Chew
Sunday brunch: Links for the week of 5-11 May 2013
Give your mother a big hug, and then ignore her for the rest of the day while you check out some links! Come on, you know you want to!
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Ecce liber cum picturis … ex futuro: Chew #33
John Layman was nice enough to send me a .pdf of Chew #33, which comes out on Wednesday, so I’m going to review it!
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What I bought – 20 March 2013
An old Ukrainian proverb warns, “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil.”
That is a risk we will have to take. (Tom Robbins, from Jitterbug Perfume)
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What I bought – 23 January 2013
And now let us believe in the long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been. (Rainier Maria Rilke)
What I bought – 28 November 2012
What theater do we have besides beauty contests? (Maxine Hong Kingston, from Tripmaster Monkey)
What I bought – 17 October 2012
Aliye’s death, and its echoes, had been stilled by the greater horror of this mother’s death, which burned inside him like a smothered coal in the silence there. But Aliye had started dying from the moment his mother told him that they were not to marry, in spite of the bey’s gracious visit, in spite of the fine carpet, in spite of the words he has whispered to Aliye and which he had thought were true words. He knew then how it must end for her, though his mother said it would be otherwise. He wished that there were one fixed thing in the world that would never change, or disappoint him, or leave him, but he did not know what that might be, unless it was the idea of God, which was a certitude without delight or consolation. (Starling Lawrence, from Montenegro)
What I bought – 12 September 2012
He was mingling with people who treated human flesh as pigment, life and death as a canvas, the human spine as an easel, and he could not for the life of him look away from it with all of his being: with most of it, yes, but not with the peeping bit of him. (Paul West*, from The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper)
What I bought – 11 and 18 July 2012
“How do you feel, Yossarian?”
“Fine. No, I’m very frightened.”
“That’s good,” said Major Danby. “It proves you’re still alive.” (Joseph Heller, from Catch-22)
What I bought – 20 June 2012
For them it might stave off what he could not help but see with clarity: that the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty. (David Guterson, from Snow Falling on Cedars)
What I bought – 23 May 2012
“That’s one of the Devil’s main tricks, of course. Fill a man with faith. What evils, what absolute horrors the noble sword of faith sends pouring into the world!” (John Gardner, from Freddy’s Book)
What I bought – 4 April 2012
Those slightly heavy, slightly watery eyes are enough to make me realize that the drama between the two has not yet ended: he continues coming to this café every evening to see her, to open the old wound again, perhaps also to know who is walking her home this evening; and she comes to this café every evening perhaps deliberately to make him suffer, or perhaps hoping that the habit of suffering will become for him a habit like any other, that it will take on the flavor of the nothingness that has coated her mouth and her life for years. (Italo Calvino, from If on a winter’s night a traveler)
What I bought – 22 February 2012
“There were little white puffs of clouds all across it, like a cat stepped in milk and then walked across the blue. I thought it was so beautiful I told Dmetro about it. He just stared at me. ‘I ain’t looked at the sky in ten years,’ he said.” (W. P. Kinsella, from The Iowa Baseball Confederacy)
Chew #24: Yep, still a good comic
Chew #24 comes out on Wednesday. Should you buy it? Well, duh, of course you should. But let’s see some reasons why you should!
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What I bought – 18 January 2012
“I’ve always believed, Josef, that we are more in love with desire than with the desired!” (Irvin D. Yalom, from When Nietzsche Wept)
What I bought – 7 December 2011
“A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs — it sucks — it strokes its eyes over the whole uncomfortable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles. Why? I can trace them. I can even, with time, pull them apart again. But why at the start they were ever magnetized at all — just those particular moments of experience and no others — I don’t know. And nor does anyone else. Yet if I don’t know — if I can never know that — then what am I doing here? I don’t mean clinically doing or socially doing — I mean fundamentally! These questions, these Whys, are fundamental — yet they have no place in a consulting room. So then, do I? … This is the feeling more and more with me — No Place. Displacement … ‘Account for me,’ says staring Equus. ‘First account for Me! …’ ” (Peter Shaffer, from “Equus”)
