(Untitled)

[proximoception]

"Shakespeare's Memory" is a lot more moving when you take it as being about Borges. That is, that he still had at 80 the memories of whoever it was that could write like he did c. 40, but was not that writer

Comments

[nightspore]

Miss reading because you're writing?

I love this: "Calvino and Borges got some kind of special pass for continuing Kafka. Maybe Abe did too. His premises, anyway - Beckett and others took over his essence, his white noise self. I kind of prefer the premises. Funny how his ideas can persist in both. I guess because Kafka read his own stories: read too many Kafka stories and you become Beckett. It's like the Italian and Argentine had heard and repeated without listening. Or perhaps it's merely their firm secularity? Maybe Kafka himself couldn't listen to what he was saying for being too close to the roar of religion."

But I love Kafka best of all these.

Hey do you know the Nabokov story "The Vane Sisters"? A cut below, obviously, but pretty cool.

[proximoception]

I don't think so, will look for it.

Miss reading because I don't read, except for work. Excepting tiny bits of cheating now and then.

[proximoception]

I'm missing the point of the Nabokov story, I guess? Must have been difficult to do and all, but so what? Also not seeing the connection with Borges.

The snow walk stuff was fantastic, and if anything rather ruined by the review.

[proximoception]

Thought brought me 'round. It's The Dead again, in a new fashion - it's not that he's haunted, but that he wants to see it that way, like she did. That he wants those moments to have been given to him by them, the ability to see them. Which it may have been, but the wanting is the more important thing - the "gesture." To keep their drops and rainbows going, some. A companion piece to Signs and Symbols in its way.

I'm still not used to sentiment (good sense) being married to both cynicism and gamesplaying in N. As strange a tone as Stendhal's or Thoreau's, but I got used to them I guess. Nabokov I still enjoy at once and an hour later but am creeped out by in between.

[agoraphiliac]

Wow. I especially like this

[proximoception]

I'm always reading something, I guess, but events have conspired against pleasure reading. To the point where I don't think I've read a leisure book since whenever Red Doc came out. And have had to cut a lot of corners with non-leisure ones.

Maybe that can change soon.