Books 2014
Books I have read in the Julian Year 2014
9 Books, 2224 Pages, ( 247 avg. pp/book)
9. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (245 pp.)
8. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (288 pp.)
7. African Goldweights, Tom Phillips (185 pp.)
6. Love and Garbage, Ivan Klima (224 pp.)
5. The Casuarina Tree, W.S. Maugham (247 pp.)
4. Nabokov's Butterfly, Rick Gekoski (248 pp.)
3. My Cocaine Museum, Michael Taussig (329 pp.)
2. Orchid Fever, Eric Hansen (268 pp.)
1. Coffee Basics, Kevin Knox and Julie Sheldon Huffaker(190 pp.)
Casuarina Tree
45
“Life is rather drab and grey, and happiness is so rare. We shall be dead so long.”
“Graceful rather than pretty.”
Remains of the Day
179
Bbut what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? Once could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way. In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points,' one can surely only recognize such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one loks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, and years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidentally small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.
My Cocaine Museum
xviii
Would that we could strip these fetishes of thei mythology and thus expose the true and real substances themselves, naked nad alone in their primal state of natural being. Yet even if we couldl, we would thereby destroy that which animates us, those suntle tricks played on human unerstandign by substances that appear to speak for themselves. The language I want is just that language that uns along the seam where matter and myth connect and disconnect continuously.
66
Like Genet, then, Travers admits to going beyond reality as the way of doing it justice.
90
What's more, history decayed into images, not stories, and it was the take of the historian to locate thse images - dialectical images, he called them - which would rescue the past because of their resonance with present circumstance.
200
History becomes space, and space is held tightly in a clenched fist.
235
Fundamental to the operation of the dialectical image, as I see it, is that it stands at the crossroads of a piled-up contradiction like a smash on the freeway of time such that several dimensions come into play, simultaneously. There is a juxtaposition of images; this is the montage dimension, and its task is to conjure forth all the tricks in the surrealist took kit; surprise, wonder, and even shock. Then there is the tense stasis of shock itself, a phase of compressed nothingness in which memory, space, and time all coagulate and then reconfigure past and present, leading to the third dimension, which is the alchemical one wherein image and material being fuse and transform one another. Voila! The dialectical image!.
248
Yet this apparent flight into the sacred by means of stones is abruptly checked by what Caillois perceives as the base materiality of stone, containing “nothing divine that is not mater, lava, fusion, cosmic tumult.” Such “negative divinity” is a stunning instance of the surreal “profane illumination” that stones provide.
257
For the world without gods is the truly fascinating world - the world of heat and rain, swamp and stone, gold and cocaine-- the world where myth and reality merge in the shapes of creates and forces that are barely distinguishable from the muck and rush of nature, monstrous earth and sea creatures like the Cyclops, like Poseidon, and like the Gorgons, or else strange magical beings rooted on rocks in the open sea like the Sirens with their sweet song making sailors lose their minds, or hidden on islands like that witch Circe-all of whom had to be subdued and even more importantly had to have their powers appropriated by the new regime of reality shapers gathered around Olympus.
Love and Garbage
8
Rubbish is immortal, it pervades the air, swells up in water, dissolves, rots, and disintegrates, changes into gas, into smoke, into soot, it travels across the world and gradually engulfs it.
16
It occurred to me that for a long time now I had only moved from one day to the next, from getting up to going ot bed, and that, while I composed plots, my own plot had ground to a half, was not developing, and was beginning to come apart.
20
But maybe she'd seen something after all, because otherwise she wouldn't have wished to meet me again, she wouldn't have voluntarily set out on a pilgrimage which, in moments of anger, she was to proclaim had led her only to pain. I have myself sometimes been amazed that she had come so close to me.
33
Man is reluctant to accept that his life has come to a conclusion in that most important respect, that his hopes have been fulfilled. He hesitates to look death in the face, and there is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love.
74-75
At one time I used to write plays. The characters were forever talking, but their words went past each other, their remarks slid past one another like the slippery bodies of fish, without making contact. Did I write that way because I believe we could step out of our loneliness? Or because I needed to find a way of avoiding answers? Where words miss each other, where humans miss each other, real conflict may arise. Or did I suspect that a man cannot successfully defend himself in the eyes of another, and when he is talking he's doing so only to drown the silence which spreads around him? To conceal from himself the reality of life, a reality which, at best, he perceives only at exceptional moments of awareness?
112
But what sense would there be in a God who existence and likeness were subject to the same laws as everything else, a God who'd be subject to time?
130
The amount of freedom is not increasing in our age, even though it may sometimes seem to be. All that increases is the needless movement of things, words, garbage, and violence. And because nothing can vanish from the face of the planet, the fruits of our activity do not liberate us but bury us.
147
Kafka with his shyness sought a way of communicating his torment and simultaneously concealing it. Yet it was so personal that it was not enough for him to express it only in hidden form, only in metaphor; time and again he was prompted to make an open confession of the experiences which touched on the essence of his being. As if he were relating an event twice. First he draws his fantastic image: a bizarre and mysterious trial, an execution machine, or a surveyor's desperate effort to get into an inaccessible castle, and second he assembles the fragments of real experiences and events. He writes everything on translucent sheets of paper or on glass and places them one over the other. Some things supplement each other, some things cover each other, some things find themselves in such surprising company that he must surely have been blissfully amazed himself. Behold, he no longer lies fatally exhausted and impotent in bed with his lover who offers him her redeeming and merciful proximity, but he finds himself, as a mortally weary surveyor, in bed with the castle official, and that man offers him his liberating bureaucratic mercy.
181-182
We long for paradise and we long to escape from loneliness.
We attempt to do so by seeking a great love, or else we blunder from one person to another in the hope that someone will at last take notice of us, will long to meet us or at least to talk to us. Some write poetry for this reason, or go on protest marches, cheer some figure, make friends with the heroes of television serials, believe in gods or in revolutionary comradeship, turn into informers to ensure they are sympathetically received at least at some police department, or they strangle someone. Even murder is an encounter between one man and another.
223
It occurred ot me that I put on that orange vest for a time because I was longing or a cleaning. Man longs for a cleaning but instead he starts cleaning up his surroundings. But until man cleanses himself he's wasting his time cleaning up the world around him.
9 Books, 2224 Pages, ( 247 avg. pp/book)
9. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (245 pp.)
8. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (288 pp.)
7. African Goldweights, Tom Phillips (185 pp.)
6. Love and Garbage, Ivan Klima (224 pp.)
5. The Casuarina Tree, W.S. Maugham (247 pp.)
4. Nabokov's Butterfly, Rick Gekoski (248 pp.)
3. My Cocaine Museum, Michael Taussig (329 pp.)
2. Orchid Fever, Eric Hansen (268 pp.)
1. Coffee Basics, Kevin Knox and Julie Sheldon Huffaker(190 pp.)
Casuarina Tree
45
“Life is rather drab and grey, and happiness is so rare. We shall be dead so long.”
“Graceful rather than pretty.”
Remains of the Day
179
Bbut what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? Once could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way. In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points,' one can surely only recognize such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one loks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, and years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidentally small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.
My Cocaine Museum
xviii
Would that we could strip these fetishes of thei mythology and thus expose the true and real substances themselves, naked nad alone in their primal state of natural being. Yet even if we couldl, we would thereby destroy that which animates us, those suntle tricks played on human unerstandign by substances that appear to speak for themselves. The language I want is just that language that uns along the seam where matter and myth connect and disconnect continuously.
66
Like Genet, then, Travers admits to going beyond reality as the way of doing it justice.
90
What's more, history decayed into images, not stories, and it was the take of the historian to locate thse images - dialectical images, he called them - which would rescue the past because of their resonance with present circumstance.
200
History becomes space, and space is held tightly in a clenched fist.
235
Fundamental to the operation of the dialectical image, as I see it, is that it stands at the crossroads of a piled-up contradiction like a smash on the freeway of time such that several dimensions come into play, simultaneously. There is a juxtaposition of images; this is the montage dimension, and its task is to conjure forth all the tricks in the surrealist took kit; surprise, wonder, and even shock. Then there is the tense stasis of shock itself, a phase of compressed nothingness in which memory, space, and time all coagulate and then reconfigure past and present, leading to the third dimension, which is the alchemical one wherein image and material being fuse and transform one another. Voila! The dialectical image!.
248
Yet this apparent flight into the sacred by means of stones is abruptly checked by what Caillois perceives as the base materiality of stone, containing “nothing divine that is not mater, lava, fusion, cosmic tumult.” Such “negative divinity” is a stunning instance of the surreal “profane illumination” that stones provide.
257
For the world without gods is the truly fascinating world - the world of heat and rain, swamp and stone, gold and cocaine-- the world where myth and reality merge in the shapes of creates and forces that are barely distinguishable from the muck and rush of nature, monstrous earth and sea creatures like the Cyclops, like Poseidon, and like the Gorgons, or else strange magical beings rooted on rocks in the open sea like the Sirens with their sweet song making sailors lose their minds, or hidden on islands like that witch Circe-all of whom had to be subdued and even more importantly had to have their powers appropriated by the new regime of reality shapers gathered around Olympus.
Love and Garbage
8
Rubbish is immortal, it pervades the air, swells up in water, dissolves, rots, and disintegrates, changes into gas, into smoke, into soot, it travels across the world and gradually engulfs it.
16
It occurred to me that for a long time now I had only moved from one day to the next, from getting up to going ot bed, and that, while I composed plots, my own plot had ground to a half, was not developing, and was beginning to come apart.
20
But maybe she'd seen something after all, because otherwise she wouldn't have wished to meet me again, she wouldn't have voluntarily set out on a pilgrimage which, in moments of anger, she was to proclaim had led her only to pain. I have myself sometimes been amazed that she had come so close to me.
33
Man is reluctant to accept that his life has come to a conclusion in that most important respect, that his hopes have been fulfilled. He hesitates to look death in the face, and there is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love.
74-75
At one time I used to write plays. The characters were forever talking, but their words went past each other, their remarks slid past one another like the slippery bodies of fish, without making contact. Did I write that way because I believe we could step out of our loneliness? Or because I needed to find a way of avoiding answers? Where words miss each other, where humans miss each other, real conflict may arise. Or did I suspect that a man cannot successfully defend himself in the eyes of another, and when he is talking he's doing so only to drown the silence which spreads around him? To conceal from himself the reality of life, a reality which, at best, he perceives only at exceptional moments of awareness?
112
But what sense would there be in a God who existence and likeness were subject to the same laws as everything else, a God who'd be subject to time?
130
The amount of freedom is not increasing in our age, even though it may sometimes seem to be. All that increases is the needless movement of things, words, garbage, and violence. And because nothing can vanish from the face of the planet, the fruits of our activity do not liberate us but bury us.
147
Kafka with his shyness sought a way of communicating his torment and simultaneously concealing it. Yet it was so personal that it was not enough for him to express it only in hidden form, only in metaphor; time and again he was prompted to make an open confession of the experiences which touched on the essence of his being. As if he were relating an event twice. First he draws his fantastic image: a bizarre and mysterious trial, an execution machine, or a surveyor's desperate effort to get into an inaccessible castle, and second he assembles the fragments of real experiences and events. He writes everything on translucent sheets of paper or on glass and places them one over the other. Some things supplement each other, some things cover each other, some things find themselves in such surprising company that he must surely have been blissfully amazed himself. Behold, he no longer lies fatally exhausted and impotent in bed with his lover who offers him her redeeming and merciful proximity, but he finds himself, as a mortally weary surveyor, in bed with the castle official, and that man offers him his liberating bureaucratic mercy.
181-182
We long for paradise and we long to escape from loneliness.
We attempt to do so by seeking a great love, or else we blunder from one person to another in the hope that someone will at last take notice of us, will long to meet us or at least to talk to us. Some write poetry for this reason, or go on protest marches, cheer some figure, make friends with the heroes of television serials, believe in gods or in revolutionary comradeship, turn into informers to ensure they are sympathetically received at least at some police department, or they strangle someone. Even murder is an encounter between one man and another.
223
It occurred ot me that I put on that orange vest for a time because I was longing or a cleaning. Man longs for a cleaning but instead he starts cleaning up his surroundings. But until man cleanses himself he's wasting his time cleaning up the world around him.