Photo of ‘Modern Book Printing", fourth sculpture (from six) of the Berliner Walk of Ideas on the occasion of 2006 FIFA World Cup Germany. Unveiling: 21 April 2006 at Bebelplatz, square near the Unter den Linden in front of Humboldt University, commemorating Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of Modern Book Printing around 1450 in Mainz

"Philosophers ruin language, poets ruin logic, but with human reasoning alone man will never make it through life." Schiller

"Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of." Brecht

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion." Goethe

"I love those who yearn for the impossible." Goethe

"This is the true measure of love: When we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will ever love in the same way after us" Goethe

"Who loves not wine, women and song, Remains a fool his whole life long"Luther

"Peace if possible, truth at all costs." Luther

"Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God" Luther

"If you are not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don’t want to go there" Luther

A child…never takes time off as a child; time off does not begin until the principles of order have been accepted. Boll

"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." Mann

"What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find." Hesse

"Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play." Kant

" Happiness, it seems to me, consists of two things: first, in being where you belong, and second — and best — in comfortably going through everyday life, that is, having had a good night’s sleep and not being hurt by new shoes." Fontane

"Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid." Heine

"Whenever there has been talk of exterminating rats, others, who were not rats, have been exterminated." Grass

I saw a deaf man, a blind man, a dumb man, and a lame man catch a hare. The deaf man heard it coming, the blind man spotted it, the dumb man shouted, "There it goes!" and the lame man ran and caught it by the collar." 
Brothers Grimm

“He who doesn’t lose his wits over certain things has no wits to lose” Lessing

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” Arendt

"About this man Weidel," said the French hotel proprietress, a few days
after the Nazis entered Paris. "He came in, trembling. … He didn’t
want to register. . . . Next morning … he was lying fully dressed on
the bed; a little glass bottle stood on the night table, empty. . . .
We predated . . . Mr. Weidel’s name on the register. . . . Then he was
buried. . . . What am I to do with [his suitcase]?" Seghers

“Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand” Marx

From the tail end of James Wood’s Guardian piece October 6, 2001: Tell me how does it feel? US novelists must now abandon social and theoretical glitter

Here Harvor catches and excuses Wood for repeating himself:

Fun to locate Elizabeth out there in cyberspace, could be anywhere, but no, she lives right here.

 Speaking of Wood, I’m reading Edmund Wilson on Dickens and damned if James doesn’t sound a lot like Edmund. Here’s the latter on G.K. Chesterton, whose writing on Dickens and elsewhere "…is always melting away into that pseudo-poetic booziness which verbalizes with large conceptions and ignores the most obtrusive actualities. " Instead of "agitated density," Wilson uses "nervous concentration," in describing the vivid colours of Edwin Drood,

 Gunter Grass

If you’re in Boston Dec.23-Jan 15, 2008. If not, there’s always the book.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Writer’s Brush

An Exhibition of Art by Writers

15 December 2007 through 15 January 2007

Opening Reception 15 December 6-10 (or longer if we can stand it):

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

The first leg of the show took place in New York in September and October at Anita Shapolsky Gallery, and our show is an expanded (and I hope improved) version of that event.  It will run from the 15th of December through the 15th of January, with an opening reception on 15 December, at which Mr. Friedman and some of the writer/artists will be present and happy to sign or inscribe books.  The show will go to Los Angeles from mid-February through mid-April at Denenberg Fine Arts (with a reception during the Los Angeles Antiquarian Book Fair), and perhaps then on to Houston.  It will contain work by more than 120 writers, including

A catalogue will be made for the exhibition, with an introduction by the magnificent novelist Joseph McElroy.

Best wishes,

John Wronoski

Lame Duck Books
Pierre Menard Gallery
10-12 Arrow Street
Cambridge, MA  02138

Just executed a comprehensive recce-browse of the fiction section at my local Chapters (big box/high street) book store, and was wowed once again by Penguins. New Vintage ones. Last time this happened it was the My Penguin blank bookcover contest, which showed striking ingenuity and marketing savvy…Low-tech, Youtube-style user-content for books. Design your own.

This time it’s creativity. Two covers in particular belittled all those sharing their shelves: Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, and most arrestingly, Laura Lee’s Cider with Rosie. Too bad it doesn’t show up so well on the web here. Best visit your local bookstore for an up-close-and-personal peruse. Here’s a book worth buying just for its cover. What a great publisher. Penguin Rules! There’s even a video.

In today’s Guardian Books Blog you can find a post by me entitled Reading to Put You off Books:Too many academics have abandoned clarity and enthusiasm for cliquey obscurity

This book is best described as charming. Less a novel, than a volume of light criticism, Flaubert’s Parrot takes a pleasant walk  through the paysage of Northern France and Gustave Flaubert’s mind. Can’t say I got much from it though. Awards and  inflated front-cover promises are in part to blame. They stoked an existing appetite for apt metaphors and profundities on literature and the human condition, and heightened anticipation of reading an untried highly regarded author. Julian Barnes‘ writing here is clever, but in the shadow of Flaubert’s, virtually invisible. The plot is like so much dough left over from the cookie cutter. Quotes worthy of mention are mostly Gustave’s; criticism is largely anecdotal. Given the hype, Barnes’s reputation and the topic, I expected a lot. Much like the case with Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam, I left the table hungry and slightly irritated.

Mounting a different metaphor: perhaps I went with the wrong horses. Maybe these weren’t bred to be the best. I wont leave the stables, but for now I’m holding my applause.

As an aperitif Flaubert’s Parrot will do, but for real sustenance, try the obvious, read Madame Bovary, then Francis Steegmuller’s Flaubert and Madame Bovary, then the mother lode, Flaubert’s Letters.

Here’s a soupçon of  bon mots from Flaubert’s Parrot:

Remember [Flaubert's] sad definition from Madame Bovary: ‘Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.’ So you can take the novelist either way: as a pertinacious and finished stylist; or as one who considers language tragically insufficient. Sartreans prefer the second option: for them Loulou’s {parrot} inability to do more than repeat at second hand the phrases he hears is an indirect confession of the novelist’s own failure. 

Perhaps this is the advantage of making friends with those already dead: your feelings toward them never cool.

Preference for the consolation of non-fulfilment over the desolation of uncompleted work: the planned visit to the brothel, the pleasure of anticipation, and then, years later, not the memory of deeds but the memory of past anticipations? Wouldn’t that keep it all cleaner and less painful?

Remember the botched brothel visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory. Such is the Flaubertian temperament.  

Comforting a sad and discouraged Louise [Colet], he reminds her that we are all caged birds, and that life weighs the heaviest on those with largest wings.

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonourably, foolishly, viciously. The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.  

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

Nabokov on adultery in his lecture on Madame Bovary: "a most conventional way to rise above the conventional."

Style arises from subject matter.

Flaubert would alter a fact for the sake of a cadence.

I’m saying that you trust the mystifier more if you know he’s deliberately choosing not to be lucid. You trust Picasso all the way because he could draw like Ingres.  

Flaubert with Montaigne teaches you to sleep on the pillow of doubt 

 Flaubert’s maxims for writing: Form isn’t an overcoat flung over the flesh of thought; it’s the flesh of thought itself. You can no more imagine an Idea without a Form than a Form without an idea…You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good, it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry. If you happen to write well, you are accused of lacking ideas.

You are elected into love by a secret ballot against which there is no appeal.

When the chest is flat, one is nearer the heart.  

Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t.

Incoming search terms:

• flaubert\s parrot analysis
• flaubert\s parrot quote about the pleasure of anticipation
• pleasure is found first in anticipation later in memory

Ed Champion, here surrounded by admirers, has announced that he’ll be closing down his Return of the Reluctant blog to focus on novel writing, Bat Segundo author interviewing and other artistic endeavours. Ed’s blog was always interesting, crammed with links, and insight and gossip and laughs. I’ll miss it. And wish him well.

We met briefly last summer at BookExpo in New York; had hoped to interview each other for our respective shows, but the timing was off. Hopefully we’ll make it happen  sometime. Perhaps after he publishes blockbuster #1. Here are his parting words:

"For now, however, I’m done with blogging. And I’m serious this time.
There are pages of crazed dialogue to bang out. Stories and essays to
write. Podcasts to unfurl. Actors to recruit. A troubled protagonist to
flesh out, who I’ve been learning more about over the past year.

If you’re looking for new content in the meantime, well, you’ll find all that over at Segundo — including, very soon, that Will Self conversation that some of you have been asking about.

But thanks very much for helping to make Reluctant what it’s been over the past four years."

– Edward Champion

 So, I’ve read the text closely and come to the conclusion that To Autumn is about…Autumn, transition, passage of time, the inevitability of change. It’s true that Keats supported political reform and Henry Hunt, that he was quite aware of the massacre at St. Peter’s Field near Manchester; and that he was in London when Hunt returned. “Somewhere,” as Aileen Ward puts it in her National Book Award winning biography, “ in the clapping, cheering, handkerchief-waving crowd Keats wandered, caught up in the surge of revolutionary ardour.” Several short pages beyond this quote Ward introduces To Autumn as Keats’ most perfect and untroubled poem. No mention of reform, Manchester, massacre or Hunt, and a direct contradiction of Paulin’s assertions of unsettlement,anxiety and discomfort. This, Ward says, is Keats’ most impersonal poem, he is
completely lost in his images, and “the images are presented as meaning simply themselves.” She does however quote Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy, stating that it was inspired by ‘Peterloo.’ In the five pages he devotes to To Autumn in his biography of Keats, Walter Jackson Bate, another authoritative scholar, makes no mention of reform or massacre, or unrest. He calls the poem “entirely concrete, and self sufficient in and through its concreteness.”

Incoming search terms:

• close reading of to autumn

BBC Radio 3′s The Essay:Greek and Latin Voices,offers listeners an accessible modern guide to some of the foundation texts of Western culture. Each
week, in four lively 15 minute programs, scholars, writers and passionate
classicists, explore various aspects of these works and their authors. There’s also a look at how these great authors influenced contemporary ones.

Just listened to Barbara Graziosi talking about Homer, whose blindness supposedly enabled him a connection with the muse. Stay tuned for great music after each program.