- Hieronymous Alloy
- Jan 30, 2009
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Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!
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Morbid Hound
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Book of the Month Poll -- April!
Whan that apriilllllleeeeeee, biotch
Ok, here we go. Pick the April book selection. Perce that droghte. Perce it to the roote.
First option:
Hemingway's A Moveable Feast
quote:
A Moveable Feast is a memoir by American author Ernest Hemingway about his years as an expatriate writer in Paris in the 1920s. The book describes Hemingway's apprenticeship as a young writer while he was married to his first wife, Hadley. Other people featured in the book include Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Hilaire Belloc, Pascin, John Dos Passos, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Hermann von Wedderkop.
The book was not published during Hemingway's lifetime, but edited from his manuscripts and notes by his fourth wife and widow, Mary Hemingway. It was published posthumously in 1964, three years after Hemingway's death. An edition revised by his grandson Seán Hemingway was published in 2009.
quote:
"Finally when we were eating the cherry tart and had a last carafe of wine he said, 'You know I never slept with anyone except Zelda.'
'No, I didn't.'
'I thought I'd told you.'
'No. You told me a lot of things but not that.'
'That is what I want to ask you about.'
'Good. Go on.'
'Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally. [This conversation was held somewhat after what Hemingway describes as "what was then called her first nervous breakdown."] She said it was a matter of measurements. I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.'
'Come out to the office,' I said.
'Where is the office?'
'Le water," [the men's room] I said.
We came back into the room and sat down at the table.
'You're perfectly fine,' I said. 'You are O.K. There's nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile.'
'Those statues may not be accurate.'
'They are pretty good. Most people would settle for them.'
'But why would she say it?'
'To put you out of business. That's the oldest way in the world of putting people out of business. Scott, you asked me to tell you the truth and I can tell you a lot more but this is the absolute truth and all you need. You could have gone to a doctor.'
'I didn't want to. I wanted you to tell me truly.'
'Now do you believe me?'
'I don't know,' he said.
'Come on over to the Louvre,' I said. 'It's just down the street and across the river.'
We went over to the Louvre and he looked at the statues but still he was doubtful about himself.
'It is not basically a question of the size in repose,' I said. 'It is the size that it becomes. It is also a question of angle.'
I explained to him about using a pillow and a few other things that might be useful for him to know.
'There is one girl,' he said, 'who has been very nice to me. But after what Zelda said--'
'Forget what Zelda said,' I told him. 'Zelda is crazy. There's nothing wrong with you. Just have confidence and do what the girl wants. Zelda just wants to destroy you.'
'You don't know anything about Zelda.'
'All right,' I said. 'Let it go at that. But you came to lunch to ask me a question and I've tried to give you an honest answer.'
But he was still doubtful.
'Should we go and see some pictures?' I asked. 'Have you ever seen anything in here except the Mona Lisa?'
'I'm not in the mood for looking at pictures,' he said. 'I promised to meet some people at the Ritz bar.'"
http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/03/hemingway-reassures-fitzgerald-about-his-penis.html
Second Option:
John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
This is a personal favorite of mine. It's one of Steinbeck's very few upbeat, happy novels.
quote:
Cannery Row is a novel by American author John Steinbeck, published in 1945. It is set during the Great Depression in Monterey, California, on a street lined with sardine canneries that is known as Cannery Row. The story revolves around the people living there: Lee Chong, the local grocer; Doc, a marine biologist based on Steinbeck's friend Ed Ricketts; and Mack, the leader of a group of bums.
The actual location Steinbeck was writing about, Ocean View Avenue in Monterey, was later renamed "Cannery Row" in honor of the book. A film version was released in 1982 and a stage version was produced in 1995.
quote:
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen" and he would have meant the same thing.
Third Option:
The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am by Kjersti A. Skomsvold
Contemporary, Norwegian, Female author:
quote:I LIKE IT WHEN I can be done with something. Like a knitted earwarmer, like winter, spring, summer, fall. Even like Epsilon’s career. I like to get things over with. But impatience has consequences. That time when Epsilon gave me an orchid for my birthday. I didn't really want an orchid. I never got the point of flowers, they’re just going to wither and die. What I actually wanted was for Epsilon to retire. “But I need a refuge, away from all the . . .”— for a second I thought he was going to say “togetherness,” but instead he said “nakedness.” “Does that mean me?” I asked. “I'm not naming any names,” he said.
So I undressed for the orchid instead, and soon the buds began to blossom, little pink flowers were springing out everywhere. “I wish you had the same effect on me,” Epsilon said.
The directions that came with the orchid said to prune the flowers after they wilt, then they’d revive in six months. First, though, the flowers had to die. So I watched and waited and finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. Time to be done, I told myself, and then I pruned the plant down to its skinny, bare stalks.
“What happened here?” Epsilon asked when he came home from work. “I did what I had to do,” I said. “The flowers wouldn't wither. But don’t worry. There will be flowers again in six months, just in time for fall. If I’d waited any longer, we would have risked not having flowers until winter.” But fall came and went, and then winter, and then spring, the flowers didn't return, the orchid was dead, and for my next birthday I got a throw pillow.
Fourth Option:
Egalia's Daughters by Gerd Brantenberg
But, seeing as people want some more modern texts by Nordic authors - as well as women - I'm going to recommend Gerd Brantenberg's Egalia's Daughters. It's a fantastic feminist text that plays a lot with language, and the translation into English is incredible; it's one of those books I teach to help my male students learn about feminism; the entire premise of the novel is a world of reversed gender norms, with the language modified to match, and it plays with this by rewriting the first chapter in more familiar language, without the reversed gender elements. It can be a bit heavy-handed, but it's a fantastic novel.
Fifth (Comedy) Option:
The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin
quote:
The Three-Body Problem (simplified Chinese: 三体; traditional Chinese: 三體, Three Body) is a science fiction novel by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. It is the first of a trilogy titled Remembrance of Earth’s Past, but Chinese readers generally refer to the series by the title of the first novel.[1] The title refers to the three-body problem in orbital mechanics.
The book was published in 2008 and became one of the most popular sci-fiction novels in China.[2] It received the Chinese Science Fiction Galaxy Award in 2006.
An English translation by Ken Liu was published by Tor Books on November 11, 2014. It was nominated for the 2014 Nebula Award for Best Novel.[3]
This one's getting rave reviews and it's on my list this month anyway. I haven't read it yet but supposedly relatively intellectual. This one is probably pretty good and I'm putting it on the list to see if something more "casual" will help get participation numbers up.
Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Mar 25, 2015
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Mar 25, 2015 21:00
