Monday, August 10, 2009
Caesar: The Civil War
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Tales From Ovid
The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
Old Christmas
The Catcher in the Rye
It
The Erotic Poems
The Iliad
Pieces of My Mind
Byron's Poetry
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm
Flappers and Philosophers
The History of Sexuality
Selected Poems
Collected Poems
Over to You
Breakfast at Tiffany's
The Stranger
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O. J. Simpson Got Away With Murder
Naked Lunch
Selected Poems
Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders
The Stand
The Castle in the Attic
Candide
The History of the Peloponnesian War
The Complete Plays of Sophocles
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
The Oresteian Trilogy
Four Plays by Aristophanes
The Consolation of Philosophy
Labels: Albert Camus, Andy Rooney, books, bookshelf, Homer, J. D. Salinger, Julius Caesar, Malcolm X, Michel Foucault, Ovid, Roald Dahl, Stephen King, Thomas Hardy, Washington Irving
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 5:46 AM]
Hollywood Cannot Be Found In Any One Place
Sunday, August 02, 2009
This morning I thought I needed to sell my books, not so much because I thought I needed to sell my books as because selling books is what other people do when they need to clear space or make emergency cash appear. The former at the moment presents less urgency than the latter, though in perusing my shelves for titles I could abandon I forgot entirely any original purpose, as I got lost flipping through the things I had read some years ago and, in certain cases, had not opened since.
I pulled out What's The Matter With Kansas?, which I read freshman year of college after the author appeared on The Daily Show, when the show was relatively mild and Jon Stewart was slightly less jaded with life. Most of what the author wrote in 2004 applied to politics five years before and applies five years after, a snippet following a quote of one of Ann Coulter's windblast comments being illustrative:
Coulter instantiates this thesis about the rich not by opening a copy of Fortune or Cigar Aficionado but by turning to what's on TV. See, there's all sorts of filth, put there by liberals. We know the liberal elite hate the common people because of what we see on the TV, what we read in highbrow modern fiction, all of which can be laid at the doorstep of liberalism. On the other hand, we know that the GOP is the true party of the workers, since the hard-guy Republican Tom DeLay is "more likely to have a beer with a trucker" than the wealthy senator Barbara Boxer of California. We know it because the two social possibilities of American life are mimicking the liberal "beautiful people" of Hollywood or embracing "the working-class hillbillies who go to NASCAR races," that favorite litmus test of the populist right.(Frank, Thomas. What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2004. pgs. 117-118)
Apparently, there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer.
Why should I sell that? "Frank" is parked between "Foucault" and "Freud", who are succeeded by "Gaiman", "Gibbon", and "Gide". I decided to part with one of two copies of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, but then:
It is Sunday; ergo, the bookstore is closed. Schade.
Labels: Ann Coulter, beer, books, bookshelf, economics, hillbillies, Jon Stewart, Kansas, liberalism, NASCAR, politics, quotes, television, The Daily Show, Thomas Frank, Tom DeLay, working-class
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 7:11 AM]
It Could All Go Up In Flames
Saturday, October 25, 2008
The space-heater in my bedroom must not be situated within three feet of anything, particularly, anything inflammable. Upon survey of my room, one discerns first the futon mattress on the floor. Next one may note the disassembled, wooden futon frame stacked to one side below the windows looking out onto nothing but the ivy that covers the side of the house. To the right, behind the space heater, stands a near-ceiling-high wooden bookshelf, containing at least two hundred books. On the floor, to one side, binders, documents, and more books (mostly dictionaries and writing supplements) rest neatly, if undecorously. On the mattress are piled six stacks of books and notebooks relating to my graduate classes and the section of beginning Latin I teach. If I shift heavily in sleep, these will bury me. If the space heater sets them alight, they will bury me in flames.
I spent the day reading about medieval archaeology and prosopography. At midday I broke off on a walk to the student recreation center, to read the first act of Kleist's Penthesileia on a recumbent bike, and then to swim about twenty laps. All this conducted in blissful solitude.
I do not like anyone.
Labels: archaeology, bedroom, books, bookshelf, flames, futon, Heinrich von Kleist, ivy, Latin, Penthesileia, prosopography, recumbent bike, sleep, solitude, space heater, student recreation, swimming
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 5:22 PM]