Posted on: December 27, 2008
by Robert Mueller
Reading Evgeny Zamyatin’s A Godforsaken Hole (Na kulichkakh, 1914), what is the novel like?
First of all, it is very funny. And familiar. And yet the strange thing is that those other novels and texts that it can remind you of would seem to come after; and it would not be any particular writer or book, but merely the feeling of its being so familiar.
What is funny about this book? Here we feel in Walker Foard’s translation (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988) the full effect of its capricious humor. The magic of caprice does in fact lead to something different, some indication of Zamyatin’s genius and personality. But the novel is known for its biting satire, and it got on people’s nerves once they noticed it, and so they burned and banned it: “By decree of the Supreme Commissariat of the Committee of Culture under Special Arrangements of His Most Esteemed the Tsar Nicholas of Russia the Second, any and all publication, illustration, distribution or infestation whatsoever of the writings purported to be unleashed under the title A Godforsaken Hole authored regrettably by the profane pen of one Evgeny Zamyatin are now and hereby placed in subjection to penalty by law and outrightly forbidden.” (official quotation mine).…
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Posted on: December 23, 2008
Autumn Woods, by Albert Bierstadt. 1886
Reading a very interesting collection of essays, The Genuine Article, by Edmund S. Morgan. It’s an historical look at early American life, taken primarily from his articles for the New York Review of Books.
Lots of food for thought. He tells us (indirectly) that historians of that early period have spent most of their time with New England, not because of bias, but because of available records. We are blessed with a huge amount and variety of journals, letters, public records, and assorted written indications of life for the early settlers in the north, but very little for those in Virginia and south of that colony. There was also a difference in family life, ratio of male to female and life expectancy that favored New England. More families settled in the north initially. Virginia and other southern colonies seemed to get far more indentured servants, and then slaves, and far fewer intact families.…
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Posted on: December 22, 2008
(taken from cape breton university)
i. the technique of oil painting
colors mixing
in the square. straw–
board fields. the buckram
coat. saucepan; stirring
sand to sun. corner–
ed: students pain–
ting…
***
the canvas
leaves. distant verid–
ian. the ochre stage. the
touched sky. (picasso: blue
tumblers.) the
wind, flak–
ing…
ii. testing: its place in education today
marks–
ism. learning
to score. strange fruit; pre–
pared minds. (the Ameri–
cannery…) waste pro–
ducts; fresh out of
school?
…
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Posted on: December 19, 2008
Flann O’Brien
The Third Policeman finds his way to At Swim-Two-Birds and lives to write about it, writes to live within it. Riding his bloody bike, he feels his molecules changing, becoming something other, something cyclical. Along the way, he meets Saint Augustine and James Joyce, both of whom are really dead, but only one of whom is an apparition.
The other is a bartender who doesn’t know about Finnegans Wake.
Well, actually, that’s only part of the story and the wrong part. The real Dalkey Archive is nothing like the above. I like the novel, but it’s just not up to the same standard as O’Brien’s (or O’Nolan’s) best two works, The Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds, which just happen to be among the very best novels of the 20th century in English.
The novel does start out with great promise, and is funny, well-written and nicely paced.…
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