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Poverty

“Poverty (yours truly) provides a certain amount of process. The rich man gets everything ready-made, including goods and services. Which means that he loses reality, because reality is a process. Worse still: the availability of ready-made things waiting to be used comes to seem natural, and he begins to expect it in the world of thought as well. That’s why the rich use ready-made ideas, copied opinions, tastes invented by others. They delegate the process. Even where their feelings are concerned, which is what make them so stereotypical and superficial: the caricatures by which they’re generally represented are actually far too complex and flattering. Would you have wanted to be like that? Do you have any idea what you’re saying? Without me, your books would have lacked the one modest virtue that no one can deny them: realism. I gave you that, and you have the nerve to hold it against me!

’m aware that with the advance of technology and consumerism, the world is adopting the system of the rich, which will be generalized eventually. That must be what makes you feel marginal and old-fashioned, as if i were a burden holding you back in a past of pr-industrial labor. Maybe that’s why you resent me, but it’s the source of all your originality, and given your maladaptation, without originality, you’re nothing.”

--from Cesar Aira’s “Poverty”

#Cesar Aira;

Ten tales for late of a Halloween night

Over at Medium, I've assembled my ten favorite spooky stories for the season. Enjoy!

https://medium.com/@levistahl/ten-little-tales-of-terror-for-late-of-a-halloween-night-bf8cf9c51d1c

nyrbclassics

As our Halloween treat for you, here are some Edward Gorey illustrations from The Haunted Looking Glass, a book of spooky-scary ghost stories and grisly goings-on selected by Gorey himself. We’re wondering if that little black cat perched on the chair in “The Judge’s House” is Jenny Linsky’s Halloween alter ego, escaped from the Cat Club…

If you want more Gorey, check out these other NYRB books with his illustrations: The Unrest-Cure and Other Stories, Men and Gods, The War of the Worlds, and from our Children’s Collection, He Was There from the Day We Moved In and Three Ladies Beside the Sea.

Cognitive behavioral therapy

She brought herself away from the disagreeably clinging thought by her usual method--imagining the sweet sharp sensation of being burned alive--and turned expectantly to her father.

From Shirley Jackson's Hangsaman

#Shirley Jackson #Hangsaman

Seasons change

As a kid, fall had been his favorite season--he loved returning to school--but as an adult he found it disheartening. It was getting dark earlier now, and the air was crisp; everything was beautiful in that sad kind of way that he absolutely fucking hated.

From Joanna Hershon's A Dual Inheritance

#Joanna Hershon #A Dual Inheritance

Thank you, Thomas Edison

Having inherited his father's inability to be idle, [John Polidori] would rise before dawn and pace his room until the weak city sun provided enough light for him to read by.

From Andrew McConnell Stott's The Poet and the Vampyure

#John Polidori #The Poet and the Vampyure #Andrew McConnel Stott

Finicky faithfulness

[J. M.] Barrie often told me of how Hardy now idealised his first wife, who from all accounts had kept him very unhappy. Barrie's veneration or his friend did not prevent him from being amused by his foibles, and he often smiled over Hardy's preoccupation with his plans for his own burial--plans which were perpetually being changed. "One day," said Barrie, "Hardy took me to see the place where he wants most to be buried, and the next day he took me to see the place where he would like next best to be buried. Usually he says he is to be buried exactly in between his two wives; but sometimes he is to be so many inches nearer to the first, sometimes, so many inches nearer to the second." I thought Barrie must be exaggerating, but the present Mrs Hardy, a little wearily if unresentfully, told me that her husnabd had one day made her walk six miles to show her the bench on which he used to sit while he was courting her predecessor. I wondered, but did not like to ask, whether he kept her up to date with his changing arrangements for her burial.

From Lady Cynthia Asquith's "Thomas Hardy at Max Gate," published in The LIstener, 55, June 7, 1956

#Thomas Hardy #Cynthia Asquith

Limits

There was a limit, he had always found, to the number of times you could chase the same worries round your head. If you let them run, they wore themselves out, and then you could make your choices in the quiet.

--From Nick Harkaway's Tigerman

#Nick Harkaway #Tigerman

Madness

The kid had been from some real shithole, signed up half-drunk and was now seeing real bullets and bombs and wishing he hadn't. So he pretended to be mad.

It was simple enough. He went on patrol in a Mickey Mouse hat he'd got from somewhere, and he carried his gun like a swagger stick. He'd never seen M*A*S*H, so he didn't realise he was travelling a well-worn path. And after each patrol he'd push it a bit further until they had to take notice. They'd put him in a secure hospital cell indefinitely, and he'd carried on the game for weeks and months and faked a suicide attempt and bitten an orderly and finally he'd broken down and explained that he was faking it, he just wanted so very much to go home. And the doctors told him: "It's okay. You're going home, and no one's going to punish you." But he deserved to be punished, he said. He'd faked it. "Yeah," the doctors said. "We always knew you thought you were faking it. But that's the thing: you never were. It was real, and now you're better." Which was about the most disturbing fucking idea the Sergeant had ever heard, until he came here, and it was just life, and then he had the really disturbing idea that everyone in the world was carrying on this way all the time.

--From NIck Harkaway's Tigerman

#Nick Harkaway #Tigerman

Passing judgment

"How about the comments I have heard you make about book burners?"

"They are not relevant to this." He yanked out more pages. "I am a man, not a government or a committee of censors. Having paid forty-seven dollars and fifty cents for this book, and having examined it and found it subversive and intolerably offensive, I am destroying it."

--From Rex Stout's Gambit. The book in question? Webster's New International Dictionary.

#Rex Stout #Nero Wolfe

Apprehensions

"You will remember," went on Marlow, "how I feared that Mr. Powell's want of experience would stand in his way of appreciating the unusual."

--From Joseph Conrad's Chance

That passage can offer particular entertainment to an Anthony Powell fan: Powell took the title of his four-volume memoir, To Keep the Ball Rolling, from one of Marlow's speeches earlier in that novel--it's fun to find Marlow worrying about what was actually one of Anthony Powell's great strengths!

#Joseph Conrad #Anthony Powell

Books and consequences

She wondered if later on she would wish she hadn't looked. That was one thing about books: once you read them, they couldn't be unread.

From Lev Grossman's The Magician's Land

#Lev Grossman #The Magician's Land

patrickemclean

Whenever things sound easy, it turns out there’s one part you didn’t hear.

Donald E. Westlake (via patrickemclean)

{Though McLean doesn’t give the source for this one, it’s the best Dortmunder book, Drowned Hopes. One of my favorite lines in all of Westlake.}

#Donald E. Westlake

God love James Boswell

To be so transparent, thinking neither of the impression he makes upon himself nor of the figure he will cut before his friend, is possibly to be fatuous. But Boswell's fatuousness, which seems to arise from a lack of will or centre in his life, is inspired. Boswell had that mysterious ingredient of the soul, so admired in the age of sensibility: "my genius," or, as we would say, his "id."

From V. S. Pritchett's "James Boswell"

#V. S. Pritchett #James Boswell

Police

The policemen wouldn't leave. One of them proved to be a good psychologist. He knocked on the door and yelled:

"May I ask you for a glass of cold water?"

Apparently he was counting on my compassion. Or the magical power of the absurd.

From Sergei Dovlatov's Pushkin Hills

#Sergei Dovlatov #Pushkin Hills

American nostalgia

The peculiar power of American nostalgia is that it is not only harking back to something lost in the past, but suggests also the tragedy of a lost future.

From V. S. Pritchett's "Mark Twain"

#V. S. Pritchett #Mark Twain

omnibuddy

brianmichaelbendis

Superhero Families by Andy Shango

ivebeenreadinglatelyannex-blog

When I was a kid reading comics, the Fantastic Four bored me. I knew families; had one. Didn't need to have them in comics, too.

Now that I'm an adult, I love nothing--not Spidey, not Batman, not Superman--as much as the Fantastic Four, -because- they're a family. More than fifty years after that fateful spaceflight, it's still all about the family and their relationships. And it never gets old.

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