the askari

"They made slow progress despite the officers' shouting and their canes. There was little respite from the under-officers' blows, as the ombasha and the shaush seem to have lost their minds too, goaded into worse ferocity by the Feldwebel. After a while the march settled into a reluctant shuffle despite the best efforts of the tiring under-officers. They stopped often, to rest or to adjust loads, and at every stop there were grumbles and scowling looks. They were not spared the usual perils of the march — the bites and the heat — the intermittent heavy rain, the aching feet from walking in worn-out boots, the exhaustion. All these were even more intolerable to the askari than usual now that they were forced to do menial work. When they finally stopped to make camp in the late afternoon, there was a tense expectation of trouble."

~~ from Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah

The Future of Literary Criticism

"There is a huge delusion in the literary world that the things that writers do matter on a massive scale. That is completely alien to my experience of America and any other places I've been anywhere in the world. Books and reading do not matter to the American public at all. Most people hate reading and are anti-intellectual. The things they care about are sports, their family, their property, and their vehicle."

~~ from The Future of Literary Criticism, with Book Critic Christian Lorentzen

escaped the slums

"And we, the aspiring, were ashamed to see ourselves as we had once been. We resented being reminded of our origins. Having escaped the slums, we dreaded slipping back, and we resented savagely the turning of our new homes into a new slum area. All this resentment was flung at the new arrivals. Had they left their junk, dressed in their best and moved in with even one suite of new furniture bought on the installment plan, the women would have turned out with cups of tea. For then the new arrivals would have been, like us. the aspiring. But they had brought the slums with them, defiantly. So the voices of the women were bitter against them. And they, sensing hostility, became aggressively louder and more vulgar."

~~ from Tell Freedom: Memories of Africa by Peter Abrahams

Write for Your Life

"For one thing, many people believe that there is still plenty of writing going on in school, that in fact written work is the basis of much of what goes on in the classroom, although the facts on the ground belie it. And there's also a sense, in a technological world, that writing, particularly creative writing, is a kind of soft science, secondary to the quantitative. Parents who have rightly concluded that a college education is a pricey investment in an uncertain future may deride the prospect: 'Poetry? Really? How will that help with getting a job?' Yet one survey of executives showed that, almost universally, they rated writing skills as extremely important, no matter what business they happened to be in, and they were inclined to hire English majors because of that."

~~ from Write for Your Life by Anne Quindlen

England had no color bar

"Rathebe talked fascinatingly about his travels. He had been to England and America. And we never tired of hearing him tell of his experiences. In England he had lived in the homes of white people, had sat at table with them! England had no color bar. A man could go where he pleased when he pleased. A man was just a man. Of course, people had looked. He was different. But there was no color bar. And he had met Negroes living in England. They had made it their home. Why, the great Paul Robeson lived there!

"But Harlem! Harlem . . . the city of Negroes. A city within a city: not a suburb, not a location, not a slum area, a city . . . We hung on his words; words spoken in an easy, subdued manner stirred our hearts and minds, and led us to wild dreams."

~~ from Tell Freedom: Memories of Africa by Peter Abrahams

The Goodbye

 Remember my dear, remember my dear,

    We've both been here before.

Remember my sweet, close to your death,

    Beyond us lies so much more.

The pain is over, the sadness ended,

    The crippled body gone.

A new one waits, God's next creation,

    Life does go on and on.

So rest my sweet, I'll hold your hand,

    And send you on your way.

I'll see you later, don't wait for me.

    I'll be home at the end of my day.

~~from Becky Jane: Memoir of an Incredible Life by Nick Delmedico

There will always be people who are smarter than us

"Keep in mind that many of the most arrogant professors are volcanoes of insecurity ready to erupt at any minute. Insecurity can be an occupational hazard of the life of the mind. I repeat, we are in a profession that judges everything we write against all writings on the subject that have come before. One of the best ways for professors and graduate students to reduce insecurity is to relinquish and/or reduce crass competitiveness with each other. There will always be people who are smarter than us and people who are less smart. There will always be people who have read more than we have and people who have read less. There will always be people who write and publish more than we write and those who produce less writing. If we could really get a handle on competitiveness, we would eliminate so much of the bad karma associated with academic life."

~~ from "An Open Letter to my Students…and Anyone Else" by Jerry Watts

that illusion of stability

"That was when I checked my phone. It was a small flip phone that I sometimes forgot about for days on end. It was always dropping calls. I had bought it from the back door of a bodega on Graham and Conselyea along with a packet of calling cards that gave you pretty modest minutes unless you were calling Yemen, in which case your time lasted forever. I had four new messages, all from unknown callers. I sat down on the stoop of a brownstone to listen to them. They were all made from that same rock from the same quarries in Pennsylvania, the stuff that looked like it could survive any kind of calamity, natural or man-made, legal or otherwise. The neighborhood was full of them and that was part of its charm, that illusion of stability."

~~ from An Honest Living by Dwyer Murphy

He had been poor once

"He smiled a thin-slipped, distant smile and slid back further into his chair. We were sitting in plush leather armchairs and every now and again he would cross or uncross one of his legs. He seemed awfully proud of himself, sitting there. He had fought and clawed and believed it meant something that he had. He had been poor once, when he was young, and now that he wasn't anymore he thought it all had meaning: his rise, his marriage, his bribes and permits, the cotton robe he was wearing and letting slide open to show off his old man's skin, all pocked and flaccid."

~~ from An Honest Living by Dwyer Murphy

the unbearable smell of communal living

"The warm air of May mingled with the odour of people's bodies in the carriage, bringing home to him for the first time in ages the unbearable smell of communal living. He wanted to live, that was now certain. But could someone who had once managed to escape society's clutches find the courage to commit himself again to that pungent stench? Society operates smoothly precisely because people remain unaware of their own smell. The student's stinking socks that haven't been washed in a week . . . [to] . . . the middle-aged man who reeks like a chimney covered in soot. People never hold back when it comes to giving off their own scents. Hanio liked to think he produced no smell or odour, but he could not be certain."

~~ from Life for Sale by Yukio Mishima

made for each other

"In the early years at least, Kingsley and Jane seemed made for each other. It was an unusual and unusually stimulating menage: two passionately dedicated novelists who were also passionately in love. Their approach to the daily business of writing formed a clear contrast, one from which I derived a tentative theory between the difference between and male and female fiction. Kingsley was a grinder; no matter how he was feeling (sickly, clogged, loth — or plain hungover, if you prefer), he trudged off to his desk after breakfast; there was a half-hour lunchbreak, and that was that until it was time for evening drinks. Jane was far more spasmodic and compulsive. She would wander from room to room, she would do some cooking or some gardening, and plenty of smoking as she stared out of the sitting-room window with arms folded and an air of anxious preoccupation. Then she would suddenly hasten to her study, and you'd hear the clutter of her typewriter keys. Quite soon, she would shyly emerge, having written more in an hour than my father would write in a day."

~~ from Inside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis

Jon Lee Anderson returns to Haiti

Jon Lee Anderson's most recent dispatch from Haiti is worth reading. At L.U.S.K., his presence there was noted at least once before. Haiti needs help.

I have not read these books

I have not read any of the 2023 Booker nominees, and I believe that I had only heard of one of the authors before the list was presented. At the library I checked for physical copies in New Fiction and found one out of the four to five that I looked for; this was when they were soon to close last night.