Burial in the East

sundry selections & extreme unction. five people who read a bunch of things.

[nerudacats]

from Love Sonnet XI

[burialintheeast]

This.

[funeral-wreath]

26 June 1926; Virginia Woolf with friends (Robert Bridges, top right, and Sir Maurice Bowra, bottom left), photographed by Lady Ottoline Morrell

[millionsmillions]

In case you feel guilty about the staggering amount of time you spend at home with your pet, just remember: Ernest Hemingway was a cat lady.

[millionsmillions]

Here’s an odd scenario straight out of a Thomas Pynchon plotline: in the course of fact-checking a review of Pynchon’s new novel, Alex Yuhas found himself emailing a person known only as “The Great Quail.”

[nevver]

Covered

[bearnaked-deactivated20111007]

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it the most?

Mark Twain (via flowerette)

[burialintheeast]

Can it be done on friendship? I don't think so. On intelligence? No. On hope, on love, on fame, on trust, on family, memory, convictions. I don't know. But if, one day, old, and propped against the pillows, or rocking in chairs together, holding hands perhaps, by the fireside; if, looking back on our lives, older now, looking back on our lives we could say, It was all right, looking back, even the things that looked like mistakes, even the apparent misfortunes at the time, they were not mistakes, they were only part of our lives till now. We have been lucky together. We are drinking, by the fireside, and thinking, why did we worry, what was that remorse. We are here still, and what happened, what we did was right. Then we will have done it. Look here. But we can live this way.

Renata Adler, Pitch Dark.

[burialintheeast]

"The father in contemporary TV ads never knows what cold medicine to take. ... Many young Hollywood writers, rather than confront their fathers in Kansas, take revenge on the remote father by making all adult men look like fools."

- Robert Bly, Iron John

[burialintheeast]

Anyway, they scurry off. Sometimes I think they are writers who do not write. That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.

Renata Adler, Speedboat.

[did-you-know]

Source

[cteaann3-deactivated20210205]

Fifty. Seven. Octaves.

[palomita17]

What.

[burialintheeast]

That's deep.

[burialintheeast]

And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don't even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in your life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means that they are so small you don't have to take them into account when you are calculating something.

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

[burialintheeast]

Also people think they're not computers because they have feelings and computers don't have feelings. But feelings are just having a picture on the screen in your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next year, or what might have happened instead of what did happen, and if it is a happy picture they smile and if it is a sad picture they cry.

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

[burialintheeast]

Mr. Jeavons said that I liked maths because it was safe. He said I liked maths because it meant solving problems, and these problems were difficult and interesting but there was always a straightforward answer at the end. And what he meant was that maths wasn't like life because in life there are no straightforward answers at the end. I know he meant this because this is what he said. This is because Mr. Jeavons doesn't understand numbers.

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

[millionsmillions]

There is new evidence showing [Pablo Neruda] was likely murdered by agents of dictator Augusto Pinochet.

A judge has ordered a hunt for the killer. (via millionsmillions)

[burialintheeast]

Arthur: Having Fun Isn't Hard When You've Got a Library Card

[burialintheeast]

It is not at all self-evident what boredom is. It implies, for example, an idea of duration. It would be crazy to say, For three seconds there, I was bored. It implies indifference but, at the same time, requires a degree of attention. One cannot properly be said to be bored by anything one has not noticed, or in a coma, or asleep. But this I know, or think I know, that idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is no accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time. They flourish in a single region of the mind.

Renata Adler, Speedboat.

[burialintheeast]

There is a passage in Dante when he and Virgil, traveling through the Inferno, stop beside a man buried to his neck in boiling mud. He does not care to speak to them. He has his own problems. He does not want an interview. Dante actually grasps him by the hair and gets his story. Some sort of parable about reporting there, I think. In fact, I know.

Renata Adler, Speedboat.

Adler's two novels were reprinted this year, and you should probably read them.