Scalped
What I bought – 16 May 2012
It is demonstrably plain that, were the whole matter of victualling the world on a non-national footing taken right out of the hands of the strutting male and handed over to a dozen sensible women who do not want to have their children killed, politics, which are nothing but a glorified form of housekeeping, would [...]
What I bought – 29 February 2012
In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace. (Umberto Eco, from The Island of the Day Before)
What I bought – 11 January 2012
‘Once giants walked the earth,’ she repeated, emphatically. ‘Yes, titans absolutely, it’s a fact.’ Three mothers creaked and swung with expressions of fascinated absorption upon their smiling faces; but Raza Hyder took no notice, closed his eyes, grunted from time to time. ‘Now the pygmies have taken over, however,’ Bilquis confided. ‘Tiny personages. Ants. Once [...]
What I bought – 23 November 2011
He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth – but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy [...]
What I bought – 14 September 2011
To know you do not know is to know a great deal. Wisdom consists in knowing there is no such thing. (Joseph Heller, from Picture This)
What I bought – 3 August 2011
“Sometimes I ask myself,” Emmerich said. “What is the function of a murderer? Is he the person you go to in order to confess?” (Don DeLillo, from The Names)
What I bought – May and June 2011
Hey, look at that! I’m back in Arizona and I picked up almost two months’ worth of comics! Yeah, I’m not going to review them properly here – that would take waaaaaaaay too long. This is more of a “What I bought and the random thoughts I have about the issues and, why not, what [...]
What I bought – 27 April 2011
Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be defined by. (A. S. Byatt, from Possession)
What I bought – 30 March 2011
How does it happen that sometimes someone says something and wins someone else over forever? … at times a single word can work miracles. (Manuel Puig, from Kiss of the Spider Woman)
What I bought – 23 February 2011
Thanks to the mild weather, the trees retained their foliage longer than usual. Red and gold, ocher and amber leaped to the eye. How beautifully the leaves aged on ten thousand twigs! No politics could produce such glory in a forest. Only so natural and simple a thing as death. (Frederic Morton, from A Nervous [...]
What I bought – 26 January 2011
For if the sun is at the center and not the earth, then there are no crystal spheres to hold us in; we have only and always fooled ourselves, we men, kept ourselves within the spheres which our own flawed and insufficient senses perceived, but which were never there at all. The way to ascend [...]
What I bought – 29 December 2010
“We met long ago,” said Galip. “When we first met, your legs looked so thin and so delicate that I was afraid they would break. Your skin was rough when you were a kid, but as you got older, after we graduated from middle school, your complexion became rosy and incredibly fine. If they took [...]
What I bought – 24 November 2010
“I write in blood, and the best truth is a bloody truth.” (Irvin D. Yalom, from When Nietzsche Wept)
What I bought – 27 October 2010
The great French revolutionary hero Danton, who will lose his head during the ‘Terror,’ is making a rueful remark. ‘… But Robespierre and the people,’ he observes, ‘are virtuous.’ Danton is on a London stage, not really Danton at all but an actor speaking lines of Georg Büchner in English translation; and the time is [...]
What I bought – 6 October 2010
“It’s like blue light when you touch me,” she’d say. “Electric blue light sparking between us.” She’d cry softly into my shoulder, tears of passion, because she couldn’t get close enough to me. (W. P. Kinsella, from The Iowa Baseball Confederacy)
