Benedict Sangster

6 The reason the impressions we receive in youth are so significant, the reason why in the dawn of life everything appears to us in so ideal and transfigured a light, is that we then first become acquainted with the genus, which is still new to us, through the individual, so that every individual thing stands as a representative of its genus: we grasp therein the (Platonic) Idea of this genus, which is essentially what constitutes beauty.

'The cloudless sky above the east's Mountains of Rincon range was the faint sick pink of an unhealed burn.'

'The scenes of our life resemble pictures in rough mosaic; they are ineffective from close up, and have to be viewed from a distance if they are to seem beautiful.'

~ Arthur Schopenhauer - On the Vanity of Existence, tr. R.J. Hollingdale

'There's two levers for skim and one for supposedly high-lecithin chocolate skim, which every new E.T.A. tries exactly once and discovers tastes like skim with a brown crayon melted into it.'

Thanks Jennifer, the only question is with which to begin....

I read The Emperor, his book about the dying days of Haile Selassie's empire, last year and thought it was brilliant. Adding this to my list

A stack of books from a recent trip to Hay-on-Wye in Wales, a mood-inspiriting candle perilously close beside it threatening wholesale conflagration, all against a backdrop of dead succulents. From top to bottom: Requiem for a Nun - William Faulkner I Who Have Never Known Men - Jacqueline Harpman, tr. Ros Schwartz War and War - László Krasznahorkai, tr. George Szirtes The Piano Teacher - Elfriede Jelinek, tr. Joachim Neugroschel Aspects of the Novel - E.M. Forster King Richard II - William Shakespeare

Recent acquisitions from a trip to the nothing short of inspirational Hay-on-Wye, the National Book Town of Wales, which well befits its title.

(Full list & translators in alt-text)

#booksky

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'The urban lume makes the urban night only semidark, as in licoricey, a luminescence just under the skin of the dark, and swelling.'

And then occasional quite beautiful passages like the above appearing throughout

When a reading of text has proceeded by laborious stages within the test-rig of detailed study, pause to allow the overall effect to integrate back into a coherent human reading, and ponder whether your life may even have been changed, just a little, or your beliefs about large questions; whether your habits of feeling have been flattered or boastfully challenged, or whether your relation to the text builds up a kind of trust. This aspect is what you will take away with you when all the study is finished, and it should last you through a lifetime.

J. H. Prynne, on reading

'Grief is selfish: we cry for ourselves without the person we have lost far more than we cry for the person [...] and if the grief is frozen by ambiguity, by the constant possibility of reversal, then so is the ability to cope.'

~ Julia Armfield - Our Wives Under the Sea

The violence of either grief or joy
Their own enactures with themselves destroy.

1 year, 1 publisher, 9,000 books: AI-generated titles flood Korean shelves - The Korea Times For generations, Koreans have regarded books as the most reliable form of information. They're slower than social media, but more carefully made an...

A horrifying vision of the future

eager for unweaving or merest harm dissuasive retreat and steps back are not the same Excerpted from Ross Scott-Buccleuch's Harm Dissuasive, in the collection Fang Coda from Salò Press.

'retreat and steps back
are not the same'

Ross Scott-Buccleuch's Harm Dissuasive, taken from the fragmentary and yet playful collection Fang Coda, via @salopress.bsky.social

GBP SHORT STORY PRIZE: A quick announcement and apologies - we'll be posting the GBP Short Story Prize longlist at 17:00 tonight; it would have been much earlier but alas, an IT meltdown has scuppered that... (Working on it now!)

(Please share if you can.)

An Absence of Sea by Christina Tudor-Sideri | *out 16 April* www.erratumpress.com/an-absence-o...

That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That a clean room feels better to be in than a dirty room. That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it. That ‘acceptance’ is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else. That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels. That nobody who’s ever gotten sufficiently addictively enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance and has successfully quit it for a while and been straight and but then has for whatever reason gone back and picked up the Substance again has ever reported being glad that they did it, used the Substance again and gotten re-enslaved; not ever. Excerpted without context and out of order from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.

Some of Infinite Jest's almost-proverbs from the first of its great, deeply human Alcoholics Anonymous/Ennet House/recovery sections. A selection of my favourites, very particularly the last two

'Have Himself hunch down to put a long pale arm around your shoulders and tell you that his own father had told him that talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.'

💛

Three books side by side: Our Wives under the Sea by Julia Armfield, Jean by Madeleine Dunnigan, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

Three new acquisitions from a recent Cambridge trip:

Our Wives Under the Sea - Julia Armfield

Jean - Madeleine Dunnigan (a @dauntbookspub.bsky.social original)

The Turn of the Screw - Henry James

'[...] and in the confusing night he forgot for the while what experience had taught him—that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.'

~ Graham Greene - The Heart of the Matter

For our winter issue, Granta goes to therapy. Read the issue for free online for the next five days.

granta.com/products/gra...

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest held up against a white table bearing several neglectfully-tended plants in varying stages of aridity.

My February big read, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest - evoking in my mind, 200pgs in, the chaos, the hilarity of William Gaddis's J.R., the drug-life and -world of Christiane F., and Pale Fire's voluminous footnotes

'And always the soldiers going,
Soldiers and lorries beating the streets of cobble,
Like blood to where a wound is flowing.'

~ Bernard Spencer - Base Town

That's interesting because I found Never Let Me Go uninspiring on the whole but for the ending which was brilliant and really stuck with me. I will keep you availed!

'He muttered detached words, also; the only one I could catch was the name of Catherine, coupled with some wild term of endearment, or suffering; and spoken as one would speak to a person present - low and earnest, and wrung from the depth of his soul.'

'[...] but both their minds tending to the same point - one loving and desiring to esteem; and the other loving and desiring to be esteemed - they contrived in the end to reach it.'

The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro The No. 1 Sunday Times Bestseller Featuring two figures on a beach beneath a tree, facing a shoreline, a figure on a boat out on the water.

On loan from a friend, a more recent Ishiguro: The Buried Giant

MIGUEL HERNANDEZ War Old age in the towns. The heart without an owner. Love without any object. Grass, dust, crow. And the young ones? In the coffins. The tree alone and dry. Woman like a stick of widowhood across the bed. Hatred there is no cure for. And the young ones? In the coffins. translated by Hardie St. Martin

'The heart without an owner.'

'[...] I was born in the night of January the second and third
In the unreliable year
Of eighteen-ninety something or other,
And the centuries surround me with fire.'

~ Osip Mandelstam - Aortas Fill with Blood, tr. James Greene