(RT)
Category Archives: books poetry lit
Most Like the Human Voice
the cello. I’ve heard voices, women’s voices,
men’s, deep, almost suntanned, the bow drawn
trembling across the past, finding the line
somebody else drew, before, ago, far, ages,
the long lasting, the note held in glass, the rim
muscled fingers, strong arms, the woman’s shape,
knees grasping, the unaccompanied suite.
Bach, his mind, moral-scaffolded, tune climbing coil,
fakir’s spiral, above, above. He holds us, bears
us. Math music. Twenty something, David,
whatever holds us, holds us aloft, keeps,
hopes. The woman, the cellist, going to buy the dress,
the black dress, the woman sitting there, spreading
her legs, embracing imagination, sawing the bow
back and forth, saying. “I don’t think this dress,”
and the saleswoman snatching the dress, “No,
not for what you want a dress for.”
at the funeral, the dead man not religious,
played Bach. How few nights later, the boy,
boy he was, David, will be, went where he should not,
to what he couldn’t live with, without, white
heat, argument, wanting more, playing less, lead,
the only way to settle fire, habit, what lifted him
when Bach didn’t. The dropped bow, the voice,
so like ours, if it were reasonable, still, every note
the dead hear, the rest of us twist the knob for,
never completely clearing static about the score.
-Starkey Flythe in Inkwell
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Fault in Our Stars Art
I don’t know where it’s from but this Fault in Our Stars book art is lovely.
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Books
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Quotidian: Tolkein
“That’s all sob stuff. No, of course, I didn’t… The Hobbit was written in what I should now regard as bad style, as if one were talking to children. There’s nothing my children loathed more. They taught me a lesson. Anything that in any way marked out The Hobbit as for children instead of just for people, they disliked-instinctively. I did too, now that I think about it. All this ‘I won’t tell you any more, you think about it’ stuff. Oh no, they loathe it; it’s awful. Children aren’t a class. They are merely human beings at different stages of maturity. All of them have a human intelligence which even at its lowest is a pretty wonderful thing, and the entire world in front of them. It remains to be seen if they rise above that.”
-Tolkien denying that his stories were written for children
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Book Review: Hush Now, Don’t You Cry
Full disclosure: I only read about a third of this so this is really more my impressions than any full, impressive book review. Rhys Bowen is an award-winning mystery writer with dozens of books, and this is the 11th in her Molly Murphy series – and also my introduction to her writing.
But look – this just wasn’t very good. Molly, an Irish private detective in a world in which lady detectives are an anomaly, has just married a New York City senior detective and the two are off on their honeymoon to an acquaintance’s estate on Rhode Island. Shortly after arriving, their host turns up dead, and the two are naturally pulled into the mystery of solving his murder.
Molly (just so you know, the book is written in the first-person) is an endearing protagonist, as is her husband Daniel – both brave, fairly clever, possessed of senses of humor. But the good characterization is buried in overly long prose and a trite mystery setup. If you’re read even one or two gothic novels, much less a great many murder mysteries, you will start to check out the moment Molly arrives at an old mansion and sees the ghostly head of a mysterious child in a window – a child who was killed years before. From there, it only gets worse – a houseful of wealthy relatives any one of whom could have wanted the victim dead and who are sketched with the barest of details and personality, a suspicious housekeeper who pops out of mysterious corridors, a decanter of whisky conveniently left in a secluded spot…
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Insert Russian Emotion into Repressed British Lit
The Millions’ Year in Reading, one of the my favorite events in the online world, has begun! Sample this hilarious bit from a Gary Shteyngart review –
“I always had difficulty with the relative lack of emotion in English lit. I developed several strategies to make my reading easier. First, I would insert some hot Russian emotion into the chilly scenes by hand. So if a character is carrying on some abstruse conversation about standing for parliament or whatever, I would interrupt it in my mind with: “And then Casaubon Casaubonovich threw himself around her neck and cried violently.” Problem solved. Then I decided to Yiddishize some of the writing to make it more haimish. Take for example the first line of David Copperstein: “Whether I shall turn out to be the mensch of my own life, or whether that station will be held by some other putz, this spiel must show.” RT
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Caffeinated Links: Catching Fire Book Cover, T.S. Eliot, Inside Llewyn Davis Music
Julian Peters’ illustrations of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock are among the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. RT
This “book covers come to life” – animated book covers – series is not just breathtaking, but also the way of the future – one day very soon we’ll walk into bookstores and the book covers will be animated. RT
Millenials in American aren’t the only ones desperate for jobs – it’s the same in Europe, according the New York Times writing about a generation “Young and Educated in Europe, but Desperate for Jobs”
100 Notable Books from 2013, RT
Ruth Engel reviews the Inside Llewyn Davis soundtrack – “The album itself is lovely – Oscar Isaac’s voice is so compelling that I’m sure his performance in the movie will be beyond reproach even if he doesn’t act at all. It includes a number of instantly recognizable folk standards, including one of my all-time favorites,” 500 Miles.” Marcus Mumford collaborates on an aching version of “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song)” that contains no frenetic banjo strumming, and Chris Thile and the Punch Brothers bring warmth and a fiddle into the mix.” RT
Coffee and Irony 