I got my clammy adolescent hands on this just months before my parents mustered the courage to give me The Talk. Oops. "But Mom, I already know about I got my clammy adolescent hands on this just months before my parents mustered the courage to give me The Talk. Oops. "But Mom, I already know about all that stuff. Who told me? Umm, my friend, Gee. Who's he? Umm, he's this, like, syphilitic roué I met at Barnes and Noble."...more
I lugged this beast across Cuba 11 years ago. I'm curious to go back the Hennepin Country Library and see if that copy still has all the sand and staiI lugged this beast across Cuba 11 years ago. I'm curious to go back the Hennepin Country Library and see if that copy still has all the sand and stains it accumulated (though if it wasn't checked in the year after I retuned it, it was probably de-accessioned).
'Guadalquivir, high tower and wind in the orange groves.'
It was very strange to be traveling in a foreign country, overwhelmed with impressions, and to be in the midst of bookish raptures at the same time. You open your book, and look down from a new world in another new world. Cuba was called 'the Andalusia of the New World,' and reading Lorca in the Cuban countryside was fitting, and disorienting. ...more
"Poetry is what's lost in translation," yadda yadda, but Mayakovsky's English effigy is compelling nonetheless. A high-school teacher assigned "A Clou"Poetry is what's lost in translation," yadda yadda, but Mayakovsky's English effigy is compelling nonetheless. A high-school teacher assigned "A Cloud in Trousers" - out of Koch's Words on the Wind anthology - and I was obsessed. This book was a dogearred angsty missal. I still love his wacky, unexpected, collage-like imagery, his strangely tender semaphore speech (that's my attempt to get around "intimate yell," James Schulyer's unbeatable description). Mayakovsky's gruff, Rodchenko-posed image even adorned my locker door, just below Camus (that one in profile, cigarette daggling from his lips, overcoat collar Bogartishly turned-up) and Baudelaire (haunted and haggard, in one of Carjat's portraits). This book, with Les Fleurs du Mal, The Rebel, Poem of the Deep Song and Absalom, Absalom! made my teenage reading world....more
A book that changed my life--by changing my reading. Up until about 14 I read exclusively military history--biographies of great commanders, accounts A book that changed my life--by changing my reading. Up until about 14 I read exclusively military history--biographies of great commanders, accounts of famous battles, technical histories of The Tank and The Bomber. The only novelist I recall reading before high school was James Fenimore Cooper. 'The Joy of Reading' consists of short, 3-4 page essays on the favorites of Van Doren's polymathic reading. The entries on 'The Scarlett Letter' and 'Crime and Punishment' convinced me to cease poring over diagrams of killing machines and pick up some belles lettres; and my reading now is lopsidedly literary. The tone throughout is personal, reminiscent and chatty--the best kind of pedagogic voice. Van Doren embarrassed his caste and calling by participation in the rancidly populist charade of a crooked 50's quiz show--in addition to its overall mendacity, '21' featured several deftly engineered, crowd-pleasing anti-Semitic and anti-intellectual plot twists--but this work of generous learning more than recoups his honor. Old Mark would be proud. ...more
Although I've always been temperamentally skeptical of Utopias, I'm thankful to Camus for completely inoculating me, as a 15-year-old, against the varAlthough I've always been temperamentally skeptical of Utopias, I'm thankful to Camus for completely inoculating me, as a 15-year-old, against the various postures of chic revolt so common among the teenagers of bored, affluent nations. There was no silk-screened Che across my bosom. Revolutions aren't secular versions of the Rapture, in which the "bad" government disappears, to be replaced by a new, "good" one. Revolution is generally a social calamity, a nightmare of inhumanity: one regime dissolves, and in the already violent chaos of meltdown various factions kill, rape and pillage in a struggle for ascendancy; the leaders of said factions tend to be nihilistic knaves (Lenin, Hitler) who would have lived, ranted, been ignored and died safely on the fringes of the old society. This book is an awesome display of philosophical insight and moral awareness; next to Camus, Sartre is at best a naive bourgeois, from a distance lionizing the revolutionaries who would have destroyed him if they had had the chance, and at worst a cynical degenerate, a knowing flatterer of tyrants. ...more