Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs > Recent Status Updates

A SURE FIRE candidate for a full FIVE STARS!

‘It’s the quiet ones you gotta watch...’ I remember adults saying that to me as a kid... And as with people, so with books: quiet, outa the way ones like this one can sneak up on you... and CLOBBER you. An edgy page-turner about extraordinary things happening to plain, ordinary people!

Excellent, hard-hitting book about the resounding wake-up call that echoes through 17-year-old Ian Bedloe’s consciousness like the icy grip of an Unknown, Unnameable Hand - breaking to pieces his comforting upper-middle class teen illusions...

On a little conservative tree-lined Street in Baltimore County, the Bedloe Family is leading their 100% American life, up until the day the youngest of the brood, Ian, comes face to face with the Gorgon of Meaninglessness...

This is the temporary weighing-anchor point for all of us on the Jude the Obscure discussion group. Festivities begin Friday (so who’s bringing the chips & pretzels?)!

“We smiled... at the opussum’s cage (of the London Zoo). ‘I can see,’ he said, ‘you’re thing of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats!”... adding, “It was Ezra Pound, you know, who dubbed me ‘Old Possum,’ and it seemed right to use it in a collection of verse so different from anything I had published before.’ [He adds that folks kept asking, Who IS this Old Possum, anyway???’]

“At the conclusion of the service, I led Eliot directly across the aisle to meet the rector’s wife, who had been alerted that Eliot was coming. She proceeded to introduce her three children to ‘Mr. C.S. Lewis....’ I could see that Eliot was vastly amused.”

Evan, the fallen angel who arrived in London by express delivery in the devil’s spaceship, must have fallen from Grace because of his pride - because already he has challenged an atheist to a duel and smashed his shop window. That’s no way to earn your wings back, Evan!

An angel has been pushed out of the devil’s spaceship in the midst of a night sky over olde London towne - and now he must contend with the demons that populate this dreary old metropolis... A barrel of laughs - and it’s available for pennies!

What a wonderful book. Jude Fawley is learning in the School of Hard Knocks that the only kind of truly perceptive thinking is seeing past the world’s facade!

My thanks to Fionnuala for her wonderful review of this book! That’s all the motivation I needed.

Father Elijah’s friend, Monsignor Billy, has heard a heart-pounding revelation in Helsinki. The Beast is Big...

In the beginning I woke up in the night gripped with fear... I had gone and done something that was going to change my life forever... I had confided... “I could live in a hut somewhere and pray all the time....” my friend said, ”... I think if anyone would want to do something like that that bad, God would want them to.... “

A personal note: Last night I excerpted Sontag’s revelation about her own head-on facing of the unfaceable - her own death.
Last night I dreamt of a battleship firing torpedoes at an enemy submarine. Waking, I was shaken because it seemed so real.

Today, I realize the dream displays my cowardly but unsafe ‘underwater’ refuge from the thought of death - which I subconsciously felt when I sent the quote.

“I was told that is was likely that I’d be dead very soon, so I was facing... what I thought might be death in the next year or two... But I also experienced moments of elation, of tremendous intensity. I felt as if something fantastic was happening, as if I had embarked on a great adventure.”

“Look, what I want is to be fully present in my life - to be really where you are, contemporary with yourself IN your life, giving full attention to the world, which INCLUDES you. You are not the world, the world is not identical to you, but you’re in it and paying attention to it. That’s what a writer does - a writer pays attention to the world.”

(On the sixties) - “How marvellous it all does seem, in retrospect. How one wishes some of its boldness, its optimism, its disdain for commerce had survived. The two poles of distinctly modern sentiment are nostalgia and utopia. Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of the time now labeled the sixties was that there was so little nostalgia. In that sense, it was indeed utopian....”

This book was one I ordered before Christmas - better late than never! So nice to see this again, 50 years after I borrowed it from our college library! In it, one of T.S. Eliot’s great friends, a young ordained minister, shares his memories with us of a grand old man of letters...

In the second volume of her journals... she declared: “Being intelligent isn’t for me like trying to do something ‘better.’ It’s the only way I exist... I know I’m afraid of passivity (and dependence). Using my mind, something makes me feel active (autonomous). That’s good.”

I’m reading it in English, by the way, and if you can’t find the English e-book, I got it on Google Play... a long, enlightening interview between Rolling Stone’s Jonathan Cott and our most widely-read postmodernist critical voice. The epigram: “When a person dies, we lose a Library.”