Matthew > Recent Status Updates

Putting this on hold so that my friend can catch up to me. But man is it good.

"My dear, I’m going to have a pretty lonely walk between this and Kingdom Come. Won’t you give me one kiss? It’ll be something to keep off the darkness now and then."

Maybe not quite the hidden gem I hoped it would be, but still good nonetheless. With a few more reading obligations now on my plate, I anticipate tucking away a chapter of Sorcerer's Son here and there before finishing it off and stamping it with a 4 that's more like a 3.5.

What a comfort to find a page-turning fantasy novel!

And just like that, my reading will now slow considerably for the rest of the year, as I have started grad school. May all of your 2022 reading goals come true <3

Melville has just introduced me to The Learned Fogo Von Slack and I will never be the same

"I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts."

(I slowed down with M-B, but rest assured, I will finish it, and soon I hope)

Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.

Fine dad, I'm reading it, have it your way.

"If I had but one leg you would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole with my timber toe. Oh! he’s a wonderful old man!”
“I don’t think it so strange, after all, on that account. If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing. That would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the other left, you know.”
“I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.”

"This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!"

"I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world."

"Be it said, that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in the bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them."

"But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope."

Powys is clearly enjoying writing Luke Bird. This is more like the Powys I know.

Feeling strangely put out here. Compared to Unclay, this has a much herky-jerkier pace, fewer memorable characters, and obscurer and less brilliant prose. I find myself reading a few paragraphs, not really understanding what I just read, and not caring enough to try again. If I had read this before Unclay, I wouldn't have bothered reading more T.F.

Fuck it, we're doing it. Unclay shook my world when I read it in 2019, and I hesitated to read T.F.'s other widely distributed novel in case it wasn't as good (how could it be?) But we're committed now. And I think I'll be reading a Long and Substantial Classic Novel (M___-D___?) after this.

Guerard retrieves a startling figure at the beginning of the "Early Novels" chapter-- that, over a 60-year career, Gide published only 500,000 words, or roughly 1,000 pages. It's hard to think of a major author (nevertheless a Nobel laureate) who worked so slowly, and whose works are so frequently novellettes and novellas, autobiographical sketches, travelogues, and other "slight" pieces.

The title story was excellent.

Here's something truly special; I've wanted to read Franz Kappus's letters to Rilke for such a long time. I happened upon this in a used bookshop in the West Village, and finding gems like this is exactly why one visits used bookshops.

Ungerer is a much weirder figure than I had assumed. The frequency and detail with which he talks about slaughtering animals is disquieting, but it's the truth of farm life. His casual references to kicking dogs and fantasizing about fucking his step-sister are more inexplicable.

Apollinaire's cultural omnivorousness is of course something we love about him, but it's still surprising and impressive to see him extemporaneously opine about Cervantes and Milton, even on the Front and so far away from the comforts of home and the presence of his books.

sifting and sorting...