March 07, 2008
GB Shaw anecdote
George Bernard Shaw once came across one of his own books in a used bookstore in London. He was surprised to find his own inscription inside — he had presented the book "with esteem" to a friend. He immediately bought the book and had it wrapped and delivered again, after adding a second inscription: "With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw."
More at Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes
An anecdote from the life of Sylvestre Matuschka. (From Half a Canuck)
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March 7, 2008 in Books & Literature | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 22, 2008
A Supermarket in California
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
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February 22, 2008 in Books & Literature | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 17, 2008
Let us go then, you and I
T.S. Eliot reads "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". (YT)
“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me…”
This page contains the 1928 commentary of Dr. Marc Edmund Jones, founder of the Sabian Assembly, on Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass illustrated by John Tenniel
Reversible Verse
Also, "I see you get a dollar a word for your writing. I enclose a check for one dollar. Please send me a sample." (Both from Futility Closet, the most recent pick of Grow-a-brain's Blog of the day)
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February 17, 2008 in Books & Literature | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 07, 2008
Mark Twain at Stormfield, 1909, filmed by Edison
(Film above by Smashing Telly. Previously, Mark Twain in Colour)
“…These last few days I have been thinking and thinking of the Nordland summer, with its endless day. Sitting here thinking of that, and of a hut I lived in, and of the woods behind the hut. And writing things down, by way of passing the time; to amuse myself, no more. The time goes very slowly; I cannot get it to pass as quickly as I would, though I have nothing to sorrow for, and live as pleasantly as could be. I am well content withal, and my thirty years are no age to speak of …”
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February 7, 2008 in Books & Literature | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 29, 2008
Henry Miller’s Bathroom monologue
(2 more videos at Wes Unruh’s home)
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January 29, 2008 in Books & Literature | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 14, 2008
…As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect
This is an original post, exclusive for “Grow-a-Brain”.
Borger Mogron, mysterious Seattle Eminence Gris and publisher of Blue Guitar Press, interviews Dex Quire, author of The Transformations, A Tale of Modern Sin. In The Transformations a young man applies penis enlargement ointment to himself and promptly turns into a donkey. He goes through many tumultuous and wild adventures before happening upon the antidote that turns him back into himself.
Borger Mogron: I don't believe your book, the Transformations is fiction. It is too realistic, too graphic in so many ways. I think you really rubbed on penis enlarging ointment and turned into a donkey and had lots of adventures and then wrote about it. I'm like Oprah. I don't like my authors lying to me: if you're lying to me I'm going to cry.
Dex Quire: No. Save the tears. I really made it up. It's a pure work of the imagination. I felt I was channeling the spirit of Apuleius when I wrote it.
BM: Who's Apuleius?
DQ: He was a North African writer in Roman times; he wrote the original comic novel about a guy who turns into a donkey. Look him up on Google.
BM: Hmm. I'm skeptical. How did you come up with the formula of penis ointment leading to donkey transformation?
DQ: It was lying on the ground. I picked it up and ran with it. I mean, I was living in a downtown Seattle high rise and my neighbor, a terrifically wrinkled 80 year-old lady who walked with a cane, one morning, instead of greeting me with "Good Morning, Dex," scowled and shook her cane at me crying out, "My inbox is filled with penis enlarging spam!" I didn't know what to say but I remember thinking, "penis enlargement has gone mainstream."
BM: What about the drug trade? Actual drug smuggling. You seem to intimate more than a casual knowledge of. Confess!
DQ: Nope. Newspaper clippings, evening news, men's adventure magazines.
BM: What was your MAIN motivation in writing this book?
DQ: I thought, "Why should readers of Harry Potter – the kids – have all the fun? Why shouldn't adults have something fun and absorbing and racy to read?"
BN: I thought you were going to say to consume coffee in amazing quantities, to attain certain leisure and standing among the literati of your fair, rain speckled city, to run with the winds, to float on azured, mirrored seas while opium smoke dances around in grey-blue columns, hanging and nether-descending or ascending, for all time, ceaselessly.
DQ: Ah, no. That doesn't sound like me, does it?
BM: True, no it doesn't. What about Art – with a capital "A?" The Transformations seems to me a very Arty book.
DQ: None whatsoever I'm afraid. "Vast amusement." Put that down. I did try, a la Harold Rosenberg, to take a leap towards the Marvelous. That and the seduction of the grown-up, post-collegiate Harry Potter set, to my world of sex and fantasy. It is the untouched anus that tells no tales.
BM: Right. So this is gay erotica?
DQ: I wouldn't say that. In places, slightly gay, in a brutal sort of way though I think the newly-outed Dumbledore might be put off by the antics of the gay police stallions. But then we have the donkey lusting after all things female, females in love with donkeys, elephants pining for giraffes, you get the idea. I give the reader a range of options, to take away what they will. The reader may wish to dress in drag while reading my book, spinning about in nothing but a tutu, or nudely carrying it to their local teahouse, oblivious to the stares of the common street pedestrian.
BM: What about Canada? Will Canadians ever understand The Transformations?
DQ: Dubious. An entire nation exempt from the collective unconscious. Rumor has it you surrender it at customs before entering the country.
BM: How does one become a Human Being, Dex?
DQ: Read The Transformations. It is available at Amazon. It's also an ebook on Kindle, Mobipocket, Lulu and other ebook dealers…
(Thank you, Dex, for the book & for this post)
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January 14, 2008 in Books & Literature | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack
January 12, 2008
Vladimir and Estragon at the Ninth Ward
The Pelican project at “Things Magazine”
There is perhaps no more fitting backdrop for Becket’s production of Waiting for Godot than New Orleans
Bukowski Reference Database. Also, Apartment Complex Where Bukowski Wrote "Post Office" For Sale, Could Be Leveled. Yep, 9 other Drunk American Writers
A new set of extra-long British stamps featuring covers from the James Bond novels has been issued by the Royal Mail
Pulp Fiction pop-ups by Thomas Allen
A Warm & Fuzzy Feeling. Warning! this is strange, NSFW & very WRONG
Re-post: It’s been 50 years since the publication of my all-time favorite book, Pinhas Sadeh’s Life as a parable. Here is an original page from the chapter Marian, with the inscription: 4 8 1957: "I finished writing Life as a Parable tonight at 12:30"
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January 12, 2008 in Books & Literature | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
December 14, 2007
There were only six words left
It’s time to sell your books when it’s less painful to just re-buy it on Amazon than go down to the basement and dig it out
Works from Kubach-Wilmsen
“I had to run a few errands downtown, but I hesitated to go.
What if I ran into bloggers?...”
Brother, Can You Spare a Hyperlink? by Paul Di Filippo
Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn.") and is said to have called it his best work. So we asked sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers from the realms of books, TV, movies, and games to take a shot themselves. Very short stories
(Book above from Poe Stories)
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December 14, 2007 in Books & Literature | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 29, 2007
Unusual books
Nietzsche et les fascistes. From Songs by Nietzsche: Lebensregeln
Cut thistles in May,
They'll grow in a day;
Cut them in June,
That is too soon;
Cut them in July,
Then they will die.
Mother Goose Alphabetical index
10 Book Titles That Have The Fockers In Them
The Most Unusual Books of the World
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November 29, 2007 in Books & Literature | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 20, 2007
“Tread softly because you tread on my dreams”
Young Foucault reader
The Early American editions of The Hobbit are collectors items because of their printing differences. (Wikipedia)
Walk around the Dublin of Ulysses
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
645 works of mathematical fiction
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November 20, 2007 in Books & Literature | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 12, 2007
Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt
Short slideshow of small town libraries in Massachusetts. (From Information Junk)
“My mother and Norman Mailer were longtime friends. So it made sense that Betsy Mailer and I were roommates in our first year of college. On the big moving day, out of NYC to Princeton, Norman and Norris (Betsy's stepmother) and my mother Jean rented a car, packed us up and drove us the hour or so down the Jersey turnpike…”
"If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who." Vonnegut Tattoos: So it Goes. (Also there: Connect the dots)
How to Identify First Edition Pulitzer Prize Books. (Thank you, Tom K.)
Pulp fiction is perhaps the only genre as beloved for its cover art as for its prose
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November 12, 2007 in Books & Literature | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 26, 2007
"F1" Is for Help
Possible Titles for Future Sue Grafton Novels After She Runs Out of Letters
The 1943 first edition dust jacket for The Fountainhead. From “How to Identify Modern First Edition Books”
Books Written by Kurt Vonnegut While Hungry
When Legends Gather #207
City of Churches by Donald Barthelme (Both in Chinese & in English)
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October 26, 2007 in Books & Literature | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 09, 2007
What should I read next?
A nice collection of vintage endpapers
The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright--
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night...
Books by the Foot for decoration purposes only. (From Global Nerdy)
What should I read next for book recommendations. The concept is simple: Enter a title you like, and you'll instantly receive a list of other books you may enjoy
My virtual library. (From Eyebeam blog)
Curiosities of Literature of Isaac D’Israeli (1766-1848)
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October 9, 2007 in Books & Literature | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 19, 2007
Just like my school books
Gallery of Book Trade Labels. (From Daily Jive)
Enhanced Russian Biology Textbook
How to cover a textbook. (From Coudal)
Dostoyevsky comics, originally printed in Drawn and Quarterly #3 (2000) - Now I’ve seen it all!
TS Eliot reads The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (MP3)
The power of books
LOLTHULHU Lovecraftian macros
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September 19, 2007 in Books & Literature | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 30, 2007
70 b3, 0r N07 70 B3–7h@7 Iz tHe Qu357i0n
hamlet’s soliloquy in 13375p34k
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,
Crooked elipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
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The John Galt Corporation of the Bronx, hired last year for the dangerous and complex job of demolishing the former Deutsche Bank building at 130 Liberty Street, where two firefighters died last Saturday, has apparently never done any work like it. Indeed, Galt does not seem to have done much of anything since it was incorporated in 1983
This note on the fridge is to say
That those ripe plums that you put away
Well, I ate them last night
They tasted all right
Plus I slept with your sister. M'kay?
(From an excellent literary limerick-off at MeFi. The original William Carlos Williams)
LEGO creation inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s story “Little Ida’s Flowers”
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August 30, 2007 in Books & Literature | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack