Calendar strikes Nov 1 and I’ve never come across so many NaNoWriMo offshoots. A very welcome abundance!
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Happy Halloween. I'm dressing as a Congressional Bill so I never have to leave the house.
Forms of online reading change so quickly. Threads on X then printed PDFs, w some long-form articles bound into little books! A kind of double impulse to give online writing permanence but also plenty that rush to comment without reading at all! Can’t help but wonder what’s next
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With Proust, you have to lose yourself, falling into the richness of the narrative. As you go along you forget things, you recall things, you are reminded of things. It’s the most wonderful experience of mislaying memories and finding them again — the subject of the book itself.
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They’re actually annoying because they have end notes, so you have to keep interrupting the story to flick to the end of the book, and then the note turns out to be “Manchester is a city in the North of England” or something
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Tell that to C. S. Lewis: “I've been reading Pride & Prejudice on and off all my life and it doesn't wear out a bit. Her books have only two faults and both are damnable: they are too few and too short.”
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Nostalgia will kill your spirit. Anemoia will ruin you if you are young.
Microdosing nostalgia is fine. But it’s very easy to OD and become miserable.
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It’s sort of remarkable that Jane Austen has become probably the central figure in English literature after Shakespeare, and arguably the most beloved. All the more so because she never traveled far from home; her life was largely lacking in drama. Early critics accused her of leading an insular existence, ignoring the great issues of the day and limiting the scope of her stories to the home. And yet, as Eudora Welty has noted, “The interesting situations of life can take place, and notably do, at home.” Such was Austen’s genius that within her limited sphere she saw the whole of human nature. All of life is contained within her six novels. She remains our greatest psychologist and one of our wisest philosophers. To read her books is a first step towards acquiring wisdom.
that video of the guy cutting the middle out of a pizza and pressing the halves back together has me thinking some contemporary novels could use the same edit????
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Steinbeck, the single story of the world
ALT We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.