UNGULATE WAR

@ungulatewar-blog

I am a teacher and writer living in Seattle, WA. I love books. Ungulate War is dedicated to literary ephemera, gossip, and thoughts on writing. I hope you enjoy it. This blog has nothing to do with ungulates - and as far as I know, they remain at peace. Do not be alarmed.

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From The Sound and the Fury (1929). The first modern usage of an emoticon?

#Faulkner #The Sound and the Fury #Emoticons #Eyes #William Faulkner

They had managed to convert their wealth, which had originally been in the form of factories or stores or other demanding enterprises, into a form so liquid and abstract, negotiable representations of money on paper, that there were few reminders coming from anywhere that they might be responsible for anyone outside their own circle of friends and relatives.

-Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus, 1990

Sound familiar?

#Vonnegut #Kurt Vonnegut #Hocus Pocus #American Manufacturing #rich people

Saul Bellow's Nobel Prize diploma by Gunnar Brusewitz. I just read Bellow's Nobel Prize lecture and, predictably, it's pretty great:

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony and even justice.

#Saul Bellow #Nobel Prize #Bellow

"[The artist appeals] to that part of our being which is a gift, not an acquisition, to the capacity for delight and wonder... our sense of pity and pain, to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation - and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts... which binds together all humanity - the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."

Joseph Conrad

#Joseph Conrad #Conrad

What's better than hearing Philip Roth talk? (Well, reading his books). PBS American Masters has the entire film Philip Roth: Unmasked uploaded over at their website.

#Philip Roth #American Masters #PBS #Roth

I just know that something good is going to happen...

#Kate Bush #Cloudbusting #Peter Reich

Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless...everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor weak nature. The most useful room in the house is the lavatory.

-Theophile Gautier, who coined the phrase, "Art for art's sake."

#Theophile Gautier #Gautier #Art for Art's sake

Martin Ansin's absolutely perfect art for the George Saunders short story, "The Semplica Girl Diaries." Check out a neat Q&A with Saunders about the story at the New Yorker:

Now, there have been lots of times when I’ve had a dream and woken up thinking, Hey, great story idea! But most of those fizzle out as soon as I realize that, for example, a chess-playing penguin with the voice of Marlene Dietrich may not “signify.” This one was different—it just lingered.

#George Saunders #The New Yorker #Martin Ansin

Take a moment and listen to the haunting poem "The Owl" by Edward Thomas (read by Dylan Thomas?). Edward Thomas was killed in World War I; after surviving the Battle of Arras, he stood to light his pipe and was hit by the blast wave of one of the last shells fired.

#Edward Thomas #Dylan Thomas #World War I Poetry

Victor G. Ambrus splendidly illustrates the three witches from Macbeth in Favorite Tales from Shakespeare.

#Macbeth #Shakespeare #William Shakespeare #witches #Victor G. Ambrus

If I was rich, I'd drop $300 to get this book. To my knowledge, no other living major American novelist has a work even remotely like Big As Life: a wacky genre-experiment that has been out-of-print since its publication in 1966; it's now largely unread, forgotten, and almost forcibly expunged from the writer's bibliography. The plot, from what I've heard, involves two immobile, human giants who suddenly appear in the Hudson River.

Doctorow says this about it, "Unquestionably it's the worst I've done. I think about going back and re-doing it some day, but the whole experience was so unhappy, both the writing and the publishing of it that maybe I never will." He won't allow it to be re-printed.

Has anyone out there actually read it?

I had no idea Setebos (Caliban's god in The Tempest) is an actual moon of Uranus, discovered in 1999. How poetically just.

From Robert Browning's poem "Caliban Upon Setebos":

Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!

'Thinketh, He dwelleth i' the cold o' the moon.

#caliban #setebos #the tempest #robert browning #william shakespeare #shakespeare #NASA

We still and always want waking.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

#annie dillard #the writing life #writing

Large things tend to be unwieldy, clumsy, crude; smallness is the realm of elegance and grace. It’s also the realm of perfection. The novel is exhaustive by nature; but the world is inexhaustible; therefore the novel, that Faustian striver, can never attain its desire. The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains. And the short story can even lay claim to a kind of completeness that eludes the novel — after the initial act of radical exclusion, it can include all of the little that’s left.

-Steven Millhauser, "The Ambition of the Short Story"

#steven millhauser #the short story #the novel #creative writing

With scatology Chaucer is equally blunt. How he loves fart jokes! In the Summoner's Tale, a friar asks a man for alms. The man agrees but says that he has secreted his money beneath his buttocks. The friar should reach down there. He does so, and the man lets fly a fart so loud, Chaucer says, that "no cart horse could produce a fart of such a sound." Some scholars claim, however, that people in Chaucer's time were less self-conscious than we are about passing wind in front of others. The Miller, describing a parish clerk, says that among this man's noteworthy traits was a squeamishness about farting in public. How interesting!

Joan Acocella, "All England" On fart jokes in The Canterbury Tales.

The more I read, the more I think the divide between "high" and "low" culture is just an illusion.

#chaucer #canterbury tales #the canterbury tales #fart jokes #farting #joan acocella

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