"The great naturalist, Fritz Müller- who was the first to describe the scent scales- mentions how, on his journeys in Brazil, he often carried a Paplio Grayi with him, just for the purpose of sniffing its scent when the mood took him." - Niko Tinbergen Curious Naturalists
"Ulysses, like everything else of Joyce's, was written entirely by hand. He used blunt black pencils- he found the ones he wanted at Smith's in Paris-and pencils of different colors to distinguish the parts he was working on. Fountain pens he didn't understand at all. They bewildered him. Once I found him struggling to fill one, covering himself with ink as he did so. Sylvia Beach Shakespeare and Company
Quicknotes on the books I finished reading this week:
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I read it before when I was young. Now after reading it again, I am convinced I should read it at least once every other year. As I was reading, I would come across an amazing line that I would want to write down, but I just couldn't stop reading. Nothing I have read exposes the farce of the American dream as well as this novel. Material desires hiding the gaping emptiness of a life not examined.
I finished up the novel while I was at Bourbon & Branch in SF, a faux speakeasy-era bar with expensive, but good-looking cocktails; I had two. A few things I learned: Fitzgerald was an alcoholic, but he never wrote drunk, he was an amazingly sober writer and it shows in his prose. He was born in Minnesota; a Mid-Westerner transplanted to the East Coast; like Gatsby. And like Gatsby, Fitzgerald fell in love with a socialite (Zelda) who rebuffed his initial marriage proposal. He wrote his first novel, which became a success, he made some money, and he got to marry the girl; who ended up going insane and was confined to a mental institution. Nothing like love to drive you mad.
Speaking of mad, I also read The Blue of Noon, by Georges Bataille. Talk about a crazy novel, leave to Georges to leave me with my mouth open, thinking, "I can't believe someone wrote that." My head spun reading this novel of drunkenness and despair; written in 1935, all around, Europe falls into pieces and the characters lose themselves in grotesque debauchery and perversity.
I also read The Modern Mind, by Peter Watson. A dash into the great-breaking ideas that affected and transformed the 19th-20th Centuries. There's some decent reviews of the book here. I agree with most of it. It is a good book to get started on developing a foundation of historical understanding for the last 100+ years. Watson's analyses on novels were succinct and inspired, so much that I added another half dozen to read, plus I read The Great Gatsby again. I developed a mini-crush on this Watson fellow, even though he's older than my father. I imagined all the books he must have read, all the mental calculations it took to connect it together in this massive book; and it fulfilled my esurient need for understanding how the parts fit together. It could have plodded along, but Watson uses his journalistic skill to keep it an engaging read.
