Emily Dickinson - Death Waits II

“Because I could not stop for Death —”
“He kindly stopped for me — ”

The words send a shiver down one’s spine. Emily Dickinson wrote without an audience (for the most part), without — much — encouragement, without limit, and without censor. Most of what she wrote languished unseen until after her death. She captured the mundane and soaring impressions of a quiet life in Amherst, Massachusetts, with an eye and voice that let them sparkle darkly.

Death Waits II draws from her life and her poems “Because I could not stop for Death,” and “A Route of Evanescence.”

Haruki Murakami - A Poor Aunt

Runner, swimmer, music lover, cafe proprietor, and inhabitor of imaginary worlds that crowd out reality, Haruki Murakami’s prose seems straightforward enough at first. But as with spaghetti we quickly find that it eludes our attempts to tame it with the fork of our intellect. Murakami is not a product of the modern age, the modern age is a product of Murakami. We read him to find out who we are, or, at least, who we might be.

“I didn’t even have / A poor aunt of my own.
Huh, like lines from a song.”
— from “A ‘Poor Aunt’ Story” by Haruki Murakami

Isaac Babel - My First Goose

Isaac Babel wrote of death, despair and brutality with a tender and lurid vigor that leaves us spellbound and repelled by the acts of man. A gentle, bespectacled intellectual, he followed the advice of his mentor, Gorky, and went out to learn to write by experiencing life. Babel joined the notorious Cossack army during the Polish-Soviet war of 1920.

My First Goose is a story from the resulting Red Cavalry collection. Surviving the war and an order of execution (reward for his unvarnished reporting), Babel continued to live in the thick of life’s discomforts. Despite the constant threat of arrest he kept the company of the police — how else to understand them? he asked. Babel’s luck eventually ran out and, by consensus at least, it is agreed that he died in 1940 in a Soviet prison.

Samuel Beckett - No Maggot Lonely

Pined for by Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce — his employer — Samuel Beckett was perhaps an odd target of romantic fascination. But perhaps not. In the words of Harold Pinter: “He’s not fucking me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy — he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not — he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely.”

Sylvia Plath - Have You Paid The Gasbill

Otto Emil Plath, German born professor of biology, entomologist, and author of ‘Bumblebees and Their Ways’ died from advanced diabetes having mistakenly diagnosed himself with lung cancer and refused to seek treatment. (His friend had died of lung cancer, therefore, he reasoned, that’s what he must have). He was 55. His daughter, Sylvia, who would grow up to be a poet, was 8.

The song incorporates two lines from “Mad Girl’s Love Song” by Sylvia Plath — ‘I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead’ and ‘(I think I made you up inside my head.)’

Seamus Heaney - A New State of Men

In an effort to explain his poetry as an escape from a terrible fear of silence that had always haunted him, Seamus Heaney looked to the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard: “What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak.”  While Heaney was still a young man, away at college, a car hit his four-year old brother and killed him.  Heaney addresses his sadness and sense of loss in the poems “Mid-Term Break” and “The Blackbird of Glanmore.”  He believed that poetry should and can be transformative, that each writing can bring into existence a new state of man.

Dante Alighieri - Beatrice

Condemned to perpetual exile from Florence, his home, during a (lengthy) period of political upheaval, Dante Alighieri found solace, one might suspect, in the composition of his Divine Comedy, a literary masterpiece which helped unify into a coherent written language the many dialects that peppered the parts of the world we now know as Italy.

Dante, the outcast, tours the circles of Hell in his Commedia, spiraling in on a reunion with his beloved Beatrice, who spurns him on the page as she had in life. Having succumbed at an early age to an unrequited love for Beatrice, Dante found he couldn’t have her, even in his own book. Beatrice Portinari, the presumed object of Dante’s undying admiration, was the daughter of a banker, and, eventually, the wife of a banker.

Paul Bowles - Points in Time

When Bowles was an infant, he remembers, his father seized on the opportunity of a frigid New York winter storm (or two?) to set his son’s crib on the window ledge in the hopes of inducing a case of hypothermia and premature demise.  No such luck for Bowles senior.  His son went on to write searing prose, and, in his turn, to wreak his own milder tortures on his wife, Jane Bowles nee Auer, whose writing career faltered after being eclipsed by that of her husband.  While less well known than other of his work, Bowles’s vivid, hypnotic Points in Time cannot be recommended too highly.

James & Lucia Joyce - From Dublin To Trieste, via Zurich

When Bowles was an infant, he remembers, his father seized on the opportunity of a frigid New York winter storm (or two?) to set his son’s crib on the window ledge in the hopes of inducing a case of hypothermia and premature demise.  No such luck for Bowles senior.  His son went on to write searing prose, and, in his turn, to wreak his own milder tortures on his wife, Jane Bowles nee Auer, whose writing career faltered after being eclipsed by that of her husband.  While less well known than other of his work, Bowles’s vivid, hypnotic Points in Time cannot be recommended too highly.

Albert Camus - Existentialist Nostalgia

When Bowles was an infant, he remembers, his father seized on the opportunity of a frigid New York winter storm (or two?) to set his son’s crib on the window ledge in the hopes of inducing a case of hypothermia and premature demise.  No such luck for Bowles senior.  His son went on to write searing prose, and, in his turn, to wreak his own milder tortures on his wife, Jane Bowles nee Auer, whose writing career faltered after being eclipsed by that of her husband.  While less well known than other of his work, Bowles’s vivid, hypnotic Points in Time cannot be recommended too highly.