Charl08 vs library's reservation shelf #2

“What we remember is probably fiction anyway.” —Beryl Bainbridge http://t.co/PgB7IVUq8f

— Quoted by The Paris Review (@parisreview)


(L) Lighthouse, Mull. (R) Gerard Manley Hopkins quote, part of a wall of Scottish poetry on the Scottish Parliament building, Edinburgh.

"What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness?
Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet,
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet."

• Nigeria The XIth Hour CM Okonkwo
• Australia Truth Peter Temple READ
• US Walter Mosely Bad boy brawly Brown READ
• Poland Zygmunt Miloszewski's Entanglement READ
  
• Thanks to drneutron I can add The Land of Dreams to the wish list

• Middlemarch
• The Broken Road By Patrick Leigh Fermor
• The Story of a Non-marrying Man
• The Periodic Table
• In a Free State
• Season of Migration to the North
• The Wake
• Three Letter Plague

• Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh The Anti-Social Family
• Lynne Segal Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure
• Sheila Rowbotham Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World
• Juliet Mitchell Woman’s Estate
• Shulamith Firestone The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
• Christine Delphy Dominating Others: Feminism and Racism after the War on Terror.

... I plunked down on the packed sand and started rereading, for the sixth or seventh time,The Grapes of Wrath.
"Readin' good books is like meeting' a girl you wanna get to know bettah," Jackson Blue once told me. "You don't just have one talk and think you know her. If that was true there wouldn't be no need to get to know more; it wouldn't be worth it. Naw, man, you wanna talk to that girl again and again. You remember her phone number and every time you talk you find out something' else. Same thing with a good book. You got to read that suckah again and again and still you finding' out sumpin' new ever time."
I liked the way Steinbeck understood the plight of a man displaced by nature and society...

Debt-ridden students also fled to the army, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who signed up secretly as a private in the 15th Light Dragoons... He couldn't ride well,had rusty equipment, found himself nursing a man with smallpox and after three months of misery was extricated by his brothers, discharged as 'insane'.

Ballard made history by performing a methodical and seemingly ordinary act - writing a few words in her diary every day. Through the diary we know her as a pious herbalist whose curiosity about the human body led her to observe and record autopsies as well as nurse the sick, whose integrity allowed her to testify in a sensational rape trial... and whose sense of duty took her out of bed at night not only to deliver babies but to care for the bodies of a wife and children murdered but heir own husband and father.

Tom walked between the lines
of coffee for half a mile
knocking fragments
of water onto his sleeves -
little bubble lenses
that amplified the weave
then broke, darkening in.

The large, composed silence of the library
with its little human lapses: coughs
rustled paper, the bump of books.
Thrumming a card index, the corners
of popular titles soft as seed heads
where the glue had worn away
the fibres coming loose.

This is another aspect of rural life that's lost now the middle-class diaspora has populated the countryside with property owning vagrants: the peculiar hell of having to live with such substantial ghosts from your past.

Ahmed Kathrada:Years and years ago, I went through very hurriedly the Complete Works when I had nothing else to do, but there were passages that made an impact, which I can't off-hand remember. Some of them of course I do... Off-hand I remember, because I quoted it at the memorial service of Walter Sisulu, a former Robben Islander. I quoted that, 'His life was gentle; and the elements; So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up, And say to all the world, THIS WAS A MAN!'

I knew how to hide in books. If need be I could build a kind of nest out of any old scraps of print I found around. The taste for words Grandpa had given me was thoroughly promiscuous. I read everything in no particular order.…

Since she made two or three movies a year, each one taking about a month to shoot, she had spare time to fill. She didn't drink and she didn't like to party, so she took up inventing.

Mr Cuddy called in every student for questioning - Have you seen Jesus? - and eventually announced that if Jesus did not return there would be no Christmas Mass.
....
(the doll is still not found)
....
By this stage the whole school was on the side of the kidnappers, and false sightings were announced hourly. Jesus was in the Chemistry lab. He was in the Girls' changing room before games. He was taking French Oral with sub Miss Trigot.
That lad is everywhere, Thomas Halvey said.

A day or two ago (I find it difficult to keep up with atrocities) fifteen Iraqi civilians were blown up in a Baghdad residential street... Pressed about civilian deaths, Big Chief Rumsfeld comments, 'Stuff happens.' Years ago our Minister of Justice, Jimmy Kruger, responded to the news of Steve Biko's death in detention, 'It leaves me cold.' Today that is all he is remembered for.

At this point a lady made her energetic way towards us. ‘I’m sorry you’re having such trouble here,’ she said to me. ‘Let me introduce myself: my name is Rödelsheimer.’ I found out later that she was a musicologist.....‘Well, Fräulein Jalowicz, you made a mistake,’ she explained to me. ‘You acted like a normal human being.’

That was what the Hellers were like: on the one hand heroically ready to risk their lives for others, on the other thinking as much of their polished floor as of resistance to the Nazis.

When I saw a name that I didn’t like on a door, because it had a Nazi ring to it, I squatted down and did my business. I left some newspaper there too. What would the people in that apartment think next morning when they found what I had left on their doormat?

Of the half-dozen books I had owned, Isaac had managed to rescue only one from my room. The loss was negligible. I knew the lost books almost by heart, and the same was true for the one with me. I took my copy of Great Expectations into the courtyard and sat near the tree. I didn't read the book so much as I recited it; I could have gone minutes without looking down at the page and not lost a word, just as I knew my father and uncles must have done with the stories they told me and their own children. The stories were lifeless until they made something out of them, and that was what I did that morning. London was now Kampala; Pip, a poor African orphan wandering the streets of the capital.

Salar the Salmon a book so good that reading it you feel you're on a river.

Each journal is carefully kept, blue marbling inside and blackly leather-bound like a Lesser Bible. The first time i opened one I felt indecent. I love the feel of a book. I love the touch and smell and sound of the pages. I love the handling. A book is a sensual thing. You sit curled in a chair with it or like me you take it to bed and it's, well, enveloping. Weird I am. I know. What the Hell? as Bobby Bowe says to everything. You either get it or you don't.

When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of the writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds; these were the literal original Facebooks, the books where faces had been, and I just loved it, the whole strange sense of being aboard a readership.

As they parked the car and got ready, she caught sight of some other people in the park lying under a tree on a blanket, lazing in the shade with their books. Lucky bastards.

The alternative that isn't on offer is what I want, but can't voice: to return to the roar of the breakers on the rocks and the gulls overhead beating their wings against the wind.

Some reviewers are outraged though. These men own Eliot. Who is this female scurrying around, sifting papers? I try (though don't quite manage) to console myself with Virgina Woolf's comic portrait of the gentleman put out to find the housemaid turning over books in his library.

...the deep pursuit will be that question Woolf asked about what is obscured in our nature: the authenticity of unuttered thoughts, the pressure to communicate the incommunicable - to say directly, even awkwardly, what's in the mind

‘Do you seriously think I would not be intellectually capable of writing down the story of my life if I wanted to?’ My mother, then aged about seventy, shouted this question down the phone

Suddenly I heard a distant voice: Po Yerushalayim (This is Jerusalem). I knocked on the wall above the receiver and cried, ‘Chaverim (comrades), I’m shut up here with an impossible Dutchman in an apartment full of bugs belonging to a Nazi woman called Blase! But I want to live! I’m fighting, I’m doing my best to survive! Shalom, shalom!’

A film with Marika Rökk was showing, and at this time everyone wanted to see it. People longed for something to take their minds off reality, and long lines formed outside the cinemas. Even in great cold or driving rain, they were ready to queue for several hours with the prospect of such enjoyment ahead. I loved to see these kitschy films myself. I identified with the women stars, imagining myself in their wonderful dresses, dancing gracefully through ballrooms. Meanwhile a second part of my mind was closely analysing the political ideology of the films, which were designed to encourage the populace to see things through while also looking for such diversions, and I despised the sentimentality served up by the Nazis.

Please don’t be surprised if I tell you that I feel I’ve emigrated already. I have emigrated from Hitler’s Germany to the Germany of Goethe and Johann Sebastian Bach, and I feel very comfortable there

We have to come to terms with the fact that we cannot solve the riddle, we must content ourselves with admitting to our ignorance and grant it an asylum by using the word ‘chance’, and establishing that it is the deciding factor in all stories of survival.

Freddy cracked the door and stuck his face out, as if he was an old woman who read the newspapers and was not so sure about this man who said that he had come to check her gas meter.

For the Line was broken, as all lines finally are; it was all for nothing, and of it nothing remained. People kept on longing for meaning and hope, but the annals of the past are a muddy story of chaos only.
And of that colossal ruin, boundless and buried, the lone and level jungle stretched far away. Of imperial dreams and dead men, all that remained was long grass.