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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Casey Cep
Read between
January 10 - January 23, 2021
George Eliot.
the worst punishment God can devise for this sinner is to make her spirit reside eternally at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic
City,”
Such shade. YESSSSSSS
(“I know exactly why she did it,” she explained in 1976 of Lizzie Borden: “Anyone burdened with long petticoats and having had mutton soup for breakfast on a day like that was bound to have murdered somebody before sundown”).
😂😂
appendixes,
Edward Le...
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Napoleon or Mussolini,
They wrote books??
Dorothy Day
an example that must have struck fear into Williams and Crain and possibly even into Lee herself once it was made known to her.
But why?
“the humbles,”
I think this may be at the heart of Lee & other "one hit wonder" authors' problems. Fear of coming up short compared to other preemminent authors or perhaps more likely, their own highly fêted debut novels.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
through their
perfectionism.
As Kierkegaard observed, we live forward but comprehend backward;
Whoa 😵😮
“the mortgage on myself,”
I just love how clever & witty she was.
(2)
(3)
Graham ...
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An Entert...
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A thriller lol
(4)
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(5)
(6)
2-6 - Could you even imagine??
In a strange inversion, the closer to done a book is, the more unfinished, in this sense, it feels.
A Gun for Sale,
This author is well-read to be able to effortlessly reference such a varied catalog of literature.
Go Set a Watchman.
Give it another go!
Robert Lowell
Elizabeth Bishop,
pin poems on her bathroom mirror and kitchen corkboard with spaces for single words she was trying to find,
I do something similar. 🍍
It is possible that Harper Lee had decided to write for her own satisfaction or for posterity, not her peers, and that the feelings of incompletion and failure the public attributed to her were incongruous with her own experience.
This is the narrative I always believed. Why mess with perfection? I never entertained any alternate theories until now.
“Self-pity is a sin,”
“It is a form of living suicide.”
“I am impatient with people who use psychiatry as a substitute for boredom. It alarms me that women of my own generation decide they are whipped, then go to a psychiatrist—when all they need perhaps is a little more household help.”
Be that as if may (and I can attest to the fact that household overwhelm contributes negatively to my mental well-being), she absolutely should not be bagging on women who seek psychiatric help or on that discipline altogether.
betrayed an adolescent sense of class, mental health, and domestic life.
she might well have just been chafing at the tendency to recommend it for everything and everyone,
I sure hope so.
domestic workers were, for any number of reasons, not a viable substitute for psychological well-being.
there are no nuclear families in Mockingbird,
Never noticed this. Like Disney movies
including with Maurice Crain.
Well that would have been an entirely shitty thing to do to Annie Laurie.
“George Plimpton’s
He's got a neat schtick.
Gerald Clarke’s
moral perfection was not only possible but the product of discrete personal decisions.
Perfection, no... responsible for your own decisions, absolutely. Of course, unavoidable obstacles notwithstanding (race, class, socioeconomic standing et al)
After three dark decades, her letters become more buoyant—no longer anguished, and absent almost any mention of trying to write.
That's wonderful. Reminds me a bit of Micky Dolenz when the stopped singing & performing for a time in the 70s & 80s. What a loss for fans (much like Lee), but probably better for his soul. Although now that he's returned to what he ostensibly loves, how seems happy.
Introductions inhibit pleasure, they kill the joy of anticipation, they frustrate curiosity.
Mockingbird still says what it has to say; it has managed to survive the years without preamble.”
She's not wrong.
HarperCollins printed Lee’s refusal as the foreword to its thirty-fifth anniversary edition.
Fearful Symmetry,
Alabamian for abracadabra,
the dust, in this case, being the kind usually accompanied by ashes.
Highlight in this paragraph demonstrate really great writing imo.
that no work begin on a biography until she was dead,
Why not just insist that it be PUBLISHED posthumously??
the disease taking her further and further from those she knew; some days, she did not even recognize her sisters.
How sad. We think my MIL is showing early signs of memory loss. 😢
Alice, by then in her nineties, was still practicing law,
OMG 😲 That's incredible. God love her.
