Ten posts. A rough month in Paris. Books that matter. Thoughts worth keeping.
Yeah, January in Paris wasn't exactly a party. But here's what the poet said: "The wind is rising!... We must try to live!" That's Valéry, from The Graveyard by the Sea. So we keep doing what makes us feel alive, what makes us vibrate with something real.
"Great caricaturists don't wait for applause. They don't draw for that. They draw to disturb, to make people uncomfortable, to get insulted." Mallarino is a famous Colombian caricaturist, so famous and revered that the city of Bogotá practically worships him. Then his past shows up at his door.
After seeing other bloggers do this, I'm jumping in. The game: answer existential questions using only book titles you read in 2022. Describe yourself: An Absolute Disaster. How do you feel: Lost in Translation. Where do you live: Nowhere Special. It's stupidly fun.
"We had to face facts: Western Europe had reached such a disgusting degree of decomposition that it could no longer save itself—no more than ancient Rome in the 5th century CE." Houellebecq drops a political bomb wrapped in fiction. France elects an Islamic president in 2022. Controversy? Obviously.
"...based on the strange belief that change will be gradual enough to manage, through insurance, security equipment, healthy eating and regular exercise, and that evil never comes roaring out of the sky..." Pynchon sets his conspiracy thriller in New York, pre-9/11. Tech bubbles. Deep web mysteries. Classic paranoid Pynchon.
"He wanted to matter... to exist... to express himself... to condemn... to refuse... to contradict... to devastate... to become alive... to invent a long, opaque, radical poem, punishing and purifying: a CARNAGE." Four people running. That's how it starts. Then Reinhardt tears everything apart.
Over-blog decided to pressure everyone into updating or lose SEO rankings. So I clicked the dreaded "update blog" button. Now everything's broken and might stay that way for a while. Bear with me. Or don't. I'm fixing it either way.
"What he finds most beautiful, most striking, are things you can't look at for very long, that don't repeat, that happen only once, there, for you, just once, and last only a moment." A story about Buffalo Bill. About spectacle. About the wild west turned into entertainment. Vuillard writes history like poetry.
Last time I read romance was during a summer challenge that sent the blogosphere into hysterics. Back when we had fun—sexy men swaps, TBR contests, the whole circus. My experience with this genre? Let's just say I'm skeptical. But here goes nothing.
May 2024 be gentle and generous. May it bring you health, joy, wonder. I wish you stacks of books, new discoveries, pure pleasure. See you on the other side.