Everyman’s Library was founded on February 15, 1906 with the publication by Joseph Dent (1849-1926) of fifty titles. Dent, a master London bookbinder turned publisher, was a classic Victorian autodidact. The tenth child of a Darlington housepainter, he had left school at thirteen, and arrived in London with half-a-crown in his pocket.
Dent promised to publish new and beautiful editions of the world’s classics at one shilling a volume, ‘to appeal to every kind of reader: the worker, the student, the cultured man, the child, the man and the woman’, so that ‘for a few shillings the reader may have a whole bookshelf of the immortals; for five pounds (which will procure him with a hundred volumes) a man may be intellectually rich for life.’ It is now published by Alfred A. Knopf in the United States and Random House UK abroad. It brings this reader great memories to see these titles and to remember reading some of them in their older editions. My copy of Heinrich Heine's Prose and Poems has long ago lost it's green dust jacket and shows tears along the binding from one of my dogs gnawing her way into the tasty, congealed glue inside. Worn and battered, It's one of my favorite treasures. Below is a list of reprints they currently market as The 100 Essential Titles. One might carp that the list is decidedly British, or that it omits many great titles, but their publication list is peppered with some of the world's greatest works as well.
The Aeneid by Virgil The Analects by Confucius Animal Farm by George Orwell Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy The Arabian Nights by Husain Haddawy The Audubon Reader by John James Audubon Beloved by Toni Morrison The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window by Raymond Chandler Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer Carried Away by Alice Munro The Castle by Franz Kafka Catch-22 by Joseph Heller Collected Stories by Raymond Chandler Collected Stories by Roald Dahl Collected Stories by Franz Kafka Collected Stories by W. Somerset Maugham The Complete Henry Bech by John Updike The Complete Short Novels by Anton Chekhov The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky David Copperfield by Charles Dickens Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Dubliners by James Joyce Essays by George Orwell The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez Great Expectations by Charles Dickens The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad The Histories by Herodotus A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipul The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende The Human Factor by Graham Greene The Iliad by Homer Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback by Raymond Chandler Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett Meditations by Marcus Aurelius Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot Moby-Dick by Herman Melville Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett Mr. Sampath–The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma by R. K. Narayan Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf My Ántonia by Willa Cather The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell The Odyssey by Homer Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov A Passage to India by E. M. Forster The Periodic Table by Primo Levi The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays by Albert Camus Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories by James M. Cain Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver’s Seat, The Only Problem by Muriel Spark The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth The Republic by Plato Rights of Man and Common Sense by Thomas Paine The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov The Stranger by Albert Camus Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, TheEnglish Teacher by R. K. Narayan Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith The Trial by Franz Kafka The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith The Woman Warrior and China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Ulysses by James Joyce Walden by Henry David Thoreau We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo
** Another interesting reprint series I discovered recently is published by the New York Review of Books (NYRB). I believe that they're all 20th century authors, but a tasty grouping of novels, stories and essays it is. Lots of authors I've never read. http://www.nybooks.com/nyrb/ (Drat and fuck, my link thingy doesn't work, you'll have to drag and drop it).
Amy Hempel is a short story writer and journalist. Along with Raymond Carver and Mary Robison, she is regarded as one of the leading figures in American minimalist fiction, an influential style which began in the 1980's and is often associated with editor Gordon Lish. Her Collected Short Stories was published by Scribner in 2006.
The Harvest
The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.
The man was not hurt when the other car hit ours. The man I had known for one week held me in the street in a way that meant I couldn't see my legs. I remember knowing that I shouldn't look, and knowing that I would look if it wasn't that I couldn't.
My blood was on the front of this man's clothes.
He said, "You'll be okay, but this sweater is ruined."
I screamed from the fear of pain. But I did not feel any pain. In the hospital, after injections, I knew there was pain in the room — I just didn't know whose pain it was.
What happened to one of my legs required four hundred stitches, which, when I told it, became five hundred stitches, because nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.
The five days they didn't know if they could save my leg or not I stretched to ten.
The lawyer was the one who used the word. But I won't get around to that until a couple of paragraphs.
We were having the looks discussion — how important are they. Crucial is what I had said.
I think looks are crucial.
But this guy was a lawyer. He sat in an aqua vinyl chair drawn up to my bed. What he meant by looks was how much my loss of them was worth in a court of law.
I could tell that the lawyer liked to say court of law. He told me he had taken the bar three times before he had passed. He said that his friends had given him handsomely embossed business cards, but where these lovely cards were supposed to say Attorney-at-Law, his cards said Attorney-at-Last.
He had already covered loss of earnings, that I could not now become an airline stewardess. That I had never considered becoming one was immaterial, he said, legally.
"There's another thing," he said. "We have to talk here about marriageability."
The tendency was to say marriage-a-what? although I knew what he meant the first time I heard it.
I was eighteen years old. I said, "First, don't we talk about dateability?"
The man of a week was already gone, the accident driving him back to his wife.
"Do you think looks are important?" I asked the man before he left.
"Not at first," he said.
In my neighborhood there is a fellow who was a chemistry teacher until an explosion took his face and left what was left behind. The rest of him is neatly dressed in dark suits and shined shoes. He carries a briefcase to the college campus. What a comfort — his family, people said — until his wife took the kids and moved out.
In the solarium, a woman showed me a snapshot. She said, "This is what my son used to look like."
I spent my evenings in Dialysis. They didn't mind when a lounger was free. They had wide-screen color TV, better than they had in Rehab. Wednesday nights we watched a show where women in expensive clothes appeared on lavish sets and promised to ruin one another.
On one side of me was a man who spoke only in phone numbers. You would ask them how he felt, he would say, "924-3130." Or he would say, "757-1366." We guessed what these numbers might be, but nobody spent the dime.
There was sometimes, on the other side of me, a twelve-year-old boy. His lashes were thick and dark from blood-pressure medication. He was next on the transplant list, as soon as — the word they used was harvest — as soon as a kidney was harvested.
The boy's mother prayed for drunk drivers.
I prayed for men who were not discriminating.
Aren't we all, I thought, somebody's harvest?
The hour would end, and a floor nurse would wheel me back to my room. She would say, "Why watch that trash? Why not just ask me how my day went?"
I spent fifteen minutes before going to bed squeezing rubber grips. One of the medications was making my fingers stiffen. The doctor said he'd give it to me till I couldn't button my blouse — a figure of speech to someone in a cotton gown.
The lawyer said, "Charitable works."
He opened his shirt and showed me where an acupuncture person had dabbed at his chest with cola syrup, sunk four needles, and told him that the real cure was charitable works.
I said, "Cure for what?"
The lawyer said, "Immaterial."
As soon as I knew that I would be all right, I was sure that I was dead and didn't know it. I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence. I waited for the moment that would snap me out of my seeming life.
The accident happened at sunset, so that is when I felt this way the most. The man I had met the week before was driving me to dinner when it happened. The place was at the beach, a beach on a bay that you can look across and see the city lights, a place where you can see everything without having to listen to any of it.
A long time later I went to that beach myself. I drove the car. It was the first good beach day; I wore shorts.
At the edge of the sand I unwound the elastic bandage and waded into the surf. A boy in a wet suit looked at my leg. He asked me if a shark had done it; there were sightings of great whites along that part of the coast.
I said that, yes, a shark had done it.
"And you're going back in?" the boy asked.
I said, "And I'm going back in."
I leave a lot out when I tell the truth. The same when I write a story. I'm going to start now to tell you what I have left out of "The Harvest," and maybe begin to wonder why I had to leave it out.
There was no other car. There was only the one car, the one that hit me when I was on the back of the man's motorcycle. But think of the awkward syllables when you have to say motorcycle.
The driver of the car was a newspaper reporter. He worked for a local paper. He was young, a recent graduate, and he was on his way to a labor meeting to cover a threatened strike. When I say I was then a journalism student, it is something you might not have accepted in "The Harvest."
In the years that followed, I watched for the reporter's byline. He broke the People's Temple story that resulted in Jim Jones’s flight to Guyana. Then he covered Jonestown. In the city room of the San Francisco Chronicle, as the death toll climbed to nine hundred, the numbers were posted like donations on pledge night. Somewhere in the hundreds, a sign was fixed to the wall that said JUAN CORONA, EAT YOUR HEART OUT.
In emergency room, what happened to one of my legs required not four hundred stitches but just over three hundred stitches. I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it's true — nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.
My lawyer was no attorney-at-last. He was a partner in one of the city's oldest law firms. He would never have opened his shirt to reveal the site of acupuncture, which is something that he never would have had.
"Marriageability" was the original title of " The Harvest."
The damage to my leg was considered cosmetic although I am still, 15 years later, unable to kneel. In an out-of-court settlement the night before the trial, I was awarded nearly $100,000. The reporter's car insurance went up $12.43 per month.
It had been suggested that I rub my leg with ice, to bring up the scars, before I hiked my skirt three years later for the court. But there was no ice in the judge’s chambers, so I did not get a chance to pass or fail that moral test.
The man of a week, whose motorcycle it was, was not a married man. But when you thought he had a wife, wasn't I liable to do anything? And didn't I have it coming?
After the accident, the man got married. The girl he married was a fashion model. ("Do you think looks are important? I asked the man before he left. "Not at first," he said.)
In addition to being a beauty, the girl was worth millions of dollars. Would you have accepted this in "The Harvest" — that the model was also an heiress?
It is true we were headed for dinner when it happened. But the place where you can see everything without having to listen to any of it was not a beach on a bay; it was the top of Mount Tamalpais. We had the dinner with us as we headed up the twisting mountain road. This is the version that has room for perfect irony, so you won't mind when I say that for the next several months, from my hospital bed, I had a dead-on spectacular view of that very mountain.
I would have written this next part into the story if anybody would have believed it. But who would have? I was there and I didn't believe it.
On the day of my third operation, there was an attempted breakout at the Maximum Security Adjustment Center, adjacent to Death Row, at San Quentin prison. "Soledad Brother" George Jackson, a twenty-nine-year-old black man, pulled out a smuggled-in .38-caliber pistol, yelled, "This is it!" and opened fire. Jackson was killed; so were three guards and two "tiertenders," inmates who bring other prisoners their meals.
Three other guards were stabbed in the neck. The prison is a five-minute drive from Marin General, so that is where the injured guards were taken. The people who brought them were three kinds of police, including California Highway Patrol and Marin County sheriff's deputies, heavily armed.
Police were stationed on the roof of the hospital with rifles; they were posted in the hallways, waving patients and visitors back into their rooms.
When I was wheeled out of Recovery later that day, bandaged waist to ankle, three officers and an armed sheriff frisked me.
On the news that night, there was footage of the riot. They showed my surgeon talking to reporters, indicating, with a finger to his throat, how he had saved one of the guards by sewing up a slice from ear to ear.
I watched this on television, and because it was my doctor, and because hospital patients are self-absorbed, and because I was drugged, I thought the surgeon was talking about me. I thought that he was saying, "Well, she's dead. I'm announcing it to her in bed."
The psychiatrist I saw at the surgeon's referral said that the feeling was a common one. She said that victims of trauma who have not yet assimilated the trauma often believe they are dead and do not know it.
The great white sharks in the waters near my home attack one to seven people a year. Their primary victim is the abalone diver. With abalone stakes at thirty-five dollars a pound and going up, the Department of Fish and Game expects the shark attacks to show no slackening.
"There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him -- disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others." --Anton Chekhov
"Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." --Antonio Gransci
"I am old, I am fat, I am ugly - but I am still Tetrazinni" --Luisa Tetrazzini
"To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now." --Samuel Beckett
"... we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong." --George Eliot
"Unhappy the land that has no heroes!" "No, unhappy the land that needs heroes.” --Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo
"Harmful literature is more useful than useful literature . . ." --Evgeny Zamyatin
"I was timid when I was young. Now that I'm eighty-five, I'm seriously terrified." --Jorge Luis Borges
"The more information one has to evaluate, the less one knows." --Marshall McLuhan
"It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg." --Anatole France
“We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.” --Simone Weil
"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music." --Vladimir Nabokov
“We are so close to the ditch that we are on the bounce and the width of the jump start not sufficient and therefore able to easily jump short if the lack of a sufficiently solid basis to convey a bounce allowed. "--Martin Heidegger, 1946 (translated by the Google German to English program). I drank with the crazy portion a sickly translation sometimes offers ownly used newness.
If one bows to a Buddha, the Buddha does not know;
If one greets a monk, one is greeting what is actually there.
--Quatrain by Yuan Mei, from the biography Yuan Mei, 18th Century Chinese Poet by Arthur Waley
III
"Reduce Bloom by cross multiplication of reverses of fortune, from which these supports protected him, and by elimination of all positive values to a negligible negative irrational unreal quantity
Successively, in descending helotic order: Poverty: that of the outdoor hawker of imitation jewellery, the dun for the recovery of bad and doubtful debts, the poor rate and deputy cess collector. Mendicancy: that of the fraudulent bankrupt with negligible assets paying 1s. 4d. in the pound, sandwichman, distributor of throwaways, nocturnal vagrant, insinuating sycophant, maimed sailor, blind stripling, superannuated bailiff's man, marfest, lickplate, spoilsport, pickthank, eccentric public laughingstock seated on bench of public park under discarded perforated umbrella. Destitution: the inmate of Old Man's House (Royal Hospital) Kilmainham, the inmate of Simpson's Hospital for reduced but respectable men permanently disabled by gout or want of sight. Nadir of misery: the aged impotent disfranchised ratesupported moribund lunatic pauper."--Ulysses, James Joyce
IV
"God who, in his simple substance, is all everywhere equally, nevertheless, in efficacy, is in rational creatures in another way than in irrational, and in good rational creatures in another way than in the bad. He is in irrational creatures in such a way as not to be comprehended by them; by all rational ones, however, he can be comprehended through knowledge; but only by the good is he to be comprehended also through love."--St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), excerpted from The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley. (The curious translator from the French is unknown to me)
V
"Since every practical law represents a possible action as good, and on this account, for a subject who is practically determinable by reason, necessary, all imperatives are formulae determining an action which is necessary according to the principle of a will good in some respects. If now the action is good only as a means to somethingelse, then the imperative is hypothetical; if it is conceived as good in itself and consequently as being necessarily the principle of a will which of itself conforms to reason, then it is categorical."
--Metaphysics of Ethics, Immanuel Kant (translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, B.D., Litt.D., Hon. D.D. (Glasg.), fellow of Trinity College, Dublin)
VI
"My brother in the wisdom of his conceit
is not willing to admit that my ingenuity
is mathematically, inevitably, equivalent to his own;
since we are not separate entities by one.
And therefore our two accomplishments are one.
He believes I cannot solve the acrostic of his fortress;
but yet it is self-evident that I must,
because we both have drawn the plan.
He believes the perimeter of my argument has
wrinkled like the wattle of a beaten cock,
not realizing this must be his also. . . "
--Notes from a Bottle found on the Beach at Carmel, Evan S. Connell
VII
"According to the Archpoet Homer, Cerberus was simply a dog. Dante calls him a worm. Hesiod mentions Cerberus twice in the Theogony, but is unable to decide if he has one head or fifty. Pindar doubles this number, while Horace endows Cerberus with a mane of snakes. The tragedians are more restrained, content with three heads. Sculptors and painters represent Cerberus with three heads at most. Here an observation comes to mind--language is inclined to hyperbole and exaggeration if not lying, while a statement in marble or paint imposes a matter-of-fact simplicity. Because of the dim illumination at the place of action, the outcome of the struggle between Heracles and Cerberus--guardian of the kingdom of the dead--was unclear. It was the twelfth, the last and the most difficult, labor of the hero. Hence the sacred semi-obscurity that befits other worlds." --"The Infernal Dog," from The King of the Ants by Zbigniew Herbert (translated from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter)
VIII
"Behind the liberal identification of totalitarianism with authoritarianism, and the concomitant inclination to see "totalitarian" trends in every authoritarian limitation of freedom, lies an older confusion of authority with tyranny, and of legitimate power with violence. The difference between tyranny and authoritarian government has always been that the tyrant rules in accordance with his own will and interest, whereas even the most draconic authoritarian government is bound by laws. Its acts are tested by a code which was made either not by man at all, as in the case of the law of nature or God's Commandments or the Platonic ideas, or at least not by those actually in power. The source of authority in authoritarian government is always a force external and superior to its own power; political realm, from which the authorities derive their "authority," that is, their legitimacy, and against which their power can be checked."
--Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt
IX
"It is one of man's passions to disentangle apparent chaos. He has to harmonize the universe to his own mental structure, and he does so by choosing from nature what fits into the working of his mind. One of the resultants of this activity is called Science. Concordances are but re-echoed questions and answers. All human activity, whether technical or artistic, tends to create structures which conform with those of our constants, and free perceptible affinities from the magma of the real and possible. The geometrising [sic] spirit is one of the consequences of the tendency to least resistance. It is innate."
--Foundations of Modern Art, Ozenfant (translation by John Rodker)
X
"Overpowered by consular guards and turned over to the police the assassin admitted to being a member of the dreaded "Fly Tox Movement" an extremist sect who hold hashish in horror getting their kicks largely from vitamin deficiency a preparation like that you can get on his line sweet and clear 'Can you hear me Homer?' Of course you can. I'm telling you what you have to do Homer. We will protect you Homer. Flying saucers will be waiting after you have done our bidding.'
Now it sometimes happens you lose a screwball can't get on his line well then you put everybody with cop in him out on the streets to trace down the lost screwball before he talks too sensible about what we are doing here in this department which is unthinkable because we got here first heavy and cold as a cop's blackjack on a winter night we was looking for a lost screwball last contacted in an orgone accumulator screen went dead case like that usually turns out to be interdepartmental sabotage or illegal recruitment the whole department is rotten with it maybe the Ethnology Department used him in a ritual murder we are men of the world these things happen . . . "
Q: "Do you think we will arrive, or have already arrived at the point of creating artificial beings without recourse to normal reproductive processes? Does that seem desirable to you?"
A: "I think it's quite within the range of modern technology, and it seems very desirable to me, indeed, because it would bring about elimination of the family. . . Now, if you could produce artificial beings, you could produce them at a reasonable age, and you wouldn't have all this infancy. Yes, it seems to me very desirable."
--The Job, interviews of William S. Burroughs by Daniel Odier (1973)
XI
"The notion of force is far from simple, and yet it is the first that has to be elucidated in order to formulate the problems of society. Force and oppression--that makes two; but what needs to be understood above all is that it is not the manner in which use is made of some particular force, but its very nature, which determines whether it is oppressive or not. Marx clearly perceived this in connection with the State; he understood that this machine for grinding men down, cannot stop grinding as long as it goes on functioning, no matter in whose hands it may be. But this insight has a far more general application. Oppression proceeds exclusively from objective conditions. The first of these is the existence of privileges; and it is not men's laws or decrees which determine privileges, nor yet titles to property; it is the very nature of things. Certain circumstances, which correspond to stages, no doubt inevitable, in human development, give rise to forces which come between the ordinary man and his own conditions of existence, between the effort and the fruit of the effort, and which are, inherently, the monopoly of a few, owing to the fact that they cannot be shared among all; thenceforward these privileges behold in their hands the fate of the very people on whom they depend, and equality is destroyed. This is what happens to begin with when the religious rites by which man thinks to win nature over to his side, having become too numerous and complicated to be known by all, finally become the secret and consequently the monopoly of a few priests; the priest then disposes, albeit only through a fiction, of all of nature's powers, and it is in their name that he exercises authority. Nothing essential is changed when this monopoly is no longer made up of rites but of scientific processes, and when those in possession of it are called scientists and technicians instead of priests."
--"Analysis of Oppression", Simone Weil (translated by Arthur Wills and John Petrie), from The Simone Weil Reader
XII
fou / mad
It frequently occurs to the amorous subject that he is, or is going, mad.
1. "I am mad to be in love, I am not mad to be able to say so, I double my image: insane in my own eyes (I know my delirium), simply unreasonable in the eyes of someone else, to whom I quite sanely describe my madness: conscious of this madness, sustaining a discourse upon it.
Werther meets a madman in the mountains: in midwinter, he wants to pick flowers for Charlotte, whom he has loved. This man, during the time he was in a padded cell, was happy: he no longer knew anything about himself. Werther half recognizes himself in the madman seeking flowers: mad with passion, like himself, but deprived of any access to the (supposed) happiness of unconsciousness: he suffers from having failed his own madness.
3. For a hundred years, (literary) madness has been thought to consist in Rimbaud's 'Je est un autre': madness is an experience of depersonalization. For me as an amorous subject, it is quite the contrary: it is becoming a subject, being unable to keep myself from doing so, which drives me mad. I am not someone else: that is what I realize with horror.
(A Zen story: An old monk busies himself in the hottest weather drying mushrooms. 'Why don't you let others do that?' 'Another man is not myself, and I am not another. Another cannot experience my action. I must create my experience of drying mushrooms.')
I am indefectibly myself, and it is in this that I am mad: I am bad because I consist."
--A Lover's Discourse, Fragments, by Roland Barthes (translated by Richard Howard)
XIII
"This way of looking at the old was itself something new. Past realities are transformed by present reflection. Te translation of tradition into conscious principles gives rise to a new philosophy which identifies itself with the old. The philosopher does not advance his ideas as his own. The Jewish Prophets proclaimed God's revelation, Confucius the voice of antiquity. He who submits to the old is saved from the presumption of basing great demands on his own infinitesimal self. He improves his chances of being believed and followed by those who still live in the substance of their origins. Independent thought, springing from the nothingness of mere reason, is futile: 'I have gone without food and sleep in order to think; to no avail: it is better to learn.' But learning and thinking go hand in hand. One demands the other. 'To learn without thinking is vain.' "
--"Confucius' Basic Idea: The Renewal of Antiquity," Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, Karl Jaspers (translated by Ralph Manheim)
XIV
"In this Chapter Ani identifies himself with Tem-Khepera, who composed the words of power that Thoth pronounced, which resulted in the creation of the heavens and the earth. In the character of this god Ani could pronounce words, the effect of which would be to give him everything that he desired. Now the Egyptians thought that words were concrete things, and that it was possible to steal from a man his words of power, or the spells wherewith he had been provided; and whereas we should say that we had forgotten a formula, the Egyptian would say that it had been stolen from him. The object of this Chapter was to give a man in Khert-Neter the ability to make his words of power, supposing they had gone away, or been carried away from him, to return to him, no matter how far away they had been carried. When the Chapter was recited by Ani, his spells would return to him more swiftly than greyhounds can run, and quicker than the light. Its recital, too, would obtain for him the help of 'him that brought the ferry-boat of Ra, of the god Herfhaf who ferried the souls of the righteous over to the Island of Fire, wherein Osiris reigned. The word of power which Ani wanted to possess was that the utterance of which would enable him to recreate himself."
--The Book of The Dead, a hieroglyphic transcription of the papyrus of Ani by E.A. Wallis Budge
XV
"A Cambridge don, John Mitchell, wrote a paper in 1783 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in which he pointed out that a star that was sufficiently massive and compact would have such a strong gravitational field that light could not escape: any light emitted from the surface of the star would be dragged back by the star's gravitational attraction before it could get very far. Mitchell suggested that there might be a large number of stars like this. Although we could not be able to see them because the light from them would not reach us, we would still feel their gravitational attraction. Such objects are what we now call black holes, because that is what they are: black voids in space."
--A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
XVI
When God made the first clay model of a human being He painted in the eyes ... the lips ... and the sex.
And then He painted in each person's name lest the person should ever forget it.
If God approves of His creation, He breathed the painted clay model into life by signing His own name.
XVII
HM: "Rewriting is so extraordinary, it's where writing, not always, but very often, takes place. That's when the writer becomes the first reader. Becomes a creator. If the reader is the only creator, the writer gets to share and in fact participates in that act of creation in the stage of rewriting. That's when the writer can play creator too. The old idea is hard to get rid of, that the writers have something to say and the readers are there to get it. I don't think things work that way at all. LT: In that sense, the author has always been dead. HM: That's right. There have never been any authors. There have only been readers. The authors are first readers. LT: Your most recent novel, Cigarettes, seems formally very different from, let's say, your first novel, The Conversions, although it seemed to me that Cigarettes reworks some of The Conversions' themes. HM: The earlier works were misread by a great many readers because they always thought I must be doing something else than what was actually there. And so they kept looking past what was right in front of them . . . The narrator makes only two or three remarks in the course of The Conversions--about his wife divorcing him, for instance--but they're enough to suggest all the things that he's not saying that he should be saying. You can't help being aware, even if you don't know why, that the narrator has been reduced to a point of total fearfulness. LT: His pursuit of the inheritance, which sets him chasing fragments of an esoteric puzzle that, in fact, doesn't exist, has all sorts of meanings. He's on a quest, a journey. Is he worthy, is he smart enough? A lot of anxiety there." --"Harry Mathews by Lynne Tillman," from BOMB magazine interviews 1992
“Fred forgot three things in a row before he reached the front door on his way to work.Then he remembered that he had wanted to take the paper with him.Dorothy didn’t bother to say that she hadn’t finished with it yet herself.She just went back and brought it to him.He dithered for a few more minutes, patting his pockets and wondering whether he ought to take an umbrella.She told him the answers to all his questions and slipped in several more of her own:would he need the umbrella if he had the car, did he really think it felt like rain?If his car had that funny noise, couldn’t he take the bus instead, and had he found the other umbrella yet?It must be at the office somewhere; it was a nice telescoping one and she suggested that someone else had walked off with it.”—Mrs. Caliban, Rachel Ingalls
"It was a death that began it all and another death that led us on.The first was of the man called Brendan and I saw the moment of it.I saw them gather round and crouch over him in the bitter cold, then start back to give the soul passage.It was as if they played his death for me and this was a strange thing, as they did not know I watched, and I did not then know what they were.
Strange too that I should have been led to them, whether by angels or demons, at a time when my folly had brought me to such great need.I will not hide my sins, or what is the worth of absolution?That very day hunger had brought me to adultery and through adultery I had lost my cloak.”—Morality Play, Barry Unsworth
“I was in trouble.An English poet (now dead) had sued me over a novel I had written because it was based in part on an episode from his life.Worse, my publishers in the United States and England had capitulated to this poet, pulling the novel out of bookstores and pulping several thousand copies.
Why should I have been surprised?My publishers were once Salman Rushdie’s publishers too.”--The Term Paper Artist, David Leavitt
“Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt.”—Persuassion, Jane Austen
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.My sin, my soul.Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, a three, on the teeth.Lo.Lee.Ta.
She was lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten inone sock.She was Lola in slacks.She was Dolly at school.She was Dolores on the dotted line.But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor?She did, indeed she did.In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita a all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child.In a princedom by the sea.Oh when?About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer.You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied.Look at this tangle of thorns.”—Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
"He was facing Seventh Avenue, at Times Square. It was past midnight and he had been sitting in the movies, in the top row of the balcony, since two o'clock in the afternoon. Twice he had been awakened by the violent accents of the Italian film, once the usher had awakened him, and twice he had been awakened by caterpillar fingers between his thighs. He was so tired, he had fallen so low, that he scarcely had the energy to be angry; nothing of his belonged to him any more--you took the best, so why not take the rest?--but he had growled in his sleep and bared the white teeth in his dark face and crossed his legs. Then the balcony was nearly empty, the Italian film was approaching a climax; he stumbled down the endless stairs into the street. He was hungry, his mouth felt filthy. He realized too late, as he passed through the doors, that he wanted to urinate. And he was broke. And he had nowhere to go."--Another Country, James Baldwin
“See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.”—Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
“On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parblly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadn’t ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.”—Ridley Walker, Russell Hoban
“The first thing the midwife noticed about Michael K when she helped him out of his mother into the world was that he had a hare lip. The lip curled like a snail’s foot, the left nostril gaped. Obscuring the child for a moment from its mother, she prodded open the tiny bud of a mouth and was thankful to find the palate whole.”—Life and Times of Michael K, J.M. Coetzee
“There was a depression over the Atlantic. It was traveling eastwards, towards an area of high pressure over Russia, and still showed no tendency to move northwards around it. The isotherms and isotheres were fulfilling their functions. The atmospheric temperature was in proper relation to the average annual temperature, the temperature of the coldest as well as of the hottest month, and the a-periodic monthly variation in temperature. The rising and setting of the sun and of the moon, the phases of the moon, Venus and Saturn’s rings, and many other important phenomena, were in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The vapour in the air was at its highest tension, and the moisture in the air was at its lowest. In short, to use an expression that describes the facts pretty satisfactorily, even though it is somewhat old-fashioned: it was a fine August day in the year 1913.”—The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil
He lies naked on a bed with his wrists bound, legs splayed, ankles secured to the corners. Striped sheet, tangled blanket. In the first shot his long, straight black hair's fallen over his face, covering everything but a greasy chin, which guts through the strands. He seems thirteen, fourteen. he genitals look like a weirdly shaped stone. His necktie is made out of a long piece of rope."--Frisk, Dennis Cooper
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."--The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.”—Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
“They sprawled along the counter and on the chairs. Another night. Another drag of a night in the Greeks, a beatup all night diner near the Brooklyn Armybase. Once in a while a doggie or seaman came in for a hamburger and played the jukebox. But they usually played some goddam hillbilly record. They tried to get the Greek to take those records off, but hed tell them no. They come in and spend money. You sit all night and buy nothing. Are yakiddin me Alex? Ya could retire on the money we spend in here. Scatah. You don’t pay my carfare . . .”—Last Exit To Brooklyn, Hubert Selby, Jr.
“Obedient to the social law that makes the moot guest the early bird at a tea party, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Lockman were the first to arrive in Utopia. The past cannot be discarded in a single gesture, and Joe, in real life a diabetic business man from Belmont, Massachusetts, had spent thirty years beating his competitors to the jump. Joe’s intentions toward Utopia were already formidable: honoring its principles of equality and fraternity, he was nevertheless determined to et more out of it than anybody else. This determination was purely spiritual. Translated from his factory and his garden to this heavenly mountain-top, he intended to paint more, think more, and feel more than his co-colonists. He meant no evil by this; he called it leadership.”—The Oasis, Mary McCarthy
“Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.”—At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien
“What makes Iago Evil? some people ask. I never ask."—Play It as It Lays, Joan Didion
“In the Oakland Greyhound all the people were dwarfs, and they pushed and shoved to get on the bus, even cutting in ahead of the two nuns, who were there first. The two nuns smiled sweetly at Miranda and Baby Ellen and played I-see-you behind their fingers when they’d taken their seats. But Jaimie could sense that they found her make-up too thick, her pants too tight. They knew she was leaving her husband, and figured she’d turn to whoring. She wanted to tell them what was what, but you can’t talk to a Catholic. The shorter nun carried a bright cut rose wrapped in her two hands.”—Angels, Denis Johnson
“My first experience with junk was during the War, about 1944 or 1945. I had made the acquaintance of a man named Norton who was working in a shipyard at the time. Norton, whose real name was Morelli or something like that, had been discharged from the peacetime Army for forging a pay check, and was classified 4-F for reasons of bad character. He looked like George Raft, but was taller. Norton was trying to improve his English and achieve a smooth, affable manner. Affability, however, did not come natural to him. In repose, his expression was sullen and mean, and you knew he always had that mean look when you turned your back.”—Junky, William S. Burroughs
“It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock. What a kitchen that was, with birds in every state of undress; some still cold and slung over hooks, some turning slowly on the spit, but most in wasted piles because the Emperor was busy.
Odd to be so governed by an appetite,
It was my first commission. I started as a neck wringer and before long I was the one who carried the platter through inches of mud to his tent. He liked me because I am short. I flatter myself. He did not dislike me. He liked no one except Josephine and he liked her the way he liked chicken.”—The Passion, Jeanette Winterson
“Later I would think of America as one vast City of Night stretching gaudily from Times Square to Hollywood Boulevard—jukebox-winking, rock-n-roll moaning: America at night fusing its darkcities into the unmistakable shape of loneliness.
Remember Pershing Square and the apathetic palmtrees. Central Park and the frantic shadows. Movie theaters in the angry morning-hours. And wounded Chicago streets . . . Horrormovie courtyards in the French Quarter—tawdry Mardi Gras floats with clowns tossing out glass beads, passing dumbly like life itself . . . Remember rock-n-roll sexmusic blasting from jukeboxes leering obscenely, blinking manycolored along the streets of America strung like a cheap necklace from 42nd Street to Market Street, San Francisco . . .”—City of Night, John Rechy
"It was an uncertain spring. The weather, perpetually changing, sent clouds of blue and of purple flying over the land. In the country farmers, looking at the fields, were apprehensive; in London umbrellas were opened and then shut by people looking up at the sky. But in April such weather was to be expected. Thousands of shop assistants made that remark, as they handed neat parcels to ladies in flounced dresses standing on the other side of the counter at Whiteley's and the Army and Navy Stores. Interminable processions of shoppers in the West end, and business men in the East, paraded the pavements, like caravans perpetually marching,--so it seemed to those who had any reason to pause, say, to post a letter, or at a club window in Piccadilly."--The Years, Virginia Woolf
"The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox's left foot was still dangling outside, as if he'd forgotten he had one."--The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
“I’m born in the late autumn or winter of 1827.
Troy, New York.
My childhood is happy, and my parents allow me to do whatever I please as long as I, by my actions, don’t infringe on their high social standing. My father is a great and wealthy man, a tall man, whom I look up to. As a child, among my dolls, I feel safe. I will never die. No one can hurt me. My mother, my father, my two older sisters, my younger sister, and my brother often ignore me, or promise to love me, give me a present, then don’t; and I cry. My name at this time is Charlotte Wood.”—Portrait of an Eye, Kathy Acker
“This is the record of a box man.
I am beginning this account in a box. A cardboard box that reaches just to my hips when I put it on over my head.
That is to say, at this juncture the box man is me. A box man, in his box, is recording the chronicle of a box man.”—The Box Man, Kobo Abe (trans. E. Dale Saunders)
"Beyond the edge of town, past tar-covered poor houses and a low hill bare except for fallen electric poles, was the institution, and it sent its delicate and isolated buildings trembling over the gravel and cinder floor of the valley.From there, one day in the early spring, walking with a tree limb as a cane, came Balamir, walking with a shadow and with a step that was not free, to fall under the eye and hand of Madame Snow.All of Balamir’s demented brothers, in like manner, had been turned out to wander far from the gravel paths, to seek anyone who would provide a tin plate or a coveted drink.Madame Snow made room for him, setting him at work digging in the basement, in the bunker, and the black air closed in about the piles of debris and he was homesick.”—The Cannibal, John Hawkes
* I intend to add a further grouping of Foreign Language "Novel Beginnings" at some point in my wastrelly future. I'm no Ezra Pound to learn languages in order to catch each nuance of an original work, therefore, as a common reader I'm gratefully indebted to those translators who do.
A list of 30 skinny books, mostly short novels or novellas. It might have something to do with my desire for instant gratification, or my slow reading speed, but large novels frighten me. However I really like to find a great skinny read. Here are some I've culled from around the house that I've enjoyed. Don't you hate to have people recommend books? Talk about ego.
01.Envy—Yuri Olesha (1927, U.S.S.R.)
02.The Big Window—Peadar O’Donnell (1955, Ireland)
03.Waiting for the Barbarians—J.M. Coetzee (1980, South Africa)
04.Franny and Zooey—J.D. Salinger (1961, USA)
05.Silas Marner—George Eliot (1861, UK)
06.Coming Through Slaughter—Michael Ondaatje (1976, Canada)
07.God Dies by the Nile—Nawal El Saadawi (1974, Lebannon)
