Alex Kudera's Blog, page 75
October 9, 2019
I do not carry a camera
"Sightseeing with two old poets, Harold Schimmel and Dennis Silk, in the Old City. It's not proper sightseeing, though. I do not, like a good tourist, carry a camera. I've never liked cameras, and I haven't owned one since 1940. In that year I photographed some long-legged pigs in Mexico, on the island of Janitizio in Lake Patzcuaro. I'd never seen such stilted pigs, and they were well worth snapping. The camera came from a hockshop on South State Street and there were small holes in the bellows, so that my pigs were speckled white."
~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back
~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back
October 3, 2019
Before I left Chicago. . .
"Before I left Chicago, the art critic Harold Rosenberg said to me, 'Going to Jerusalem? And wondering whether people will talk freely? You've got to be kidding, they'll talk your head off.'"
~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back
~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back
October 2, 2019
To Jerusalem and Back
"An old Mormon missionary in Nauvoo once gripped my knee hard as we sat side by side, and he put his arm about me and called me 'Brother." We'd only met ten minutes before. He took me to his good bosom. His eyes began to mist. I was a prospect, an exotic prospect in old tennis shoes and a sweatshirt. His heart opened to me. It opened like a cuckoo clock. But it did not give me the time of day."
~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back
~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back
September 30, 2019
Ms. Purple and The Farewell
Ms. Purple and The Farewell both focus on a dying parent as they consider Asian American immigrant and first-generation experience.
Ms. Purple
is a sadder, perhaps deeper or more intense movie while The Farewell has more laughs as it considers the psychology of not telling Grandma she's dying. Both recommended--good, if not great.
September 26, 2019
Crazy Rich Dufflemans
Cyrus and Friends with Crazy Rich AsiansSeptember 25, 2019
September 24, 2019
our terror of going hungry
“We had only one thing in common in our family in the Passage, and that was our terror of going hungry. We all had plenty of that. It was with me from my first breath. . . They passed it on to me. . . We were all obsessed with it. . . As far as we were concerned, the soul was fear. In every room the walls sweated fear of going without. . . It made us swallow the wrong way, it made us bolt our meals and run around town like mad. . . we zigzagged like fleas all over Paris, from the Place Maubert to the Etoile, for fear of being auctioned off, for fear of the rent, of the gas man, the tax collector. . . We were always in such a hurry I never had time to wipe myself properly.”~~ from Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
