From 'An Unnecessary Woman' by Rabih Alameddine

Words, phrases and sentences to think about:


1. Alain Robbe-Grillet once wrote that the worst thing to happen to the novel was the arrival of psychology. ....he meant that now we all expect to understand the motivation behind each character's actions. Novels tend to lose their flavor because we are 'always supposed to infer causality.'

2. 'None of us knows how to deal with the aleatory nature of pain.'

3. 'If you think Madame Bovary commits adultery because she's trying to escape the banality of Pleistocene morals, then her betrayals are not yours.'

4. '...I do what makes me happy sometimes. I don't suffer from anhedonia after all.'

5. 'When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.'

wish you well

by David Baldacci

I'm reading this book a second time. There is something haunting about it.

Today, I came across these fantastic words:

1. ........the distinct beauty of the language never overshadowed the blunt force of the story.

and

2. Excitement, nervousness, panic and hope competed for space on the small landscape of their faces.

Josef Pieper

....we have commodified our aliveness so much as to mistake making a living for having a life.


.....the strange tapestry of tenderness and wilderness of which the human soul is woven.

Charles Bukowski

on writing...

I didn’t pay a hell of a lot of attention to grammar, and when I write it is for the love of the word, the color, like tossing paint on a canvas, and using a lot of ear and having read a bit here and there, I generally come out ok, but technically I don’t know what’s happening, nor do I care.

Go, set a watchman

Isaiah 21:6 reads:

“For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.”

In the wake of the release of Harper Lee's book, the papers have been flooded with impressions, analyses and reviews on the book. Questions are being raised on its ethical value.... Trying to figure out what the title meant and why Lee had chosen it, this is the best explanation I came across:

"Nelle (Harper Lee) probably likened Monroeville to Babylon. The Babylon of immoral voices, the hypocrisy,” said Flynt, who is also a longtime friend to Lee. "Somebody needs to be set as the watchman to identify what we need to do to get out of the mess."

A nice turn of phrase

Wear your knowledge lightly

Why I enjoy David Baldacci

is not only because of the fantastic momentum he creates right from the first word, but also because he packs in a lot of information on a variety of things.

Here's one:

'"King Fu," literally translated, meant a skilful ability attained through hard work. Thus, someone could be a baseball player and be deemed to have good "kung fu."'