Reviews

Notes p50 - That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought. The boy was sad too and we begged her pardon and butchered her promptly. p55 - “Take a good rest, small bird,” he said. “Then go in and take your chance like any man or bird or fish.” p60-61 - The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea. p64 There are three things that are brothers: the fish and my two hands. It must uncramp. It is unworthy of it to be cramped. I wish I could show him what sort of man I am. But then he would see the cramped hand. Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so. I wish I was the fish, he thought, with everything he has against only my will and my intelligence. He was comfortable but suffering, although he did not admit the suffering at all. p66 - “I told the boy I was a strange old man,” he said. “Now is when I must prove it.” ¶ The thousand times he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it. The page made me think of Hamlet. “…to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing, end them…” Hamlet holds a special place in my heart and I suppose I see it in many things. p88 - I must hold his pain where it is, he thought. Mine does not matter. I can control mine. But his pain could drive him mad. (TB: were it so easy.) p103 - “But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” p104-105 - It is silly not to hope, he thought. Besides I believe it is a sin. Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it. ¶ I have no understanding of it and I am not sure that I believe in it. Perhaps it was a sin to kill the fish. I suppose it was even though I did it to keep me alive and feed many people. But then everything is a sin. Do not think about sin. It is much too late for that and there are people who are paid to do it. p110 “I wish it were a dream and that I had never hooked him. I’m sorry about it, fish. It makes everything wrong.” (TB: feeling like you’ve ruined something in the seeking of it or the attainment of it, or of its vision, anyway.) Now is not the time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is. p115 - What will you do now if they come in the night? What can you do? ¶ “Fight them,” he said. “I’ll fight them until I die.” p117 - I hope I do not have to fight again, he thought. I hope so much I do not have to fight again. Last. TB: Even knowing that Hem did not enjoy ideas of theme in story, it is hard for me to read this as anything but an analogy for the struggle of self against. Against nature, self, etc. Ideas of persistence, despair, hope, skill, and will. Also the idea of corrupting or destroying a thing in the seeking or achievement of it. Published 1952. Hem died by suicide in 1961. — # Review ...

Notes “He says opening bottles is what makes drunkards,” Bill explained. “That’s right,” said Nick. He was impressed. He had never thought of that before. He had always thought it was solitary drinking that made drunkards. Pages 46-48. Nick is exploring the end of his relationship and is clearly depressed and trying to put on a brave face in front of his friend. His friend is telling him all the ways in which he is better off, which is always high on the list of things you do not want to hear and do not believe, anyway. Then the idea of hope comes to him. Then, of course, he is happy. “He says he’s never been crazy, Bugs,” Ad said. “He’s got a lot coming to him.” Review This short little book of short stories from Hemingway is good. I’ve read some of these, mostly the Nick Adams stories, before in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway which I’ve gotten about halfway through on my Kindle years ago. ...

I am not a great lover of poetry and am usually stumped by it. Historically if poetry isn’t a haiku or in iambic pentameter I am a little too dumb to read it, because I don’t know how to make it sound in my inner voice. Don’t ask me to read it out loud. I am self-conscious of this blind spot. I tried reading The Waste Lands last year and was totally bumfuzzled by it. ...

This did not work for me and I detected that quickly. Ronin is a great short, and it’s one of those things that I don’t think having more of is that much of a good thing. There are many, many characters in this book. Too many, I think. I wish it had focused on the Ronin and Fox and left many of the others behind. It felt too scattered and felt very long and drawn out because of that. Every time we got to a Kouru chapter I wanted to skip it because I found that character and their story uninteresting. ...

Notes / Quotes Ch 1 What Writing Is & Does Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolysm (sic). Ch 2 The Qualities of a Writer The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it. Good writing is true writing. Mice: What is the best early training for a writer? Y.C.: An unhappy childhood. Ch 4 What to Write About The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life—and one is as good as the other. Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damn hurt use it—don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don’t think anything is of importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you. Love is also a good subject as you might be said to have discovered. Other major subjects are the money from which we get riches and poores. Also avarice. … Murder is a good one so get a swell murder into [your] next book and sit back. Ch 5 Advice to Writers All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. Remember to get the weather into your god damned book—weather is very important. Ch 6 Working Habits Mice: Do you know what is going to happen when you write a story? Y.C.: Almost never. I start to make it up and have happen what would happen as it goes along. The minute I quit trying to write the rest of it is easy. Ch 7 Characters Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to by symbols. Ch 13 The Writer’s Life …Had never had the real old melancholia before and am glad to have had it so I know what people go through. It makes me more tolerant of what happened to my father. But [Bernard Berenson] I think we should never be too pessimistic about what we know we have done well because we should have some reward and the only reward is that which is within ourselves… I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket. All criticism is shit anyway. Nobody knows anything about it except yourself. Review A nice little book collecting notes on writing from Hemingway over his career and across his publications. It is probably foolhardy to read a book about a writer’s habit in search of your own habit, but it is at least interesting to compare and contrast. I thought a lot about Stephen King’s On Writing while reading this. King writes 10 pages or thereabouts a day. Hemingway might write 400 words according to this book. Neither is right nor wrong, it’s just the work of the writer. ...

Notes “What those ancient Greeks (who, after all, did have a bit of understanding of philosophy) assumed to be the task for an entire lifetime because expertise in doubting is not acquired in days or weeks; what was attained by the old, veteran combatant (==who had preserved the equilibrium of doubt through every seductive snare, fearlessly denying the certainty of the senses and of thought, uncompromisingly defying the anxiety of self-love and the flattering advances of sympathy==)—in our times, this is where everyone begins.” Abraham: “Lord in heave, I thank you; it is after all better that he believe me to be a monster than that he should lose faith in you.” What provokes such dedication to a thing so terrible? SK asks: what sin could be more frightful than this? “No one who was great in the world shall be forgotten, but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of what he loved.” “the power whose strength is weakness, great through the wisdom whose secret is foolishness, whose form is madness, great through the love that is hatred of oneself.” “The entire content of his life is contained in this love, and yet the situation is such that it would be impossible for this to become a reality, impossible for it to be translated from ideality to reality.” “Only inferior natures forget themselves and become something new.” “For only in infinite resignation do I become transparent to myself in my eternal validity, and only then can there be talk of grasping existence by virtue of faith.” “By virtue of the absurd…” ==“Thus, then, my intention in telling the story of Abraham is to extract from it, in the form of problems, the dialectical element it contains, so that we might see what an enormous paradox faith is, a paradox that is capable of turning a murder into a holy act that is well-pleasing to God, a paradox that restores Isaac to Abraham, which no thinking can master, because faith begins precisely at the point where thinking leaves off."== (end of the Preliminary in the Problemata). In Problema I, extended discussion of the sacrifice of a daughter for ’the good of the whole community’ and what a hero that makes the father, and even moreso the fiancé. Not heroic! What the fuck! In Problema I re: a peasant more or less and approaching the King’s chamber. See page 77 for full context. “On the contrary, he should find joy in observing every rule of decorum with happy and confident enthusiasm, which is precisely what will make him openhearted and cheerful.” Difficult to suppress the chortle I made at this. Get real. “It is far more difficult to receive than to give—that is, if one has had the courage to do without and has not proven a coward in the hour of need.” Review I picked this up because it is at one point referenced in God, Human, Animal, Machine, and then I also saw it referenced in Carl Roger’s On Becoming a Person, which I was thumbing through in the bookstore the other day. I picked this up with little knowledge of Kierkegaard beyond those two citations, other than a vague awareness of his status as a philosopher/theologian. ...

A friend gifted this book to me for my birthday last month. I’m glad they did, because I’d have missed it otherwise! I did not quite know what to expect going in, but it proved to be a lovely mix of memoir, history, and question-asking. Very me. I’m going to keep this constrained to just my experience reading the book. This has been one of my most notated books in recent memory and a lot of my notes are questions. I’m going to resurrect my dusty substack to meander through some of those. I’ll edit this review later with links to those posts. ...

This was an impulse buy. I read this several years ago at the height of my Francophile days when I was able to speak French about half as well as I could read it. Now I can read it okay and speak it only when drunk, and quite poorly. My mom told me a week or two ago that she wanted me to think about going to Paris again. This is something I have wanted to do for years but I have never traveled internationally and not much domestically. You read Baldwin and Hemingway and Hugo and the others and see Paris as this imperfectly perfect place. Somewhere that a lost person can go to figure things out. I am not convinced any such place really exists outside of the mind, but in the same breath I’ll say context matters. Anyway I’m filling out passport paperwork again and maybe I will save enough to go and cheaply. ...

I bought the Picador Modern Classics hardcover of this a week or two ago on a whim. I was trying to find gifts for family and ended up buying this for myself instead. I think this is my third read of the book? I read a lot of Isherwood aroundabouts 2013 when I was fresh out of high school and struggling with being gay. It didn’t really matter that the time period was all wrong, or that things were so different. A lot of things weren’t different, and it was more or less about reading books that showed relationships and love in a non-heterosexual way. ...

It’s finally done, I’ve read everything that Cormac ever published. What a year. I plan to write something about that elsewhere, but for now, Suttree. I think this is Cormac’s longest novel at nearly 500 pages. It is episodic in nature and the episodes are presented without a lot of scaffolding to let you know. Cormac provides you with the changing of the seasons and that is the major progressive force of the novel. There is little plot other than Suttree’s sort of underboiling search for self. I think you’d have to read it a few times to really mine it, and I think there is something there to mine. ...