April 12, 2020 at 5:19 am (Links, Women Writers)
Tags: essay, history, New York Review of Books, review, Saturday
She had not been encouraged to consider physical decay; when she had made her triumphal entry into France, and crowds turned out to see her, ugly people had been warned to stay away.
— from The Perils of Antoinette, a review by Hilary Mantel
That is such a Hilary Mantel sentence. The tone is so calmly authoritative that one doesn’t even pause to ask: WHAT ARE THE CRITERIA FOR ‘UGLY.’ (Missing teeth? Pox-scarred skin? So many possibilities!)
The NYRB is making the entire piece available, through April 2020.
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February 22, 2020 at 5:18 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended)
Tags: New York Review of Books, poetry, Saturday, Spanish writers, translation
Rod Blagojevich claimed to Anderson Cooper that he was “a political prisoner.”
Here’s a real one:
THE CEMETERY LIES NEAR
from the collection Miguel Hernandez selected and translated from the Spanish by Don Share (NYRB, 2013)
The cemetery lies near
where you and I are sleeping,
among blue nopals,
blue pitas, and children
who shout at the top of their lungs
if a corpse darkens the street.
From here to the cemetery everything
is blue, golden, clear.
Four steps away, the dead.
Four steps away, the living.
Clear, blue, and golden.
My son grows remote there.
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February 6, 2018 at 5:54 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Memoirs)
Tags: essay, inspiration, literature of medicine, medicine, memoir, Mondays, New York Review of Books, review, sayings, wisdom
You will notice, dear blog reader, that all the magazines self has been quoting this week are three years old. That is because 2015 is the last year she had much leisure time. She thinks it’s a very good sign that she saved all these past issues of New York Review of Books. Like she knew, she’d be getting back to them one day. Even if that day was three years later.
Moving on.
Oliver Sacks is no longer with us. Nevertheless, his ouevre remains. Jerome Groopman, in his review of Oliver Sacks’s memoir On the Move: A Life, quotes Sacks’s description of himself:
of “vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.” A talented student drew a contrast with Ivan Ilyich, who was passionless and shaped his behavior to strictly conform to others’ expectations. Tolstoy judged Ilyich’s life as “most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”
Which is why self is sharing this photo (taken at the San Carlos Auto Pride carwash):
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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August 13, 2016 at 9:43 pm (Memoirs)
Tags: essay, inspiration, New York Review of Books, reviews, Saturdays
From Gregory’s review in The New York Review of Books of Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, by William Finnegan (August 13, 2015):
- This capacity for geographical familiarity — knowing exactly where the neighbor’s fence warps slightly — is a visceral kind of knowledge, gained organically, and it atrophies as we age. Learning a place by heart is a luxury rarely afforded to adults, and unless absolutely forced to, one seldom even notices that the ability has been lost.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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July 4, 2016 at 5:52 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Sundays)
Tags: New York Review of Books, poetry, Spanish writers, translation
A creature must grow
From the seedbed of nothing
and more than one turns up
under the design of an angry star,
under a troubled and bad moon.
an excerpt from “Bloody Fate” (in the collection Miguel Hernandez, NYRB/Poets) translated by Don Share
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December 29, 2014 at 7:30 pm (Books, Lists, Places, Publishers, Recommended)
Tags: biographies, book lists, India, lists, Mondays, New York Review of Books, nonfiction, novel, translation
Oh why oh why had self mis-laid this issue. Apparently it lay discarded in self’s clothes closet for over a year. And today is a busy busy Monday (Mondays always are), but she just can’t help perusing the issue. And it turns out, there are so many interesting reviews!
Without further ado, here are a couple of books reviewed in the 26 September 2013 issue of The New York Review of Books:
- The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis, by Julie Kavanagh (Knopf, $27.95)
- The Lady of the Camellias, by Alexandre Dumas fils, translated from the French by Liesl Schillinger (Penguin, $16.00)
- The Force of Things: A Marriage in War and Peace, by Alexander Stille (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28.00)
- The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson (Random House, $15.00)
- Calcutta: Two Years in the City, by Amit Chaudhuri (Knopf, $25.95)
- Subtle Bodies, by Norman Rush (Knopf, $26.95)
- Mortals, by Norman Rush
- Whites, by Norman Rush
- The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced, by Stephanie Dalley (Oxford University Press, $34.95)
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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December 14, 2014 at 6:03 pm (Sundays)
Tags: Hawthornden, New York Review of Books, poetry, Sundays
Self found this in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books:
excerpt from IN THE DARK
by Edwin Frank
Further information is sure to be
forthcoming, but for now
our one
recourse is
to wait, and we,
we have been,
we have been waiting now
for a very long time
for something
to become clear, although
everything remains
unclear. The light,
even the light is —
dim like the light in a basement — and these
shambolic trees
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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December 13, 2014 at 5:12 pm (Artists and Writers, Links, Recommended)
Tags: discoveries, inspiration, New York Review of Books, poetry, Saturday, translation
Self adores Miguel Hernandez.
His poem, from which self is taking this excerpt, is tacked above her computer in son’s room. The translation is by Don Share. Self discovered it in The New York Review of Books.
She reads it at least once a day.
Everything is filled with me:
with something yours and memory
lost, yet found
again, at some other time.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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