I once traveled in a touring group guided by an amicable man named Gadi. When the group played Secret Santa and I received his name as my beneficiary, I decided to write him a poem.
Please excuse any awkwardness in the pseudo-literary Chinese. The gift was completed in a hurry, for a non-Chinese-speaking audience, so I judged rhyming more important than phrase construction.
A Gift for Gadi, Original
Gadi Gadi Gadi
我队队长
样子很帅
哥们超爽
人才之峰
留一大胡
教人何为
天天为酷
A Gift for Gadi, Rough English Translation
Gadi Gadi Gadi
Captain of our team.
His style is way fresh,
This Chiller Supreme.
Of eminent talents
And big-bearded too,
He teaches all people
His everyday cool.
One way for a book to earn my approval is by making me laugh out loud. Three Men in a Boat accomplished that several times.
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
The second book in the Pantagruel and Gargantua series, which I read first (my copy of the series placed it before Pantagruel because it's a prequel to that book.)
The introduction made me laugh hysterically, and the first several chapters made me laugh until I cried. Rabelais is a master of repetition; his most common form of joke is to describe a ludicrous number of items within a character's response, or in a description of a scene. For example, one early chapter (in my opinion, the funniest) is almost entirely taken up with an enumeration of the things that Pantagruel, a toddler of comic proportions, has used to wipe his bottom.
I've read magazine pieces by Tom Wolfe, but this is the first novel of his that I've read. Wolfe's strongest skill is capturing the every-which-way rush of ideas that the average person experiences in unsure and stressful situations. He does this with a signature style in which descriptive prose is constantly being broken up by characters' reactions and inner monologues. He's also good at writing odious characters, and at simmering both the characters' anxieties and the reader's expectations. On the other hand, his verbose style can come off cutesy, flat, and artificial once I've spent enough time trekking through it.
When I checked out this book, the library clerk said he thought the ending came too fast. Events do happen quickly in the ending sequence, but I disagree that they happen too quickly.
This is a collection of interview articles which novelist Amos Oz conducted in October and November, 1982, while writing for the newspaper Davar. The titles given in the citations are those of the articles, which are also the titles of the collection's chapters.
This was my master's way. He not only knew how to read the great book of nature, but also knew the way monks read the books of Scripture, and how they thought through them.
pg 24-25
"Monasterium sine libris," the abbot recited, pensively, "est sicut civitas sine opibus, castrum sine numeris, coquina sine suppellectili, mensa sine cibis, hortus sine herbis, pratum sine floribus, arbor sine foliis […]"
pg 36
Then the abbot gave his benediction, the hebdomadary said the prayers, all bowed toward the altar in a moment of meditation whose sweetness no one can comprehend who has not experienced those hours of mystic ardor and intense inner peace.
pg 102
Because this city, as we know, is alive with girls wholly unlike Mary Jane Reed, promising, unbroken, uncontaminated young women--healthy, in fact, as milkmaids. I know, because these were her predecessors--only they didn't satisfy, either. They were wrong, too. Spielvogel, believe me, I've been there, I've tried: I've eaten their casseroles and shaved in their johns, I've been given duplicate keys to their police locks and shelves of my own in the medicine cabinet, I have even befriended those cats of theirs--named Spinoza and Clytemnestra and Candide and Cat--yes, yes, clever and erudite girls, fresh from successful adventures in sex and scholarship at wholesome Ivy League colleges, lively, intelligent, self-respecting, self-assured, and well-behaved young women--social workers and research assistants, schoolteachers and copy readers, girls in whose company I did not feel abject or ashamed, girls I did not have to father or mother or educate or redeem. And they didn't work out, either!
sepulture: n. I knew the word "sepulcher" (tomb, burial place) and wondered if this was a synonym or variant spelling. It can mean the same thing as "sepulcher", but can also mean "the act of burial".
