Archive for the ‘ Literature ’ Category

Michel Houellebecq

I am reading his book The Map and the Territory – (a translation from the French) and it is good. I don’t usually buy books Amazon recommends, there are just too many of them. But this time I lucked out. Without even trying to, the central character becomes an artist – and gives us a devastating satirical view [ READ MORE ]

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?

NY Review – In a Panic About Love I know from personal experience, and from the experience of some male friends I have known, how terrible a mother-son relationship can be. When I read of a truly terrible mother-daughter relationship, my heart goes out to them – they are even worse. This book is about [ READ MORE ]

A Clockwork Orange – The Movie

Hollywood knows its viewers are idiots (especially when they are viewing) – and produces movies to please them. This summarizes my review of the movie. The book was literature of a particular kind: social satire, which the English have specialized in for a long time, and which they do better than anyone else. The movie [ READ MORE ]

A Clock That Looked Like an Orange

I am referring to A Clockwork Orange, of course, which I have been listening to. This is definitely not Sunday School material, but it can be safely described as unique Literature - whose success took its young author, Anthony Burgess, by surprise. It has spawned its own literature, such as this poem On Inhabiting an Orange. He was thoroughly pissed [ READ MORE ]

Arthur Schnitzler

I never heard of this writer before I read his Night Games. To quote from the Foreword: So yes, Schnitzler divided his attention between the often anti-climatic everyday and the dramatic climaxes of love and death. He encompased great passions, and stony detachment. You cannot read him without feeling this man really understood. And in feeling [ READ MORE ]

‘Tis so Appalling – it Exhilirates

This morning I listened to a chapter of A Clockwork Orange. Then picked up the book Dickinson, and read poem J341. Imagine my amazement when they were talking about the same thing! – horrible social events. Here is the first stanza: ‘Tis so appalling – it exhilarates - So over Horror, it half captivates - The Soul stares [ READ MORE ]

Gertrude Stein and the Nazis

NY Review – Missionaries Several books are reviewed in this article. The one I am interested in is Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fäy, and the Vichy Dilemma. Here is a quote: Janet Malcolm had much to say about Stein’s relations with Fäy during the Vichy period in her New Yorker essays of June 2, 2003, and [ READ MORE ]

Lewis Lapham Blows Me Away

TomGram - Lewis Lapham, Machine-Made News Harpers Magazine – Ignorance of Things Past And fortunately he is still blowing at gale-force, as these links will show you. I like the first one best, because he refers to Marshall McLuhan: The conundrum is in line with the late Marshall McLuhan’s noticing 50 years ago the presence of “an [ READ MORE ]

What Goes On On the Surface – and What Goes On Below the Surface

I am still listening to Thérèse Raquin, which was the subject of another posting. I am horrified by what is going on there, which is largely the result of bourgeois hypocrisy – something my childhood was drenched with also. Here is a summary of the plot: an illegitimate baby girl was adopted by a woman of modest means who [ READ MORE ]

Thérèse Raquin

Audible I feel strange this morning – I feel I have everything (such as this recording), and at the same time I have nothing (in the way of a social life). I will speak of the recording first. This is a excellent recording of a book by Emile Zola – of whom I knew nothing [ READ MORE ]

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