Alex Kudera's Blog, page 40

Salman Rushdie

On August 12, 2022 a 24-year-old from New Jersey nearly murdered Salman Rushdie although it appears as if the author will survive.

walleye pollock roe

"After hopping off the train, I walked for such a long time that my legs became stiff as boards. But finally, I got to Hyesan. I hadn't eaten for two days, so I headed for the market. It was huge, and there were so many products, I felt dizzy. Rice . . . flour . . . walleye pollock roe . . . you name it. Some people were clearly shopping for something to buy, while others looked like homeless people, unable to do anything but look on enviously.

"I had no money, of course, so I tried to find something on the ground. I eventually spotted some abandoned corncobs. There were no kernels on them, but I fastened my teeth on the cobs and ate what I could."

~~ from  A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea  by Masaji Ishikawa

to free me from their grief

"The summer that my brother died, I moved home to be with my parents, until one day in August my mother told me to leave, to 'go and live your life.' What a gift that was, to free me from their grief. A few weeks later, I boarded an Amtrak train to New York City, my clothes and manuscript in a Hefty trash bag, $1,000 in my front jeans pocket."

~~ from Morningstar: Growing Up with Books by Ann Hood

always be knocking

Tad Friend's "Sam Taggart's Hard Sell" has me thinking about sales and my own efforts writing about it.

Hitchens in Harper's

Christian Lorentzen is good on Christopher Hitchens in the London Review of Books and elsewhere.

however hard I worked

"Seeing my baby's face as she slept so peacefully made me determined to work harder than ever. But the reality hit home late that night. I had a wife. And now two children. And however hard I worked, I would always be poor. I would never be allowed to better  myself, no matter how much effort I put in. My children would be faced with a life of hardship regardless of what I did."
~~ from A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa

he alone managed to crawl here

"The rumors about him are mysterious and mundane. Before he was my father, he was a skinny kid in the South Vietnamese army. He was a heroin addict. He was a gangster. He sold American cigarettes on the black market. He cruised girls. He ran away from home. He was part of a select unit trained by the Americans. He jumped out of airplanes and disappeared for weeks into the jungles and hill towns. His friends fell around him, first during the war and then after the war, but somehow he alone managed to crawl here, on his hands and knees, to this life."

~~ from The Gangster We Are All Looking For by Lê Thi Diem Thúy

a hated person

"Such a gift of perception and observation is of the greatest advantage, but on the other hand also of the greatest disadvantage, and it is rarely welcome, almost invariably unwelcome. Such a person who perceives everything and who sees everything and who observes everything, moreover continually, is not popular, more often feared, and people have always guarded themselves against such a person, because such a person is a dangerous person and dangerous persons are not only feared but hated, and in that respect I have to describe myself as a hated person. Personally, of course, I regard my perceptivity and gift for observation as an exceedingly useful advantage, one which has often proved life-saving."

~~ from Yes by Thomas Bernhard

stalactites or stalagmites?

"The days of the examinations passed in a blur. We all recognised them as the climax of years of misery, not only because we recognised them as the threshold of whatever futures we desired for ourselves, but also because each of us hoped through them to state our worth and value. Everything conspired to seduce us into this absurd position. We were the heroes of the day, confronting the tests of life and intellect, grappling with an irrational enemy that sought at every turn to ambush and trick us. After each sitting, we set off from the examination hall in a body, like guerillas returned from battle, wandering the streets and parading ourselves as the smiling survivors of the examiners' wiles. We formed self-important discussion groups by the roadside: should the answer have been stalactites or stalagmites? Nobody laughed at us, although our teachers feigned amusement by our intensity. We all knew the prizes that had become available to those who had succeeded ahead of us."

~~ from Memory of Departure by Abdulrazak Gurnah

the same kind of liberal preaching

"'Do you like Peter Abrahams?' I asked.

"'Well, he's not a bad writer,' he said. 'He's too self-conscious, that's the problem. He doesn't write like an African. Do you know what this book reminds me of? Alan Paton. It has the same kind of liberal preaching, soft-nosed and confused. Do you know what I mean? There is no sense of identification with the mass of oppressed Africans.'"

~~ from Memory of Departure by Abdulrazak Gurnah