Forty Literary Recipes for Thanksgiving (Or Any Other Time) biblioklept.org/2025/11/27/f...

Ah, I’ve lusted after everything, and enjoyed nothing. . . . I have inside me every sort of appetite and curiosity — and I’ve been reduced to observing everything and grasping nothing.” Guy De Maupassant, AFLOAT

“America for me was not the land of liberty, bright prospects, new beginnings. No: America was emptiness. . . . I would be pure existence there, an affectless point moving through time, nihilism’s silver bullet.” Banville’s Axel Vander, moving east to west (later reversing that movement) in SHROUD

Late-stage capitalism.

In John Banville’s SHROUD, a riotous, Evelyn Waugh-like erotic interlude in wartime London: “What I am thinking of is the license, voluptuous and languid, with just a whiff of brimstone to it, that was granted to us by the permanent likelihood of imminent, indiscriminate, and violent death.”

“Do we not on countless occasions every day step effortlessly into other selves without even noticing it?” John Banville, SHROUD

Like MacDonald Harris’ equally remarkable 1964 novel MORTAL LEAP, Banville’s SHROUD sees the traumatic disruptions of war as providing the potential for transfiguration, an opportunity to unmoor the soul from social constraints.

Like MacDonald Harris’ equally remarkable 1964 novel MORTAL LEAP, Banville’s SHROUD sees the traumatic disruptions of war as providing the potential for transfiguration, an opportunity to unmoor the soul from social constraints.

“It felt entirely natural, like putting on a new suit of clothes that had been tailored expressly for me, or rather, for my identical twin, now dead. . . . Am I not, like everyone thrown together from a legion of selves?” Axel Vander’s transfiguration in Banville’s SHROUD

“This is the trouble with the dead, that they take their secrets with them to the grave.” John Banville, SHROUD

Leading me once again to the conclusion that academic scholarship needs more studies of wealth. 🧵Thread:

“All this I remembered, even though it had never happened.” In John Banville’s SHROUD, the artifice of vivid memories.

“The old should have a special garment, something like a monk’s habit, simple and functional, and suitably presageful of the winding cloth.” John Banville, SHROUD

Condé Nast folded a beloved magazine that treated youth and feminism as political topics, not trends. Read Sarah Leonard. www.cjr.org/feature/the-...

. . . my email self is my best self . . .

The military logic of Stewart’s 1949 FIRE. Watching his beloved forest burn, the conservation minded “Fire Boss” Bart is unstrung. “It was like fighting a war, a General figured it would cost so many dog tags . . . That was part of Bart’s trouble, he didn’t want to admit that any trees had to burn.”

George Stewart’s 1949 FIRE plunges one back into mid-century gender norms. The plucky college girl in the fire tower waits, as thick smoke rises, for the young weatherman to rescue her; the untried forest supervisor has to show grit before he is called “Slim,” his preferred manly nickname.

Back from an eight day driving and hiking jaunt due south to the borderlands, all of it under clear skies and a spectacular super moon. Trip reading was George R. Stewart’s 1949 FIRE in which wilderness conservation vies with the economic logic of extraction.

“He hated the younger man because his days of strength lay ahead, and because he thought of trees as lumber, and figured fire-fighting on sheets of paper.” As the Spitcat fire continues to devour the forest in George Stewart’s FIRE, an emotional generational divide emerges.

“And now with a kind of slow majesty — when the end of the world comes, there is no need to hurry — the crown-fire moved down the ridge, leaping from tree top to tree top” — a cold weather front kicks-up the blaze in George Stewart’s FIRE

West Texas Ramble (11/6/2025). Hiking under the supermoon in the Davis Mountains; late evening at the Indian Lodge; browsing Donald Judd at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa

“Like a man, a fire exists in time . . . where once it scarcely crept, now suddenly it walks and runs.” The wildfire as life form in George Stewart’s novel FIRE (1948). “The fire is a thing in itself. It begins, and is, and ends; it is born, and lives, and dies.”

Wake-up view. Marathon TX

“His motto seemed to be: ‘I suffer and I stay silent.’” Reading in typescript a new translation of HONORINE, one of Balzac’s long stories, in which a reclusive and otherwise stoic aristocrat lives a secret life of charity, entrapped in a fervor of selfless benevolence.

Usually, when your beliefs fail to evolve as you age, it’s a bad thing However I’m feeling good about my crotchety, knee-jerk attachment to radical 20c concepts like anti-racism, don’t do crimes, avoid financial bubbles, feed all the kids, fight Nazis, etc etc It’s a weird time to be obsolete!

Rising in the ranks of his profession, T. C. Worsley finds himself increasingly unsuited to administrative duties: “My sympathies were against all authority [and] I was always on the side of the lawbreaker. How then could I weild authority with any conviction?” FLANNELED FOOL

On my own this weekend, with H in Portland on business. Dropped into an old haunt, The Normandy Kitchen, for brunch after quite a few years away. Glad to say they’ve maintained their strict policy of *always* having Turner Classic movies (muted) on the television over the bar.

The “cold, barbarous barn” that is the school’s common area in Worsley’s FLANNELED FOOL. Staffed by the school’s athletes, “the only law was the jungle law of force; and the special sufferers were the individualists and non-conformers.”

Weekend reading is T.C. Worsley’s memoir FLANNELED FOOL. Fascism rises in 1930s Europe, reverberating as a fierce culture war within the walls of a beef-witted English public school. The exasperated Master begs for peace: “We were fighting like weasels in a bag. It wouldn’t do.”

“But my loyalties were with my own little group of rebels rather than with the authorities of which I was, after all, one.” The schoolmaster T.C. Worsley, in his memoir FLANNELED FOOL, as the political crisis of the 1930s erupts.

Encountering the dangerously dashing Esmond Romilly: “I couldn’t help admiring the spirit of I-care-for-nobody which gave him such a single-minded will . . . He was a lone wolf with a wolf’s bite for any hand that fed him and a wolf’s snarl for anyone who reasoned with him.” Worsley, FLANNELED FOOL

Embracing stasis in Dino Buzzati’s THE STRONGHOLD: “The freedom to waste time in this way, without taking refuge in sleep, without fearing the lateness of the hour, letting the sun rise, a foretaste of eternity unfolding before you, without any compulsion to agonize.”

“He had advanced through the carefree period of early youth . . . years pass slowly with such a light step that no one notices their conclusion. . . You savor the foretaste of the marvelous things that lie in wait.” The ever-receding promised future in Buzzati’s THE STRONGHOLD

“The French detest the idea of traveling, whereas the English delight in it, and indeed they both have good reasons. It’s easy to find something better than England almost anywhere, whereas it would be difficult to discover charms equal to those of France anywhere else.” Balzac, “Honorine”

“Curzio kept to himself, attending to his persona. I always had the sense he was a loner, one look at his house and you understand.” Malaparte’s last years in his stark, concrete villa overlooking the sea, Casa Come Me (“House Like Me”), famous for its appearance in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt.”

“As a true narcissist, Malaparte always preferred appearances to existence. For him the mirror had the same value, if not a greater one than ink on paper.” Maurizio Serra, in MALAPARTE: A LIFE

“The walls of disinterest and silence had risen around him.” Last night, finished Maurizio Serra’s biography of Curzio Malaparte, whose desperate craving for fame only accelerates as he reaches the last years of his life and descends into brooding solitude.

In Serra’s MALAPARTE, the mania of Benito Mussolini for marking the papers or press clippings set before him with large “M’s” in blue or red pencil. A self-imposed bureaucratic burden of which he was inordinately proud, declaring himself the “ox” or “workhorse” of Italy.

Attracted by the fortune and élan of a rebellious Fiat heiresss, Malaparte runs up against her corporate protector, “a small, terse dictatorial man, who never spoke more than three words in a row in his whole life, one of the three invariably being ‘No!’” Serra, MALAPARTE

If you dig Vladimir Sorokin, Ursula Le Guin, Tarkovsky, Aleksei German’s adaptation of HARD TO BE A GOD

“One needs to remember that Caesar does not offer happiness, only compensation. Happiness must be conquered, must be sought in the secret realms where Caesar does not reign.” MALAPARTE, in Serra’s biography, having made a significant misstep in his risky political ascent.

Maurizio Serra, in his Malaparte biography, writing of the allure in fascist aesthetics for the dolichocephalic — men with heads proportionally longer than average. (Reminding me, also, of the mystique in medieval Italy for the Lombard — “long beard” — invaders from the north).

Maurizio Serra, describing his subject Curzio Malaparte’s (née Suckert) evening toilette: “He was proud of his taut cheeks, to which he would nightly apply, legend has it, raw steaks; the freshness of his skin; and the cleanliness of his fingernails.” Serra, MALAPARTE

“If you find my words ridiculous, it’s because you don’t yet know how powerful I am.” Behind all the bloody mayhem of Manchette’s NO ROOM AT THE MORGUE lies the tearful rage of a heartbroken American businessman.

“I don’t know if it was because of lack of food or lack of sleep, but living in a dream was becoming my main activity. . . . My theories were collapsing one by one, but I started constructing them all over again. At the same time, I was dreaming of steak frites.” Manchette, NO ROOM AT THE MORGUE

Glad to be getting to Leif Weatherby’s much-anticipated LANGUAGE MACHINES, wish he was here on Bsky. This slaps.

Spending the early afternoon with Jean-Patrick Manchette’s NO ROOM AT THE MORGUE. His detective, the disgraced gendarme Eugéne Tarpon, establishes his office (and residence) on the fifth floor of a seamy Red Light district walkup, which helps in warding off bothersome clients.

When you publish a website that posts the names and photos of scholars who have written or said things you disagree with and encourage people to surveil and harass them, you are not, in fact, a “free speech” organization.

A Joseph Conrad quote, from “The Secret Sharer,” making the rounds this weekend: “I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank — but that’s not the same thing.”

“There’s my filthy Itri,” enthuses a journeying artist in Hans Christian Anderson’s THE IMPROVISATORE (1825), whose aesthetic is miserable poverty. “In the North, I yearned for a nice, filthy Italian town. A place like this is so typical; it’s just the thing for an artist.”