Category: Books

It’s interesting to notice that James’ The Aspern Papers actually works off the same mechanism as The Turn of the Screw – the obsessive narrator and literary detective, who thinks he is so valiantly pursuing truth and the papers themselves, hears what he wants to hear, distorts and twists everything, pushes every conversation away from…

Having mentioned Charles Wright's poem 'Snow', perhaps no copyright lawyer will be too upset if I quote it: Snow If we, as we are, are dust, and dust, as it will, rises,Then we will rise, and recongregateIn the wind, in the cloud, and be their issue, Things in a fall in a world of fall,…

Four in the morning: my stomach is bothering me (was it the soy sauce?). Restless, stretches of time in bed sectioned with looks at computer screens and taking various books off the shelves. I keep looking through the five shelves of poetry for just what I want to read: I don't know what it is…

No, that's not some Joycean take on 'woodsman'. John E. Woods has been translating – retranslating – Thomas Mann's major works for over a decade now; I only recently found out about it. I've got The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus arrived today; Buddenbrooks and Joseph and his Brothers (which I'd always assumed was one of…

For the past seven or eight days – basically since finishing one of the two articles I've been working on – I have been either on the computer, or reading until three, four, five, even six a.m. I keep trying to stop it, to get to bed more regularly: but haven't really succeeded. Again, tonight:…

No wind, no moving air, a rather dull gray sky – you can hear a dog barking from very far away. Hardly anybody walking in the streets. It's very warm – for here – about 75° F. It's the kind of atmosphere they use in horror, tragedy, nihilistic psychological novels, etc., when something dreadful is…

I'm not normally a great fan of Lovecraft – yes, many of the stories are well-written, and he has a lot of remarkable ideas; but the heavy reliance on "unspeakable", "unfathomable", "eldritch" and a handful of other words and ideas that seem to pop up at least once in every damned paragraph of his work…

On a day when I was feeling rather – I don't know – bored – by either writing or not writing, by the smallness of my life as it is… by going to restaurants or staying home, by all the things I'm not doing on this Labor Day weekend, by the holidays and end of…

A footnote to the above mention of Semi-Monde; I've predated it so that this appears below it. One of the odd jewels of my book collection is something I came upon almost by accident – where was it, I wonder? – in the old days working in the Gifts & Exchange section of the Smithsonian…