Alex Kudera's Blog, page 70

how risky it is. . .

"The tendency of people so invested in art to turn their lives into novelistic plots demonstrates how risky it is to ask life to take the shape of a story."

~~ from L.A.R.B.'s "Delicate Mundanity: On Maxim Osipov's 'Rock, Paper, Scissors: And Other
     Stories'"

So here I was, home again. . .

"So here I was, home again after all those years. Standing in the main square (which I had crossed countless times as a child, as a boy, as a young man), I felt no emotion whatsoever. . . During those years, there was nothing to attract me to my hometown; I told myself that I had grown indifferent to it, which seemed natural: I had been away for fifteen years, had almost no friends or acquaintances left here (and wished to avoid the ones I did have), my mother was buried among strangers in a grave I had never tended."

~~ from The Joke by Milan Kundera

On Ellison and Houellebecq

Commentary Magazine recently included Christopher Caldwell on Michel Houellebecq in "A Bellow from France" and Joseph Epstein's "Ralph Ellison in Opposition."

A 75th for Dresden. . .

"The Allied destruction of Dresden wasn’t the biggest or deadliest aerial bombardment of a German city during World War II. But it is by far the most infamous, largely due to Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war masterpiece  Slaughterhouse-Five . February 13 marks the 75th anniversary of what Vonnegut, who survived the bombing as a prisoner-of-war, called 'carnage unfathomable.'"

more discount shopping

Prepare for the read of your life.

K-12 homelessness

A record-high 1.5 million students were homeless during the 2017-18 school year, 11 percent more than the previous year and nearly double the number a decade ago. . .

food deserts

And then I stumble upon the food deserts of Mississippi, Philadelphia, Memphis, Virginia, and more.

Stephen and James Joyce

The Irish Times profiles Stephen Joyce and his guardianship of his grandfather James Joyce's literature.

In the spring of that year, the Year of the Dragon. . .

"In the spring of that year, the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese calendar, was old-fashioned--then the summer was eccentric. It snowed twice in July, and once the dawn never came, so the night lasted for forty-eight hours. And so on, day after day. Nothing happened. Just like in earlier years, when the summers were more respectable. Our tiny whims exist just to camouflage our desperate emptiness. I thought: when the time comes, I will have nothing to write about, and my next book, like the preceding ones, will be brimming with loneliness, boredom, and nullity. Now, it is possible that wasn't thinking about that; I was gathering material for future works of fiction: an abundance of nausea, loads of fears, huge bins overflowing with feelings of failure and numbness--all the tedious material of modern storytelling. But I wrote nothing down. God is my witness. Suddenly, an interesting reason to write popped up. My friend, N.V., made sure of that. He committed suicide. A classic: a hundred barbiturates and sliced veins. But that's still no kind of story line. What's strange about that, that one of my friends kills themselves? A year does not pass without two or three of them committing suicide."

~~ from The Mongolian Travel Guide by Svetislav Basara

full of potholes. . .

"In any case, on the wall of Juan Stein's house, there hung a rather ornately framed portrait of Chernyakhovsky, and that, I dare say, incommensurably more important than the busts and the cities named after him and the countless Chernyakhovsky Streets, full of potholes, scattered through the Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania and Russia. I don't know why I've kept the photo, Stein said to us."

~~ from Distant Star by Roberto Bolano