> Audiobook
> Book Club
...Ned Kelly, story told as a memoir written by Ned Kelly for his own children
...father a convict, deported from England to Australia.....crossdresser?...beat the kids
> "one never knows from where happiness may come."....Ned upon the birth of his sister, Grace....he helped deliver her and loved her immediately
> first bath after saving Shelton boy.....treated royally.....freed his father from jail.......ned age 12
> Optimistic move to mother's family's district....lived in old hotel...dreams of a farm
> Uncle James.....father's brother...."askew"...burned house, hung for it...family split up until she got land
> Hard work...age 13
> change in pnerspective....when riding out with Harry Powers
> mother just sent him off with Harry Powers so she could marry the other guy? How does one survive that kind of betrayal?
> Word....adjectival
>LibraryThing Review......Audiobook....Book Club book.....The initial third of this book had me totally engaged. Ned Kelly's childhood was incredible, as was the family he was born into. I also learned about the status of the Irish in Australia in the 1800s, only above the aborigines in the social structure of the times. The second third of the book became just plain annoying with trauma after trauma. Is it really possible to be bored in the face of such a tragic tale, you ask? Yes, it is. While. Listening to the audio version with a friend while on vacation, we repeatedly looked at one another and exclaimed," Oh....come ON!"
The final third was an improvement over the middle. Enough said. Wait...one more thing....if I hear the word "adjectival" one more time I will have to screech!
Footnote: At book club Judy mentioned the long history of the Irish "Molly McGuires"...irish-american men dressing as women and protesting exploitative conditions.....wikipedia says they started in coal mining areas and may have been formed as early as the American Civil War
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
"Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer", by Steven Millhauser *****
> Summer Read with Beth
> Setting: New York City, late 1800s, massive construction occurring
> Characters: Martin (the shopkeeper's son with a dream), Caroline (wife, idealized yet empty, symbol of the dream, haunting, elusive), Emmeline (Caroline's sister, Martin's right hand, symbol of the real), Marie Haskova (the Ukrainian maid who had sex with Martin on his wedding night, symbol of the past?), Harwinton (the advertising man...ascribing meaning to the meaningless), Rudolf Arling ( daring designer always pushing the edge, Martin liked his edginess)
> p.1..."This was toward the end of the nineteenth century, when on any streetcorner in America you might see some ordinary-looking citizen who was destined to invent a new kind of bottlecap or tin can, start a chain of five-cent stores, sell a faster and better elevator, or open a fabulous new department store with big display windows made possible by an improved process for manufacturing sheets of glass....."
> p.24..." He admired the hotel as an invention, an ingenious design, a kind of idea, like a steam boiler or a suspension bridge."
> p.59..."Then the dream-feeling would come over him, as if his real life were not here, where it seemed to be, but over there, a little off to one side, just over there."
> p.60..."As he walked, looking about, taking it all in, feeling a pleasant tension in his calves and thighs, he felt a surge of energy a kind of serene restlessness, a desire to do something, to test himself, to become, in some way, larger than he was."
> p.65..."He felt a kind of inner straining at the leash, an almost physical desire to pour out his energy without constraint."
> p. 79..."For it was interesting, it was a subject that never ceased to fascinate him, how the two worlds existed together, the world of oil lamps and incandescent lights, of horsecars and steam trains, one world gradually crowding out the other."
> p.129..."...he felt, even as he turned over the idea of a fourth cafe in Brooklyn, a little sharp burst of restlessness, of dissatisfaction, as if he were supposed to be doing something else, something grander, higher, more difficult, more dangerous, more daring."
> p.167..."It was a world in which he could feel his senses waking even as he walked in cold dawns to the iron stairs of the El, a hard sharp exhilarating world--an Emmeline-world, as he had come to think of it, bright and flashing, charged with energy
> p. 173.."And at once he saw: deep under the earth, in darkness impenetrable, an immense dynamo was humming."
> p.174..."...and then it was as if the structure were his own body, his head piercing the clouds, his feet buried deep in the earth, and in his blood the plunge and rise of elevators."
> p.179..."Far from deploring such contradictions, Martin felt deeply drawn to them, as if they permitted people to live in two worlds at once, a new world of steel and dynamos and an older world of stone arches and hand-carved wood."
> p.181..."The department store and the hotel were little cities within the city, but they were also experimental cities, cities in advance of the city, for they represented in different forms the thrust toward vertical community that seemed to Martin the great fact of the modern city."
> p.194..."But far more than this it was an age of inner or enclosed eclecticism, by which he meant not the familiar combination of antiquated styles with modern technological devices like elevators and telephones, but rather the tendency of modern structures to embrace and enclose as many different elements as possible."
> p.204..."As Harwinton put it, his eyes were opened; advertising was a science, a system of measurable strategies for awaking and securing the attention of buyers."
> p.205.."But as an advertiser, I train myself to experience the world as an immense blankness. It's my job to provide that blankness with meaning."
> p.234..."Sometimes he seemed to hear, all up and down the West End, a great ripping or breaking, as bedrock split open to give birth to buildings."
> p.234..."It was as if the West End had been raked over by a gigantic harrow and planted with seeds of steel and stone; now as the century turned, the avenues had begun to erupt in strange, immense growths; modern flowers with veins of steel, bursting out of bedrock."
> p.235.."His own dream was to push the New Dressler beyond the limits of the old, to express in a single building what the city was expressing separately in its hotels and skyscrapers and department stores; and again he had the old dream-sense that friendly powers were leading him along, powers sympathetic to his deepest desires."....a tad Messianic if you ask me!
> p.240..."The writer criticized the New Dressler as a hybrid for, a transitional form, in which the hotel had begun to lose its defining characteristics without having successfully evolved into something else....". The dilemma the USA has now as well?
> p.243..."And it seemed to Martin that if only he could imagine something else, something great, something greater, something as great as the whole world, then he might rest awhile.".....desire to be Godlike
> p.259..."It pleased him that the city was going underground, that even as it strained higher and higher it was smashing its way through avenues and burrowing through blackness......"...the manner in which humanity is consuming the earth and its environment?
> p.260..."The Bellingham had simply vanished. That was the way of things in New York: they were there one day and gone the next. Even as his new building rose story by story it was already vanishing, the trajectory of the wrecker's ball had been set in motion as the blade of the first bulldozer bit into the earth."
> p.263..."...as an advertising man he saw the world as a great blankness, a collection of meaningless signs into which he breathed meaning. Then you might say that Harwinton was Go0d. That would explain why he never grew old. The thought interested Martin: he was having a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee with the Lord God, King of the Universe, a youthful American god with light blue eyes and blond lashes."
> p.275..."There was thus a paradoxical sense in which the minutiae of the building were expressions of the architect's obsession with the gigantic, and a corresponding sense in which the sheer immensity of the structure was an expression of a miniaturist's tendency toward obsessive elaboration. Both sense betrayed a yearning for the exhaustive, which was the secret malady of the age."
> p.281..."Did the public, along with its craving for the up-to-date and the brand-new, also crave not simply the familiar, but the repetitive, the reassuring sense of boredom provided by multiple sameness?"
> p.281..."Or was he peing punished for something deeper than crime, for a desire, a forbidden desire, the desire to create the world? For of course only God and Harwinton could do that. Anyone else was bound to fail."
> p.288..."The Grand Cosmo would soon pass away, even now it was fading, becoming dreamlike as he watched. Already he could hear it falling, falling like white snow. The three women were a sign, demon-women summoned up from deepest dream. Fa a building was a dream, a dream made stone, the dream lurking in the stone so that the stone wasn't stone only but dream, more dream than stone, dream-stone and dream-steel, forever unlasting. Friendly powers had led him along dark paths of dream......"
> p.293..."For the time being he would just walk along, keeping a little out of the way of things, admiring the view. It was a warm day. He was in no hurry." He is waking from the dream as the story ends
> LibraryThing Review: This Pulitzer Prize winning novel is deceptively simplistic. The tale of a dreamer and the American Dream, the story builds consistently to what may be considered a predictable ending. However, the final trajectory of the story was reminiscent of "Atlas Shrugged" in its stunning and thought provoking conclusion.
The themes in the novel include: dream v. reality and the ability to become lost in either of them, creativity, ambition, the American Dream v. the American dreamer, the trajectory of New York City in the late 1800s. Excellent read!
> Setting: New York City, late 1800s, massive construction occurring
> Characters: Martin (the shopkeeper's son with a dream), Caroline (wife, idealized yet empty, symbol of the dream, haunting, elusive), Emmeline (Caroline's sister, Martin's right hand, symbol of the real), Marie Haskova (the Ukrainian maid who had sex with Martin on his wedding night, symbol of the past?), Harwinton (the advertising man...ascribing meaning to the meaningless), Rudolf Arling ( daring designer always pushing the edge, Martin liked his edginess)
> p.1..."This was toward the end of the nineteenth century, when on any streetcorner in America you might see some ordinary-looking citizen who was destined to invent a new kind of bottlecap or tin can, start a chain of five-cent stores, sell a faster and better elevator, or open a fabulous new department store with big display windows made possible by an improved process for manufacturing sheets of glass....."
> p.24..." He admired the hotel as an invention, an ingenious design, a kind of idea, like a steam boiler or a suspension bridge."
> p.59..."Then the dream-feeling would come over him, as if his real life were not here, where it seemed to be, but over there, a little off to one side, just over there."
> p.60..."As he walked, looking about, taking it all in, feeling a pleasant tension in his calves and thighs, he felt a surge of energy a kind of serene restlessness, a desire to do something, to test himself, to become, in some way, larger than he was."
> p.65..."He felt a kind of inner straining at the leash, an almost physical desire to pour out his energy without constraint."
> p. 79..."For it was interesting, it was a subject that never ceased to fascinate him, how the two worlds existed together, the world of oil lamps and incandescent lights, of horsecars and steam trains, one world gradually crowding out the other."
> p.129..."...he felt, even as he turned over the idea of a fourth cafe in Brooklyn, a little sharp burst of restlessness, of dissatisfaction, as if he were supposed to be doing something else, something grander, higher, more difficult, more dangerous, more daring."
> p.167..."It was a world in which he could feel his senses waking even as he walked in cold dawns to the iron stairs of the El, a hard sharp exhilarating world--an Emmeline-world, as he had come to think of it, bright and flashing, charged with energy
> p. 173.."And at once he saw: deep under the earth, in darkness impenetrable, an immense dynamo was humming."
> p.174..."...and then it was as if the structure were his own body, his head piercing the clouds, his feet buried deep in the earth, and in his blood the plunge and rise of elevators."
> p.179..."Far from deploring such contradictions, Martin felt deeply drawn to them, as if they permitted people to live in two worlds at once, a new world of steel and dynamos and an older world of stone arches and hand-carved wood."
> p.181..."The department store and the hotel were little cities within the city, but they were also experimental cities, cities in advance of the city, for they represented in different forms the thrust toward vertical community that seemed to Martin the great fact of the modern city."
> p.194..."But far more than this it was an age of inner or enclosed eclecticism, by which he meant not the familiar combination of antiquated styles with modern technological devices like elevators and telephones, but rather the tendency of modern structures to embrace and enclose as many different elements as possible."
> p.204..."As Harwinton put it, his eyes were opened; advertising was a science, a system of measurable strategies for awaking and securing the attention of buyers."
> p.205.."But as an advertiser, I train myself to experience the world as an immense blankness. It's my job to provide that blankness with meaning."
> p.234..."Sometimes he seemed to hear, all up and down the West End, a great ripping or breaking, as bedrock split open to give birth to buildings."
> p.234..."It was as if the West End had been raked over by a gigantic harrow and planted with seeds of steel and stone; now as the century turned, the avenues had begun to erupt in strange, immense growths; modern flowers with veins of steel, bursting out of bedrock."
> p.235.."His own dream was to push the New Dressler beyond the limits of the old, to express in a single building what the city was expressing separately in its hotels and skyscrapers and department stores; and again he had the old dream-sense that friendly powers were leading him along, powers sympathetic to his deepest desires."....a tad Messianic if you ask me!
> p.240..."The writer criticized the New Dressler as a hybrid for, a transitional form, in which the hotel had begun to lose its defining characteristics without having successfully evolved into something else....". The dilemma the USA has now as well?
> p.243..."And it seemed to Martin that if only he could imagine something else, something great, something greater, something as great as the whole world, then he might rest awhile.".....desire to be Godlike
> p.259..."It pleased him that the city was going underground, that even as it strained higher and higher it was smashing its way through avenues and burrowing through blackness......"...the manner in which humanity is consuming the earth and its environment?
> p.260..."The Bellingham had simply vanished. That was the way of things in New York: they were there one day and gone the next. Even as his new building rose story by story it was already vanishing, the trajectory of the wrecker's ball had been set in motion as the blade of the first bulldozer bit into the earth."
> p.263..."...as an advertising man he saw the world as a great blankness, a collection of meaningless signs into which he breathed meaning. Then you might say that Harwinton was Go0d. That would explain why he never grew old. The thought interested Martin: he was having a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee with the Lord God, King of the Universe, a youthful American god with light blue eyes and blond lashes."
> p.275..."There was thus a paradoxical sense in which the minutiae of the building were expressions of the architect's obsession with the gigantic, and a corresponding sense in which the sheer immensity of the structure was an expression of a miniaturist's tendency toward obsessive elaboration. Both sense betrayed a yearning for the exhaustive, which was the secret malady of the age."
> p.281..."Did the public, along with its craving for the up-to-date and the brand-new, also crave not simply the familiar, but the repetitive, the reassuring sense of boredom provided by multiple sameness?"
> p.281..."Or was he peing punished for something deeper than crime, for a desire, a forbidden desire, the desire to create the world? For of course only God and Harwinton could do that. Anyone else was bound to fail."
> p.288..."The Grand Cosmo would soon pass away, even now it was fading, becoming dreamlike as he watched. Already he could hear it falling, falling like white snow. The three women were a sign, demon-women summoned up from deepest dream. Fa a building was a dream, a dream made stone, the dream lurking in the stone so that the stone wasn't stone only but dream, more dream than stone, dream-stone and dream-steel, forever unlasting. Friendly powers had led him along dark paths of dream......"
> p.293..."For the time being he would just walk along, keeping a little out of the way of things, admiring the view. It was a warm day. He was in no hurry." He is waking from the dream as the story ends
> LibraryThing Review: This Pulitzer Prize winning novel is deceptively simplistic. The tale of a dreamer and the American Dream, the story builds consistently to what may be considered a predictable ending. However, the final trajectory of the story was reminiscent of "Atlas Shrugged" in its stunning and thought provoking conclusion.
The themes in the novel include: dream v. reality and the ability to become lost in either of them, creativity, ambition, the American Dream v. the American dreamer, the trajectory of New York City in the late 1800s. Excellent read!
Monday, July 11, 2011
"The Magician's Assistant" by Ann Patchett ****
> Audiobook
> Characters: Sabine (assistant), Parsifal/Guy (magician), Fan (Parsifal's lover), Dot, Kitty, Bertie (Parsifal's family), Rabbit (the rabbit)
>LibraryThing Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this Ann Patchett novel. In fact, it may be my favorite of hers so far. The story works on multiple levels as does a good magic show, and the theme of the sleight of hand we all employ in our presentation to others is deftly woven throughout the story. The characters, including the magician's assistant herself, discover untold truths and debunk family myths and in the end develop new strengths because of both experiences. The hand is quicker than the eye in more ways than one!
> Characters: Sabine (assistant), Parsifal/Guy (magician), Fan (Parsifal's lover), Dot, Kitty, Bertie (Parsifal's family), Rabbit (the rabbit)
>LibraryThing Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this Ann Patchett novel. In fact, it may be my favorite of hers so far. The story works on multiple levels as does a good magic show, and the theme of the sleight of hand we all employ in our presentation to others is deftly woven throughout the story. The characters, including the magician's assistant herself, discover untold truths and debunk family myths and in the end develop new strengths because of both experiences. The hand is quicker than the eye in more ways than one!
"The Slum" by Aluisio Azevedo - *****
> Summer Read with Beth
> Brazilian author
> Setting: Rio de Janeiro, mid to late 19th century
> Characters: Miranda (wealthy man who wants a title and is extremely jealous and competitive with his neighbor, the slumlord, Joao Romao and his wife, Bertoleza; Rita, the sexy Bahian woman,: Jaronimo (gentle giant, Portuguese immigrant who transforms from being culturally Portuguese to being culturally Brazilian) and his wife, Piedade de Jesus)
> cultural issues: Portuguese v. Brazilian, black v. mulatto,music of either culture
> p.2...."He suggested they live together and she gladly agreed because, like all colored women,she wanted to keep away from blacks and instinctively sought a mate of a superior race."....True to this day in Brazil
> p.13...."For two years the slum grew from day to day gaining strength and devouring newcomers. And next door, Miranda grew more and more alarmed and appalled by that brutal and exuberant world, that implacable jungle growing beneath his windows with roots thicker and more treacherous than serpents, undermining everything, threatening to break through the soil in his yard and shake his house to its very foundations."
> Vocabulary: 1)Carioca: a native or resident of Rio de Janeiro
> p.46..."Marry him? I'm not that dumb! God forbid! What for? To be someone's slave? A husband's worse than a devil trying to boss you around. Never! God preserve me! There's nothing like running your own life and taking care of your own business."
> p.61..."That mulatta embodied the mystery, the synthesis of everything he had experienced since his arrival in Brazil. She was the blazing light of midday; the fierce heat of the farm where he had toiled; the pungent scent of clover and vanilla that had made his head spin in the jungle; the palm tree, proud and virginal, unbending before its fellow plants., She was poison and sugar. She was the sapotikla fruit, sweeter than honey, and sumac, whose fiery juice burned through his skin. She was a green snake, a slithering lizard, a mosquito that for years had buzzed around his body, stirring his desires, quickening energies dulled by longing for his homeland, piercing his veins to rouse his blood with a spark of southern love, of music that was a long sigh of pleasure, a larva from the swarm of bright green flies that flitted around Rita Bhiana and shimmered in the air with aphrodisiac phosphorescence."......love this
> p.76...."...the more he adopted Brazilian ways, the more acute his sense became and the more his body weakened."
> p.95..."He saw himself straddling the globe trying to clasp it with his short legs, with a crown on his head and a scepter in his hand."...how male!
> p.115 or so...Pombinha's sexual awakening....lovemaking with the cocotte and then getting her period....well written
> p.121..."...only when she had felt the blood of womanhood stir within her, was she capable of seeing those violent torments poets adorn with the name of love."
> "cat-heads" v. "silver jennies"...the two slums which were each others' foes
> Pombinha had become as skilled as Leonie at their trade: her ill-fated intelligence, born and bred in Sao Romao;s humble muck, throve amid the richer slime of more spectacular vices>' as a whore
> I found the ending, Bertoleza's death, really upsetting, particularly the betrayal by Sao Romao!
> LibraryThing Review: The novel, "The Slum" provides a 19th century glimpse of Brazilian society via the misadventures of the founder and residents of a slum. Somehow Azevedo is able to convey a myriad of social tensions across multiple levels and he does so with incredible vividness, wonderful prose, and memorable characters. The reader is immersed in the tension between Portuguese immigrants and Brazilians, between mulattoes and blacks, between men and women, between upper and lower classes resulting in a rather head-spinning sensation. Azevedo's descriptions are at times disturbing and always revealing. At the end, I felt like I had just returned from a journey into a new culture which left me changed forever!
> Brazilian author
> Setting: Rio de Janeiro, mid to late 19th century
> Characters: Miranda (wealthy man who wants a title and is extremely jealous and competitive with his neighbor, the slumlord, Joao Romao and his wife, Bertoleza; Rita, the sexy Bahian woman,: Jaronimo (gentle giant, Portuguese immigrant who transforms from being culturally Portuguese to being culturally Brazilian) and his wife, Piedade de Jesus)
> cultural issues: Portuguese v. Brazilian, black v. mulatto,music of either culture
> p.2...."He suggested they live together and she gladly agreed because, like all colored women,she wanted to keep away from blacks and instinctively sought a mate of a superior race."....True to this day in Brazil
> p.13...."For two years the slum grew from day to day gaining strength and devouring newcomers. And next door, Miranda grew more and more alarmed and appalled by that brutal and exuberant world, that implacable jungle growing beneath his windows with roots thicker and more treacherous than serpents, undermining everything, threatening to break through the soil in his yard and shake his house to its very foundations."
> Vocabulary: 1)Carioca: a native or resident of Rio de Janeiro
> p.46..."Marry him? I'm not that dumb! God forbid! What for? To be someone's slave? A husband's worse than a devil trying to boss you around. Never! God preserve me! There's nothing like running your own life and taking care of your own business."
> p.61..."That mulatta embodied the mystery, the synthesis of everything he had experienced since his arrival in Brazil. She was the blazing light of midday; the fierce heat of the farm where he had toiled; the pungent scent of clover and vanilla that had made his head spin in the jungle; the palm tree, proud and virginal, unbending before its fellow plants., She was poison and sugar. She was the sapotikla fruit, sweeter than honey, and sumac, whose fiery juice burned through his skin. She was a green snake, a slithering lizard, a mosquito that for years had buzzed around his body, stirring his desires, quickening energies dulled by longing for his homeland, piercing his veins to rouse his blood with a spark of southern love, of music that was a long sigh of pleasure, a larva from the swarm of bright green flies that flitted around Rita Bhiana and shimmered in the air with aphrodisiac phosphorescence."......love this
> p.76...."...the more he adopted Brazilian ways, the more acute his sense became and the more his body weakened."
> p.95..."He saw himself straddling the globe trying to clasp it with his short legs, with a crown on his head and a scepter in his hand."...how male!
> p.115 or so...Pombinha's sexual awakening....lovemaking with the cocotte and then getting her period....well written
> p.121..."...only when she had felt the blood of womanhood stir within her, was she capable of seeing those violent torments poets adorn with the name of love."
> "cat-heads" v. "silver jennies"...the two slums which were each others' foes
> Pombinha had become as skilled as Leonie at their trade: her ill-fated intelligence, born and bred in Sao Romao;s humble muck, throve amid the richer slime of more spectacular vices>' as a whore
> I found the ending, Bertoleza's death, really upsetting, particularly the betrayal by Sao Romao!
> LibraryThing Review: The novel, "The Slum" provides a 19th century glimpse of Brazilian society via the misadventures of the founder and residents of a slum. Somehow Azevedo is able to convey a myriad of social tensions across multiple levels and he does so with incredible vividness, wonderful prose, and memorable characters. The reader is immersed in the tension between Portuguese immigrants and Brazilians, between mulattoes and blacks, between men and women, between upper and lower classes resulting in a rather head-spinning sensation. Azevedo's descriptions are at times disturbing and always revealing. At the end, I felt like I had just returned from a journey into a new culture which left me changed forever!
"Light in August" by William Faulkner *****
> Summer Read with Beth
> Setting: Jefferson, Mississippi
> Lena, pregnant, unmarried, walks from Alabama to Mississippi to find Lucas Burch, father of the child
> Lucas Burch, deadbeat, liar, runs from responsibility
> Byron Bunch, honorable man, loves Lena, respects her desire to find Lucas, but lies to postpone their meeting
>Gail Hightower, minister whose wife goes crazy and becomes promiscuous, he loses his church but refuses to leave town
> Joe Christmas.....mixed blood man, tragic trajectory of life in the south,kills Miss Burden and burns the house
> Mr & Mrs. McEachern: adopted Joe from orphanage, Mr. was ruthless, fundamentalist
>Miss Burden....spinster who wants to marry Joe Christmas and have him work on behalf of Negroes
> "Old Doc" Eupheus & Mrs. Hines.....Joe Christmas' grandparents, turns out Doc was the janitor who watched Joe at orphanage and tried to save him from going to home for black children
> p.5..."But some of the machinery would be left, since new pieces could always be bought on the installment plan...brick rubble and ragged weeds with a quality profoundly astonishing, and gutted boilers lifting their rusting and un-smoking stacks with an air stubborn, baffled and bemused upon a stumppocked scene of profound and peaceful desolation, unplowed, untilled, gutting slowly and choked ravines beneath the long quiet rains of autumn and the galloping fury of vernal equinoxes." -----Amazing prose!
> p.108...."It was as though he had merely come there to be present at a finality, and the finality had now occurred and he was free again."
> p.109..."Lying in the single blanket upon the loosely planked floor of the sagging and gloomy cavern acrid with the thin dust of departed hay and faintly ammoniac with that breathless desertion of old stables, he could see through the shutterless window in the eastern wall the primrose sky and the high, pale morning star of full summer."......Lovely and so accurate re: the barn smell
> p.114...."He went on, passing still between the homes of white people, from street lamp to street lamp, the heavy shadows of oak and maple leaves sliding like scraps of black velvet across his white shirt."
> p. 114....."As from the bottom of a thick black pit he saw himself enclosed by cabinshapes, vague, kerosenelit, so that the street lamps themselves seemed to be further spaced, as if the black life, the black breathing had compounded the substance of breath so that not only voices but moving bodies and light itself must become fluid and accrete slowly from particle to particle, of and with the now ponderable night inseparable and one."
> p.115..."Now and then he could see them; heads in silhouette, a white blurred garmented shape; on a lighted veranda four people sat about a card table, the white faces intent and sharp in the low light, the bare arms of the women glaring smooth and white avove the trivial cards. 'That's all I wanted,' he thought, 'That dont seem like a whole lot to ask.' "......sums up the disparity of the races
>Title: p.116......"he could see the street down whicvh he had come, and the other street, the one which had almost betrayed him; and further away and at right angles, the far bright rampart of the town itself, and in the angle between the black pit from which he had fled with drumming heart and glaring lips. No light came from it, from here no breath, no odor. It just lay there, black, impenetrable, in its garland of Augusttremulous lights. it might have been the original quarry, abyss itself."..the light of August, contrasts, disparity
> p.123....."The dietitian was twentyseven...old enough to have to take a few amorous risks but still young enough to attach a great deal of importance not so much to love, but to being caught at it."
> Opinion of women: 1) p.125..."Her subsequent actions followed a kind of divination, as if the days and the unsleeping nights during which she had nursed behind that calm mask her fear and fury had turned her psychic along with her natural female infallibility for the spontaneous comprehension of evil.", p.168...It was the woman who, with a woman's affinity and instinct for secrecy, for casting a faint taint of evil about the most trivial and innocent actions"..."There have been good women who were martyrs to brutes, in their cups and such. But what woman, good or bad, has ever suffered from any brute as men have suffered from good women."....Hightower to Byron, "Woman (not the seminary as he had once believed); the Passive and Anonmymous whom God had created to be not along the recipient and receptacle of the seed of his body but of his spirit too, which is truth or as near truth as he dare approach" .....How to describe Faulkner's real attitude about women?
> Vocabulary: 1)ratiocination: the process of exact thinking, a reasoned train of thought 2) perspicuous: : plain to the understanding especially because of clarity and precision of presentation 3) maculate: marked with spots, blotched, impure, besmirched
> p.130...."He will look just like a pea in a pan full of coffee beans"....love this
> p.169...."It was the woman: that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men."........Joe Christmas, had to harden self to survive
> p.203..."He turned into the road at that slow and ponderous gallop, as though in some juggernautish simulation of terrific speed though the actual speed itself was absent, as if in that cold and implacable and undeviating conviction of both omnipotence and clairvoyance of which they both partook known destination a speed were not necessary." ....amazing prose
> p.220..."Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets."
> p.230..."...;he seemed to flow into the dark kitchen: a shadow returning without a sound and without locomotion to the allmother of obscurity and darkness. "
> Phases of relationship between Joe and Miss Burden: 1) strangers having sex 2)invited guest, dinner on the table 3) She tried to get Joe to marry her and work on behalf of Negroes......"during the first phase it had been as thought he were outside a house where snow was on the ground, trying to get into the house; during the second phase he was at the bottom of a pit in the hot wild darkness; now he was in the middle of a plain where there was no house, not even snow, not even wind."
> p.262..."And when he thought of that other personality that seemed to exist somewhere in physical darkness itself, it seemed to him that what he now saw by daylight was a phantom of someone whom the night sister had murdered and which now moved purposeless about the scenes of old peace, robbed even of the power of lamenting."
> p.270..."I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice."..how true!
> p.296..."It was as if the very initial outrage of the murder carried in its wake and made of all subsequent actions something monstrous and paradoxical and wrong, in themselves against both reason and nature."
> p.318..."It is Tennyson.....Soon the fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts begins to swim smooth and swift and peaceful. It is better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand.".......Faulkner's metaphors and similes are magical!
> p.331....found it amusing that Faulkner referenced "the sound and fury..."
> p.339.."...the street that ran for thirty years"....great concept
> p.341..."...it is the happy faculty of the mind to slough that which conscience refuses to assimilate"...how true
> p.367..."...like all Protestant music. It was as though they who accepted it and raised voices to praise it within praise, having been made what they were by that which the music praised and symbolised, they took revenge upon that which made them so by means of the praise itself. Listening, he seems to hear within it the apotheosis of his own history, his own land, his own environed blood: that people from which he sprang and among whom he lives who can never take either pleasure or catastrophe or escape from either, without brawling over it.l Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear; their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and praying; catastrophe too, the violence identical and apparently inescapable. And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another?"
> p.391...Hightower refuses to lie for Joe Christmas and create an alibi....why? Not clear to me
> p.423..."It seems like a man can just about bear anything. he can even bear what he never done. He can even bear the thinking how some things is just more than he can bear. He can even bear it that if he could just give down and cry, he wouldn't do it. He can even bear it to not look back, even when he knows that looking back or not looking bnack wont do him any good."....Byron as he begins to leave Jefferson...and then doesn't
> p.449..."Then I believe that the white blood deserted him for the moment. Just a second, a flicker, allowing the black to rise in its final moment and make him turn upon that on which he had postulated his hope of salvation. It was the black blood which swept him by his own desire beyond the aid of any man, swept him up into that ecstasy out of a black jungle where life has already ceased before the heart stops and death is desire and fulfillment. And then the black blood failed him again, as it must have in crises all his life. He did not kill the minister." ....Joe Christmas' last desperate act
> p.466...."He can remember how when he was yong, after he first came to Jefferson from the seminary, how that fading copper light would seem almost audible, lika a dying yellow fall of trumpets dying into an interval of silence and waiting, out of which they would presently come. Already, even before the falling horns had ceased, it would seem to him that he could hear the beginning thunder not yet louder than a whisper, a rumor, in the air."....Hightower
> p. 483..."Boys. Because this. This is beautiful. Listen. try to see it. Here is that fine shape of eternal youth and virginal desire which makes heroes. That makes the doings of heroes border so close upon the unbelievable that it is no wonder that their doings must emerge now and then like gunflashes in the smoke, and that their very physical passing becomes rumor with a thousand facwes before breath is out of them, lest paradoxical truth outrage itself......It's too fine, too simple, ever to have been invented by white thinking."
> p.486..."Already he can feel the two instants about to touch: the one which is the sum of his life, which renews itself between each dark and dusk, and the suspended instant out of which the 'soon' will presently begin. When he was younger, when his net was still too fine for waiting, at this moment he would sometimes trick himself and believe that he heard them before he knew that it was time."...Hightower
> p.487..."He sees himself a shadowy figure among shadows, paradoxical, with a kind of false optimism and egoism believing that he would find in that part of the Church which most blunders, dreamrecovering, among the blind passions and the lifted hands and voices of men, that which he had failed to find in the Church's cloistered apotheosis upon earth. It seems to him that he has seen it all the while: ;that that which is destroying the Church is notr the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples.He seems to see them, endless, without order, empty, symbolical, bleak, skypointed not with ecstasy or passion but in adjuration, threat, and doom. He seems to see the churches of the world like a rampart, like one of those barricades of the middleages planted with dead and sharpened stakes, against truth and against that peace in which to sin and be forgiven which is the life of man.".............the point of the entire novel.
LibraryThing Review: This is the third novel of Faulkner's that I have read and it is absolutely flawless! The prose begs to be read aloud as poetry throughout the book, the story is fascinating in and of itself and also historically intriguing, and the characters are deeply engaging. Faulkner's deeply Southern story is thought-provoking and engaging. Just to tease prospective readers, consider a pregnant girl who walks from Alabama to Mississippi to find her lover, the minister who cannot bring himself to overcome his past, the illegitimate boy named Christmas whose destiny seems written in stone, and the heroic Byron Burch.....and that just names a few of the wonderful characters in this novel.
As is true of many great writers, Faulkner's writing can be challenging, but believe me, it is well worth the effort!
> Setting: Jefferson, Mississippi
> Lena, pregnant, unmarried, walks from Alabama to Mississippi to find Lucas Burch, father of the child
> Lucas Burch, deadbeat, liar, runs from responsibility
> Byron Bunch, honorable man, loves Lena, respects her desire to find Lucas, but lies to postpone their meeting
>Gail Hightower, minister whose wife goes crazy and becomes promiscuous, he loses his church but refuses to leave town
> Joe Christmas.....mixed blood man, tragic trajectory of life in the south,kills Miss Burden and burns the house
> Mr & Mrs. McEachern: adopted Joe from orphanage, Mr. was ruthless, fundamentalist
>Miss Burden....spinster who wants to marry Joe Christmas and have him work on behalf of Negroes
> "Old Doc" Eupheus & Mrs. Hines.....Joe Christmas' grandparents, turns out Doc was the janitor who watched Joe at orphanage and tried to save him from going to home for black children
> p.5..."But some of the machinery would be left, since new pieces could always be bought on the installment plan...brick rubble and ragged weeds with a quality profoundly astonishing, and gutted boilers lifting their rusting and un-smoking stacks with an air stubborn, baffled and bemused upon a stumppocked scene of profound and peaceful desolation, unplowed, untilled, gutting slowly and choked ravines beneath the long quiet rains of autumn and the galloping fury of vernal equinoxes." -----Amazing prose!
> p.108...."It was as though he had merely come there to be present at a finality, and the finality had now occurred and he was free again."
> p.109..."Lying in the single blanket upon the loosely planked floor of the sagging and gloomy cavern acrid with the thin dust of departed hay and faintly ammoniac with that breathless desertion of old stables, he could see through the shutterless window in the eastern wall the primrose sky and the high, pale morning star of full summer."......Lovely and so accurate re: the barn smell
> p.114...."He went on, passing still between the homes of white people, from street lamp to street lamp, the heavy shadows of oak and maple leaves sliding like scraps of black velvet across his white shirt."
> p. 114....."As from the bottom of a thick black pit he saw himself enclosed by cabinshapes, vague, kerosenelit, so that the street lamps themselves seemed to be further spaced, as if the black life, the black breathing had compounded the substance of breath so that not only voices but moving bodies and light itself must become fluid and accrete slowly from particle to particle, of and with the now ponderable night inseparable and one."
> p.115..."Now and then he could see them; heads in silhouette, a white blurred garmented shape; on a lighted veranda four people sat about a card table, the white faces intent and sharp in the low light, the bare arms of the women glaring smooth and white avove the trivial cards. 'That's all I wanted,' he thought, 'That dont seem like a whole lot to ask.' "......sums up the disparity of the races
>Title: p.116......"he could see the street down whicvh he had come, and the other street, the one which had almost betrayed him; and further away and at right angles, the far bright rampart of the town itself, and in the angle between the black pit from which he had fled with drumming heart and glaring lips. No light came from it, from here no breath, no odor. It just lay there, black, impenetrable, in its garland of Augusttremulous lights. it might have been the original quarry, abyss itself."..the light of August, contrasts, disparity
> p.123....."The dietitian was twentyseven...old enough to have to take a few amorous risks but still young enough to attach a great deal of importance not so much to love, but to being caught at it."
> Opinion of women: 1) p.125..."Her subsequent actions followed a kind of divination, as if the days and the unsleeping nights during which she had nursed behind that calm mask her fear and fury had turned her psychic along with her natural female infallibility for the spontaneous comprehension of evil.", p.168...It was the woman who, with a woman's affinity and instinct for secrecy, for casting a faint taint of evil about the most trivial and innocent actions"..."There have been good women who were martyrs to brutes, in their cups and such. But what woman, good or bad, has ever suffered from any brute as men have suffered from good women."....Hightower to Byron, "Woman (not the seminary as he had once believed); the Passive and Anonmymous whom God had created to be not along the recipient and receptacle of the seed of his body but of his spirit too, which is truth or as near truth as he dare approach" .....How to describe Faulkner's real attitude about women?
> Vocabulary: 1)ratiocination: the process of exact thinking, a reasoned train of thought 2) perspicuous: : plain to the understanding especially because of clarity and precision of presentation 3) maculate: marked with spots, blotched, impure, besmirched
> p.130...."He will look just like a pea in a pan full of coffee beans"....love this
> p.169...."It was the woman: that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men."........Joe Christmas, had to harden self to survive
> p.203..."He turned into the road at that slow and ponderous gallop, as though in some juggernautish simulation of terrific speed though the actual speed itself was absent, as if in that cold and implacable and undeviating conviction of both omnipotence and clairvoyance of which they both partook known destination a speed were not necessary." ....amazing prose
> p.220..."Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets."
> p.230..."...;he seemed to flow into the dark kitchen: a shadow returning without a sound and without locomotion to the allmother of obscurity and darkness. "
> Phases of relationship between Joe and Miss Burden: 1) strangers having sex 2)invited guest, dinner on the table 3) She tried to get Joe to marry her and work on behalf of Negroes......"during the first phase it had been as thought he were outside a house where snow was on the ground, trying to get into the house; during the second phase he was at the bottom of a pit in the hot wild darkness; now he was in the middle of a plain where there was no house, not even snow, not even wind."
> p.262..."And when he thought of that other personality that seemed to exist somewhere in physical darkness itself, it seemed to him that what he now saw by daylight was a phantom of someone whom the night sister had murdered and which now moved purposeless about the scenes of old peace, robbed even of the power of lamenting."
> p.270..."I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice."..how true!
> p.296..."It was as if the very initial outrage of the murder carried in its wake and made of all subsequent actions something monstrous and paradoxical and wrong, in themselves against both reason and nature."
> p.318..."It is Tennyson.....Soon the fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts begins to swim smooth and swift and peaceful. It is better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand.".......Faulkner's metaphors and similes are magical!
> p.331....found it amusing that Faulkner referenced "the sound and fury..."
> p.339.."...the street that ran for thirty years"....great concept
> p.341..."...it is the happy faculty of the mind to slough that which conscience refuses to assimilate"...how true
> p.367..."...like all Protestant music. It was as though they who accepted it and raised voices to praise it within praise, having been made what they were by that which the music praised and symbolised, they took revenge upon that which made them so by means of the praise itself. Listening, he seems to hear within it the apotheosis of his own history, his own land, his own environed blood: that people from which he sprang and among whom he lives who can never take either pleasure or catastrophe or escape from either, without brawling over it.l Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear; their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and praying; catastrophe too, the violence identical and apparently inescapable. And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another?"
> p.391...Hightower refuses to lie for Joe Christmas and create an alibi....why? Not clear to me
> p.423..."It seems like a man can just about bear anything. he can even bear what he never done. He can even bear the thinking how some things is just more than he can bear. He can even bear it that if he could just give down and cry, he wouldn't do it. He can even bear it to not look back, even when he knows that looking back or not looking bnack wont do him any good."....Byron as he begins to leave Jefferson...and then doesn't
> p.449..."Then I believe that the white blood deserted him for the moment. Just a second, a flicker, allowing the black to rise in its final moment and make him turn upon that on which he had postulated his hope of salvation. It was the black blood which swept him by his own desire beyond the aid of any man, swept him up into that ecstasy out of a black jungle where life has already ceased before the heart stops and death is desire and fulfillment. And then the black blood failed him again, as it must have in crises all his life. He did not kill the minister." ....Joe Christmas' last desperate act
> p.466...."He can remember how when he was yong, after he first came to Jefferson from the seminary, how that fading copper light would seem almost audible, lika a dying yellow fall of trumpets dying into an interval of silence and waiting, out of which they would presently come. Already, even before the falling horns had ceased, it would seem to him that he could hear the beginning thunder not yet louder than a whisper, a rumor, in the air."....Hightower
> p. 483..."Boys. Because this. This is beautiful. Listen. try to see it. Here is that fine shape of eternal youth and virginal desire which makes heroes. That makes the doings of heroes border so close upon the unbelievable that it is no wonder that their doings must emerge now and then like gunflashes in the smoke, and that their very physical passing becomes rumor with a thousand facwes before breath is out of them, lest paradoxical truth outrage itself......It's too fine, too simple, ever to have been invented by white thinking."
> p.486..."Already he can feel the two instants about to touch: the one which is the sum of his life, which renews itself between each dark and dusk, and the suspended instant out of which the 'soon' will presently begin. When he was younger, when his net was still too fine for waiting, at this moment he would sometimes trick himself and believe that he heard them before he knew that it was time."...Hightower
> p.487..."He sees himself a shadowy figure among shadows, paradoxical, with a kind of false optimism and egoism believing that he would find in that part of the Church which most blunders, dreamrecovering, among the blind passions and the lifted hands and voices of men, that which he had failed to find in the Church's cloistered apotheosis upon earth. It seems to him that he has seen it all the while: ;that that which is destroying the Church is notr the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples.He seems to see them, endless, without order, empty, symbolical, bleak, skypointed not with ecstasy or passion but in adjuration, threat, and doom. He seems to see the churches of the world like a rampart, like one of those barricades of the middleages planted with dead and sharpened stakes, against truth and against that peace in which to sin and be forgiven which is the life of man.".............the point of the entire novel.
LibraryThing Review: This is the third novel of Faulkner's that I have read and it is absolutely flawless! The prose begs to be read aloud as poetry throughout the book, the story is fascinating in and of itself and also historically intriguing, and the characters are deeply engaging. Faulkner's deeply Southern story is thought-provoking and engaging. Just to tease prospective readers, consider a pregnant girl who walks from Alabama to Mississippi to find her lover, the minister who cannot bring himself to overcome his past, the illegitimate boy named Christmas whose destiny seems written in stone, and the heroic Byron Burch.....and that just names a few of the wonderful characters in this novel.
As is true of many great writers, Faulkner's writing can be challenging, but believe me, it is well worth the effort!
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Friday, June 24, 2011
"Ape House" by Sara Gruen ***
Audiobook.........A nice story. I liked the characters, but the dual story line made both feel a bit washed out to me. The whole issue of the bonobo apes and their plight was really interesting, and I wish the focus had remained on them, although clearly the author was drawing a parallel between the plight of any creature living a forced lifestyle, be it living up to the physical beauty standards in LA, or the apes living in a contrived setting.
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