Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

Also from this book: Dennis the Dentist 

On the day of my flight to Moscow, I was late to the airport. Check-in was already closed. Although I was eventually let onto the plane, my suitcase was not, and it subsequently vanished altogether from the Aeroflot informational system. Air travel is like death: everything is taken from you. Because there are no clothing stores in Yasnaya Polyana, I was obliged to wear, for four days of the conference, the same clothes in which I had traveled: flip-flops, sweatpants, and a flannel shirt. I had hoped to sleep on the plane and had dressed accordingly. Some International Tolstoy Scholars assumed that I was a Tolstoyan—that like Tolstoy and his followers I had taken a vow to walk around in sandals and wear the same peasant shirt all day and all night.

loc.1915

“We will hear more about these very interesting editions on Thursday! … if we are still alive.” It was fashionable among International Tolstoy Scholars to punctuate all statements about the future with this disclaimer: an allusion to Tolstoy’s later diaries. After his religious rebirth in 1881, Tolstoy changed his practice of ending each diary entry with a plan for the next day; now, he simply wrote the phrase: “if I am alive.”

loc.1934

A few days later, Tolstoy received a letter from Chertkov and refused to let Sonya see it. Sonya flew into a rage and renewed her accusations about the secret will. “Not only does her behavior toward me fail to express her love,” Tolstoy wrote of Sonya, “but its evident object is to kill me.” Tolstoy fled to his study and tried to distract himself by reading The Brothers Karamazov: “Which of the two families, Karamazov or Tolstoy, was the more horrible?” he asked. In Tolstoy’s view, The Brothers Karamazov was “anti-artistic, superficial, attitudinizing, irrelevant to the great problems.”

loc.2018

In a final period of lucidity on November 6, he said to his daughters, “I advise you to remember that there are many people in the world besides Lev Tolstoy.” He died of respiratory failure on November 7.

loc.2042

On the third day of the Tolstoy conference, a professor from Yale read a paper on tennis. In Anna Karenina, he began, Tolstoy represents lawn tennis in a very negative light. Anna and Vronsky swat futilely at the tiny ball, poised on the edge of a vast spiritual and moral abyss. When he wrote that scene, Tolstoy himself had never played tennis, which he only knew of as an English fad. At the age of sixty-eight, Tolstoy was given a tennis racket and taught the rules of the game. He became an instant tennis addict. “No other writer was as prone to great contradictions,” explained the professor, whose mustache and mobile eyebrows gave him the air of a nineteenth-century philanderer. All summer long, Tolstoy played tennis for three hours every day. No opponent could rival Tolstoy’s indefatigable thirst for the game of tennis; his guests and children would take turns playing against him. The International Tolstoy Scholars wondered at Tolstoy’s athleticism. He should have lived to see eighty-five—ninety—one hundred! Tolstoy had also been in his sixties when he learned how to ride a bicycle. He took his first lesson exactly one month after the death of his and Sonya’s beloved youngest son. Both the bicycle and an introductory lesson were a gift from the Moscow Society of Velocipede-Lovers. One can only guess how Sonya felt, in her mourning, to see her husband teetering along the garden paths. “Tolstoy has learned to ride a bicycle,” Chertkov noted at that time. “Is this not inconsistent with Christian ideals?”

loc.2044

The Dukhobors—literally, “Spirit Wrestlers”—were a Russian peasant religious sect, whose tenets included egalitarianism, pacificism, worship through prayer meetings, and the rejection of all written scripture in favor of an oral body of knowledge called the “Living Book.” When they were persecuted for their refusal to fight in the Russo-Turkish war, Tolstoy donated all the proceeds from his novel Resurrection to finance their immigration to Canada in 1899.

loc.2314

Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana, 1908

Umberto Eco, from the essay How to Use Suspension Points inside How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays
Harcourt, 1994 (org. essays written in Italian between ‘59-‘61)

Also from this book: How to Travel with a Salmon?

Writers use suspension points only at the end of a sentence, to indicate that more could be written on the subject (“and this point could be further elaborated, but…”), or, in the middle of a sentence or between two sentences, to underline the fragmentary nature of a quotation (“Friends … I come to bury Caesar…”). Non-writers use these dots to crave indulgence for a rhetorical figure that they consider perhaps too bold: “He was raging like a … bull.”

A writer is someone determined to extend language beyond its boundaries, and he therefore assumes full responsibility for a metaphor, even a daring one: “The moving waters at their priestlike task / Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.” Everyone agrees that Keats has allowed his fancy to soar, but at least he makes no apology for that. The non-writer, on the other hand, would have written: “The moving waters at their … priestlike … task/ Of pure … ablution.” As if to say: don’t mind me, I’m only joking.

A writer writes for writers, a non-writer writes for his next-door neighbor or for the manager of the local bank branch, and he fears (often mistakenly) that they would not understand or, in any case, would not forgive his boldness. He uses the dots as a visa: he wants to make a revolution, but with police permission.

184

John Keats

Umberto Eco

Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem
Blackwell, 2007

‘Discourse’, as we shall see, means attending to language in all of its material density, whereas most approaches to poetic language tend to disembody it. Nobody has ever heard language pure and simple. Instead, we hear utterances that are shrill or sardonic, mournful or nonchalant, mawkish or truculent, irascible or histrionic. And this, as we shall see, is part of what we mean by form. People sometimes talk about digging out the ideas ‘behind’ the poem’s language, but this spatial metaphor is misleading. For it is not as though the language is a kind of disposable cellophane in which the ideas come ready-wrapped. On the contrary, the language of a poem is constitutive of its ideas.

It would be hard to figure out, just by reading most of these content analyses, that they were supposed to be about poems or novels, rather than about some real-life happening. What gets left out is the literariness of the work. Most students can say things like ‘the moon imagery recurs in the third verse, adding to the sense of solitude’, but not many of them can say things like ‘the poem’s strident tone is at odds with its shambling syntax’. A lot of them would just think that this was funny. They do not speak the same language as the critic who said of some lines of T. S. Eliot: ‘There is something very sad about the punctuation’. Instead, they treat the poem as though its author chose for some eccentric reason to write out his or her views on warfare or sexuality in lines which do not reach to the end of the page.
2-3

Helen DeWitt published a new short, titled That Obscure Object of Desire, in the Bullet magazine. That link is dead. Here is a reproduction from Google’s webcache:

“Uncertainty and information are the same quantities, the removal of uncertainty being equated with the giving of information.” —Codes and Cryptography by Dominic Welsh

The train stops at Kottbusser Tor. Cement stairs go down. In the concrete cavern a Reisemarkt sells tickets for the U-Bahn and the lottery, cigarettes, papers: Frankfurter Allgemeine, Tagesspiegel, Berliner Morgenpost, Gazzetta dello Sport, le Monde. There’s a revolving stand of Turkish papers. Fanatik seems to be the Turkish equivalent of Gazzetta dello Sport. The Guardian, the FT, the Wall Street Journal. A refrigerated case has yogurt drinks in glass bottles, beers with gold or silver foil over the cap and neck. There are squares of Ritter sports chocolate: Quadratisch. Praktisch. Gut.

If he had children he could buy squares of chocolate to take home. It’s not an appropriate gift for a robot.

He has no habits now, only memories of habits. Looking for things to buy to prove he’d been where he said he’d been. Looking for things that could have been bought where he said he’d been. Things that were tied to a place; things that weren’t tied to a place. Things with no ties were a safer habit.

He buys a Wall Street Journal, which is running a piece on nanotechnology. It’s good to see what people with money are being told to bet on.

He walks out. There’s a flower stall to his left with gilded roses, tulips with tightly packed heads, the massed flowers of the periphery of a vision that has never looked with an eye to buy. Two concrete ramps fork up; he takes the one on the left and comes out by an open-air vegetable market. Behind it, a Rossmann’s Droguerie, Tadım Yaprak Döner Kebap, Asia Snack Thuy-Chung, Optik Bey. He used to do it automatically, scope out places he could plausibly loiter. He doesn’t do that automatically anymore.

He has a better idea, now, of the sheer pointlessness of much of normal behavior. He browses unconvincingly. There’s no one to be convinced.

A newsagent-cum-bookseller: Regenbogen Buchhandlung Gökkuşağı Kitabevi TÜRKÇE KİTAP KASET VE CD TÜRKISCHE BÜCHER CD`s und MC`s.

He goes in.

Complete works of Stalin, 12 volumes, 80 Euros. Complete works of Lenin, 16 volumes, 80 Euros.

They have a shelf of paperbacks by Orhan Pamuk. He read one once. He’d like to buy it.

If Kitap = Buch then Kara Kitap =? Black Book. 15,50.

He does not know Turkish, but he opens the book and looks at the words. He feels closer to this writer, probably, than to any writer in any language he knows, read only in sentences with meanings tangled up with other encounters with the language.

The back cover has:

“Pamuk’un şaheseri.” THE TIMES 

LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, İNGİLTERE

“Bir şaheser.” LIBÉRATION, FRANSA 

“Zengin, yaratıcı, modern bir ulusal destan.” THE SUNDAY TIMES, İNGİLTERE

“Büyüleyici, çetin ve esrarlı bir işaretler girdabı. Bitmeyen bir enerji, çok nadir birşşey…” LIRE, FRANSA

He looks up “şaheser” in a Turkisch- Deutsch dictionary he does not mean to buy. Meisterwerk. A masterpiece.

He buys the book and walks out.

The people he knew are dead.

He’ll go back to the Café Einstein.

There’s nothing here.

He gets a table in the curve of a maroon leather bench hugging a corner. The place hasn’t changed much, though the Euro has hiked the prices. He orders a Schultheiss.

He puts the Wall Street Journal on the table beside him. He opens his book.

Birinci Bölüm

Galip Rüya’yı İlk Gördüğünde

“Epigraf kullanmayın, çünkü yazının içindeki esrarı öldürür!”

Adli

“Böyle ölecekse, öldür o zaman sen de esrarı, esrar satan yalancı peygamberi öldür!”

Bahti

Yatağın başından ucuna kadar uzanan mavi damalı yorganın engebeleri, gölgeli vadileri ve mavi yumuşak tepeleriyle örtülü tatlı ve ılık karanlıkta Rüya yüzükoyun uzanmışş uyuyordu. Dışarıdan kışşsabahının ilk sesleri geliyordu: Tek tük geçen arabalar ve eski otobüsler, poğaçacıyla işbirliği eden salepçinin kaldırıma konup kalkan güğümleri ve dolmuş durağının değnekçisinin düdüğü. 

He likes this. He likes this very much.

Is this rational? It looks highly irrational, as does the purchase of the book.

Is it, then, genuinely irrational behavior which would, like so much genuinely irrational behavior, be intuitively comprehensible to most, perhaps all, hypothetical observers? Genuinely irrational but highly unusual behavior reflecting preferences which would mark him out as eccentric, perhaps mad? Apparently irrational but ultimately rational behavior, perhaps some sort of effective hunter- gatherer heuristics procedure, which would be widely recognized as such? Ultimately rational behavior which would, like so much rational behavior, be radically incomprehensible to the average observer?

Billions of purchases cluster around 100% comprehensibility. 20%, perhaps a few hundred thousand. Finnegans Wake. Tender Buttons. 0%, 1.

Humans have the capacity to assign meaning to behavior not previously encountered. Not all outlying behaviors are meaningless.

Purchase of 100% comprehensible books comprehensible to some but not all non-book buyers. Purchase of FW/TB comprehensible to some but not all non-FW/ TB buyers. Purchase of incomprehensible book possibly comprehensible to some non- incomprehensible-book buyers.

His memory of the translation he read is a contributing factor. Incomprehensibility would have come cheaper in a copy of Fanatik (0.85). He has paid approximately 1800% more for the unreadable text of a book he knows. This has a veneer of sense. The surest sign of superstition.

He is reassured by instances of irrationality in himself. The few instances of irrationality which he finds himself happy to indulge. They make him think communication will not be impossible with those around him, whose unselfconscious irrationality is pervasive and strange. He sometimes mentions them as a conversational gambit, thinking to establish common ground, thinking any error of reason will count as a likable foible. It’s a false security, usually. The irrationality is often the wrong kind of irrationality. He can’t easily tell the right kind from the wrong.

He’s grossly overstating the incomprehensibility of the text. A rough count of proper nouns on pages 12-21 62 yields 35, 28, 17, 28 40, 32, 31, 31, 18 22. Mean number per page 28.2, standard deviation of 6.9, 70% of data within s of the mean. Average number of words per page based on sample of 2,302. So about 9% comprehensibility. High.

The true figure must be slightly higher. The capital letter at the beginning of a sentence conceals any proper noun that occurs there.

His new job is not so different from his old job.

Sometimes the name is something familiar. 56 model Chevrolet. DeSoto. Dodge. Packard. Cadillac. Mainly cars.

But Paris. More often the names are strange. Galip. Rüya. Celal.

9% comprehensibility is like walking the streets of a strange city. Some of the cars are the same. In a public place a famous monument is seen, the Eiffel Tower, Hagia Sofia. The streets are thronged with strangers.

It’s not uncommon to go to strange cities to walk streets thronged with strangers. If this is desirable in a city, it is not easy to see why it should be less desirable in a book. It’s not easy to see why it would be less rational to go to Istanbul than Berlin.

Odada, lacivert perdelerin soldurduğu kurşuni bir kış ışığı vardı. Uyku mahmurluğuyla Galip, karısının mavi yorgandan dışarı uzanan başına baktı: Rüya’nın çenesi yastığın kuştüyüne gömülmüştü. Alnının eğiminde, o sırada aklının içinde olup biten harika şeyleri insana korkuyla merak ettiren gerçekdışı bir yan vardı.

He likes this very much. He skips to the end.

Çünkü hiçbir şey hayat kadar şaşırtıcı olamaz. Yazı hariç. Yazı hariç. Evet tabii, tek teselli yazı hariç.

He can’t remember what it says, but he knows how it ends.

He’s heard that New Life is the one to start with.

A woman is sitting at the next table.

She says, “You read Turkish?”

He says, “No, but I know what it’s about.”

She says, “What’s it about?”

He says, “It’s about a man who loses his wife.”

He should say something else.

She has a book, Bajki robotów. STANISŁAW LEM.

He says, “You read Polish?”

She says, “No, but I know what it’s about.”

He says, “What’s it about?”

She says, “It’s a collection of robot tales.”

She says, “He’s better known as the author of Solaris, if you know Solaris.”

He says, “I know Solaris.”

She says, “But I liked the idea of robot tales.”

He should say something.

He says, “I teach robots to talk.”

She says, “What do you teach them to say?”

He says, “Robots do not understand time. I try to make them distinguish between past and future.”

She says, “How do you make them do that?”

He says, “I make them invent words so they can talk about time among themselves.”

She says, “And how do you make them do that?”

He says, “I use iterative language games.”

The waiter comes with his beer. She says, “Die Rechnung, bitte.”She pays. She leaves.

He wonders if he was too dour.

He’s been talking to robots too long.

A robot is given a set of algorithms. It is necessary to make explicit assumptions that are left unstated in ordinary language. It is necessary to identify and eliminate possible sources of ambiguity. It is necessary to set out the steps in a chain of reasoning. If the robot is to engage in conversation it will need to distinguish between purely formal exchanges and whatever is not purely formal.

The Japanese are exceptionally advanced robotic engineers. He does not think it is pure technical facility. A socially functional Japanese robot is K2. A socially functional American robot is un-American. Joke. It’s Everest.

A socially functional Japanese robot would require the formalization of a range of affective states whose vagueness and resistance to expression are the markers of adept social functioning in Japanese humans.

We can posit a society where natural language makes explicit the algorithms of social interaction within that society.

He’s in his hotel room. He chose a hotel famous for its handsomely renovated Jugendstil fittings, with the idea of assimilating the playfulness a robot requires if it is to be an entertaining companion. It depresses him to be comfortable enough to afford it. He’s been doing too many things too long.

He throws his jacket on the bed. It lands with a dragging pocket.

He slips a hand in.

It’s the other book.

He opens to a page here, a page there.

Words are underlined, sometimes sentences.

wzsyedt

gwiezdnie

wszystko

zwyciężyć

Źył raz pewien wielki konstruktor- wynalazca, który nie ustając, wymyślał urządzenia niezwzkąe i najdziwniejsze stwarzał aparaty.

Źył raz pewien inżynier Kosmogonik, który rozjaśniał gwiazdy, żeby pokonać ciemność.

He sees the word robot here and there. He imagines them talking among themselves, chattering in a language where z and w occur in an abundance that looks robot-friendly to a non-Polish human. He can’t really read Polish, his mind blankly pronounces and after a short gap throws up the word in Cyrillic which he knows. Knew.

Sometimes there is no word in Cyrillic. His mind keeps trying to run the search and replace even after he has determined that there is no match. This is a method of cerebration not easily analyzed for robotic intercourse. Does it serve any purpose at all? Is it as irrational as it seems? If a robot is not programmed to replicate this waste of intellectual energy will it be ill-adapted for communication with non-robots? He doesn’t like programming for stupidity.

A sticker on the back cover says it came from Polonia.com.

Biała śmierć.

белая смерь.

White death.

The planet Aragona is built underground so that it looks uninhabited from space.

Roughly.

Is this a rational activity? There’s no better thing to do. So there’s no opportunity cost. So it must be rational.

He could have bought himself a square of chocolate, if he’d thought of it.

This by order of the ruler, Metameryk. The inhabitants escaped the destruction of their former planet. Those who destroyed them may hunt them down.

Roughly.

He turns the page.

There’s a knock on the door.

Knut Hamsun, The Ring is Closed
Souvenir Press, 2010. trans: Robert Ferguson (org. “Ringen Sluttet”, 1936)

Also from this book: Olga

They walked along together as far as the little park, chatting away. By the time they got there they were tired and sat down. Good to sit for a while, next to a little chat there was, by God, nothing as good as a rest. They’re so full of loneliness and age, so wizened, and already they’ve started to die. Kjørboe is seventy five.

…

A housewife has stretched a line between two trees in the park and hung out washing on it. You weren’t supposed to do that, so they passed a comment on it. A pair of women’s bloomers hanging there in broad daylight with their shameless opening, they both pretend they aren’t looking at them. They wonder what kind of housewife it is who dares to let the whole park down like that. Mind you, the wash is clean and white, and they aren’t looking at the bloomers but staring fixedly at a pillow case next to them, as if it was an interesing shape in its square-ness.

p.28

Lolla would be fine, she was quick around the house, used to chickens and pigs, unmarried, four years older now, in good health and quite pretty. Tengvald was after her, a trained blacksmith now and working as a journeyman, they could have got married any time and started a family. But Tengvald held back. Why? Probably because he lacked the courage. He was a quiet, rather shy blacksmith, nothing especially outstanding about him, but honest and steady. It wasn’t easy for him to break up with Lolla, but she had those crazy nostrils that fluttered every time she looked at him. His excuse was that he had to take care of his mother. Okay then, said Lolla, who wasn’t too brokenhearted about it. What was Tengvald the blacksmith to her? But when, a little while later, the very same Tengvald began courting Lovise Rolandsen, and even ended up marrying her, Lolla started passing a lot of sly remarks: that, by God, those two were made for each other, because one thing was for sure, he wouldn’t be forcing his attentions on her too often, and she wouldn’t be having to repair any children’s clothes!

And how could Lolla know something like that?

p.21

It all started when I ran into a hotel to escape a sudden squall, and she was just on her way out. Young woman, listening to the music in the foyer, English, pretty, so I took to her at once. The weather frightened her. I reached out and I grabbed the first umbrella I could from the cloakroom and I said: This is yours! Mine? she said, smiling, and looked at me. I left a pound behind on the counter for the loan and walked out to a taxi with her. I am so grateful to you, she said. I’m the one who should be grateful, I said and I climbed in after her. I never saw your like! she says in surprise. To begin with she was a little reserved, and she got worried about her violin when I moved in closer to her, but then we started talking, and by the time we got to where we were going we’d done a lot of talking, and she didn’t turn me down when I said I had to have her at any cost. I really meant what I said, and it was the worst case of being in love I’ve ever had, what you might call a kind of exaltation. Her cheeks went all warm and she got restless in the seat, if I just touched her hand it went right through her, her sex was all over her body. There’s a lot of them like that, it’s not that uncommon. She didn’t want to let me come in with her, so I said it right back to her: I never saw your like, and I want to marry you. I am married, she said. What difference does that make? I said. No, she said. And on the stairway she said it as well, that it made no difference. Take good note of that. We came into the house, it was full of the most appalling animals and birds and there was an atrocious smell. A mad dog greeted us at the door, screeching birds in cages, three hedgehogs, a tortoise lumbering about on the floor, there was an ape sitting on the sofa. Did you ever hear the like of it, and maybe there was a snake or two here as well. I got so distracted by all these ugly beasts that I started talking too much about them instead of about her, and the mood passed off her. Damn those bloody animals! I know she would have left her husband, but then the next time I brought it up she said no. What I should have done, straightaway I should have chased that monkey off the sofa. Hahaha! the Engineer laughed.

p.117

Are you angry? I’ve got a feeling you’re sitting there and getting angry, Lolla. How can you be bothered? Be indifferent to everything and everybody – that’s the way to make time pass.

Yes, and the days and the years pass. And we don’t do anything. And so our whole lives pass.

Abel nodded: I once thought of doing something, but not straight away. And if a thing isn’t done straight away it can still be done next year. Why not do it now? I don’t know. Right now, with the summer nearly over? I’ve always thought it should be in the spring. Some spring or other.

Lolla shrieked in her distress: For God’s sake, Abel, you’re letting yourself go completely!

Abel smiled: Don’t get so worked up, Lolla.

p.127

…and he made a point of keeping the encounter casual and friendly, waving and calling to her: At last! It affronted her slightly, he was neither her brother nor her husband.

Good morning, Abel! she said. You greet me as if we’d seen each other just yesterday.

Forgive me! I did it on purpose, I planned it.

Ah. Yes, you’re very strange.

p.300

Or say he calls in at a local cellar cafe and says: I just want to warn you that I saw a mouse squeeze in under your door. A mouse? the proprietress shrieks, picking up her skirts. There it is! he cries, pointing. The proprietress doesn’t see it, but she opens a door and calls the cat. Abel nods and walks on, taking with him a little piece of sausage, a reward to himself for warning her about the mouse.

p.323

But things worked out. Everything works out. Though sometimes they work out sideways.

p.125

Knut Hamsun, The Ring is Closed
Souvenir Press, 2010. trans: Robert Ferguson (org. “Ringen Sluttet”, 1936 )

Also from this book: Ringen Sluttet

Let me look at you now, you’re so wonderfully unpainted today, Olga, he said and switched on the ceiling light.

Yes. And it may well be I had my reasons for that, since I knew I was coming on board.

Well I don’t suppose it was for the benefit of me and the Mate.

Abel, why don’t you get married too?

You’re right, I should really have someone at home to take care of the milking and the chickens and mend my stockings.

I’m being serious.

I’ve been married, he said.

That was a piece of nonsense. I’m the one you should’ve had, Abel.

Yes, you probably were. But I had no chance.

No.

And anyway, I would only have lost you again if I had won you.

Yes, if you couldn’t keep hold of me.

Hold of you, Olga? With what? You’re impossible to get a hold of. You’re like that electric light there. A fire created just for the eyes, for the vision. Maybe there’s a tiny amount of heat in it, but it’s not like the heat of a fire.

Not like with a stove, exactly. But I do try, in my fashion, to be held onto, she said quietly. Did you notice when we were out together that time – with Clemens, I mean – that I didn’t call him by his first name?

In the restaurant, yes I remember that.

Not one single time. I just said You, so I didn’t have to say his name. I saved that for my new husband, they both have the same name, they’re both William. Of course, he wasn’t my new husband then, but I saved it for him. I wanted to do that for him. Do that much for him.

Abel blushed furiously and tried to hide it by being casual: Very nicely done, I think.

Olga flushed: Oh, Abel, it’s so kind of you to say that. No-one else seems to think it matters.

Oh yes, very nicely done. But – if I can say this – it’s not – I mean, there’s tenderness in it alright. But not the other thing. It’s not the heat of a fire.

Olga complains: I’ve worked hard on that too.

Silence.

Around her wrist there’s a bracelet he recognises, but apart from that she isn’t wearing a lot of rings and suchlike, she’s modest in her jewelery. Suddenly he feels for her. This is Olga, with whom he was once so desperately in love, the only one for him at school, and in town, the only one in the whole world. He laid his hand on hers.

What is it?

Nothing, he says and takes his hand away.

No, what was it, Abel?

Nothing. Just a moment I forgot to remember to forget.

p.219

Am I boring you?

No, Olga.

No, she wasn’t boring him. But the way she spoke it was as though she spoke of a love of some kind, and he didn’t seize the moment, didn’t grab it, instead he was suspicious: maybe she would lead him on, a long way on, and then leave? What did he know – an unhappy woman, time on her hands, passionate, tender, hysterical? Sure he could make a pass at her, and if necessary put up with the rejection and the loss. But that would be such a pity, because this, this here, this was Olga.

p.309

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
Oxford World’s Classics, 2008 (org. 1907)

He was too lazy even for a mere demagogue, for a workman orator, for a leader of labour. It was too much trouble. He required a more perfect form of ease; or it might have been that he was the victim of a philosophical unbelief in the effectiveness of every human effort. Such a form of indolence requires, implies, a certain amount of intelligence. Mr Verloc was not devoid of intelligence —and at the notion of a menaced social order he would perhaps have winked to himself if there had not been an effort to make in that sign of scepticism. His big, prominent eyes were not well adapted to winking. They were rather of the sort that closes solemnly in slumber with majestic effect.

p.10

From an interview with William Faulkner by Jean Stein for the Paris Review
New York, 1956 

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior, by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol —cross or crescent or whatever— that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot teach man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral code and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope.

Writers have always drawn, and always will draw, upon the allegories of moral consciousness, for the reason that the allegories are matchless—the three men in Moby Dick, who represent the trinity of conscience: knowing nothing, knowing but not caring, knowing and caring. The same trinity is represented in A Fable by the young Jewish pilot officer, who said, “This is terrible. I refuse to accept it, even if I must refuse life to do so”; the old French Quartermaster General, who said, “This is terrible, but we can weep and bear it”; and the English battalion runner, who said, “This is terrible, I’m going to do something about it.”

(Source: theparisreview.org)

From an interview with William Faulkner by Jean Stein for the Paris Review
New York, 1956 

I had just completed a contract at MGM and was about to return home. The director I had worked with said, “If you would like another job here, just let me know and I will speak to the studio about a new contract.” I thanked him and came home. About six months later I wired my director friend that I would like another job. Shortly after that I received a letter from my Hollywood agent enclosing my first week’s paycheck. I was surprised because I had expected first to get an official notice or recall and a contract from the studio. I thought to myself, the contract is delayed and will arrive in the next mail. Instead, a week later I got another letter from the agent, enclosing my second week’s paycheck. That began in November 1932 and continued until May 1933. Then I received a telegram from the studio. It said: “William Faulkner, Oxford, Miss. Where are you? MGM Studio.”

I wrote out a telegram: “MGM Studio, Culver City, California. William Faulkner.”

The young lady operator said, “Where is the message, Mr. Faulkner?” I said, “That’s it.” She said, “The rule book says that I can’t send it without a message, you have to say something.” So we went through her samples and selected I forget which one—one of the canned anniversary-greeting messages. I sent that. Next was a long-distance telephone call from the studio directing me to get on the first airplane, go to New Orleans, and report to Director Browning. I could have got on a train in Oxford and been in New Orleans eight hours later. But I obeyed the studio and went to Memphis, where an airplane did occasionally go to New Orleans. Three days later, one did.

I arrived at Mr. Browning’s hotel about six p.m. and reported to him. A party was going on. He told me to get a good night’s sleep and be ready for an early start in the morning. I asked him about the story. He said, “Oh, yes. Go to room so-and-so. That’s the continuity writer. He’ll tell you what the story is.”

I went to the room as directed. The continuity writer was sitting in there alone. I told him who I was and asked him about the story. He said, “When you have written the dialogue I’ll let you see the story.” I went back to Browning’s room and told him what had happened. “Go back,” he said, “and tell that so-and-so—. Never mind, you get a good night’s sleep so we can get an early start in the morning.”

So the next morning in a very smart rented launch all of us except the continuity writer sailed down to Grand Isle, about a hundred miles away, where the picture was to be shot, reaching there just in time to eat lunch and have time to run the hundred miles back to New Orleans before dark.

That went on for three weeks. Now and then I would worry a little about the story, but Browning always said, “Stop worrying. Get a good night’s sleep so we can get an early start tomorrow morning.”

One evening on our return I had barely entered my room when the telephone rang. It was Browning. He told me to come to his room at once. I did so. He had a telegram. It said: “Faulkner is fired. MGM Studio.” “Don’t worry,” Browning said. “I’ll call that so-and-so up this minute and not only make him put you back on the payroll but send you a written apology.” There was a knock on the door. It was a page with another telegram. This one said: “Browning is fired. MGM Studio.” So I came back home. I presume Browning went somewhere too. I imagine that continuity writer is still sitting in a room somewhere with his weekly salary check clutched tightly in his hand. They never did finish the film. But they did build a shrimp village—a long platform on piles in the water with sheds built on it—something like a wharf. The studio could have bought dozens of them for forty or fifty dollars apiece. Instead, they built one of their own, a false one. That is, a platform with a single wall on it, so that when you opened the door and stepped through it, you stepped right off onto the ocean itself. As they built it, on the first day, the Cajun fisherman paddled up in his narrow, tricky pirogue made out of a hollow log. He would sit in it all day long in the broiling sun watching the strange white folks building this strange imitation platform. The next day he was back in the pirogue with his whole family, his wife nursing the baby, the other children, and the mother-in-law, all to sit all that day in the broiling sun to watch this foolish and incomprehensible activity. I was in New Orleans two or three years later and heard that the Cajun people were still coming in for miles to look at that imitation shrimp platform which a lot of white people had rushed in and built and then abandoned.

(Source: theparisreview.org)

Kazuo Ishiguro, from “Come Rain or Come Shine” inside Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
Faber and Faber, UK, 2009

Also from this book: Crooner

“You know, Emily, Charlie’s a decent guy. A very decent guy. And he loves you. You won’t do better, you know.”

Emily shrugged and drank some more wine.

“You’re probably right. And we’re hardly young any more. We’re as bad as one another. We should count ourselves lucky. But we never seem to be contented. I don’t know why. Because when I stop and think about it, I realise I don’t really want anyone else.”

For the next minute or so, she kept sipping her wine and listening to the music. Then she said: “You know, Raymond, when you’re at a party, at a dance. And it’s maybe a slow dance, and you’re with the person you really want to be with, and the rest of the room’s supposed to vanish. But somehow it doesn’t. It just doesn’t. You know there’s no one half as nice as the guy in your arms. And yet … well, there are all these people everywhere else in the room. They don’t leave you alone. They keep shouting and waving and doing daft things just to attract your attention. ‘Oi! How can you be satisfied with that?! You can do much better! Look over here!’ It’s like they’re shouting things like that all the time. And so it gets hopeless, you can’t just dance quietly with your guy. Do you know what I mean, Raymond?” I thought about it for a while, then said: “Well, I’m not as lucky as you and Charlie. I don’t have anyone special like you do. But yes, in some ways, I know just what you mean. It’s hard to know where to settle. What to settle to.” “Bloody right. I wish they’d just lay off, all these gatecrashers. I wish they’d just lay off and let us get on with it.”

p.84

Kazuo Ishiguro, from “Crooner” inside Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
Faber and Faber, UK, 2009

Also from this book: Come Rain or Come Shine

To be honest, I was now beginning to wonder what I’d got myself into, what this whole serenade thing was about. And these were Americans, after all. For all I knew, when Mr. Gardner started singing, Mrs. Gardner would come to the window with a gun and fire down at us.

p.16

“Let me tell you a little secret,” Mr. Gardner said suddenly. “A little secret about performance. One pro to another. It’s quite simple. You’ve got to know something, doesn’t matter what it is, you’ve got to know something about your audience. Something that for you, in your mind, distinguishes that audience from the one you sang to the night before. Let’s say you’re in Milwaukee. You’ve got to ask yourself, what’s different, what’s special about a Milwaukee audience? What makes it different from a Madison audience? Can’t think of anything, you just keep on trying till you do. Milwaukee, Milwaukee. They have good pork chops in Milwaukee. That’ll work, that’s what you use when you step out there. You don’t have to say a word about it to them, it’s what’s in your mind when you sing to them. These people in front of you, they’re the ones who eat good pork chops. They have high standards when it comes to pork chops. You understand what I’m saying? That way the audience becomes someone you know, someone you can perform to. There, that’s my secret. One pro to another.”

p.17

And like all the best American singers, there was that weariness in his voice, even a hint of hesitation, like he’s not a man accustomed to laying open his heart this way. That’s how all the greats do it.

p.27

Roberto Calasso, K.
2006 

He replied to Brod with a closely argued letter in which he explained that the only sensible conclusion he had ever reached in his life was ‘not suicide, but the thought of suicide’. If he didn’t go beyond the thought, it was due to a further reflection: ‘You who can’t manage to do anything, you want to do this?’

(Source: spurious.typepad.com)

Alexander McCall Smith, Tears of the Giraffe (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, Book 2)
Anchor, 2002

‘Some people are slow to give,’ she said. ‘It is something to do with how their mothers brought them up. I have read all about this problem in a book. There is a doctor called Dr. Freud who is very famous and has written many books about such people.’

‘Is he in Johannesburg?’ asked Mr J. L. B. Matekoni.

‘I do not think so,’ said Mma Potokwane. ‘It is a book from London. But it is very interesting. He says that all boys are in love with their mother.’

‘That is natural,’ said Mr J. L. B. Matekoni. ‘Of course boys love their mothers. Why should they not do so?’

Mma Potokwane shrugged. ‘I agree with you. I cannot see what is wrong with a boy loving his mother.’

‘Then why is Dr. Freud worried about this?’ went on Mr J. L. B. Matekoni. ‘Surely he should be if they did not love their mothers.’

Mma Potokwane looked thoughtful. ‘Yes. But he was still very worried about these boys and I think he tried to stop them.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ said Mr J. L. B. Matekoni. ‘Surely he had better things to do with his time.’

‘You would have thought so,’ said Mma Potokwane. ‘But in spite of this Dr. Freud, boys still go on loving their mothers, which is how it should be.’