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
‘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.
Extraordinary how the shape of this story emerges, to the extent that it does. It might be quite brilliant. I’m going to read it again immediately.
‘To set literature as the principal aim of a life is in many respects an extraordinary, if not pathological, pursuit.’ — William Marx, ‘A Scholar’s Life’.
Beginning Volodine Radiant Terminus took me somewhere I didn't want to leave. Like Thomas De Quincey in the Confessions and Suspiria de Profundis, Volodine treats landscape as a state of consciousness, though stripped of De Quincey's grandeur. In the endless taiga time dilates, nights last…
Beginning Volodine
Radiant Terminus took me somewhere I didn't want to leave. Like Thomas De Quincey in the Confessions and Suspiria de Profundis, Volodine treats landscape as a state of consciousness, though stripped of De Quincey's grandeur. In the endless taiga time dilates, nights last centuries, the dead walk among the living and among those who can't tell the difference. Jeffrey Zuckerman's prose is slightly fatigued, a flat register that sustains the wasteland.
timesflowstemmed.com
But next, another Antoine Volodine, being read in the order I track them down.
One of my Much Anticipated 2026 books: 'East of Dreams' by Nastassja Martin, author of the brilliant 'In the Eye of the Wild'.
Pleased that Granta 175 features excerpts from Lars Norén's five-volume diaries, translated from the Swedish by Sigrid Rausing. (Hope for a selected diaries volume at some point.)
Auerbach 'had to melancholically embrace the idea of the disappearance of libraries in order to find within himself the power to write a book that would be able to outlast all libraries.' —William Marx, 'Libraries of the Mind'