Alex Kudera's Blog, page 10

Tom Robbins

As a cowgirl once said, an author should never be just another roadside attraction. May Tom Robbins rest in peace.

Lenin

"Yes . . . but Lenin knew where he was going."

~~ from The Seven Madmen and The Flamethrowers by Roberto Arlt

where i'm calling from

 

Barnes and Noble

Barnes and Noble on Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia 
 

Un Jour

"I pull a copy of London Bridge by Céline from my bag."

~~ from "Un Jour" by Steve Anwyll

the happiest creature on earth

"Everything had been denied her as a child. She remembered how one of the fantasies of her childhood was to dream she would be the happiest creature on earth if only she could live in a room with wallpaper."

~~ from The Seven Madmen and The Flamethrowers by Roberto Arlt

affirm my existence

"But still, if tomorrow I throw a bomb or murder Barsut, suddenly I'm everything, the man who exists, the man for whom generations of criminologists have prepared punishments, jails, and theories. I, who am nothing, will start the whole terrible machinery of police, secretaries, reporters, lawyers, prosecutors, jailers, paddywagons, and nobody will see me as a loser; instead, I'll be the antisocial man, the enemy who must be kept apart from society. That's really weird! And yet, only crime can affirm my existence, just as evil is all that affirms the presence of man on earth."

~~ from The Seven Madmen and The Flamethrowers by Roberto Arlt

the American Dream

"For what we get in Fight For Your Long Day is a very much street-level view of Duff’s (and Kudera’s) much beloved and fretted-over hometown of Philadelphia circa 2000-and-something, and while the picture is hardly a pretty one, it is a keenly-felt one for all that. Our man Duff really does worry about the many of its citizens who somehow fall several (or more) rungs below him on the various, supposedly meritocratic, but shyster-led-and-bred ladders of the American Dream."

Everything

"One important Other Thing about the Duffler is his intense, even completely nutso, levels of self-scrutiny: it’s as if he dictated the entirety of auto-scrutor par excellence Ignatius of Loyola’s notoriously fastidious Spiritual Exercises to himself in a brief chat in some under-the-tracks diner somewhere in the heart of Philly’s supposed no-go (or, for the Duff, don’t-go-gently) zones, for our Man is nothing in this novel if not self-conscious in every dimension imaginable—and usually quite guiltily so as well, as if his entire life were this one Platonic Long Day (which it very much is, avec initial caps as in the novel), and that Day’s spiritual forebears were the Jewish family of Annie Hall gathering on some perpetual Day of Atonement not because anyone but themselves has told them to, but because they simly, unavoidably feel unspecified, pervasive, transcendental Guiltand—and so simply are somehow guilty of, well, Everything."

a new review

Consider W.D. Clarke's review of Fight for Your Long Day.