Reminded of Larkin’s poem ‘Coming’ today with the longer, lighter Spring evening

Ite domum saturae, venit Hesperus, ite capellae.

The Late Arrival

Celan in the late and early hours.

My aunt's copy of 'Story of O'.

When you look back on the works that have moved you, you find that they have always been written out of some kind of necessity. There's something calling out to you, some human call, that makes you want to listen to the work. In the end, it probably has very little to do with literature. Paul Auster

“The sheaves refuse my bonds. In this infinite, unanimous dissonance, each ear of corn, each drop of blood, speaks its language and goes its way. The torch, which lights the abyss, which seals it up, is itself an abyss.” — Jacques Dupin (from “Lichens,” tr. Paul Auster)

Pascal Quignard in an interview (2020): “We do not know where the word ‘literature’ comes from. I love infinitely that there are two words whose etymology is entirely unknown: *eros* and *literature*. I love that words emerge from the night like comets.”

Two new installments in the @Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature, published by @oxunipress.bsky.social Bi-lingual editions (Mandarin/English on facing pages) covering 3,000 years of Sinitic literatures. #literatureintranslation #chineseliteratureintranslation

'Blackbirds & Ravens' contemporary ceramic sculpture by Kathleen Sukiennik

Another pastoral English classic, paired well with 'Cold Comfort Farm', though Lee is sincere where Gibbons is subversive.

This painting depicts Vilhelm Hammershøi's sister Anna, who was two years his junior. It is one of the earliest known works by him of a figure viewed from behind. The picture created a sensation when it was first exhibited in 1885.

Stella Gibbons prose is genuinely accomplished. A bit of an outlier for me, but it is very good at what it does. Wonderful control. I'll be rereading, I imagine.

M. Boissonade.

One of the briefest yet most beguiling flames: Beautiful, blighted Vaslav Nijinsky, who revolutionized ballet & choreography, born on this day in 1889.

‘Thought-whelmed’. A word Stella Gibbons coins in ‘Cold Comfort Farm’: His body sunk into the immemorial posture of a man thought-whelmed. . . Humanity left him abruptly.

I enjoy thinking through Lydia Davis’s Essays. I catch her mind and follow.

“I write because I need to say something I do not know.” [J’écris parce que j’ai besoin de dire quelque chose que j’ignore.] — Pascal Quignard (interview, 2001)

Pascal Quignard: “I’m a firm believer in the distance between the hand that writes and the eyes that read, and that this distance can’t be augmented: it’s an infinite gap. Hand and eye are not located in the same body.” (from Albucius, tr. Bruce Boone)

the fascination of trifles; the enchantment of frivolity; the spell of worthless things; the seduction of nonsense; the charm of idle pursuits; the lure of empty pleasures; the enticement of meaningless diversions; the allure of trivial things; the spell of slight things

Just as I finish Montevideo, news of another Vila-Matas novel in translation. @yalebooks.bsky.social coming to the rescue again. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

‘I feel I am not yet grown up’: Alan Bennett’s diary of his 90th year

New review: the new (unabridged and three-volume) translation of Yoshikawa Eiji's 1939 epic, 𝑀𝑢𝑠𝑎𝑠ℎ𝑖 www.complete-review.com/reviews/japa...

In which I sheepishly admit: in between the post-it flags that festoon my volumes of Woolf's diaries are stretches that I didn't find that interesting...which is fine, really, as they were never meant to be masterpieces.

Good morning, friends!

There are some things (like first love and one’s first reviews) at which a woman in her middle years does not care to look too closely. Stella Gibbons, from the foreword to ‘Cold Comfort Farm’

“For the first time in English, all the short fiction that Ingeborg Bachmann wrote in her lifetime in a single volume. Available Sep 29, 2026” (!!!) @ndbooks.bsky.social 🔥🔥🙌 www.ndbooks.com/book/the-com...

With Marguerite Duras and a blank notebook at the edge of the Black Sea. A few days of calm; months of storm thereafter. “There is nothing I can do about the eternity that I carry to the place of your final gaze.”

Violette Leduc on the sneering turds of her life.

Contact When I began writing here I believed reading was collaboration. Sartre's word. The writer offers and the reader completes. What I didn't anticipate was how much of reading is loss. Books I loved that left nothing behind. Books I discarded that lingered unexpectedly. The unread shelves that…

Solitude and Gathering, Revisited I once wrote a post about King Alfred's translations, and I have been thinking about it again. Not because I have changed my mind, but because I now stand closer to the thing I was describing. Alfred began his translations in middle age; when I wrote about him I…

The second-rate works of a great writer are worth reading because they offer the best criticism of his masterpieces. —Virginia Woolf, from 'The Common Reader'

Here in the few minutes that remain, I must record, heaven be praised, the end of The Waves. I write the words O Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity and intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice. — Virginia Woolf

"Why read? Because you can know, intimately, only a very few people, and perhaps you never know them at all. After reading The Magic Mountain you know Hans Castorp thoroughly, and he is greatly worth knowing." — Harold Bloom

New arrivals

Fascinatio Nugacitatis Kafka wrote to his friend Oskar Pollak in January 1904 that a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. I have taken him at his word. I own hundreds of unread books and last weekend I compiled an eighteen-month reading plan to get through the ones most likely to…

Elizabeth Bowen died #otd in 1973, in University College Hospital, London, aged 73. She is buried with her husband in St Colman's churchyard in Farahy, Co. Cork, close to the gates of her family seat, Bowen's Court.

So that passion can do no harm, let us act as it we had only one week to live. — Pascal

Three Views of Sleep Charlotte Beradt collected the dreams of ordinary Germans under the Third Reich. In them, factory owners made involuntary Nazi salutes. Women dreamed erotically of Hitler. Sleep was where totalitarianism completed its work. This last private space invaded. Fernando Pessoa saw…

And now I’m sleepy, because I think – I don’t know why – that the meaning of it all is to sleep. Fernando Pessoa

God Is the Fact That We Exist and That’s Not All I'm reading Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet from cover to cover. It wasn't written that way, but Richard Zenith's choices cluster thematically. It's a book that teaches you how to read it as you go. Text 22 ends, God Is the Fact That We Exist…

These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it's because I have nothing to say . . . what I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.

The cult of Humanity, with its rites of Freedom and Equality, always struck me as a revival of those ancient cults in which gods were like animals or had animal heads. Fernando Pessoa

Three chapters in, a unique (?) way to view totalitarianism, numbing.

With considerable poetic powers, this writer seems to me possessed with a more intense and morbid self-consciousness than I ever knew in any sane human being. I should think it a sincere confession, though of a most unloveable state. John Stuart Mill's annotation on his copy of Browning's 'Pauline'

Was it something said, Something done, Vexed him? was it touch of hand, Turn of head? Strange that very way Love begun I as little understand Love's decay. Robert Browning, from 'In a Year'

Ugh, when did Penguin Classics adopt these matte, rubbery POD covers? Maybe only with online purchases?

Four Writers, One Johnson I should not have been surprised that Chesterton was not to be found in Samuel Beckett's library. Perhaps I expected to find a trenchant remark. Chesterton belonged to an entirely different literary constellation; there was not even an interesting friction as sparked…

“I shall read a passage of Shakspeare every Sunday at ten o Clock—you read one at the same time and we shall be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room.” — John Keats in a letter (1818)