reading institutions, preventing them from financing readable novels. a proposed bailout of the US publishing industry ; The single funniest sentence-opening of 2009 so far (and easy odds-on favorite for the whole year), from Leslie Bennetts' profile of brainless trophy-bird Gisele Bundchen-Brady, from the latest issue of Vanity Fair: An avid reader, Gisele ... Hee. Too precious. Seven things are hidden from men. These are the day of death, the day of consolation, the depth of judgement; no man knows what is in the mind of his friend; no man knows which of his business ventures will be profitable, or when the kingdom of the house of David will be restored, or when the sinful kingdom will fail. Delaying the Messiah
• · · · Following in the footsteps of the New York Times, the Guardian asked 150 literary luminaries to vote for the best novel to come out of the British Commonwealth between 1980 and 2005. Here are the results in order: Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee; Money by Martin Amis; Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess and Atonement by Ian McEwan both tying for third, Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, Unconsoled by Kazuio Ishiguro, Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and Amongst Women by John McGahern tying for eighth, and That They May Face the Rising Sun by John McGahern. The publication also lists several of the other nominees. Cold River; Fiction may be the last refuge of the outrageous, the last redoubt of Orwell’s thought crime. Moreover, even the freedom to be outrageous in fiction is under threat. No, incorrect and careless chatter, / words mispronounced, thoughts ill-expressed / evoke emotion's pitter-patter.... –Pushkin A strange collaborative criticism blog
• · · · · They pass it round secretly, under the eyes of the police, in the guise of books and poems. The anodyne pretext of literature allows them to offer you at a rock-bottom price this deadly ferment which it is high time to make generally available for consumption. It is the genie in the bottle, it is the gold of poetry in a solid bar. Buy, buy the damnation of your soul, at last you are going to lose your way, here is the machine guaranteed to capsize the mind. I announce to the world this momentous news item: a new vice has just been born man has acquired one more source of vertigo--Surrealism, offspring of frenzy and darkness. Blog by book lovers for book lovers; Demon of conjectures, fever of phantasmagoria, pass your sulphurous and nacreous fingers through your tow hair and answer me: who is Prato, and on the first floor with its paradoxical lift what is this agency which I am obstinately convinced must be a vast organization in white-slave traffic. This is Not a Novel
• · · · · · The bitterest love poetry you'll ever read - George Meredith's Modern Love – The critic is madder than the poet; Kundera deepens his thesis of the novelist's essential attitude to History-with-a-capital-H in his new suite of essays, The Curtain (La Rideau):
Because History, with its agitations, its wars, its revolutions and counter-revolutions, its national humiliations, does not interest the novelist for itself – as a subject to paint, to denounce, to interpret. The novelist is not a valet to historians; History may fascinate him, but because it is a kind of searchlight circling around human existence and throwing light onto it, onto its unexpected possibilities, which, in peaceable times, when History stands still, do not come to the fore but remain unseen and unknown. The last observatory