Perusing through a book store in Porter Square today, I was numbed after a while by the number of books published these days. This was not a new observation. I have been wondering about it every time I go to the public library (2-3 times a week) and see the new books shelf, overflowing with new books. And the library probably gets just 10%, if that, of new books published.

I wondered if books have become like movies - new ones hit the shelves every few weeks and then they disappear into the dustbins of history. Movies go to DVD rentals, then sell for a few bucks a piece. Books end up in bargain book shelves in stores or on amazon.com, selling for throwaway prices - sometimes for less than a dollar. At the book store today, I saw a Pulitzer prize winning book in the bargain books section, selling for $3.99 within a year or two of having won the accolade. Where is the longevity to all that gets published these days? I guess, by its very definition, we will know in time. Also, 99% of everything published is probably crap. (Yes, Sturgeon was an optimist!)

I also wondered if publishers, like investors picking mutual funds instead of betting on individual stocks, pick a whole slew of first-time authors (on whom they do not have much to lose as I believe they do not pay first-time authors much; the latter are just overjoyed to be published and do not have the bargaining power that only success can bring them) not knowing which one of them will be the next 'God of small things' or 'Inheritance of loss'. (Sorry for my India-centric examples; I am sure there are other examples from US authors that would probably make my point equally well but names fail me at this instant.)

But how then does one resolve the paradox of new novels being published by the hundreds every month and yet it being so difficult to publish?

And is it just me or is it true that literature from American authors has become like typical Hollywood fare: every now and then there is an unexpected and exceptional work of art but for the most part, they are formulaic, mundane, trite, and oh-so-conventional.

On the other hand, authors that I have read from non-UK Europe (lumping the UK for the time being with the US), I find that even in translation, novels from the last 25-odd years from France, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Albania, Russia, etc., and even those from the Arabic or African world, are much more out-of-the-box, more adventurous, a little less homologous; peerless pieces of literary forms that go beyond a genre or a fad. The same can be said of movies I have seen from non-UK Europe or the Middle East in the last 10-15 years: innovative fare that leaves you satisfied and moved more often than not; almost never repenting the time and effort spent in watching the movie.

To some extent this is a problem not just of North American writers but also South American writers, who indulge in the same old literary form of magic realism made famous by Gabriel Marquez (my ignorance - maybe it existed before, but arguably this has become more apparent to the English-reading world since the world took notice of and appreciated the adventure in magic realism through Marquez's successes); efforts that sizzle with life and imagination and yet are unified, and hence limited, by their homogeneity of style.

In some ways, Arabic, African, and anything from India or China, also runs the same risk as the Latin American writers of getting boxed into a certain genre, a certain way of thinking and writing. But since authors from these countries are still new to the Western world, perhaps their efforts are a little bit easier to tolerate; for the time being.

Perhaps the pressures to get published makes writers sync up their efforts to meet the current fad (memoirs; stories of love and pain and heart-rendering loss, etc.); although why this would be more true in the US than elsewhere is not clear to me. Perhaps this is a fallaciaous argument, biased by my own experiences living in the US. However, I remember someone else ruing this homogeneity too; aruging that the uniformity in voices and styles by American authors is a by-product of writers these days being products of the many MFA programs that have sprung across the nation, which train them in a certain style, beating the uniqueness out of them and rendering them impotent through the humdrum of conformity.

Anyways, just some random thoughts today after spending an hour browsing through the book store.

Thoughts? Is this a baseless allegation by me, warped by my own biases...or is there some truth to it?

P.S. Another question that I did not really ask but is sorta related and was explored in the New York Times earlier this week: Just who is really reading?

It is a the first of a series of articles that the NYT will publish on the future of reading, comparing digital versus print reading and looking at "how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read."

Total filmi.... and yet an endearing snippet of life.

The New York Girl of my Dreams romance did not have a romantic ending.

And so it goes.

...by sidestepping the accidents, defects, and rough edges of truth, falseness reaches its goal much more easily, without hurdles or doubts, than a scrupulous approach which hews closely to the matter at hand.

No. I am not talking about political spin this election season. The above lines are an excerpt from the novel I just started - Conjugal love by the Italian author, Alberto Moravia.

Perfection is not a human quality; in most cases it belongs to the realm of lies rather than truth, whether those lies seep into our relationships with other people or they merely dominate our relationships with ourselves. This is because by sidestepping the accidents, defects, and rough edges of truth, falseness reaches its goal much more easily, without hurdles or doubts, than a scrupulous approach which hews closely to the matter at hand.

When I read authors like Moravia and Italo Calvino in translation, I wonder how amazing they must sound in their original! Of course, the epitome of this for me is Pablo Neruda's poetry. Such lilt and beauty even in translation; imagine how good it must be in Spanish! It would be an injustice to link to a few of his poems here but it may be time worth spent to read his Nobel lecture.

Excerpt from Kafka on the shore by Haruki Murakami:

''Fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step."

This is how we all feel some days -- just have to close your eyes, plug up your ears, and keep walking.

I'm reading the book and enjoying it; though I am not sure I am following and experiencing every mind-bending journey the author takes us on. Like the first Murakami book I read, Sputnik Sweatheart, this one is also ..

...about loneliness and isolation; about the painfully fragmentary nature of our effect upon one another - the terrifying thought that maybe not even real, human love forges connections, that space, time and inexplicable events will always snake their way between ourselves and others.

And the blurring of reality and warping of time that makes us survive this loneliness.

I get a feeling one has to read this book a few times to appreciate and enjoy it more but who has the time. It's enough that I read it once. Next, I need to read his much praised Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

Update: Coincidentally, just this week via a Time magazine page, readers can ask the author questions.

Like I had written earlier this year:

I have read only one Haruki Murakami's novel - Sputnik Sweetheart - and none of his other famous ones (1, 2, 3).

I hope to fix this soon and have picked up Kafka on the shore, which I hope to read in the next two weeks. I doubt I will be quoting much from the book but here is an image early on in the book that I loved.

I look around, standing stock-still, and take a deep breath. The clock shows three p.m., the two hands cold and distant. They're pretending to be noncommittal, but I know they're not on my side. It's nearly time for me to say good-bye.

How poetic!

Perusing through more snippets of interviews at the Paris Review website, I found this gem of an exchange from an interview with Charles Simic, the current Poet laureate of the US. (Bold emphasis mine.)

INTERVIEWER: On the other hand, one of the main pleasures of your work, for me anyway, is the way it reminds us of all the ordinary pleasures of life, and urges us, or rather invites us, to enjoy them while we still can—things such as fried shrimp, tomatoes, roast lamb, red wine . . .

SIMIC: Don’t forget sausages sautéed with potatoes and onions! It’s also highly advisable to have a philosopher or two on hand. A few pages of Plato while working on a baked ham. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus over a bowl of spaghetti with littleneck clams. We think best when we bring opposites together, when we realize that all these realities, one inside the other, are somehow connected. That’s how the wonder and amazement that are so necessary to both poetry and philosophy come about. A “truth” detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen—and then in bed, of course.

Quotable quote, that last sentence! :)

No, not God but the Writer.

The writer's relation to his work must be like that of God to the Universe: omnipresent and invisible - Flaubert

I found this also at the great interview with Richard Yates, which I quoted from extensively in an earlier post.

Time for some good music tonight. Here are three videos I've enjoyed in the last 15 minutes!








The thrill is gone! (I wish I had seen BB King live!)

One of my favorite songs. Amazing guitar work, great lyrics, ...everything a good great song ought to be.



And here is another favorite, though I like the version from the album more than any live version.



Through the storm we reach the shore....

And last but not least, some amazing guitar work in this piece from 1983 by Clapton.



Clapton IS God! [1] :)

I saw this video on Facebook, where the poster challenged viewers to "watch the whole thing without ever breaking a smile or a laugh." I resisted. But within a minute, the older guy in the yellow t-shirt with his bray-like laughter got to me!

Record your reaction at http://www.skypelaughterchain.com and become part of the chain.

Quote for the day:

We can so easily slip back from what we have struggled to attain, abruptly, into a life we never wanted; can find that we are trapped, as in a dream, and die there, without ever waking up. This can occur. Anyone who has lifted his blood into a years-long work may find that he can't sustain it, the force of gravity is irresistable, and it falls back, worthless. For somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work. —from Requiem for a Friend, by Rainer Maria Rilke

Enjoy The Collector; based on the short story 'Good Country People' by Flannery O'Connor.



Loved everything about this - The song; the notion of capturing the essence of a short story in a silent movie like setting; the movie itself, shot in sepia tones. Very creative. Nicely done. (Thanks to Missflannery Weblog, where I found it.)

You can also see a short film based on the same story, as directed in the 1960s by Gary Graver and also read a short exposition of the nuances of this rather complex story.

And last but not least, here is what Flannery O'Connor herself wrote about the story, as extracted from an excellent article on "Writing Short Stories" that I read yesterday; it is taken from her book of essays, Mystery and Manners.

In good fiction, certain of the details will tend to accumulate meaning from the action of the story itself, and when this happens they become symbolic in the way they work. I once wrote a story called "Good Country People," in which a lady Ph.D. has her wooden leg stolen by a Bible salesman whom she has tried to seduce. Now I'll admit that, paraphrased in this way, the situation is simply a low joke. The average reader is pleased to observe anybody's wooden leg being stolen. But without ceasing to appeal to him and without making any statements of high intention, this story does manage to operate at another level of experience, by letting the wooden leg accumulate meaning. Early in the story, we're presented with the fact that the Ph.D. is spiritually as well as physically crippled. She believes in nothing but her own belief in nothing, and we perceive that there is a wooden part of her soul that corresponds to her wooden leg. Now of course this is never stated. The fiction writer states as little as possible. The reader makes this connection from things he is shown. He may not even know that he makes the connection, but the connection is there nevertheless and it has its effect on him. As the story goes on, the wooden leg continues to accumulate meaning. The reader learns how the girl feels about her leg, how her mother feels about it, and how the country woman on the place feels about it, and finally, by the time the Bible salesman comes along, the leg has accumulated so much meaning that it is, as the saying goes, loaded. And when the Bible salesman steals it, the reader realizes that he has taken away part of the girl's personality and has revealed her deeper affliction to her for the first time.

...one blog post at a time? How delusional!

This cartoon by the talented and creative genius, Jessica Hagy, says it all.

More of her wit, shared through index cards, here. There are many gems of delight at the site but I'll highlight one other that I loved! You can enjoy the rest at her website or her new book, Indexed.

...and "the immense mysterious power of the pointless."

Milan Kundera, in The Curtain, writes:

"All we can do in the face of the ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That -- that is the raison d'etre of the art of the novel."

"The novel alone [can] reveal the immense, mysterious power of the pointless."

Here's an excerpt from the book.

Michael Dirda at WaPo writes:

Joseph Conrad once wrote that his purpose as a novelist was simply "to make you see." According to Viktor Shklovsky -- the influential Russian formalist critic of the 1920s and '30s -- our daily, automatic routines leach all the freshness from existence, so that we no longer experience the wonder of the people and life around us. Art's purpose, consequently, is to "defamiliarize" the familiar, to shake up our dulled perceptions, to reinvest the dingy, gray and arthritic universe with richness, color, vitality.

According to Milan Kundera's similar literary theory of "the curtain," we grow up with cultural preconceptions that "pre-interpret" the world and close off various aspects of experience. He writes that "a magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose." Ever since, the true novelist's ambition "is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say."

Another quote from Jane Yolen's book, Take Joy - A writer's guide to loving the craft:

Writing takes us into another, brighter, deeper, more engaging world than the world we actually live in. Even mediocre writing can do this. But good writing creates - as E. O. Doctorow has put it -- "not the fact that it's raining but the feel of being rained upon."

Great writing sets the reader down in inimitable worlds that become the reader - in two senses of the word: matching or embellishing the reader's mind, and then metamorphosing the reader by the incorporation of that world into his own.

Or as Proust put it (as quoted by Milan Kundera in The Curtain)

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.

or in Kundera's own words:

"Against our real world, which, by its very nature, is fleeting and worthy of forgetting, works of art stand as a different world, a world that is ideal, solid, where every detail has its importance, its meaning, where everything in it -- every word, every phrase -- deserves to be unforgettable and was conceived to be such."

--

The ultimate concern of the artist is not to paint mountains and clouds and trees but the air between them - Wang Wei.

Emily Hanlon writes in her article, Publish or Perish - It’s Not Only for Academia:

One of the great challenges that we face as writers is to understand in the core of our beings that the journey of being a writer is the biggest payoff of all. That’s when the magic happens, when unknown corridors within open, when writing becomes the song of the soul. There is inexpressible pleasure that comes from the unleashed imagination; the effortless flow of words; the appearance of characters who say the unexpected and do the unpredictable. There is inexpressible pleasure in waking up in the morning, hungry to return to my characters and their stories. Then there is no such thing as a “bad writing day.” Then there is only the writing, and my doing what feels as natural as breathing.

To which I can counter: There is an inexpressible frustration that comes from the barren imagination, the stilted drip of words..... . There is no such thing as a 'good writing day.' There is only the dream of wanting to write, something that one wishes came naturally but is usually a struggle far greater than imagined.

Actually, like Emily Hanlon's article, Jane Yolen, in her wonderful book, Take Joy - A writer's guide to loving the craft, also contends that "it is not the writing that makes writers miserable. It is the emphasis on publication."

But I have no real hopes or aspirations, at least as of now, of ever publishing something I write. I just want to be able to write. I am finding out I do not quite know how to write and perhaps was merely deluded with false aspirations of being a writer. Like chasing smoke - you think you see it and you reach out but can hold on to nothing.

An unlikely combination - two masters of their trade, both of whom passed away last year. (Actually, just checked - James Brown passed Christmas day in 2006.)

James Brown & Pavarotti live!

The 'Skine.Art website has a great collection of 'Moleskine' art from around the world.

Moleskine (pronounced mol-a-skeen’-a) is a brand of notebook manufactured by Moleskine srl, an Italian company. For two centuries now Moleskine has been the legendary notebook of artists, writers, intellectuals and travelers. From gifted artists Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), to poet and leader of the surrealist movement André Breton (1896-1966) to Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961).

Amazing stuff. I found the above site through a Boing-Boing post about Susan Rudat's flickr site full of "warm, textured, dimensional pen-and-ink sketches".

Chris Blake writes:

For my latest music video, I compiled some of the weirdest, funniest and most touching real-life regrets I found on the Web. Then I set them to my new song 'Someone Else' about unrequited love.

Link found via Boing-Boing, a great site which I happened to swing by today after many months.

Apropos nothing in particular, these lines today from poems by Walter de la Mare, seem worth sharing:

Wonderful lovely there she sat,
Singing the night away,
All in the solitudinous sea
Of that there lonely bay
- Sam

We wake and whisper awhile,
But, the day gone by,
Silence and sleep like fields
of amaranth lie.
- All that's past

And so the days go by, 'the silence surging softly backward'....

Note: The phrase "the silence surged softly backward" ends de la Mare's famous poem, The Listeners, which apparently "might have been in F Scott Fitzgerald's mind when he composed the final, mysterious sentence of The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.""

Amongst the literary minded, the first sentence of books is often discussed but after reading that I should say there should be lists of last sentences of books too. Some have attempted to compile such a list. The above sentence from The Great Gatsby would certainly be on the top of any such list I would compile! What an beautiful sentence to end! Makes me want to go out and read the book NOW and see how we get there! I had started reading the book some years back but never got beyond a couple pages - not because the book was tedious to read but because I lacked the time and the patience. Just was not the right time, if I remember right. Some day, before I die, I'll get around to reading all the books I should have read!

I started reading Man's search for meaning by Victor Frankl yesterday* but am getting a bit jaded by all this psycho-babble. Ok..its not babble and in fact, of all the different theories of psychology (will to power (Neitzche & Adler), the will to live (Schopenhauer), the will to pleasure (Freud), etc.), it is Frankl's logotherapy ideas - the will to find meaning in life - that is the most appealing to me; especially due to the ideas around existential frustration and angst, which is a topic I have found to be of particular interest since the 1990s when I first read Kundera's books, which led me to read about some of the original ideas of existentialism (Heidegger, Sartre, etc.).

But this morning, I'm in no mood for any of this. The quest for the meaning of life is pointless. What a pointless exercise to even spend time blogging about this! (But then my entire blogging is pointless, no?)

* For what its worth though, here are some quotes from the book that i found thru wikipedia:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him - mentally and spiritually.

We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing a something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.

It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

Suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration. … Existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic. A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.

More sample quotes from Man's Search for Meaning.

Just randomly strolling through some music videos on youtube and found another good song. Its called Boston by Augustana. Embedding is disabled by request but you can hear it here.

The lyrics would have sounded cool in my early twenties but now that I am in Boston, where do we go from here? :)

She said I think I'll go to Boston.
I think I'll start a new life.

....

You don't know me,
And you don't even care, oh yeah,

Boston, where no one knows my name
Where no one knows my name
Where no one knows my name

Boston, where no one knows my name.

Great beat to this simple sing-along song by the Moldy Peaches, made famous by inclusion in last year's surprise hit movie, Juno.




The movie has quite a few songs by Kimya Dawson, one-half of the Moldy Peaches. Overall, Juno has a great soundtrack. Worth buying!

I have been reading a number of books on the 'art' and the process of writing - more about it some other time, once I actually learn how to use the knowledge - but this morning I found this sentence in Victor Frankl's foreword to his "must-have, must-read" book, Man's search for meaning, which is as good a piece of advice as any for budding writers.

Don't aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run - in the long run, I say! - success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.

Too often we give up without waiting for the long run. And too often we forget that success (and maybe happiness too) is fleeting and evanescent.

I've heard of a few different websites in the past few years where people take pictures of themselves or their daily lives and post it at their website daily. Yes - daily. But this is easy to do in today's age of digital cameras.

But I was intrigued when I just read about Jamie Livingston, who took a Polaroid a day for 18 years, with the last one being a day before he died. Over 6,000 poloroids - one per day, from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997, when he died of cancer on his 41st birthday.

The pictures have been archived online by his friends, Hugh Crawford and Betsy Reid, with a creative interface. (Turns out the website crashed after too many people flocked to it after Chris Higgins at the Mental Floss found the haunting pictures, the details of Jamie's life slowly got out through this blog, and the story got widespread coverage at the Huffington Post, Metafilter, and other websites. Livingston even got a wikipedia entry after this meme caught on!)

And if interested, here's a CBC Podcast featuring an interview with Chris Higgins.

A narcisstic indulgence perhaps but still cool!

Blogging has been slow over the long weekend (Independence Day here in the US) as I went white-water rafting and camping on Saturday/Sunday and am hosting some friends from Sunday evening onwards... but I'll be back soon.

For now, here are a few quotes for the day, all gleaned from The Poet's Guide to Life, a wonderful collection of quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke, as collected by Ulrich Baer from almost 7000 of Rilke's letters.

The whole book is quotable but I'll have to resist the temptation and just transcribe a baker's dozen worth of random quotes here. The rest you can enjoy through the book. Since I have too many books and rarely read the ones I have, I have stopped buying books in the past few years but this one's worth buying!

To be a part, that is fulfillment for us: to be integrated with our solitude into a state that can be shared.

All disagreement and misunderstanding originate in the fact that people search for commonality within themselves instead of searching for it in the things behind them, in the light, in the landscape, in beginning and in death. By so doing they lose themselves and gain nothing in turn.

The strings of sorrow may only be used extensively if one vows to play on them also at a later point and in their particular key all of the joyousness that accumulates behind everything that is difficult, painful and that we had to suffer, and without which the voices are not complete.

After all, life is not even close to being as logically consistent as our worries; it has many more unexpected ideas and faces than we do.

If we wish to be let in on the secrets of life, we must be mindful of two things: first, there is the great melody to which things and scents, feelings and past lives, dawns and dreams contribute in equal measure, and then there are the individual voices that complete and perfect this full chorus. And to establish the basis for a work of art, that is, for an image of life lived more deeply, lived more than life as it is lived today, and as the possibility that it remains throughout the ages, we have to adjust and set into their proper relation these two voices: the one belonging to a specific moment and the other to the group of people living in it.

Each experience has its own velocity according to which it wants to be lived if it is to be new, profound, and fruitful. To have wisdom means to discover this velocity in each individual case.

My God, how magnificent life is precisely owing to its unforeseeability and to the often so strangely certain steps of our blindness.

How numerous and manifold is everything that is yet to come, and how differently it all surfaces and how differently it all passes from the way we expect. How poor we are in imagination, fantasy, and expectation, how lightly and superficially we take ourselves in making plans, only for reality then to arrive and play its melodies on us.

You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but according to its depth. One does not have to do what comes next if one feels a greater affinity with that which happens later, at a remove, even in a remote distance. One may dream while others are saviors if these dreams are more real to oneself than reality and more necessary than bread. In a word: one ought to turn the most extreme possibility inside oneself into the measure for one’s life, for our life is vast and can accommodate as much future as we are able to carry.

Life has long since preempted every later possible impoverishment through its astoundingly immeasurable riches. So what is there for us to be afraid of? Only that this should be forgotten! But all around us, within us, how many ways of helping us remember!

Wishes are the memories coming from our future!

It is not possible to have an adequate image of how inexhaustible the expansiveness and possibilities of life are. No fate, no rejection, no hardship is entirely without prospects; somewhere the densest shrub can yield leaves, a flower, a fruit. And somewhere in God's furthest providence there surely exists already an insect that will gather riches from this flower or a hunger that will be sated by this fruit. And if this fruit is bitter it will have astonished at least one eye, and will have provided it pleasure and have triggered curiosity for the shapes and colors and crops of the shrub. And if the fruit were to fall, it would fall into the abundance of that which is yet to come. Even in its final decay it contributes to this future by turning it into more abundant, more colorful, and more urgent growth.

What we all need most urgently now: to realize that transience is not separation - for we, transient as we are, have it in common with those who have passed from us, and they and we exist together in one being where separation is just as unthinkable. Could we otherwise understand such poems if they had been nothing but the utterance of someone who was going to be dead in the future? Don't such poems continually address inside of us, in addition to what is found there now, also something unlimited and unrecognizable? I do not think that the spirit can make itself anywhere so small that it would concern only our temporal existence and our here and now: where it surges toward us there we are the dead and the living all at once.

Like I said... every quote in the book is quotable. I am going to try hard not to blog again with quotes from this book again; though I KNOW I will be tempted as I read more of the book.

I was perusing through the Best American Poetry 2006 this morning. Many poems go right over my head (my inadequacy) but this one I liked. Mary Oliver's poems (1, 2) are always so rich and suffused with nature's beauty but this one had a great impact due to the contrast with the human condition, 'dripping with despair.'

The Poet With His Face in His Hands

You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn't need any more of that sound.

So if you're going to do it and can't
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can't
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

Must be a Kafka-week or something. (Well...yesterday was his 125th birthday but still ...the timing is well... Austerian.)

First, I get this urge to read Kafka. Then I find out it's his 125th birthday while reading something yesterday; then I pick up a book by Kafka at the library and start reading it (just the Preface by Updike so far) last night.

Then, today, after getting to the New York Review of Books article by Dyson, I see that Zadie Smith has a review in this month's issue of a biography of Kafka: The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay by Louis Begley. Here's an excerpt from Smith's review:

Readers are incurable fabulists. Kafka's case, though, extends beyond literary mystique. He is more than a man of mystery—he's metaphysical. Readers who are particularly attached to this supra-Kafka find the introduction of a quotidian Kafka hard to swallow. And vice versa.

Indeed. I think I'm taken in by this idea of a supra-Kafka. The quotidian seems too ordinary (to be perfectly redundant) to be of interest to the incurable fabulist within me. :) Ok.. enough blogging and surfing around. Time to go read some Kafka. The Judgement beckons.

In 1990, in the Usenet group rec.arts.sf-lovers, James D. Nicoll wrote the following epigram on the English language:

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

More Nicoll quotes here.

Word for the day: Indubitableness.

That is what Kafka, who was pretty self-deprecatory of anything he wrote, called his short piece, The Judgement, which he wrote in a single eight-hour sitting on the night of September 22nd-23rd, 1912.

Apparently, he loved its Zweifellosigkeit or "indubitableness".

I found this nugget of information in John Updike's preface to The Complete Stories: Franz Kafka, which I just picked up at the library, as I had previously stated I would do this afternoon.

Apparently, the morning after writing the short story "The Judgment," Kafka noted in his diary (p 212-213)

This story, "The Judgment," I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22^nd-23^rd, from ten o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water. . . . How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again. . . . Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening of the body and the soul.

A complete opening of the body and the soul! If only more writers could write that way. In a way its devastating to be such a writer perhaps. A writer such as Kafka, whom Thomas Mann paid tribute to (again quoted from Updike's preface) by praising his "conscientious, curiously explicity, objective, clear, and correct style, [with] its precise, almost official conservatism" - comes once in a lifetime. How tragic then that like some of the pieces he left behind his life was tragically cut short. One wonders what other masterpieces would have flowed from his pen if he had lived longer than 41 years. If he had survived the tuberculosis and not died in 1924, what would be his response to the nationalism and anti-Semetism that overtook Germany in the late 20s and early 30s. And one wonders if Kafka would have survived Hitler's madness and the concentration camps. Alternative historians can speculate that endlessly but I for one am going to go enjoy the book now.

P.S. Reading a book is the best way to read Kafka's diaries but you can also find excerpts online here and here. The latter links to a number of other pieces by Kafka too, including The Judgement.

Update: Later last night, I read that Franz Kafka's three sisters died in Nazi concentration camps. So, my wondering about whether he would have survived Hitler's madness yesterday has an almost certain answer: No.

A car small enough to alter your relationship with the city, writes Farhad Manjoo

What a beautiful poem by Naomi Shihab Nye - featured on The Writer's Almanac today. It is small enough to reproduce here in its entirety but since I do not have the permission like Garrisson Keillor does, I'll provide an excerpt and you go read it at the Almanac link above.

To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

What a beautiful thought. What beautiful imagery: "a cloud of sudden azaleas". (Makes me want to listen to Louis Armstrong in his wonderful piece Azalea, which I've heard on The Great Summit: The Complete Sessions album from Blue Note. Torrent available here. It's not on youtube or I would have embeded it here for you to enjoy.)

Incidentally, I had read Naomi Shihab Nye's book of poems 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East last year. While impressed in parts, I had eventually tired of the cliched stuck-between-two-cultures evocations though to be fair that was the theme of the book, as the title itself makes clear. I did read it in its entirety as its a short book and remember many a poignant /nostalgic moment in many of the poems.

But what freshness in this poem. Almost wants you to suffer from loneliness, so that you can then enjoy the feeling of leaving it behind and floating free.

Back to Armstrong... no Azalea but I'll leave you with three of his many wonderful pieces. Enjoy! Take it away, Satchmo.

Secret of Stradivarius violins' superior sound uncovered

Its the density of the wood*. And Stradivarius may have been lucky to have access to it!

Scientists say the patterns of the grain are markedly different from modern instruments. It is believed that the seasonal growth of trees in the early seventeenth century was affected by a mini-Ice Age. Stradivarius had the benefit of wood that was produced in conditions that have not been repeated since then, the journal Plos One reports.

* This guy already knew that. What's good for the guitar's good for the violin. Or something like that.

Five quotes for the day:

A step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction. --Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano, 1952

Parker Bros. has one for every gathering, and there's a game for every season--ice hockey, basketball, baseball, football. Life soon appears to be a game, and its isn't. In games the object is to win, but in life the object is not to win. The object of the whole world is to preserve the game board and the pieces, and there is no such game. - Kurt Vonnegut, as quoted in a 1969 article in the NT times.

Writers are specialized cells in the social organism. They are evolutionary cells. Mankind is trying to become something else; it's experimenting with new ideas all the time. And writers are a means of introducing new ideas into the society, and also a means of responding symbolically to life. I don't think we're in control of what we do. - Kurt Vonnegut, Playboy interview, 1973.

We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane. - Breakfast of Champions, 1973.

Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease. - Breakfast of Champions, 1973.

More quotes from Vonnegut's work through Wikiquote.