BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: THE JOYS OF READING

“I still remember that adolescent thrill, that sublime discovery of the novel and short story as an utterly free space, where anything might be thought, anything uttered. In the novel, you might encounter atheists, snobs, libertines, adulterers, murderers, thieves, madmen riding across the Castilian plains or wandering around Oslo or St. Petersburg, young men on the make in Paris, young women on the make in Paris…”

James Wood. The Nearest Thing to Life (Waltham,Ma.:
Brandeis University Press, 2015)
**

MARGO JEFFERSON

Jefferson, Margo –
Reading about the adventures of an Argo-
Naught,
Sat in her chair & thought & thought & thought
   & thought.

**

ON THE INSPIRATION FOR DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF
 ELECTRIC SHEEP (its film version is BLADE RUNNER)

…in late ‘40s when I  read that (DIARY OF AN SS MAN)  
and I still remember the one line he had in there: ‘
We are kept awake at night by the cries of starving
children.’ I still remember that line , and that 
influenced me . I thought , There is amongst us something 
that is a bipedal humanoid, morphologically identical 
to the human being that is not human. It is not human 
to complain in your diary that starving children are 
keeping you awake. And there, in the ‘40s, was born 
my idea that within our species is a bifurcation 
between the truly human and that which mimics the 
truly human…”

Philip K. Dick, interviewed by James Van Hise in 
“Blade Runner and Hollywood Temptations”  (August 1981).
The Last Interview and other conversations, edited by
David Sreitfeld (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2015)
**
ON READING & A BRIDGE OVER THE CHASM SEPARATING
THE SENSUAL AND THE SYMBOLIC

…very early on, I found that printed material may offer 
a bridge over the chasm separating the sensual and the 
symbolic.  Books and magazines are naturally full of 
symbols, and often, too, they contain much to charm 
the senses.  In my father’s bookcase there were rows 
of leather bindings, some with gilded edges and ribbed 
spines, marvels to the eye and to the nose. Incidentally,
 Buenos Aires does not live up to its name: the air 
there is always humid, both in summer and winter, and 
that fact, which may be pretty uncomfortable for porteños,
is wonderful for the decay of paper. I used to think 
of those pages sprinkled with yellow-brown spots and 
smelling of mold as being spread with a sort of time 
marmalade, but that homely image does not do justice 
to the complexities of aged paper.  Different types 
of paper age differently – some may smell as sweet 
as a jar of jasmine jam; occasionally, when we bury 
our face in an old book, we may recover the sense of the Romantic forest, its rustle and murmur, hear the sound
 of the post horn, taste the wild mushrooms, and smell 
the smoke from the chimney of the witch who lives there
 and who, alone, knows our spring and our spell.
 Unfortunately, the books that smelled so wonderfully 
in Buenos Aires have lost most of that particular charm 
when transported to Upstate New York, where I live now,
 and where winters are so dry that when one arrives 
home and touches the doorhandle, a spark flies.

	"The Books in my Parents' House", part of a memoir by Ricardo L. Nirenberg in OFFCOURSE  Issue #89, June 2022
**

“Melville saw the possibility of an entrapment in
victory however nobly sought. War might be fought for human freedom, but victory might carry its own irony, the
possibility of the great modern power state of unbridled capitalism and military ambition might herald a new and disastrous destiny.”

 Robert Penn Warren in his introduction to The Essential
Melville (1987)
**



EPIGRAPH TO FRAMED by TONINO BENSQUISTA

“Juan Gris, the Spanish cubists, had convinced Alice
Toklas to pose for a still life and began with his typical
abstract conception of objects, began to break her face and body down to its basic geometrical forms until the police came and pulled him off.”   
                                                  Woody Allen

Tonino Benacquista. Framed (London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2006). Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter.

**

FOR A.A. MILNE

The more I read
Tiddlee-pom, tiddlee-pom
Tiddlee-pom,
The more I hunger for
An Atomic Bomb, an Atomic Bomb,
An Atomic Bomb.

LJP