June 2012
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Emily Dickinson
We think of hidden in a white dress among the folded linens and sachets of well-kept cupboards, or just out of sight sending jellies and notes with no address to all the wondering Amherst neighbors. Eccentric as New England weather the stiff wind of her mind, stinging or gentle, blew two half imagined lovers off. Yet legend won’t explain the sheer sanity of vision, the serious mischief of...
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“[The narrator of ‘The Ghost of Tom...
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“I am by trade a novelist. It is, I think, a harmless trade, though it is not...”
– Anthony Burgess, from The Clockwork Condition in the New Yorker
May 2012
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“As I’ve often said, you can shop online and find whatever you’re looking for,...”
– Economist Paul Krugman Is a Hard-Core Science Fiction Fan | Underwire | Wired.com via Shelf Awareness (via housingworksbookstore)
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“[Senator Obama] revealed later in the...
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Wedding
No bridal gown. No tuxedo. Just Her and Him in plain clothes, both skinny, famished, exhausted by the months of intensive love preceding their decision.
They didn’t notice the clerk or any witnesses. They looked at one another in a trance, in an immobile dance within.
They fled right after the ceremony —what ceremony? They took a Chagall flight over the city. They never...
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“For what is more delightful than leisure devoted to literature? That literature...”
– Cicero
“So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering...”
– Nicole Krauss, The History Of Love (via lifesomeday)
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Memorial Day
Bill Mauldin had long derided as “brass” those like Patton who used their positions of power to aggrandize themselves. Indeed, Mauldin became something of an expert on brass, defining it not as rank or office, “but a state of mind.” “Brass,” he wrote several years after the war, “is an alloy which knows it is not gold, and mistakenly tries to hide this...
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“She hoped Smoke was wrong about people being unknowable. She hoped that she...”
– Bonnie Jo Campbell, from Once Upon A River
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“To our American ears, the variety of accents in Britain is endlessly...”
– In the San Francisco Chronicle, Martin Rubin describes the tone of Diana Athill’s charming letters to the American poet Edward Field in her new book Letters to a Friend. Rubin goes on to say that Athill’s letters bring to mind Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice.
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“afraid of getting nickrolled by the link to The Great Gatsby trailer”
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Hurry
We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store and the gas station and the green market and Hurry up honey, I say, hurry hurry, as she runs along two or three steps behind me her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.
Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave? To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?
Today, when al the errands are finally done, I say to her, Honey...
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Nearly a Valediction
You happened to me. I was happened to like an abandoned building by a bull- dozer, like the van that missed my skull happened a two-inch gash across my chin. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse. A new- born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone, swaddled in strange air I was that alone again,...
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“They were simple, earnest people, those early Victorians, and had not yet learnt...”
– Ford Madox Ford
“Herman Melville to 16-year-old self: Create a Typee franchise”
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“This year’s roster of storm names — some of which will acquire the honorific...”
– Diane Ackerman, from “Wild Ponies and Wild Weather”
“The life of the wealthy is one long Sunday.”
– Georg Büchner
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How to Read Ezra Pound
At the poets’ panel, after an hour of poets debating Ezra Pound, Abe the Lincoln veteran, remembering the Spanish Civil War, raised his hand and said: If I knew that a fascist was a great poet, I’d shoot him anyway.
-Martín Espada, from The Trouble Ball
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Ask Me Anything: Michael Dirda, Pulitzer...
Take a moment to read this exchange from the AMA Reddit with Norton author Michael Dirda. Not since Here We Go Magic picked up the hitchhiking John Waters have we been so delightfully surprised by the internet:
Redditor Question: Are you a fan of Hunter S. Thompson?
Michael Dirda: My copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is inscribed: “To Mike, with thanks for getting me the crack in...
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“We used to think that breast milk was just a food and that it was filled with...”
– Florence Williams, author of Breasts, on the benefits of breast milk (via nprfreshair)
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Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012): The Novelist as the...
“There has never been a Latin American writer who caught the fancy of the world so much as Fuentes. Neruda is beloved, as is Garcia Marquez; Cortazar is studied, Gabriela Mistral is not, Asturias is still read with pleasure, Borges lives on, Rulfo is venerated, and Paz is admired, but Carlos Fuentes occupies a unique space: He is the novelist as the world would have the novelist be.”
...
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But One Point Is Very Important
The artist can never write to satisfy himself—to get, as the saying is, something off the chest. He must not write propaganda which it is his desire to write; he must not write rolling periods, the production of which gives him a soothing feeling in his digestive organs or wherever it is. He must write always so as to satisfy that other fellow—that other fellow who has too clear an intelligence to...
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Persephone, Falling
One narcissus among the ordinary beautiful flowers, one unlike all the others! She pulled, stooped to pull harder— when, sprung out of the earth on his glittering terrible carriage, he claimed his due. It is finished. No one heard her. No one! She had strayed from the herd.
(Remember: go straight to school. This is important, stop fooling around! Don’t answer to strangers. Stick ...
“How I met your mother: As told by Menelaus.”
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Marks
My husband gives me an A for last night’s supper, an incomplete for my ironing, a B plus in bed. My son says I am average, an average mother, but if I put my mind to it I could improve. My daughter believes in Pass/Fail and tells me I pass. Wait ‘til they learn I’m dropping out.
—Linda Pastan, from The Five Stages of Grief
“Microproblems: The Parenting Secrets of the European Microstates...”
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In a Stolen Boat,
push off what seemed safe: The fishing dock, pitch pines, children glazed to sheen by ruthless summers. Past
the jetty, past the past, to open sea— all violet and green, that choppy path between doom and luck— Put your back into it, and row.
—April Bernard, from Romanticism
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Instructions: Early Epiphanies
What to do: First you put your hand on her arm on a weekday morning, coming out of the subway. Nothing flies up from the street that shouldn’t— not newspapers, not trash. The island’s becalmed, dazzling: mica is caught in the sidewalk, it’s ten o’clock, too early in the year for shade.
Test: Does the pavement tremble? Trains pull away under you and the ground. Cross calmer...
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“Usually, it takes me three years to write a book, but that’s no problem: I...”
– Anne Enright, from Making Babies: Stumbling Into Motherhood
“Damn it feels good to be a reader.”