a hated person

"Such a gift of perception and observation is of the greatest advantage, but on the other hand also of the greatest disadvantage, and it is rarely welcome, almost invariably unwelcome. Such a person who perceives everything and who sees everything and who observes everything, moreover continually, is not popular, more often feared, and people have always guarded themselves against such a person, because such a person is a dangerous person and dangerous persons are not only feared but hated, and in that respect I have to describe myself as a hated person. Personally, of course, I regard my perceptivity and gift for observation as an exceedingly useful advantage, one which has often proved life-saving."

~~ from Yes by Thomas Bernhard

stalactites or stalagmites?

"The days of the examinations passed in a blur. We all recognised them as the climax of years of misery, not only because we recognised them as the threshold of whatever futures we desired for ourselves, but also because each of us hoped through them to state our worth and value. Everything conspired to seduce us into this absurd position. We were the heroes of the day, confronting the tests of life and intellect, grappling with an irrational enemy that sought at every turn to ambush and trick us. After each sitting, we set off from the examination hall in a body, like guerillas returned from battle, wandering the streets and parading ourselves as the smiling survivors of the examiners' wiles. We formed self-important discussion groups by the roadside: should the answer have been stalactites or stalagmites? Nobody laughed at us, although our teachers feigned amusement by our intensity. We all knew the prizes that had become available to those who had succeeded ahead of us."

~~ from Memory of Departure by Abdulrazak Gurnah

the same kind of liberal preaching

"'Do you like Peter Abrahams?' I asked.

"'Well, he's not a bad writer,' he said. 'He's too self-conscious, that's the problem. He doesn't write like an African. Do you know what this book reminds me of? Alan Paton. It has the same kind of liberal preaching, soft-nosed and confused. Do you know what I mean? There is no sense of identification with the mass of oppressed Africans.'"

~~ from Memory of Departure by Abdulrazak Gurnah

shrug

"I pulled the man out of the shrubs by his feet until his own body was on the lawn. His cameras rode up over his head. I turned him over, grabbed him under the arms, and dragged him across the grass to the summer house, laying him down behind it. Whoever found him would wonder for a moment how it had happened, rob him, shrug, and maybe get someone to bury him."

~~ from An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans

several solitaries of the highest genius

"'That's just it. There never was such a literary world,' I said. 'In the nineteenth century there were several solitaries of the highest genius—a Melville or a Poe had no literary life. It was the customhouse and the barroom for them. In Russia, Lenin and Stalin destroyed the literary world. Russia's situation now resembles ours—poets, in spite of everything against them, emerge from nowhere. Where did Whitman come from, and where did he get what he had? It was W. Whitman, an irrepressible individual, that had it and that did it.'"

~~ from Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

I did not know these writers

This week Elizabeth Victoria Aldrich and Noah Eli Gordon passed on. I did not know either of these writers, but I saw a flurry of posts expressing sadness, appreciation, devastation, and respect. K. J. P. Garcia's words on grieving for these poets—or any authors—were meaningful to me. I don't know how these writers died, but they were both too young to go. Rest in peace.

life, Charlie, not literature

"Twenty years ago in the hands of the law, he had wrestled with the cops. They had forced him into a straight jacket. He had had diarrhea in the police wagon as they rushed him to Bellevue. They were trying to cope, to do something with a poet. What did the New York police know about poets! They knew drunks and muggers, they knew rapists, they knew women in labor and hopheads, but they were at sea with poets. Then he had called me from a phone booth in the hospital. And I had answered from the hot grimy flaking dressing room a the Belasco. And he had yelled, 'This is life, Charlie, not literature!' . . . [W]hen Humboldt cried, 'Life!' . . . [h]e only meant realistic, naturalistic life. As if art hid the truth and only the sufferings of the mad revealed it."

~~ from Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

rest in peace, John

Only yesterday, I learned that teacher and historian, John H. Ahtes III, died young at 48 in 2010. A tall, talented, and eccentric academic, he certainly had lived as a reader. In Philadelphia's Center City, he could be found in bookstore coffeeshops in the 1990s and 2000s. 

To me, he had a sense of humor about his elitist, conservative leanings even as I could accentuate my left-of-center origins and modest upbringing. Possibly, his upbringing was modest, too. I remember that he would insist that a key to avoiding trouble with the boys in blue was to wear a jacket and tie downtown. I can't recall ever seeing him without one. He would invariably have something interesting to say—a breath of fresh air in a world where recent novels and news stories can be packed with clichés. 

The last time I saw him in person was around twenty years ago in Barnes and Noble on Rittenhouse Square. He was in between college appointments and dealing in antique furniture. He advised me that the trick to surviving as an adjunct was to not take too seriously ourselves or the negatives associated with an itinerant role. Good advice, yes, but also understandably challenging to execute at times. 

It was also only yesterday that I learned that Professor Ahtes was central to a research project on 57 Irishmen who arrived as labor in 1832 and were dead within six weeks of their ship's docking in Philadelphia. In a trailer to the documentary based upon the researchers' collaboration, Ahtes notes that the story concerns "the dark side of immigration" and "the dark side of industrialization." The Pennsylvania Gazette's "Bones Beneath the Tracks" is the most extensive online writing I've found about the historians and their work. It sounds significant, so I bought a copy of their book to learn more. Rest in peace, John.

Sharing a part of these lands

"I can do okay, in short doses, living in the circus of rules that is New York City—but I would hate to live in a country where getting out on the land meant having to be in a space as heavily regulated as a national park. I don't currently plan on becoming a wild-bearded old miner working a placer claim on some lonely creek, but I would hate to live in a country where that wasn't an option if I fuck everything else up. My arsenal of firearms right now is nothing very warlike, but I would hate to live in [a] country without wild mountain fastnesses 'to function as bases for guerilla warfare against tyranny,' as Ed Abbey put it long ago. Environmentalists can think these kinds of thoughts too. Sharing a part of these lands shaped my conception of myself long before I ever set foot on the lands themselves. They gave me a sense of possibility far beyond the bounds of my immediate existence."

~~ from Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West by James Pogue

Abdulrazak Gurnah and Willem Frederik Hermans

"When the Monsoon Winds Turned: The lost worlds of Abdulrazak Gurnah" by Nafida Mohamed is an engaging read and an opportunity to learn about the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature. A second compelling overview of an accomplished novelist is also included in the July 2022 print issue: "Dutch Master: On Willem Frederik Hermans" by Francine Prose.

steak and vodka

"Tolsto[y] thought that people got into trouble because they ate steak and drank vodka and coffee and smoked cigars. Overcharged with calories and stimulants and doing no useful labor they fell into carnality and sins. At this point I always remembered that Hitler had been a vegetarian, so it wasn't necessarily the meat that was to blame."

~~ from Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow