Alex Kudera's Blog, page 123

vintage selfie

Colin Powell took time to post a vintage selfie, and it reminded me of my dad's efforts at such from the 1970s.

Below my father's photo rests his college copy of The Sun Also Rises , which I enjoyed rereading in Suzhou, China in May of 2012. The book, as in the copy depicted (originally posted two years ago), figures prominently in "My Old Man," a story included here, about visiting my father when he had only forty dollars in his pocket but was happily living by the beach, writing poetry, and soon to return to the world of work as a cashier at a local gas station's convenience store. That was twenty years ago when I first plucked it off Jay's shelf near St. Augustine, Florida, began reading, and took it back with me to Philly (not my first time through that novel, but my first time through my father's copy).

In Suzhou, among other places, I read from it in a faux Italian gelato cafe in a small shopping mall near my daughter's four-year-old kindergarten. Alas, I'd feel I was dissembling if I didn't also confess to doing much of my editing and proofreading at a McDonald's in the same "retail environment."

passenger train

Cool as a cat, Passenger is on it: "We're all slowly dying in front of [redacted] computers."

Hunger

So it should come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog that I'm now reading Hunger for the third or fifth time. It's a novel that has found its way to this blog several times before, including this early entry. Like several other great writers of the period, late in his life Knut Hamsun was on the wrong side of fascism, but, regardless, he was indisputably on the right side of literature (in the sense that he wrote it).

Here are a couple early quotations I've appreciated:

"I was beginning to be drawn in. The plot ran away with me, and one lie after the other popped into my head." p.27

"Despite my alienation from myself that moment, and even though I was nothing but a battleground for invisible forces, I was aware of every detail of what was going on around me." p.15

(Both are from the Noonday edition, Robert Bly trans. with an intro from Isaac Bashevis Singer.)

If by chance Hamsun's Hunger is one you've missed, please do grab a copy and read it right away.

Vietnam War Memorial

Last November, we had a chance to walk the wall in Washington, D.C.

  

Two Small Coincidences?

Late last night, as I tore through a section of Dave Newman's Two Small Birds where the narrator expresses his admiration for Knut Hamsun's Hunger , I turned to my left, and sure enough it was the only book on the stool by my bed (linked to the edition I own, translated by Robert Bly and with an introduction by Isaac Bashevis Singer).

This reminded me of the other Pittsburgh novel, Said Sayrafiezadeh's When Skateboards Will Be Free, and how I was about to fall asleep early after reading a page with the sentence, "The clock on the wall read 8:50." I checked my cell phone, and sure enough, it was 8:52 p.m.

I'll just tidy up, find the Hunger links, and escape this entry without mentioning Mr. Coincidence, Paul Auster (who, by the way, has written an introduction to a different edition of Hunger ).

more 44

Forty-four continues to chase me around the interwebs, this time showing up in the first sentence of a New York Times Op-Ed by Pamela Druckerman.

Some of her thoughts are fun ones although I'd say, to the contrary, on today's college campuses the girl you see him with is almost always the daughter, not the girlfriend (Druckerman's penultimate words of wisdom).

Two Small Birds

"One of the only true sins is to resent those who have less, who live harder lives, and I did it and felt ashamed."

from Dave Newman, Two Small Birds, page 146

#AWP14

I woke up too early, neither exhausted nor rejuvenated, and went downstairs to heat water and prepare corn flakes with milk.

Now it's back to thin herbal tea and Dave Newman's Two Small Birds. The book is trucker fiction, heavy on the fried chicken and poetry.

A facebook comment suggested that Cartilage and Skin author Michael James Rizza picked up some match boxes at the Atticus table at the Book Fair.

On his way to the conference, Dan Cafaro of Atticus walked by a musician busking on the street in Seattle. The guitarist may or may not be Charlie Parr of Austin, Minnesota, but Rizza will understand when I say that it looks like Parr has gotten beyond Duluth.

I'm not at the conference, but the Seattle Public Library system has five print copies of Fight for Your Long Day.

I may soon add swimming or stationary bicycle to my regular walking routines, but for now, I'll count as additional exercise an unease I've experienced, during turbulence, on the smaller planes of my recent flights.

Of course, everything will be fine.

Pittsburgh lit

I've been reading prose from Pittsburgh, first the memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free by Said Sayrafiezadeh and now the novel  Two Small Birds by Dave Newman.

libertie, equalitie, selfie

Portrait of the blogger with a copy of Keith Hoeller's Equality for Contingent Faculty :


 Vanderbilt Press is on it. Are you?