another bed

“The free countries are curiously lethargic about their freedom. The credit of revolution is strong in Western Europe, while capitalism, especially in its hated American form, is held to be dying. Many exult over its approaching death. Tired of old evils, they long for "the new thing" and will not be happy until they've had it. Baudelaire writes, in one of his journals, that life is a hospital in which patient believes that he will recover if he is moved to another bed.”

~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back

an early masterpiece

Eclectica Magazine has published an early masterpiece, "Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served."

2018-19 Nobel Prize for Literature

"The Polish author Olga Tokarczuk and the Austrian writer Peter Handke were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday, [October 10, 2019,] the Swedish Academy announced at a ceremony in Stockholm."

I do not carry a camera

"Sightseeing with two old poets, Harold Schimmel and Dennis Silk, in the Old City. It's not proper sightseeing, though. I do not, like a good tourist, carry a camera. I've never liked cameras, and I haven't owned one since 1940. In that year I photographed some long-legged pigs in Mexico, on the island of Janitizio in Lake Patzcuaro. I'd never seen such stilted pigs, and they were well worth snapping. The camera came from a hockshop on South State Street and there were small holes in the bellows, so that my pigs were speckled white."

~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back

Before I left Chicago. . .

"Before I left Chicago, the art critic Harold Rosenberg said to me, 'Going to Jerusalem? And wondering whether people will talk freely? You've got to be kidding, they'll talk your head off.'"

~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back

To Jerusalem and Back

"An old Mormon missionary in Nauvoo once gripped my knee hard as we sat side by side, and he put his arm about me and called me 'Brother.' We'd only met ten minutes before. He took me to his good bosom. His eyes began to mist. I was a prospect, an exotic prospect in old tennis shoes and a sweatshirt. His heart opened to me. It opened like a cuckoo clock. But it did not give me the time of day."

~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back