To make up for light posting and little time to read, I wanted to share a passage from Petersburg that I found fascinating. I realize it is an overlong excerpt, but I found I couldn’t cut anything out of it and retain its power. To set the stage: Nikolai Apollonovich (Kolenka) has just returned home […]
Author: Dwight
So…another brief recap of things I’ve been listening to over the past couple of months as well as a few I missed in the previous audiobook recap. The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño I read and listened to 2666 but only listened to this book. A wild ride and after it’s done I feel I don’t […]
I’ve read maybe 10 pages this week and got nothin’, so in the spirit of Halloween I present a few clips of Monster Chiller Horror Theatre with Count Floyd. I haven’t seen these clips in years (and only vaguely remember seeing them the first time) but I’m hooked again and look foward to seeing more […]
Those were strange, misty days: venomous October was passing with its freezing tread; frozen dust blew around the city in drab-brown vortices; and the golden whisper of foliage lay down submissively on the paths of the Summer Garden, and he rustling purple lay down submissively at people’s feet, to wind and chase at the feet […]
How terrible is the fate of an ordinary, perfectly normal man: his life is resolved by a vocabulary of readily understood words, and by the practice of exceedingly clear actions; those actions carry him into the boundless distance, like a little boat rigged with words and gestures that are entirely expressible; if, however, that boat […]
From an article by E. J. Wagner in November’s Smithsonian: On the evening of April 6, 1830, the light of a full moon stole through the windows of 128 Essex Street, one of the grandest houses in Salem, Massachusetts. Graced with a beautifully balanced red brick facade, a portico with white Corinthian columns and a […]
Nikolai, upon crashing a ball wearing a cape and domino but freezing on the dancefloor, begins to realize he has turned a bad situation into something worse… It was still him, of course: Nikolai Apollonovich. He had come today to say—to say what? He had forgotten his own self; forgotten his thoughts; and forgotten his […]
Picture source My introduction to the use of contrasting plants to send an evil message involved a neighbor’s yard sprouting winter grass in their dormant bermuda grass reading “31 – 7”—that year’s Alabama/Auburn football score. Every day, until the neighbor seeded the rest of his yard with winter grass, I would look out my bathroom […]
Apollon Apollonovich had a strange secret of his own: a world of figures, contours, tremors, weird physical sensations—in short: a universe of oddities. This universe always arose on the brink of sleep, and it arose in such a way that, at the moment he dropped off to sleep, Apollon Apollonovich would remember all the incoherences […]
The Neglected Books Page had a review of the audiobook releases of William Gaddis’ The Recognitions and JR. Based on the review, I downloaded The Recognitions and have been listening to it for the last two weeks. It is everything said in the Neglected review—Nick Sullivan’s performance is amazing. Reading Gaddis can be frustrating, trying […]