February 2012
11 posts
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and now there is this →
For some time now I’ve been kicking around the idea of attempting the laborious & unnatural activity of shifting my voluminous writing and thinking about books from my private notebooks (and, to a certain extent, this space—it has been spilling over) to a Proper Old Blog. I know, internet, I know: my trajectory is exactly the opposite of everyone else’s, I am so late to...
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“The ducks swam through the drawing-room windows. The weight of the water had...”
– The opening lines of Barbara Comyns’ Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, which I like more than anything else I’ve read recently. It is a marvelous little book, beginning wonderfully with a flood and ending with a funeral; it’s funny and dark and sad and delightful. Reminded me a bit...
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Thought for the evening: I am very sick of the “What we talk about when we talk about ________” title format. It was great the first time but now it is just tiresome and derivative; anything with this title actually encourages me not to read the work because I’m shallowly contrary like that.
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1Q84 by Haruki Murakami | Quarterly Conversation →
“Such outsized love stories as which Murakami embarks on in 1Q84 must be treated with extreme diligence, as they present sizable problems vis a vis believability, melodrama, and sentimentality. Murakami founders upon all three. It may sound ironic that a writer who indulges in the surreal as casually as Murakami would butt up against the problem of believability, but in attempting to piece...
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