December 2010
23 posts
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I had to cut this from an essay, though wish to...
I cannot begin to list the books that I have read and loved, though Nabokov’s “Lolita” is always a great place to begin for the power of its unparalleled prose to have the reader battling moral quandaries as each passage entices romantic engagement and each reflection of that passage recalls the ignobility of it’s meaning.
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“Love came
flowed like blood
beneath skin, through veins
emptied me of my self...”
– Abu-Said Abil-Kheir
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who knows if the moon's | e.e. cummings
who knows if the moon’s a balloon,coming out of a keen city in the sky—filled with pretty people? (and if you and i should get into it,if they should take me and take you into their balloon, why then we’d go up higher with all the pretty people than houses and steeples and clouds: go sailing away and away sailing into a keen city which nobody’s ever visited,where always...
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A story about love: →
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Galactica | James Hoch
We are now accepting apologies for the universe’s indignities: spitting stars, solar burnout, the cosmic purgatory of hanging from a fence by your underwear, for gaseous ruptures, vortexes of nothing, and certainly for the nothingness. Could it have been more plain? Frozen pupils, battered moons. Weren’t we paying attention? Even here, what is more worrisome than the silence of an...
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An Afternoon | Raymond Carver
As he writes, without looking at the sea, he feels the tip of his pen begin to tremble. The tide is going out across the shingle. But it isn’t that. No, it’s because at that moment she chooses to walk into the room without any clothes on. Drowsy, not even sure where she is for a moment. She waves the hair from her forehead. Sits on the toilet with her eyes closed, head down. Legs...
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Ask The Paris Review: I have this compulsion where... →
There’s nothing wrong with not finishing a book. Samuel Johnson, surely one of the great readers of all time, claimed to feel guilty because he almost never read a book to the end—but still, he didn’t. Finish them, I mean. Why should you read a book just because it’s there, or (worse) because you read it yesterday? Completism is the bugbear of actual reading. There are books even by some of my...
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Regret | Lawrence Raab
Every day there’s something old to feel sorry about— what I should have done and didn’t, or what I did, and kept on doing. I want to believe everyone’s forgotten by now. Then I picture them thinking back. And those who’ve died and earned the wisdom death allows just shake their heads and sigh. “Very funny,” my father would say after my sister and I played some cruel little joke on him....
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“Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient of...”
– Ian McEwan
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