> Audiobook
>Austrian author
> Listening while cross stitching on cottage front porch with Sall
> Setting: Saigon, as Americans are evacuating and the North is about to take power
> Characters: Helen (photojournalist), Linh (lover, wounded by gunshot)
> Epigraph/Title: The name pretty much says it all. The Lotus Eaters eat the Lotus. Oh, and forget about their lives, homes, families, dreams, and aspirations after doing so. We almost forgot that part.....reference to Homer's "Odyssey".
> How to get "the big story" without falling into a dangerous situation during
transition of power
> Sounds like what is happening in the Middle East....the tragedy of regime change
> LibraryThing Review: The book dragged very slowly in terms of plot, and there were significant gaps in information. I was listening with a friend and we both got fed up after four hours....threw in the towel!
Saturday, July 16, 2011
"Pale King" by David Foster Wallace *****
> Summer Read with Beth
> Amazing right from the start....
> Stream of consciousness of young man flying to Peoria, transferring to an IRS office there, needing to pass the CPA exam,and random observations of people around him
> Epigraph: "We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed."...Frank Bidart, "Borges and I"
> Opening line: "Past the flannel plains and backtop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: .........(list of plants) all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother;s soft hand on your cheek."
> p.11..."...like some type of omen of death or crushing failure on the CPA exam, which two things had collapsed in Sylvanshine's psyche to a single image of his silently, expressionlessly pushing a wide industrial mop down a corridor lined with frosted-glass doors bearing other men's names.
> p.12..."Sylvanshine viewed himself as weak or defective in the area of will. Most of what others esteemed or valued in him was unwilled, simply given, like a person's height or facial symmetry."
> p.14..."What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn't wrong with other people? What if he was simply ill-suited, the way some people are born without limbs or certain organs? The neurology of failure. What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?"......was this how Foster Wallace felt?
> p.15..."Surely fear is a type of stress. Tedium is like stress but its own Category of Woe."
> p.17..."He doesn't realize something's ALWAYS wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing."
>p.24...Thought Stopping: on the tarmac...."trying to merge his own awareness with the panoramic vista, which except for airport-related items was uniformly featureless and old-coin gray and so remarkably flat that it was as if the earth here had been stamped on with some cosmic boot, visibility in all directions limited onlty by the horizon, wh......an oceanic impresison so literally obliterating that Sylvanshine was cas or propelled back in on himself and felt again the edge of the shadow of the wing of Total Terror and Disqualification pass over him, the knowledge of his being surely and direly ill-suited for whatever lay ahead, and of its being only a matter of time before this fact emerged and was made manifest to all those present in the moment that Sylvanshine finally, and forever, lost it."...........Autobiographical?
Vocabulary: 1) lemniscate: a figure-eight shaped curve whose equation in polar coordinates is ρ2=a2 cos 2θ or ρ2=a2 sin 2θ 2)rodential: interesting word, can guess it means rodent-like 3)anfractuous:full of windings and intricate turnings : tortuous 4) prolixly: unduly prolonged or drawn out, too long 5) imbrication: an overlapping of edges (as of tiles or scales) 6) semions: ? 7)parenchyma: the essential and distinctive tissue of an organ or an abnormal growth as distinguished from its supportive framework 8)hortation: urge or yearning 9)peplum: a short skirtlike section usually attached to the waistline of a blouse, jacket, dress, and made usually with a flared, pleated, or ruffled design 10) inedia: couldn't find definition 11)algesia: sensitiveness to pain 12) defilade: to arrange (fortifications) so as to protect the lines from frontal or enfilading fire and the interior of the works from plunging or reverse fire 13) trilby:a soft felt hat with indented crown
> Laughed out loud at the IRS worker found dead at his desk after four days. His supervisor said, "Frederick was always the first guy in each morning and the last to leave at night. He was very focused and diligent, so no one found it unusual that he was in the same position all that time and didn't say anything. He was always absorbed in his work, and kept to himself."
> Leonard Stecyk: obsessively politically correct child.....hysterically funny chapter...#5
> p.41..."..a real vision of hell. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing eachc other, silent. There would be battle but no victor. Or never a battle...the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other and seeing therin something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, they could not hear each other's speech as even words or read anything from what their faces looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way."
> p.52..."...he was no more to be blamed for it than an ant was to be blamed for crawling on your potato salad at a picnic...creatures just did what they did." - I like this
> p.55.."After Houston her favorite doll had been the mere head of a doll, its hair prolixly done and the head's hople threaded to meet a neck's own thread; she had been eight when the body was lost and it lay now forever supine and unknowing in weeds while its head lived on." - classic projective art symbol of being a victim of sexual abuse is to draw a self portrait only of a head without a body....
> p.70..." 'The Pale King'is, in other words, a kind of vocational memoir. It is also supposed to function as a portrait of a bureaucracy.....".
> p.73..."Our mutual contract here is based on the presumptions of (a) my veracity, and (b)....protective legal devises."
> The foreword was fascinating in terms of content as well as placement in the novel...
> p.75.....he was trying to anticipate "debilitating post-grad debt" when he conducted his business of writing papers for other students, only discovered because other students plagiarized his papers....followed by tirade on the elite schools and their priorities
> the college was "a veritable temple of Mammon"...god of wealth and greed
> p.81..."One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either."
> ..."The moral system of a college fraternity turns out to be classically tribal, i.e., characterized by a deeply felt sense of honor, discretion, and loyalty to one's so-call 'brothers', coupled with a complete, sociopathic lack of regard for the interests or even humanity of anyone outside that fraternal set."
>p. 82.."If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can determine his whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of human life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity."
> p.83..."Distilled to its essence, the question was whether and to what extent the IRS should be operated like a for-profit business."
> p. 83....He first introduces the notion that the government does not need to lie about what it does.....easier just to be "massively, spectacularly dull."
> p.85..."This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down."
p. 85..."The memoir relevant point here is that I learned, in my time with the Service, something about dullness, information, and irrelevant complexity. About negotiating boredom as one would a terrain, its levels and forests and endless wastes.
> Why don't people discuss the dull? "Maybe it's because the subject is, in and of itself, dull...only then we're again right back where we started, which is tedious and irksome. There may, though, I opine, be more to it...as in vastly more, right here before us all, hidden by virtue of its size."
> p.86..."....characterization of a government bureaucracy as 'the only known parasite larger than the organism on which it subsists',' the truth is that such a bureaucracy is really much more a parallel world, both connected to and independent of this one, operating under its own physics and imperatives of cause."
....the crucial part of the analogy is that the elaborate system'[s operator is not himself uncaused. The bureaucracy is not a closed system; it is this that makes it a world instead of a thing."
> p.93...Leonard's sweat problems..."For there were, by this time, degrees and gradations of public sweating, from a light varnish all the way up to a shattering, uncontrollable, and totally visible and creepy sweat."...not unlike hot flashes
> p.96..."That what he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse hall of mirrors of fear, all of which were ridiculous and weird."
> p.96..."Similarly, 'primed' became his inner code word for the state of hair-trigger fear and dread that could cause him to have an attack at almost any time in public".
> I like that he points out that "there has to be some slack or play in the rules and procedures for certain cases, or else sometimes there's going to be some ridiculous four-up and someone's going to be in a living hell." ---kind of like my view of fundamentalist religion
> p.116..."being in a stare"....trancelike.....I know exactly how this feels....staring but really being miles away in your mind
> p.118..."fact psychic" or "data mystic"....is this real?
> p.aa9...like the notion of irrelevant intuitions or foresights....this is why I am hesitant to ever see a psychic
> desk names? never heard of this
> p.130..."As citizens we cede more and more of our autonomy, but if we the government take away the citizens' freedom to cede their autonomy we're now taking away their autonomy. It's a paradox. Citizens are constitutionally empowered to choose to default and leave the decisions to corporations and to a government we expect to control them." - Powerful notion
> p.134 - "But it's something very odd. That they could have been so prescient and farsighted about erecting checks against the accumulation of power in any one branch of government, their healthy fear of government, and yet their naive belief in the civic virtue of the common people.".....depressing
> p.136..."Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites." --I hope this is not completely true!
> p.136.."I don't think of corporations as citizens, though. Corporations are machines for producing profit; that's what they're ingeniously designed to do. It's ridiculous to ascribe civic obligations or moral responsibilities to corporations." - Unfortunately, I agree
> p.141..."...so attitudes about paying taxes seem like one of the places where a man's civic sense gets revealed in the starkest sorts of terms."
> p.141....from de Tocqueville...."he says somewhere that one thing about democracies and their individualism is that they by their very nature corrode the citizen's sense of true community, of having real true fellow citizens whose interests and concerns were the same as his. This is a kind of ghastly irony, if you think about it, since a form of government engineered to produce equality makes its citizens so individualistic and self-absorbed they end up as solipsists, navel-gazers."
> p.143..."Maybe it's existential. I'm talking about the individual US citizen's deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose........Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly......."---how true!
> p.144..."The post-production capitalist has something to do with the death of civics. But so does fear of smallness and death and everything being on fire."
> p.144..."...the fulcrum was the moment in the sixties when rebellion against conformity became fashionable, a pose, a way to look cool to the others in your generations.......Because the minute it became not just an attitude but a fashionable one, that's when the corporations and their advertisers can step in and start reinforcing it and seducing people with it into buying the things the corporations are producing."
> p.147..."...I don't think the American nation today is infantile so much as adolescent--that is, ambivalent in its twin desire for both authoritarian structure and the end of parental hegemony."
> Reagan set up the IRS to be the Big Brother everyone hates
> p.149..."A rule of image, which because it's so empty makes everyone terrified......and whose terror opf not really ever even existing makes them that much more susceptible to the ontological siren song of the corporate buy-to-stand-out-and-so-exist gestalt."....not sure I buy this....do you, Beth?
> p.183..."doubling"...the ability to feel something and also be aware of feeling something
> p.193..."Real freedom is the freedom to obey the law."....?????
> p.193....definition of a tax.....the amount of tax is equal to the product of the tax base and tax rate (T=B x R)
> progressive v. flat tax....progressive taxes consumption, trying to to put undue hardship on the poor
> p.209...It's not unlike the religious confidence that one is 'loved unconditionally' by God--as the God in question is defined as something that loves this way automatically and universally, it doesn't seem to really have anything to do with you, so it's hard to see why religious people claim to feel such reassurance in being loved this way by God." I laughed out loud when I read this
> p.229 - "Here is the truth--actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested." -----interesting!
> p.231 - "Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui--these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real."
> p.238...His mother's mental health issues....bird gazing, etc.....
> p.240..."I think part of what was so galvanizing was the substitute's diagnosis of the world and reality as already essentially penetrated and formed, the real world's constituent info generated, and that now a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling, and organizing that torrential flow of info."
> p.253.."Dream: I saw rows of foreshortened faces over which faint emotions played like the light of distant fire. The placid hopelessness of adulthood."....Wallace's own experience?
> p.293..."Without distraction, or even the possibility of distraction, certain types of people feel dread--and it's this dread, not so much the test itself, that people feel anxious about.".....Saw this repeatedly in my private practice over the years
> Entire chapter of people in library turning pages.....very funny
> The notion that "Phantom" visits...a "particular kind of hallucination that can afflict rote examiners at a certain threshold of concentrated boredom"...loved it!
> What about the boy who was obsessed with his lips touching every inch of his body?
> Stecyk's lifesaving in Home Ec when teacher cut off thumb.....
> p. 417..."...the distinctions between one's essential character and value and people's perceptions of that character/value are fuzzy and hard to delineate, especially in adolescence."
> A good administrator is genuinely liked, without trying to be or appearing to try
> p.437..."....life owes you nothing; that suffering takes many forms; that no one will ever care for you as your mother did; that the human heart is a chump."
> p.438.."The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and '85, two such men. It is the key to modern life., if you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."...quite a concept!
LibraryThing Review: I think David Foster Wallace was absolutely brilliant. You might wonder how I could possibly give 5 stars to a work which was unfinished at the time of the author's suicide. Well.....read it. In some ways, as the editor says at the beginning, it is almost a collection of character studies....and what characters! Or, it is a treatise on the ability to immerse oneself in a boring set of repetitive tasks and to emerge successful and sane! Or, it is a commentary on the manner in which the American people have abdicated their responsibility to take responsibility for the running of their country! It is partially all of the above. The writing is witty, insightful, dark....who could ask for more? I cannot imagine what the novel would have been in its completed form. What a tragedy that Wallace suffered so that ending his life became a viable option! A loss to his family, the world of literature and humanity in general!
> Amazing right from the start....
> Stream of consciousness of young man flying to Peoria, transferring to an IRS office there, needing to pass the CPA exam,and random observations of people around him
> Epigraph: "We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed."...Frank Bidart, "Borges and I"
> Opening line: "Past the flannel plains and backtop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: .........(list of plants) all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother;s soft hand on your cheek."
> p.11..."...like some type of omen of death or crushing failure on the CPA exam, which two things had collapsed in Sylvanshine's psyche to a single image of his silently, expressionlessly pushing a wide industrial mop down a corridor lined with frosted-glass doors bearing other men's names.
> p.12..."Sylvanshine viewed himself as weak or defective in the area of will. Most of what others esteemed or valued in him was unwilled, simply given, like a person's height or facial symmetry."
> p.14..."What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn't wrong with other people? What if he was simply ill-suited, the way some people are born without limbs or certain organs? The neurology of failure. What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?"......was this how Foster Wallace felt?
> p.15..."Surely fear is a type of stress. Tedium is like stress but its own Category of Woe."
> p.17..."He doesn't realize something's ALWAYS wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing."
>p.24...Thought Stopping: on the tarmac...."trying to merge his own awareness with the panoramic vista, which except for airport-related items was uniformly featureless and old-coin gray and so remarkably flat that it was as if the earth here had been stamped on with some cosmic boot, visibility in all directions limited onlty by the horizon, wh......an oceanic impresison so literally obliterating that Sylvanshine was cas or propelled back in on himself and felt again the edge of the shadow of the wing of Total Terror and Disqualification pass over him, the knowledge of his being surely and direly ill-suited for whatever lay ahead, and of its being only a matter of time before this fact emerged and was made manifest to all those present in the moment that Sylvanshine finally, and forever, lost it."...........Autobiographical?
Vocabulary: 1) lemniscate: a figure-eight shaped curve whose equation in polar coordinates is ρ2=a2 cos 2θ or ρ2=a2 sin 2θ 2)rodential: interesting word, can guess it means rodent-like 3)anfractuous:full of windings and intricate turnings : tortuous 4) prolixly: unduly prolonged or drawn out, too long 5) imbrication: an overlapping of edges (as of tiles or scales) 6) semions: ? 7)parenchyma: the essential and distinctive tissue of an organ or an abnormal growth as distinguished from its supportive framework 8)hortation: urge or yearning 9)peplum: a short skirtlike section usually attached to the waistline of a blouse, jacket, dress, and made usually with a flared, pleated, or ruffled design 10) inedia: couldn't find definition 11)algesia: sensitiveness to pain 12) defilade: to arrange (fortifications) so as to protect the lines from frontal or enfilading fire and the interior of the works from plunging or reverse fire 13) trilby:a soft felt hat with indented crown
> Laughed out loud at the IRS worker found dead at his desk after four days. His supervisor said, "Frederick was always the first guy in each morning and the last to leave at night. He was very focused and diligent, so no one found it unusual that he was in the same position all that time and didn't say anything. He was always absorbed in his work, and kept to himself."
> Leonard Stecyk: obsessively politically correct child.....hysterically funny chapter...#5
> p.41..."..a real vision of hell. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing eachc other, silent. There would be battle but no victor. Or never a battle...the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other and seeing therin something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, they could not hear each other's speech as even words or read anything from what their faces looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way."
> p.52..."...he was no more to be blamed for it than an ant was to be blamed for crawling on your potato salad at a picnic...creatures just did what they did." - I like this
> p.55.."After Houston her favorite doll had been the mere head of a doll, its hair prolixly done and the head's hople threaded to meet a neck's own thread; she had been eight when the body was lost and it lay now forever supine and unknowing in weeds while its head lived on." - classic projective art symbol of being a victim of sexual abuse is to draw a self portrait only of a head without a body....
> p.70..." 'The Pale King'is, in other words, a kind of vocational memoir. It is also supposed to function as a portrait of a bureaucracy.....".
> p.73..."Our mutual contract here is based on the presumptions of (a) my veracity, and (b)....protective legal devises."
> The foreword was fascinating in terms of content as well as placement in the novel...
> p.75.....he was trying to anticipate "debilitating post-grad debt" when he conducted his business of writing papers for other students, only discovered because other students plagiarized his papers....followed by tirade on the elite schools and their priorities
> the college was "a veritable temple of Mammon"...god of wealth and greed
> p.81..."One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either."
> ..."The moral system of a college fraternity turns out to be classically tribal, i.e., characterized by a deeply felt sense of honor, discretion, and loyalty to one's so-call 'brothers', coupled with a complete, sociopathic lack of regard for the interests or even humanity of anyone outside that fraternal set."
>p. 82.."If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can determine his whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of human life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity."
> p.83..."Distilled to its essence, the question was whether and to what extent the IRS should be operated like a for-profit business."
> p. 83....He first introduces the notion that the government does not need to lie about what it does.....easier just to be "massively, spectacularly dull."
> p.85..."This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down."
p. 85..."The memoir relevant point here is that I learned, in my time with the Service, something about dullness, information, and irrelevant complexity. About negotiating boredom as one would a terrain, its levels and forests and endless wastes.
> Why don't people discuss the dull? "Maybe it's because the subject is, in and of itself, dull...only then we're again right back where we started, which is tedious and irksome. There may, though, I opine, be more to it...as in vastly more, right here before us all, hidden by virtue of its size."
> p.86..."....characterization of a government bureaucracy as 'the only known parasite larger than the organism on which it subsists',' the truth is that such a bureaucracy is really much more a parallel world, both connected to and independent of this one, operating under its own physics and imperatives of cause."
....the crucial part of the analogy is that the elaborate system'[s operator is not himself uncaused. The bureaucracy is not a closed system; it is this that makes it a world instead of a thing."
> p.93...Leonard's sweat problems..."For there were, by this time, degrees and gradations of public sweating, from a light varnish all the way up to a shattering, uncontrollable, and totally visible and creepy sweat."...not unlike hot flashes
> p.96..."That what he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse hall of mirrors of fear, all of which were ridiculous and weird."
> p.96..."Similarly, 'primed' became his inner code word for the state of hair-trigger fear and dread that could cause him to have an attack at almost any time in public".
> I like that he points out that "there has to be some slack or play in the rules and procedures for certain cases, or else sometimes there's going to be some ridiculous four-up and someone's going to be in a living hell." ---kind of like my view of fundamentalist religion
> p.116..."being in a stare"....trancelike.....I know exactly how this feels....staring but really being miles away in your mind
> p.118..."fact psychic" or "data mystic"....is this real?
> p.aa9...like the notion of irrelevant intuitions or foresights....this is why I am hesitant to ever see a psychic
> desk names? never heard of this
> p.130..."As citizens we cede more and more of our autonomy, but if we the government take away the citizens' freedom to cede their autonomy we're now taking away their autonomy. It's a paradox. Citizens are constitutionally empowered to choose to default and leave the decisions to corporations and to a government we expect to control them." - Powerful notion
> p.134 - "But it's something very odd. That they could have been so prescient and farsighted about erecting checks against the accumulation of power in any one branch of government, their healthy fear of government, and yet their naive belief in the civic virtue of the common people.".....depressing
> p.136..."Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites." --I hope this is not completely true!
> p.136.."I don't think of corporations as citizens, though. Corporations are machines for producing profit; that's what they're ingeniously designed to do. It's ridiculous to ascribe civic obligations or moral responsibilities to corporations." - Unfortunately, I agree
> p.141..."...so attitudes about paying taxes seem like one of the places where a man's civic sense gets revealed in the starkest sorts of terms."
> p.141....from de Tocqueville...."he says somewhere that one thing about democracies and their individualism is that they by their very nature corrode the citizen's sense of true community, of having real true fellow citizens whose interests and concerns were the same as his. This is a kind of ghastly irony, if you think about it, since a form of government engineered to produce equality makes its citizens so individualistic and self-absorbed they end up as solipsists, navel-gazers."
> p.143..."Maybe it's existential. I'm talking about the individual US citizen's deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose........Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly......."---how true!
> p.144..."The post-production capitalist has something to do with the death of civics. But so does fear of smallness and death and everything being on fire."
> p.144..."...the fulcrum was the moment in the sixties when rebellion against conformity became fashionable, a pose, a way to look cool to the others in your generations.......Because the minute it became not just an attitude but a fashionable one, that's when the corporations and their advertisers can step in and start reinforcing it and seducing people with it into buying the things the corporations are producing."
> p.147..."...I don't think the American nation today is infantile so much as adolescent--that is, ambivalent in its twin desire for both authoritarian structure and the end of parental hegemony."
> Reagan set up the IRS to be the Big Brother everyone hates
> p.149..."A rule of image, which because it's so empty makes everyone terrified......and whose terror opf not really ever even existing makes them that much more susceptible to the ontological siren song of the corporate buy-to-stand-out-and-so-exist gestalt."....not sure I buy this....do you, Beth?
> p.183..."doubling"...the ability to feel something and also be aware of feeling something
> p.193..."Real freedom is the freedom to obey the law."....?????
> p.193....definition of a tax.....the amount of tax is equal to the product of the tax base and tax rate (T=B x R)
> progressive v. flat tax....progressive taxes consumption, trying to to put undue hardship on the poor
> p.209...It's not unlike the religious confidence that one is 'loved unconditionally' by God--as the God in question is defined as something that loves this way automatically and universally, it doesn't seem to really have anything to do with you, so it's hard to see why religious people claim to feel such reassurance in being loved this way by God." I laughed out loud when I read this
> p.229 - "Here is the truth--actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested." -----interesting!
> p.231 - "Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui--these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real."
> p.238...His mother's mental health issues....bird gazing, etc.....
> p.240..."I think part of what was so galvanizing was the substitute's diagnosis of the world and reality as already essentially penetrated and formed, the real world's constituent info generated, and that now a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling, and organizing that torrential flow of info."
> p.253.."Dream: I saw rows of foreshortened faces over which faint emotions played like the light of distant fire. The placid hopelessness of adulthood."....Wallace's own experience?
> p.293..."Without distraction, or even the possibility of distraction, certain types of people feel dread--and it's this dread, not so much the test itself, that people feel anxious about.".....Saw this repeatedly in my private practice over the years
> Entire chapter of people in library turning pages.....very funny
> The notion that "Phantom" visits...a "particular kind of hallucination that can afflict rote examiners at a certain threshold of concentrated boredom"...loved it!
> What about the boy who was obsessed with his lips touching every inch of his body?
> Stecyk's lifesaving in Home Ec when teacher cut off thumb.....
> p. 417..."...the distinctions between one's essential character and value and people's perceptions of that character/value are fuzzy and hard to delineate, especially in adolescence."
> A good administrator is genuinely liked, without trying to be or appearing to try
> p.437..."....life owes you nothing; that suffering takes many forms; that no one will ever care for you as your mother did; that the human heart is a chump."
> p.438.."The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and '85, two such men. It is the key to modern life., if you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."...quite a concept!
LibraryThing Review: I think David Foster Wallace was absolutely brilliant. You might wonder how I could possibly give 5 stars to a work which was unfinished at the time of the author's suicide. Well.....read it. In some ways, as the editor says at the beginning, it is almost a collection of character studies....and what characters! Or, it is a treatise on the ability to immerse oneself in a boring set of repetitive tasks and to emerge successful and sane! Or, it is a commentary on the manner in which the American people have abdicated their responsibility to take responsibility for the running of their country! It is partially all of the above. The writing is witty, insightful, dark....who could ask for more? I cannot imagine what the novel would have been in its completed form. What a tragedy that Wallace suffered so that ending his life became a viable option! A loss to his family, the world of literature and humanity in general!
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
"True History of the Kelly Gang", by Peter Carey ***
> 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
> 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
"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!
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)