*A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
*A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
*Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
*Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
*Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
*Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
*I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
*I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
*I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.
*If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
*If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
*In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
*It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
*Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
*Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.
*One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
*Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.
*Our lives teach us who we are.
*Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
*Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Saturday, October 9, 2010
The Real Thing By Henry James (1843-1916)
* “Wouldn't it be rather a pull sometimes to have — a — to have —?” He hung fire; he wanted me to help him by phrasing what he meant. But I couldn't — I didn't know. So he brought it out, awkwardly: "The real thing; a gentleman, you know, or a lady” (James, 237).
*There were moments when I was oppressed by the serenity of [Mrs. Monarch’s] confidence that she was the real thing. All her dealings with me and all her husband's were an implication that this was lucky for me. Meanwhile I found myself trying to invent types that approached her own, instead of making her own transform itself — in the clever way that was not impossible, for instance, to poor Miss Churm. Arrange as I would and take the precautions I would, she always, in my pictures, came out too tall — landing me in the dilemma of having represented a fascinating woman as seven feet high, which, out of respect perhaps to my own very much scantier inches, was far from my idea of such a personage” (James).
*I could take his measure at a glance--he was six feet two and a perfect gentleman. It would have paid any club in process of formation and in want of a stamp to engage him at a salary to stand in the principal window.
* Learning that he was a painter they tried to approach him, to show him too that they were the real thing; but he looked at them across the big room, as if they were miles away: they were a compendium of everything he most objected to in the social system of his country. Such people as that, all convention and patent- leather, with ejaculations that stopped conversation, had no business in a studio. A studio was a place to learn to see, and how could you see through a pair of feather-beds?
*"Now the drawings you make from US, they look exactly like us," she reminded me, smiling in triumph; and I recognised that this was indeed just their defect. When I drew the Monarchs I couldn't anyhow get away from them--get into the character I wanted to represent; and I hadn't the least desire my model should be discoverable in my picture. Miss Churm never was, and Mrs. Monarch thought I hid her, very properly, because she was vulgar; whereas if she was lost it was only as the dead who go to heaven are lost--in the gain of an angel the more.
Quotations by Henry James: *It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance . . . and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
*To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.
*Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.
*Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?
*Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
*There were moments when I was oppressed by the serenity of [Mrs. Monarch’s] confidence that she was the real thing. All her dealings with me and all her husband's were an implication that this was lucky for me. Meanwhile I found myself trying to invent types that approached her own, instead of making her own transform itself — in the clever way that was not impossible, for instance, to poor Miss Churm. Arrange as I would and take the precautions I would, she always, in my pictures, came out too tall — landing me in the dilemma of having represented a fascinating woman as seven feet high, which, out of respect perhaps to my own very much scantier inches, was far from my idea of such a personage” (James).
*I could take his measure at a glance--he was six feet two and a perfect gentleman. It would have paid any club in process of formation and in want of a stamp to engage him at a salary to stand in the principal window.
* Learning that he was a painter they tried to approach him, to show him too that they were the real thing; but he looked at them across the big room, as if they were miles away: they were a compendium of everything he most objected to in the social system of his country. Such people as that, all convention and patent- leather, with ejaculations that stopped conversation, had no business in a studio. A studio was a place to learn to see, and how could you see through a pair of feather-beds?
*"Now the drawings you make from US, they look exactly like us," she reminded me, smiling in triumph; and I recognised that this was indeed just their defect. When I drew the Monarchs I couldn't anyhow get away from them--get into the character I wanted to represent; and I hadn't the least desire my model should be discoverable in my picture. Miss Churm never was, and Mrs. Monarch thought I hid her, very properly, because she was vulgar; whereas if she was lost it was only as the dead who go to heaven are lost--in the gain of an angel the more.
Quotations by Henry James: *It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance . . . and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
*To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.
*Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.
*Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?
*Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Robert Penn Warren (1905- 1989) on Hemingway (1899-1961) :
Hemingway’s heroes are not squealers, welchers, compromisers, or cowards, and when they confront defeat they realize that the stance they take, the stoic endurance, the stiff upper lip means a kind of victory. If they are to be defeated they are defeated upon their own terms; some of them have even courted their defeat; and certainly they have maintained, even in the practical defeat, an ideal of themselves – some definition of how a man should behave, formulated or unformulated – by which they have lived. They represent some notion of a code, some notion of honor, that makes a man a man, and that distinguishes him from people who merely follow their random impulses and who are, by consequence, “messy.”
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.
Hemingway’s heroes are not squealers, welchers, compromisers, or cowards, and when they confront defeat they realize that the stance they take, the stoic endurance, the stiff upper lip means a kind of victory. If they are to be defeated they are defeated upon their own terms; some of them have even courted their defeat; and certainly they have maintained, even in the practical defeat, an ideal of themselves – some definition of how a man should behave, formulated or unformulated – by which they have lived. They represent some notion of a code, some notion of honor, that makes a man a man, and that distinguishes him from people who merely follow their random impulses and who are, by consequence, “messy.”
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.
Ernest Hemingway
Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Never confuse movement with action.
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
A Farewell to Arms, 1929
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
Ernest Hemingway, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech
Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so.
The Old Man and the Sea
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Never confuse movement with action.
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
A Farewell to Arms, 1929
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
Ernest Hemingway, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech
Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so.
The Old Man and the Sea
from: The Battler
He came up the track toward the fire carefully. It was off to one side of the track, below the railway embankment. He had only seen the light from it. The track came out through a cut and where the fire was burning the country opened out and fell away into woods. Nick dropped carefully down the embankment and cut into the woods to come up to the fire through the trees. It was a beechwood forest and the fallen beechnut burrs were under his shoes as he walked between the trees. The fire was bright now, just at the edge of the trees. There was a man sitting by it. Nick waited behind the tree and watched. The man looked to be alone. He was sitting there with his head in his hands looking at the fire. Nick stepped out and walked into the firelight.
The man sat there looking into the fire. When Nick stopped quite close to him he did not move.
"Hello!" Nick said.
The man looked up.
"Where did you get the shiner?" he said.
"A brakeman busted me."
"Off the through freight?"
"Yes."
"I saw the bastard," the man said. "he went through here´bout an hour and a half ago. He was walking along the top of the cars slapping his arms and singing."
"The bastard!"
"It must have made him feel good to bust you," the man said seriously.
"I´ll bust him."
"Get him with a rock sometime when he´s going through." the man advised.
"I´ll get him."
"You´re a tough one, aren´t you?"
"No," Nick answered.
from: The Battler
The man sat there looking into the fire. When Nick stopped quite close to him he did not move.
"Hello!" Nick said.
The man looked up.
"Where did you get the shiner?" he said.
"A brakeman busted me."
"Off the through freight?"
"Yes."
"I saw the bastard," the man said. "he went through here´bout an hour and a half ago. He was walking along the top of the cars slapping his arms and singing."
"The bastard!"
"It must have made him feel good to bust you," the man said seriously.
"I´ll bust him."
"Get him with a rock sometime when he´s going through." the man advised.
"I´ll get him."
"You´re a tough one, aren´t you?"
"No," Nick answered.
from: The Battler
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Ernest Hemingway ( 1899-1961)
"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."
"There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave."
" You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes. " from The Sun Also Rises
"There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave."
" You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes. " from The Sun Also Rises
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Welcome
Welcome to Cours de littérature L1.
*Approach
*texts- our focus would be on short story
*Words to Ponder
“Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?”
Harold Bloom
from "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" by: William Carlos Williams 1883-1963
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hear me out
for I too am concerned
and every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides.
“A blank page is actually a whitewashed wall with no door and no window. Beginning to tell a story is like making a pass at a total stranger in a restaurant. Remember Chekhov’s Gurov in “ the Lady with the dog”? Gurov beckons to the little dog, wagging his finger at it over and over again, until the lady says, blushing, “ He doesn’t bite”, whereupon Gurov asks her permission to give the dog a bone. Both Gurov and Chekhov have now been given a thread to go by; the flirtation begins and story takes off.
The beginning of almost every story is actually a bone, something with which to court the dog, which may bring you closer to the lady.”
Amos Oz
*Approach
*texts- our focus would be on short story
*Words to Ponder
“Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?”
Harold Bloom
from "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" by: William Carlos Williams 1883-1963
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hear me out
for I too am concerned
and every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides.
“A blank page is actually a whitewashed wall with no door and no window. Beginning to tell a story is like making a pass at a total stranger in a restaurant. Remember Chekhov’s Gurov in “ the Lady with the dog”? Gurov beckons to the little dog, wagging his finger at it over and over again, until the lady says, blushing, “ He doesn’t bite”, whereupon Gurov asks her permission to give the dog a bone. Both Gurov and Chekhov have now been given a thread to go by; the flirtation begins and story takes off.
The beginning of almost every story is actually a bone, something with which to court the dog, which may bring you closer to the lady.”
Amos Oz
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