“I do not find that the repetition of an important word a few times—say three or four times—in a paragraph, troubles my ear if clearness of meaning is best secured thereby. But tautological repetition which has no justifying object, but merely exposes the fact that the writer’s balance at the vocabulary bank has run short and that he is too lazy to replenish it from the thesaurus—that is another matter. It makes me feel like calling the writer to account.”
—Mark Twain
February 2011
20 posts
January and February reads
- Open Secrets by Alice Munro
- The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
- The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
- Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
- A Relative Stranger by Charles Baxter
- The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
- Adam Bede by George Eliot
- The World According to Garp by John Irving
- The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard
- Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1 by Mark Twain (with a whole bunch of editors, but to be honest I read only the 400 pages by MT and skipped the 500 pages of endnotes)
- All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
“When I was born in this house it was already filled with books in five languages and since I knew that as a woman the world would be largely denied me I seized upon this other world. I was reading by the time I was five and no one ever took a book from my hands. Ever.”
—All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
“He hasn’t a hard city face, nor crusty and repellent city ways, nor indeed anything about him which can be called ‘citified’ — that epithet which suggests the absence of all spirituality, and the presence of all kinds of paltry materialisms, and mean ideals, and mean vanities, and silly cynicisms.”
—Mark Twain
Snagged the last armchair at my favorite coffee shop. Yesssss.
“When the train arrives you must jump, rush, fly, and swarm with the crowd into the first cigar box that is handy, lest you get left. You have hardly time to mash yourself into a portion of a seat before the train is off again. It goes blustering and squttering along, puking smoke and cinders in at the window, which some one has opened in pursuance of his right to make the whole cigar box uncomfortable if his comfort requires it; the fog of black smoke smothers the lamp and dims its light, and the double row of jammed people sit there and bark at each other, and the righteous and the unrighteous pray each after his own fashion. The train stops every few minutes, and there is a new rush and scramble each time. And every quarter of an hour you change cars, and fly thirty yards to a stairway, and up the stairway and fifty yards along a corridor, and down another stairway, and plunge headlong into a train just as it moves off; and of course it is the wrong one, and you must get out at the next station and come back. But it is no matter. If you had stopped to ask the official on duty, it would have been the right train and you would have lost it by stopping to ask; and so none but idiots stop to ask.”
—Mark Twain. Smoking is now banned on the subway but nothing else has changed…
“We think boys are rude unsensitive animals, but it is not so in all cases. Each boy has one or two sensitive spots, and if you can find out where they are located you have only to touch them and you can scorch him as with fire.”
—Mark Twain
Mark Twain
I finally got a library copy of the new Mark Twain autobiography. When I’m not reading it I’m using it to tone my biceps. I’m not sure what to think of the structure of the volume; for now I’m just enjoying Twain’s writing and ignoring the 500 pages of endnotes.
I think I’d like to own a copy and stick post-it notes all over so I could handily revisit his thoughts on religion, plagiarism, slavery, the hilarious response he wrote to this guy who tried to edit his writing, his descriptions of childhood…
For now I’ll just be posting favorite quotes here as I read them.
“I have no feeling about him, I have no harsh words to say about him. He is a great fat good-natured, kind-hearted, chicken-lobster slave; with no more pride than a tramp, no more sand than a rabbit, no more moral sense than a wax figure, and no more sex than a tape-worm. He sincerely thinks he is honest, he sincerely thinks he is honorable. It is my daily prayer to God that he be permitted to live and die in those superstitions.”
—Mark Twain
“Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”
—Raymond Carver (via reading-is-fun)
I could post this quote every morning.
“How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? Or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy’s flutelike voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer deeper music.”
—George Eliot, Adam Bede
“That is a simple scene, reader. But it is almost certain that you, too, have been in love — perhaps, even, more than once, though you may not choose to say so to all your feminine friends. If so, you will no more think the slight words, the timid looks, the tremulous touches, by which two human souls approach each other gradually, like two little quivering rain-streams, before they mingle into one — you will no more think these things trivial than you will think the first-detected signs of coming spring trivial, though they be but a faint indescribable something in the air and in the song of the birds, and the tiniest perceptible budding on the hedgerow branches. Those slight words and looks and touches are part of the soul’s language; and the finest language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as ‘light,’ ‘sound,’ ‘stars,’ ‘music’ — words really not worth looking at, or hearing in themselves, any more than ‘chips’ or ‘sawdust.’ It is only that they happen to be the signs of something unspeakably great and beautiful.”
—George Eliot, Adam Bede
“Socially, Jenny had that kind of graceless seriousness which makes more frivolous people uncomfortable. She read a lot and was a great ransacker of the Steering library; the book someone wanted was always discovered to be checked out to Nurse Fields. Phone calls were politely answered; Jenny frequently offered to deliver the book directly to the party who wanted it, as soon as she finished it. She finished such books promptly, but she had nothing to say about them. In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?”
—John Irving, The World According to Garp
Henry James is my new hero
I checked out The Wings of the Dove because I wrote a paper on A Portrait of a Lady in high school, and I remember thinking at the time that Henry James was crazy awesome, and somehow in the intervening years I haven’t read anything else he wrote.
Then I got bogged down in the PREFACE to this 450-page novel, and I couldn’t understand a word he was saying, and I’m pretty sure the Internet is to blame. I’m constantly feeling distracted by this overwhelming urge to make sure I’m not missing anything important on the Internet. This is really making it hard for me to absorb serious literature. Much as I <3 serious literature.
So anyway, I’m reading this preface Henry James wrote, and I’m thinking I might as well just abandon it and move on to the novel itself and write a blog post blaming the interwebs for my laziness, BUT THEN.
Henry James straight up REACHED HIS BONY HANDS OUT OF THE BOOK AND SHOOK SOME SENSE INTO ME.
For real.
I’m pretty sure the gist of it was: “Suck it up and read — no, not like that, not while playing with your phone, not with one eye on the TV, but really, for real, DIG IN, or you will totally miss out.”
See, he’s talking about some plot point that I didn’t understand because I hadn’t read the book yet, and he says something like, “Did I make a mistake writing this bit this way? No, I didn’t, because if you pay attention in the first two books you’ll see how I set up this very plot point.” What he literally says is, “I had definitely opened the door, as attention of perusal of the first two Books will show.”
Then, in parentheses, the part where he reached out of the book and strangled me:
“(Attention of perusal, I thus confess by the way, is what I at every point, as well as here, absolutely invoke and take for granted, a truth I avail myself of this occasion to note once for all — in the interest of that variety of ideal reigning, I gather, in the connexion. The enjoyment of a work of art, the acceptance of an irresistible illusion, constituting, to my sense, our highest experience of ‘luxury,’ the luxury is not greatest, by my consequent measure, when the work asks for as little attention as possible. It is greatest, it is delightfully, divinely great, when we feel the surface, like the thick ice of the skater’s pond, bear without cracking the strongest pressure we throw on it. The sound of the crack one may recognize, but never surely to call it a luxury.)”
Whoa. I had to read that seventy bajillion times.
Enjoyment of a book = “the acceptance of an irresistible illusion” = the biggest “luxury” but NOT when you can read the book without paying any attention to it. You have to throw the strongest pressure/attention at the book’s skating rink/illusion, and if it holds up, your experience will be “delightfully, divinely great.”
Can’t argue with that.
Terry Gross and I had the same childhood!
- Terry Gross: Now, I read that when you were young, you were good at competitive hog calling and I'm not even sure what that is, having grown up in Brooklyn.
- Walton Goggins: You guys didn't hog-call in Brooklyn?
- Gross: No.
- Goggins: That's not how you got your pork in Brooklyn?
- Gross: We got our pork in Chinese restaurants in the neighborhood.
