Chris Via > Recent Status Updates

Mmmmmm, literature!

"He is a happy man who can weave his days, / No trouble upon the loom."
"They are the white star Sirius rising / In the honey and spice of a summer night."
- Alkman

"Give my tethered heard its full desire" (Sappho). Davenport's introduction of Sappho is among the best I've read: "...she demands the enveloping appetence that identifies and completes the beautiful, the untranslatable imeros, that yearning that was at once love, sexual longing, adoration, and fascination."

Part 2 of the 2666 group read is now live: https://youtu.be/dy3FhoTSJ4k

The good-natured need no cutlery in their vocabulary.
- Archilochos, fragment 136

Ambrosia

Finally getting round to "Baron Corvo" (thanks for the push, Alexander Theroux). These stories are described as bridging the Decadence of the 1890s and early 20th-century Modernism (so: somewhere between Wilde and Woolf, as I take it). I figure it's a good appetizer to Hadrian the Seventh. Let's see!

Mr. Dirda always makes me feel proud to be bookish (not that I really need affirmation).

How can this guy have been so many writers in one?!

Got about 50-some-odd pages into this final part and had to restart. After the pot-boiler of the first 3 sections and the gauntlet of the 4th, this capstone was a jarring shift. Had to calibrate. All good now. Bolaño was a mad genius.

‪NEW VIDEO! The first video of Bolaño’s 2666 series, reading in tandem with The Recognitions Book Club. https://youtu.be/4-2YkCzuVkU‬

I feel flayed. Reading the real story of Sergio González Rodríguez now, having read "The Part about the Crimes" is haunting. One thing is for sure, this book and the ghosts of every femicide in Mexico will forever be with me.

-/:;((,&,!:(/&/&:’skxjxhsb

We’re really getting in the soup now.

Now that third part/book was a masterclass in great writing.

Deep breathes.
Plunging...

‪NEW VIDEO! Bookshelf Tour of my Science section! https://youtu.be/DGswoOm9XJc‬

I can’t stop walking toward the madness.

Like Norton in the window of her hotel in Mexico, I can hear-feel this dreadful hum. And I don’t think it’s the AC.
(Continuing to let Bolaño lead me by he hand along the precipice.)

Through the labyrinth to the abyss.

Oh, now this is rather delicious!

Enjoying some foreplay before 2666. "[Top-notch writing is]...the ability to peer into the darkness, to leap into the void.... The ability to sprint along the edge of the precipice: to one side the bottomless abyss and to the other...the smiling faces you love, and books and friends and food. And the ability to accept what you find, even though it may be heavier than the stones over the graves of all dead writers."

NEW VIDEO! Thomas Pynchon's MASON & DIXON! https://youtu.be/DhZoK32YNRs