November 2011
21 posts
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“Beckett was profoundly marked by the horrors of war and Occupation – just how...”
– Alan Jenkins, “How I dislike that play now …“, a review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume Two 1941-1956, The Times Literary Supplement, Nov 2 2011. Bold mine. Similar or somewhat related remarks found in previous posts: Daniil Kharms, J.D. Salinger & Howard Zinn. (via msodradek)
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our...”
– Mark Twain Travel Quotes (Today is Twain’s 176th Birthday Anniversary)
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“… the story these letters tell, inescapably, is the banal tale of the dream come...”
– Tim Parks, “On Needing to Be Looked After”, a review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1941-56, London Review of Books, Dec 1 2011. Bold mine. (via msodradek)
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“In most of his Socratic dialogues, what happens is, some guy is walking along...”
– Kazuo Ishiguro (via thebronzemedal)
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Salvador Dalí Illustrates Alice in Wonderland →
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“…había creído ingenuamente que venía por otro túnel paralelo al mío, cuando en...”
– Sábato - El Túnel
(via finaldeljuego)
[“…she had naively thought that she had come to another tunnel parallel to mine, when in fact, she belonged to the wider world, the limitless world of those who do not live in tunnels; and maybe out of curiosity, she had approached one of my strange...
Allen Mandelbaum, Translator of ‘Divine Comedy,’... →
Mandelbaum’s was the first translation of Dante I ever read. I was sucked in by the experience, as many of you know.
A sad tip of the hat to the man who first guided me through Dante’s hell, purgatory and paradise.
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“It’s entirely conceivable that life’s splendor surrounds us all, and always in...”
– Kafka, Tagebucher (via kateoplis)
Tagebucheintrag am 18. October 1921.
[“Es ist sehr gut denkbar, daß die Herrlichkeit des Lebens um jeden und immer in ihrer ganzen Fülle bereit liegt, aber verhängt, in der Tiefe, unichbar, sehr weit. Aber sie liegt dort, nicht feindselig, nicht widerwillig,...
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“[Gertrude] Stein…had gone beyond the right-wing musings of the late...”
– Wars They Have Seen - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
My friend and mentor John Whittier-Ferguson is interviewed in this piece by Eric Banks about Gertrude Stein’s complicated right-wing politics.
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“Few would question looking at a great painting twice, or watching a favorite...”
– From the New Yorker’s Book Bench by Nathanial Stein reviewing Patricia Meyer Spacks’s On Rereading.
I would love to read, for the first time, a book on the world of guilt, doubt and anxiety that is the world of reading. No activity seems as informed and inflected by death as that of reading.... 