books
Language is a virus from outer space — Burroughs
Just Kids
A beautifully written account of Patti Smith's early life and her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. It makes you wish you were sitting in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel when it was the centre of the universe, submerged in poetry and alcohol. Put on Phantasmagoria in Two and sink in.
"It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies. I fixed on the drummer, who seemed as if he was on the lam and had slid behind the drums while the cops looked elsewhere. Toward the end of their set he sang a song called 'Blind Rage,' and as he slammed the drums, I thought, This guy truly embodies the heart and soul of rock and roll. He had beauty, energy, animal magnetism."
"Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply. I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortés."
Stoner
Stoner is a quiet novel written with devastating precision. The prose is exact, not a word is wasted. It reminds me of train dreams — a book about one life that might appear small from the outside but contains immense inner weight and turmoil. From farm to the hallowed halls of university, it traces the life of one man who endures. It is a book to be experienced rather than unpacked. I really enjoyed it.
"The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly."
"In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another."