Without Lifting A Finger

Finished one new Solstad (i.e., newly translated) and started on another: T Singer . Good stuff. * Clip: He didn’t know what sort of music she played, even though he could hear it clearly, though faintly, through the closed door, and he didn’t recognize the music, he made no connections to it, which isn’t especially strange since it was music for teenagers. A couple of times he did ask, in an attempt to be friendly, about the tune she was playing, and she always told him, both the name of the singer, whether it was a specific solo act or a group, and the name of the song, and she spoke this solo act or the band’s name, and the title of the song with obvious respect. But Singer had a bad habit of forgetting quite quickly both who was singing and what the title was, so that the next time he happened to ask her about the music he heard playing, it occurred to him as he asked, that this tune sounded exactly like what he’d heard the last time he had asked, not even a week ago, and...

Excerpt from King, Queen, Knave : The other day as they were having ice chocolate there, Martha counted at least three foreigners among the crowd. One, judging by his newspaper, was a Dane. The other two were a less easily determinable pair: the girl was trying in vain to attract the attention of the café cat, a small black animal sitting on a chair and licking one hind paw rigidly raised like a shouldered club. Her companion, a suntanned fellow, smoked and smiled. What language were they speaking? Polish? Esthonian? Leaning near them against the wall was some kind of net: a bag of pale-bluish gauze on a ring fixed to a rod of light metal.      "Shrimp catchers," said Martha. "I want shrimps for dinner tonight." (She clicked her front teeth."      "No," said Franz. "That's not a fisherman's net. That's for catching mosquitoes."      "Butterflies," said Dreyer, lifting an index finger.      "W...

She is at least part of why I am dipping into De Quincey again. In which of her works did she say, Read Quincey. That I no longer remember. * Woolf on De Quincey: Clearly, therefore, De Quincey as an autobiographer labours under great defects. He is diffuse and redundant; he is aloof and dreamy and in bondage to the old pruderies and conventions. At the same time he was capable of being transfixed by the mysterious solemnity of certain emotions; of realising how one moment may transcend in value fifty years. He was able to devote to their analysis a skill which the professed analysts of the human heart–the Scotts, the Jane Austens, the Byrons — did not then possess. We find him writing passages which, in their self-consciousness, are scarcely to be matched in the fiction of the nineteenth century: And, recollecting it, I am struck with the truth, that far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as invo...

Thomas Penson De Quincey ( / ˈ t ɒ m ə s d ə ˈ k w ɪ n s i / ; [ 1 ] 15 August 1785 – 8 December 1859) was an English essayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). [ 2 ] [ 3 ] Many scholars suggest that in publishing this work De Quincey inaugurated the tradition of addiction literature in the West. Medical Issues: A number of medical practitioners have speculated on the physical ailments that inspired and underlay De Quincey's resort to opium, and searched the corpus of his autobiographical works for evidence. One possibility is "a mild … case of infantile paralysis" that he may have contracted from Wordsworth's children. [ 28 ] De Quincey certainly had intestinal problems, and problems with his vision – which could have been related: "uncorrected myopic astigmatism … manifests itself as digestive problems in men." [ 29 ] De Quincey also suffered neuralgic facial pain, "trigeminal neuralgia"  – "attack...

  [Photo by WOJTEK JAKUBOWSKI] 

Jan Peter Tripp (* May 15 1945 in Oberstdorf in the Allgäu ) is a German painter and graphic artist . Life and Work Jan Peter Tripp is the son of the painter Franz Josef Tripp and his wife Josefa Tripp. Jan Peter Tripp went to Oberstdorf in the elementary school and the secondary school, together with the later writer WG Sebald . The two linked up to Sebald's death in 2001, a deep friendship, and Sebald dedicated in his collection of essays lodging in a country house, the last chapter Tripps painting. Tripp made ​​in 1965 in Oberstdorf, the High School and then studied for two years at the Free Art School in Stuttgart in Gerd Neisser . From 1967 to 1970 he attended the Academy in Stuttgart and studied sculpture at Rudolf Daudert . He then spent two years as a master student of painting at Rudolf Hausner . In 1971, he was by the German Academic Exchange Service with a university scholarship in Vienna excellent. The following year he received another award a...

Finished Cosmos , sparingly dipping into Dziennik (kind of saving it for my trip to Germany/Poland this summer), and am re-reading Nabokov's Speak, Memory  (third time, first time via Kindle). * From Speak : My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the émigré who "hates the Reds" because they "stole" his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.      And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche:           ... Beneath the sky           Of my America to sigh                  For one locality in           ...

Johan August Strindberg (   pronounced   ( help · info ) ; 22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics. [ 4 ] A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy , monodrama , and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. [ 5 ] [ 6 ] From his earliest work, Strindberg developed forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition so innovative that many were to become technically possible to stage only with the advent of film. [ 7 ] He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has ...