R. often points out, about cars, that “they can’t get upset because they don’t have faces and they don’t talk.” Today she leapt without warning to the paraphrase: “They can’t get upset because they don’t have faces or minds.”
The Roof Rat Review
- Gerald Murnane. Inland. (1989). A lovely X-ray of provincial childhood, wrapped in metafictional padding to which I was often indifferent but that sometimes carried off the magic trick as intended.
- Anna Burns. Milkman. Faber & Faber, 2018. An awful delight.
- Arakida Moritake, Steven D. Carter (trans). Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology. Stanford University Press, 1993 (1991). Meticulously done. Reading in concert with a literary history like Keene's is a good way to avoid the false sense of sameness that comes with the heft.
- Donald Keene. World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Premodern Era - 1600-1867 (A History of Japanese Literature - Volume 2). Columbia University Press, 1999 (World Within Walls, 1976). Literary history through a reflecting telescope: genres cohere and then hollow out, what moves are possible when.
- [more...]
What goes on