Category: Books & Writers

Squashed Philosophers – Condensed Plato Aristotle Augustine Descartes Hume Marx Freud Copernicus Hobbes Sartre Ayer Sade Wittgenstein Einstein

“The books which defined the way The West thinks now condensed and abridged to keep the substance, the style and the quotes, but ditching all that irritating verbiage.”

Another lovely, little story from Beats Per Minute, “The Lives We Lead.”

was born in Boston on this date in 1809 but moved to Richmond as a small child. According to the Poe Museum

After attending schools in England and Richmond, young Poe registered at the University of Virginia on February 14, 1826, the second session of the University. He lived in Room 13, West Range. He became an active member of the Jefferson Literary Society, and passed his courses with good grades at the end of the session in December. Mr. Allan [Poe’s foster father] failed to give him enough money for necessary expenses, and Poe made debts of which his so-called father did not approve. When Mr. Allan refused to let him return to the University, a quarrel ensued, and Poe was driven from the Allan home without money. Mr. Allan probably sent him a little money later, and Poe went to Boston. There he published a little volume of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems. It is such a rare book now that a single copy has sold for $200,000.

The Poe Museum biography continues the story.

was born on this date in 1809.

Once upon a midnight dreary,
As I pondered weak and weary,
Over many quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
As I nodded, nearly napping,
Suddenly there came a tapping As of some one gently rapping,
rapping at my chamber door.
“‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered,”
“tapping at my chamber door,
Only this and nothing more.”

“The Raven,”
Edgar Allan Poe

The Library of Congress has a wealth of material on Poe available on-line.

was born in Alessandria, Italy, on this date in 1932. Look here for an interesting web site devoted to Eco.

“But why doesn’t the Gospel ever say that Christ laughed?” I asked, for no good reason. “Is Jorge right?”

“Legions of scholars have wondered whether Christ laughed. The question doesn’t interest me much. I believe he never laughed, because, omniscient as the son of God had to be, he knew how we Christians would behave. . . .”

The Name of the Rose

was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, on this date in 1892. Tolkien is best known for his fantasy novels The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-1955).

was born in Bedford, England on this date in 1886. From The Writer’s Almanac:

He’s the author of the Antarctic travelogue, The Worst Journey in the World (1922). His book is about a search for the eggs of the Emperor Penguin in 1912. He and his two companions traveled in near total darkness and temperatures that reached negative 77.5 degrees Fahrenheit. He wrote, “Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.”

As noted in Outside, “25 (Essential) Books for the Well-Read Explorer” —

Cherry-Garrard’s first-person account of this infamous sufferfest is a chilling testimonial to what happens when things really go south. Many have proven better at negotiating such epic treks than Scott, Cherry, and his crew, but none have written about it more honestly and compassionately than Cherry. “The horrors of that return journey are blurred to my memory and I know they were blurred to my body at the time. I think this applies to all of us, for we were much weakened and callous. The day we got down to the penguins I had not cared whether I fell into a crevasse or not.”

Barbara Enrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed filled much of NewMexiKen’s 10 hour trip home last night. The book, published in 2001, may change the way you feel about a lot of things, or perhaps reinforce them. As with Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which was written to describe the life of the industrial worker and ended up primarily as an expose of meat packing, Ehrenreich writes to tell about the life of working at $6 and $7 hour jobs, but you can’t help learning more than should know about restaurants and maid services.

An important, revealing, yet entertaining book; highly recommended.

Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer’s retina
as he stood on the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.

The above is by Ted Kooser, the current Poet Laureate of the United States (a one-year term designated by the Library of Congress).

Thanks to Jon at Albloggerque for the pointer and this link to several poems.

One more —

Selecting A Reader

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
“For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned.” And she will.

From The New York Times:

The books we’ve chosen as the year’s 10 best — five novels, a short-story collection, a memoir, two biographies and a historical study — present a broad range of voices and subjects. What do they have in common? Each is a triumph of storytelling, and each explores the past, whether through research, recollection, invention or some combination of the three.

Gilead by By Marilynne Robinson

The Master by Colm Toibin

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

Runaway by Alice Munro

Snow by Orhan Pamuk

War Trash by Ha Jin

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan

Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt

From a story in The New York Times:

R. Craig Hogan, a former university professor who heads an online school for business writing here, received an anguished e-mail message recently from a prospective student.

“i need help,” said the message, which was devoid of punctuation. “i am writing a essay on writing i work for this company and my boss want me to help improve the workers writing skills can yall help me with some information thank you”.

Hundreds of inquiries from managers and executives seeking to improve their own or their workers’ writing pop into Dr. Hogan’s computer in-basket each month, he says, describing a number that has surged as e-mail has replaced the phone for much workplace communication. Millions of employees must write more frequently on the job than previously. And many are making a hash of it.

“E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited,” Dr. Hogan said. “It has companies tearing their hair out.”
…

“People think that throwing multiple exclamation points into a business letter will make their point forcefully,” Ms. Andrews said. “I tell them they’re allowed two exclamation points in their whole life.”

From The New York Times, its list of the 100 notable books of the year.

The book titles are linked to the full reviews. Next week we’ll present the 10 Best Books of the Year, chosen from this longer list.

NewMexiKen is spending a cold, blustery day reading though the Essential Shakespeare Handbook, an attractive and informative new publication from DK. The book sets the scene with biographical, historical, literary and language background, then provides details on each the 39 plays, the sonnets and poetry. Nicely done.

Among the many tidbits, I’ve learned that Shakespeare coined the word “retirement”. One more reason to admire the Bard.

Also from The Hill:

Ready for some conspiracy theories involving George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and other Founding Fathers?

Then get ready for the next book by Dan Brown, author of The DaVinci Code, which will be set in the nation’s capital. Its plot is built around the murders of several current political leaders by someone with ties to the Freemasons, the secretive fraternity that included some of the Founding Fathers.

Sorry for the lack of blogging today. NewMexiKen was busy reading two of Elmore Leonard’s westerns, Hombre and Valdez Is Coming. If you like westerns, or like Leonard’s mysteries, you’ll love these and his other western novels written early in his career. They’re all available in inexpensive paperbacks.

And yes, Hombre was made into a movie with Paul Newman, Richard Boone and Martin Balsam.

As noted below, today is author Pat Conroy’s birthday. He’s 59.

Byron, one of two official sons-in-law of NewMexiKen, sent me this story about Conroy, in part because the tale it tells concerns Byron’s own high school alma mater.

Mr. Conroy’s latest book, “My Losing Season,” published this month by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, is ostensibly a memoir of his senior year playing basketball at the Citadel.

But the book’s most gripping moment, for those readers interested in education, may be the three and a half pages set inside Room 2A, the classroom of Joseph A. Monte at Gonzaga High School, a Jesuit institution in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Monte was Mr. Conroy’s sophomore-year English instructor, and in describing how Mr. Monte taught him to read Faulkner that year, Mr. Conroy has provided a bonus for all those devoted teachers in his audience: he has captured that elusive moment when a teacher succeeds in firing the imagination of a student.

Mr. Monte’s mantra was: “Read the great books, gentlemen, just the great ones. Ignore the others. There’s not enough time.” To that end, in November 1960, Mr. Conroy received a personal assignment to read “The Sound and the Fury.”

After studying the first 90 pages, Mr. Conroy said he felt as if he was “reading the book underwater.” Even after rereading those 90 pages, he did not understand a word.

When Mr. Conroy approached his teacher in the cafeteria to tell him of his despair, Mr. Monte sent him scurrying in a different direction: the scene in “Macbeth” when Macbeth learns of the death of his queen.

“There you will find the key to your dilemma,” the future novelist was told, “if, Mr. Conroy, you’re the student I think you are.”

The critical passage, Mr. Conroy discovered, was when Macbeth says, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Mr. Conroy realized that “The Sound and the Fury” was also told by an “idiot,” Benjy.

“That’s why I was confused,” Mr. Conroy writes in his new book. “It was surfaces and shadows and what Benjy thought he was seeing. Faulkner was writing through Benjy’s eyes . . . through an idiot’s eyes.”

The lesson, according to Mr. Monte: “Sometimes literature is direct and straightforward. Sometimes it makes you work.”

For his trouble, Mr. Conroy received an “A+, double credit” in Mr. Monte’s ever-present grade book.

“This is a good moment in the life of your mind,” Mr. Conroy recalls his teacher saying. “It’s a good moment in my life as a teacher. We should both cherish it.”

The longer article by Jacques Steinberg originally appeared in The New York Times in 2002, but can be found several places on the Internet including here.

Nonfiction

• Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (Holt)
• David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (Oxford Univ.)
• Jennifer Gonnerman, Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett (Farrar)
• Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Norton)
• The 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States – Authorized Edition (Norton)

Fiction

• Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Madeleine Is Sleeping (Harcourt)
• Christine Schutt, Florida (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern Univ.)
• Joan Silber, Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories (Norton)
• Lily Tuck, The News from Paraguay (HarperCollins)
• Kate Walbert, Our Kind: A Novel in Stories (Scribner)

The winners will be announced November 17.

Author Mario Puzo was born on this date in 1920. The Writer’s Almanac tells his story:

[Puzo is] best known as the author of the novel The Godfather (1969), which was made into a movie in 1972. People had written novels and made movies about the mafia before, but the mafia characters had always been the villains. Puzo was the first person to write about members of the mafia as the sympathetic main characters of a story. The son of Italian immigrants, he started out trying to write serious literary fiction. He published two novels that barely sold any copies. He fell into debt, trying to support his family as a freelance writer. One Christmas Eve, he had a severe gall bladder attack and took a cab to the hospital. When he got out of the cab, he was in so much pain that he fell into the gutter. Lying there, he said to himself, “Here I am, a published writer, and I am dying like a dog.” He vowed that he would devote the rest of his writing life to becoming rich and famous. The Godfather became the best-selling novel of the 1970s, and many critics credit Puzo with inventing the mafia as a serious literary and cinematic subject. He went on to publish many other books, including The Sicilian (1984) and The Last Don (1996), but he always felt that his best book was the last book he wrote before he became a success – The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964), about an ordinary Italian immigrant family.

Puzo died in 1999.