Anthony
@timesflow.bsky.social
Rootless cosmopolitan | Reading wildly | 'Obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of solitudes.' — De Quincey | ‘. . . the importance of being at all times occupied with literary activities’. – Flann O’Brien. https://timesflowstemmed.com
No one but Pound could have got this published. Deliciously cantankerous, and unaccountably readable.
📚 We are pleased to announce our August publications — HOW TO MAKE A WOMAN by Marie Darrieussecq, tr. Penny Hueston; — ANATOMY OF A MOMENT by Javier Cercas, tr. Anne McLean; — CROWDS AND POWER by Elias Canetti, tr. Carol Stewart. fitzcarraldoeditions.com/shop/?utm_so...
Sleep, I thought, is the other half of us, our safe haven, our escape route. It is in us, in our absence. Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless
Perhaps we are the transitory race of coherent organisms that emerges as love loses its grip, a momentary accident, destined soon to decay. Catherine Osborne
This amazing idea in all of us that we are indestructible, that the body will take everything and deal with it, again and again. Antigone Kefala, Sydney Journals
Trying to write, one needs so much confidence in oneself to carry even a sentence. The moment the level goes down one realizes the futility of all things, the thin nature of the enterprise and language that refuses to work. — Antigone Kefala, Sydney Journals
A launch thread for my new book WHAT LIES AHEAD AND OTHER ESSAYS out with @blackheraldpress.bsky.social 1/
Ankle-deep once again in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman of which I am very fond yet in each of my four sallies I have yet to reach the end which is sort of Shandean I suppose but this time I am determined which is arguably un-Shandean
‘There are far too many biographies. They imply a sort of attempt to make eternal a thing that is really transient. What you want is to give the impression of a character very completely and in a form that can be remembered.’ Gilbert Murray
Deeply enjoyable, slowing my pace to stay with the grace and elegance of the essays.
Enjoying Nabokov's deliciously eccentric commentary to Eugene Onegin, prior to reading James Falen's translation.
‘For myself, I face facts, and admit that the younger generation stands upon my shoulders, and for that reason it would be a scandal if I were not found sitting at its feet.’ Jane Ellen Harrison, "Crabbed Age and Youth"
‘I adjusted the glasses to the front of each of us and reflected on the solemnity of the occasion.’ Flann O’Brien, ‘At Swim-Two-Birds’ [I know porter≠ Guinness stout. Perhaps in Dublin I can have ‘my first taste of porter’.]
‘A satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity.’ Flann O’Brien
Nineteen degrees and overcast at Derrynane. Perfect beach weather.
Unable to reconcile my need to read with the insatiable demands of chess, I've retired from the latter. Currently in Ireland with the rather wonderful Flann O'Brien (my first).
I'm very pleased that @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social are bringing Hélène Bessette into English via Kate Brigg's translations. 'Lili is Crying was one of last year's favourites and I expect no lesser experience with 'Twenty Minutes of Silence'.
Look, foot to forelock, how all things suit! he / Is strung by duty, is strained to beauty, / And brown-as-dawning-skinned / With brine and shine and whirling wind. Gerard M. Hopkins
Long harboured an ambition to read the Zibaldone cover to cover, following every allusion and reference to its source. Tried and failed, and tried again.
“A month before his death in April 1936 he described himself as an ‘egoistic hedonist’, adding that while George Eliot said she was a meliorist, he was a pejorist. And ‘pejorist hedonist’, with its English blend of Latin and Greek, fits him well enough.” Frank Kermode on A. E. Housman
Sunday: Josef Koudelka’s diaries (to accompany Melissa Harris’s visual biography). ‘DON’T OWN ANYTHING; DON‘T BUY ANYTHING. DON’T BE A MATERIALIST.’
No religion survives the descent: the parting of knowledge is reversed. Gregory Leadbetter
No sign yet of J. H. Prynne's two-volume Collected Prose "forthcoming from Oxford University Press (New York)." Very much looking forward to this collection.