Erstwhile Okie on St. Mark's Place. "That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past."
Just exposed to this quote by the physicist Paul Dirac and love it: "the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way." I love obfuscation, hence my obsession with incomprehensible Old Testament stories. I think it gets you closer to truth.
I picked up Charles Baxter's THE FEAST OF LOVE last August at a real low point because a stranger told me it was their favorite book. I always ask people their favorite movie or book and they typically say either that they have lots of favorites (wild how few people know the definition of the word favorite) or else they give some sort of mock-embarrassed shrug and name something popular and trite. But this person said THE FEAST OF LOVE so I bought it and have been reading it in drips and drabs for nearly a year.
It bounces between the perspectives of different ordinary people. It's lovely and moving but wasn't especially engaging. There's a woman who is sleeping with a married man and then starts dating someone else. She ends up marrying the latter but fails to fall out of love with the former so they divorce and she goes back to the married man. It made me irrationally angry, as every affair in a book or movie always does. Which made me wonder why I always relate to the cuckold rather than the lover.
Anyway, it was well done but I doubt I'll give it much thought.
· 1 min read
1 years ago
I've been getting a kick out of these wizard memes on Instagram, but found this one quite touching.
It reminded me of the verse "It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness."
And arguably not really related but a line from The English Patient that often pops into my head: "Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again."
· 1 min read
1 years ago
#BooksOf2025
1. Less by Andrew Sean Greer
5.5/10
GOOD: Funny, engaging, well-written
BAD: Blow-by-blow from a single perspective, self-indulgent
Finished my first novel of 2025 last night (though I read the majority of it in 2024). Less by Andrew Sean Greer. It was fine. Engaging and fun and a few very funny lines, eg:
His first response to Peter was to ask: "How did they even know I was gay?" He asked this from his front porch, wearing a kimono.
The fact that it's not dissimilar from stuff I've written and gotten nowhere with, and that it won the Pulitzer probably played no small part in engendering some bitterness... But it also does the thing that I used to love and can't stand anymore, which is to paint as realistic a world in which literary novelists have any sort of recognition or relevance.
The protagonist, Arthur Less, is an aging novelist, and a minor one by all accounts, who finds fans among the working class he encounters in different countries. It's writer porn. By writers and for writers.
There's also an under-developed thread that turns out, in the end, to be the big pay-off, which felt a bit pat and uninteresting.
I'm also a bit squeamish with male physical intimacy, and there's that throughout the book, though it's perfectly tasteful, but it probably didn't help its chances of winning me over.
Currently reading.
· 1 min read
2 years ago
Just finished Graham Greene's Ways of Escape. My favorite author, along with Christopher Isherwood, I've since read all of his novels and have been reduced to his latter-day autobiographies. They sort of read like the fat cut off from the meat of his fiction. Nothing more than lovely travelogues, as from his account of Israel after the Seven Days War:
"Only an occasional group of Egyptian tanks retained a scorched, upright dignity and sometimes even faced in the direction of their enemy. Some trucks had started through a grove of date palms towards the blue still sea as though their drivers hoped to escape from war. The bouquets of dates hung overhead out of reach, brown, orange, yellow, scarlet: the trucks failed to reach the white beach before they were sent up in flames."
From a book of W.H. Auden's poems. I've never liked his stuff much but am trying to since I moved onto his old block, St. Mark's between 1st and 2nd.
Follow-up to the enjoyable gothic-romance potboiler.
#toread
I can find some fun lines in here. Camus?
#trainlife. First time reading Camus. So far inclined to let it be the last. 🥱🤮
With Graham Greene and a tunafish sandwich taking the train upstate for the first time in a few weeks.
Heck of an opening line.
· 1 min read
4 years ago
Excited to learn that Tom Perrotta has put out a sequel to ELECTION via a review by Katy Waldman in the New Yorker. Loved this quote of hers: "Perrotta evokes, too, the contradictions of American ambition: how fundamentally our bootstrapping ideals conflict with our cult of destiny... it may turn out that scrambling for favor has, by dint of the effort itself, disqualified you."
Just started reading THE MOVIEGOER last night. Great so far--baffled that I'd never heard of it before last week.
One of the takeaways from the Andrew Jackson biography I'm reading: People called other people "poltroon" a lot in the early 19th century, and it seems to have packed the punch of m*f*-er times a billion.
Just finished RIPLEY UNDER WATER, and have nothing left to read in the "Ripliad". Au revoir, Tom. I will miss your casual gardening, the purposeful order of your life of leisure, and your afternoon Calvados and Gitanes.
· 1 min read
9 years ago
First discovered this poem in high school in a thick volume of religious verse that belonged to my dad's dad. I memorized the 2nd stanza at the time and often find it playing in my head, but only just thought to look to find the full text.
The Hidden Line (The Destiny of Men)
by Joseph Addison Alexander
There is a time, we know not when,
A point we know not where,
That marks the destiny of men
To glory or despair.
There is a line by us unseen,
That crosses every path;
The hidden boundary between
Godâs patience and his wrath.
To pass that limit is to dieâ
To die as if by stealth;
It does not quench the beaming eye
Or pale the glow of health.
The conscience may be still at ease,
The spirit lithe and gay;
That which pleases still may please,
And care be thrust away
But on that forehead God has set,
Indelibly a mark
Unseen by men, for men as yet
Are blind and in the dark
And yet doomed manâs path below
May bloom as Eden bloomed;
He did not, does not, will not know,
Or feel that he is doomed
He knows, he feels that all is well,
And every fear is calmed;
He lives, he dies, he wakes in hell,
Not only doomed, but damned.
Oh, where is this mysterious bourn
By which our path is crossed;
Beyond which God himself hath sworn,
That he who goes is lost.
How far may we go on in sin?
How long will God forbear?
Where does hope end, and where begin
The confines of despair?
An answer from the skies is sent,
"Ye that from God depart,
While it is called today, repent,
And harden not your heart."
· 1 min read
9 years ago
I love Ferrol Sams, Georgia author and a childhood friend of my grandfather's (la-dee-da). Finally reading his WHEN ALL THE WORLD WAS YOUNG:
"What hotel did you say?"
"The Hotel Sherman, Osborne. It's the finest hotel in Chi[cag]o; what's the matter with you?"
"Nothing's the matter with me; something's the matter with the damn hotel. You know who it's bound to be named for, and I'm not going to set foot in it. My grandmother would skin me alive if I did."
"Come off that crap, Osborne, and quit acting like a Southern hick. Everybody up here forgot about the Civil War a long time ago."
"War Between the States," Porter corrected automatically.
...
Porter expressed outrage when the driver turned onto a wide and busy thoroughfare and he saw the street sign.
"Sheridan Avenue? Can't we ride on some other street?"
Zane Grey Day!
Zane Grey Day!
Zane Grey Day!
Zane Grey Day!
Zane Grey Day!
· 1 min read
11 years ago
This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say "To-morrow is Saint Crispian."
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say "These wounds I had on Crispian's day."
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
"The younger brother must help to pay for the pleasures of the elder." --Jane Austen
The more of the series I read, the more I understand the Magic School Bus as a bleak study of profoundly broken individuals.
No country for old men
Opening paragraphs are the best bit
Looks like a book cover. Probably about some working class guy
Darkly
Reading at the club
· 1 min read
12 years ago
Just found out that H. P. Lovecraft was a big fan of the Catskills! From his story "Beyond the Wall of Sleep":
"..his appearance was that of the typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region; one of those strange, repellent scions of a primitive Colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of a little-traveled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren of the thickly settled districts. Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly to the decadent element of "white trash" in the South, law and morals are non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of native American people. "
GRAVITY = Milton's PARADISE LOST
Boom.
Reading BRIDGE OF SIGHS--don't understand how it is that Richard Russo can be so great without being very good.
Happy Birthday, Tennessee Williams!
"Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out and death's the other."