The Rembrandt by Edith Wharton

“You’re so artistic,” my cousin Eleanor Copt began.

Of all Eleanor’s exordiums it is the one I most dread. When she tells me I’m so clever I know this is merely the preamble to inviting me to meet the last literary obscurity of the moment: a trial to be evaded or endured, as circumstances dictate; whereas her calling me artistic fatally connotes the request to visit, in her company, some distressed gentlewoman whose future hangs on my valuation of her old Saxe or of her grandfather’s Marc Antonios. Time was when I attempted to resist these compulsions of Eleanor’s; but I soon learned that, short of actual flight, there was no refuge from her beneficent despotism. It is not always easy for the curator of a museum to abandon his post on the plea of escaping a pretty cousin’s importunities; and Eleanor, aware of my predicament, is none too magnanimous to take advantage of it. Magnanimity is, in fact, not in Eleanor’s line. The virtues, she once explained to me, are like bonnets: the very ones that look best on other people may not happen to suit one’s own particular style; and she added, with a slight deflection of metaphor, that none of the ready-made virtues ever had fitted her: they all pinched somewhere, and she’d given up trying to wear them.

Therefore when she said to me, “You’re so artistic.” emphasizing the conjunction with a tap of her dripping umbrella (Eleanor is out in all weathers: the elements are as powerless against her as man), I merely stipulated, “It’s not old Saxe again?”

She shook her head reassuringly. “A picture–a Rembrandt!” 

“Good Lord! Why not a Leonardo?”  

“Well”–she smiled–“that, of course, depends on you.”

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Via Things Magazine

Three Days In June -Anne Tyler

I am always eager to read a new Anne Tyler novel and luckily for me she produces one every few years. She has an unerring sense of character, place and family that draws the reader in. Her often eccentric characters encounter crises that are the same bumps that many of us encounter on the rocky road of life. Marriages are often uneasy and sometimes dissolve but the partners are good people.

At just 176 pages “Three Days In June” is a short novel about Gail Baines, a woman who is getting ready for the marriage of her only daughter, Debbie. She has suddenly been thrown off balance. Her daughter’s in-laws-to-be are paying for the wedding and Gail is feeling left out of the loop. She is a teacher and receives the news that the promotion she was next in line for would be going to another candidate and she is told that she lacks the necessary people skills for the position. Her ex-husband, Max, arrives at her door expecting to stay with her for a few days - and he brings a stray cat with him! Gail’s day is not going well. The marriage stirs up uncomfortable memories for Gail and Max and when Debbie shares a secret they’d rather not hear it is the icing on the cake. 

Tyler has been writing for six decades and her critics say her novels are all similar. They are and that’s because she writes about what she knows and what we know. “Three Days In June” is a touchingly human story that has a familiar feel that I find very comfortable. 

Breaking And Entering - Joy Williams

'The houses on Crab Key were owned by people so wealthy that they were hardly ever there.'

Years ago I read Joy Williams’ book, The Florida Keys: A History & Guide because I wanted to visit the Keys. It was a unique travel guide, witty and charming. I never made it to the Keys but when I saw a recommendation for Breaking and Entering, Williams’ 3rd novel written in 1988, I remembered the guidebook and decided to give this one a go. It’s about Liberty and Willie, a young, unemployed couple, who break into Florida Keys properties when the owners are away. They have a home of their own but enjoy the superior amenities of these properties for awhile and leave before the owners return. Liberty is unable to have children of her own but has a big white rescue dog and two neglected neighbourhood children that she has befriended. She is depressed. Liberty and Willie have been together since they were teenagers but lately she finds him drifting away.

This is a story about America’s dark side. There is a black cloud hanging over it. Will they get caught breaking and entering? Will they be victims of the gun violence that is pervasive in Florida? This is not a feelgood book - it starts on a whimsical note and gets much bleaker - but it is well written and captures a world that I hope I never have to live in. 

Los Angeles, Indiana | Jesse Barron

“When he died last year, Gary Indiana was writing a novel called Remission. The title could refer to the cancer Gary was suffering from as he composed it, but as with most things Gary wrote, the word had multiple meanings and echoes. Gary intended Remission to be similar, on the surface, to the books in his great ‘American crime’ trilogy, at least in the sense that the story would revolve around a real, high-profile case.

The case had started in 2017. That summer, a man died of a meth overdose at an apartment in West Hollywood. The tenant of the apartment, Ed Buck, was a retired businessman turned political activist. The man who died, Gemmel Moore, was a twenty-six-year-old doing sex work. Buck was white, Moore black. The coroner ruled Moore’s death an accident, but a year later, a second man died of an overdose in Buck’s living room, and nine months after that, a third man called the police from a gas station on Santa Monica Boulevard, saying Buck had just given him a too-high shot of meth. Finally, the police arrested Buck, charging him with the two prior deaths, and a judge gave him thirty years. For obvious reasons, this received significant coverage in the media.”

Read more: Granta

A Day's Work

Memorable passages from the pulp detective stories of Robert Leslie Bellem (1902-1968):

• “There were tears brimming on her azure peepers, and tremulous grief twisted her kisser.” (“Forgery’s Foil”)
• “She wrapped her arms around my neck; glued her crimson kisser to my lips. She fed me an osculation that sent seven thousand volts of electricity past my tonsils.” (“Design for Dying”)
• “And then, from the doorway, a gun barked: ‘Chow-chow!’ and I went drifting to dreamland.” (“Design for Dying”)
• “The rod sneezed: ‘Chow! Ka-Chow!’ and pushed two pills through Reggie’s left thigh.” (“Murder Has Four Letters”)

Read More  Futility Closet

On publishing Charlotte Brontë’s miniature book of poems for the first time.

 

“As Patti Smith writes in her introduction to the first-ever publication of A Book of Ryhmes, the poet, a thirteen-year-old Charlotte Brontë, must have transcribed her ‘ryhmes’ (the misspelling is on her title page) into the tiny handmade book while sitting at the kitchen table in Haworth Parsonage. The 1829 winter was severe, Barbara Heritage tells us, and we all know something of the circumstances of the Brontë family at this time whether or not we realize that many of the myths have been reconsidered by researchers. Charlotte’s adolescent poetry may be rather derivative, but it was very accomplished for a child of her age and circumstances, and it was obviously heartfelt. Charlotte aspired to being a serious poet, while at the same time she imagined her verse to be written by the characters who populated the imaginary worlds she shared with her siblings.”

Read more: Literary Hub

Good Bones

How much should you tell your children?

Good Bones

By Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

 

Copyright Credit:

Maggie Smith, "Good Bones" from Waxwing.  Copyright © 2016 by Maggie Smith.  Reprinted by permission of Waxwing magazine

viaThe Poetry Foundation

Influencer Emily Dickinson’s Morning Routine

 

4:00 a.m. – Lie completely still and compose six hauntingly perfect quatrains in your mind. Refuse to scribble them down. Let them ferment in the silence like forbidden knowledge.

6:47 a.m. – Brew tea. Steep it precisely thirty-two seconds while murmuring a sonnet to the leaves. The tea listens. The tea understands.

8:00 a.m. – Receive a letter from Death. Decline his invitation; you cannot stop for him. Reseal the letter with wax and hide it under your pillow.

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How Hunter S. Thompson's Perceived Persona Overshadowed His Real Self

The narrator talks about Thompson’s difficult childhood, his brief criminal stints in high school, his first journalism job, and embedding with the Hell’s Angels, a project that came to a violent yet prosperous end.

(Laughing Squid)

Architect’s Watercolor by Arthur Sze

Architect’s Watercolor

An architect draws a watercolor

depicting two people about to

enter a meeting room, while

someone

on the stairway gazes through windows

at a park, river, skyscrapers

beyond; he does not want to be

locked

like a carbon atom in a benzene

ring but needs to rotate, lift off,

veer along wharves and

shoreline. In the acoustics of

this space,

he catches a needle bounce

off a black granite floor, wanders

from a main walkway, encounters

prickly pear burned purple in wind.

In the ocean gusts before dawn,

he yearns for a Mediterranean spray

where sunlight tingles eyelashes,

where sand releases heat

under the stars. In the atrium,

two violinists launch fireworks

of sound that arc, explode, dissolve

into threads of melodic charm.

Here slate near a pool of water

absorbs sunlight, releases ripples

into the evening; and in this space,

each minute is encounter:

he steps out and makes

footprints on a sidewalk dusted with snow.

Via Literary Hub

A run-on sentence on Gabriel García Márquez’s delirious novel The Autumn of the Patriarch

Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch isn’t so much a novel as it is a delirium, a swamp fever, a sun-bleached hallucination stretched across centuries, a beast that coils and uncoils, bloated with its own rot, a thing that does not begin or end but only festers, looping back on itself in great, heaving tides of unpunctuated or undepunctuated or mispunctuated thought, García Márquez dragging us under, drowning us in the mind or minds of the titular dictator, a paranoid consciousness so swollen with its own power that it warps reality itself, a man who reigns forever and is always dying, whose past rewrites itself with every breath, whose power is infinite and yet always slipping, slipping, slipping through his fingers like the stolen sea, parceled off and shipped to Arizona, because why not, because what is truth if not what he declares it to be, because when you have lived for centuries, when your general is served up at a Thyestean feast, when your nation’s children are disappeared to an island, never to return, when the cattle are branded with your mark, when the very hour itself is subject to your whim, then nothing is real, nothing but the fear, the violence, the rape, the predation, the endless grinding machinery of power that must sustain itself, and so we cycle, we spiral, we convulse through six sections, six deaths, six endless iterations of his reign, six grotesque confirmations that absolute power is an ouroboros swallowing its own tail, devouring itself, erasing itself, until nothing is left but the silence of his ruin, the empty palace where his corpse will be found again and again, where his legacy is nothing but absence, and translator Gregory Rabassa—mad saint, linguistic necromancer—renders it all in English without breaking the spell, his translation a relentless incantation that doesn’t just mimic the novel’s crushing, hypnotic cadence but becomes it, suffocating, pressing, forcing you to inhabit the mind of this eternal, rotting god-tyrant, this cosmic mistake, this doomed and doom-dealing beast whose power, no matter how total, will crumble, will fade, will rot, will vanish into nothing, just like everything else.

Via  Biblioklept

April

 

On Tyranny

Read more: the art room plant: Nora Krug

via everlasting blort

Library In The Earth

Burrowed in a corner of the KURKKU Fields in Kisaru, Japan is a library destined to serve the farmers during their downtime in bad weather. Designed by architect Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP, Library in the Earth occupies a space that was once a natural valley filled with construction debris, leaving only flat, dry land above.

Photography © Koji Fujii / TOREAL

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Jennie's Boy by Wayne Johnston

Thriller writer Linwood Barclay will champion Jennie's Boy by Wayne Johnston on

Canada Reads 2025. The debates take place March 17-20.