'Essays One' by Lydia Davis.
I enjoy thinking through Lydia Davis’s Essays. I catch her mind and follow.
08.03.2026 18:22
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'Essays One' by Lydia Davis.
I enjoy thinking through Lydia Davis’s Essays. I catch her mind and follow.
“I write because I need to say something I do not know.”
[J’écris parce que j’ai besoin de dire quelque chose que j’ignore.]
— Pascal Quignard (interview, 2001)
Pascal Quignard:
“I’m a firm believer in the distance between the hand that writes and the eyes that read, and that this distance can’t be augmented: it’s an infinite gap. Hand and eye are not located in the same body.”
(from Albucius, tr. Bruce Boone)
the fascination of trifles; the enchantment of frivolity; the spell of worthless things; the seduction of nonsense; the charm of idle pursuits; the lure of empty pleasures; the enticement of meaningless diversions; the allure of trivial things; the spell of slight things
Just as I finish Montevideo, news of another Vila-Matas novel in translation. @yalebooks.bsky.social coming to the rescue again. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...
‘I feel I am not yet grown up’: Alan Bennett’s diary of his 90th year
New review: the new (unabridged and three-volume) translation of Yoshikawa Eiji's 1939 epic, 𝑀𝑢𝑠𝑎𝑠ℎ𝑖 www.complete-review.com/reviews/japa...
In which I sheepishly admit: in between the post-it flags that festoon my volumes of Woolf's diaries are stretches that I didn't find that interesting...which is fine, really, as they were never meant to be masterpieces.
A detail from a panel from a 1990 Peanuts comic strip showing Snoopy lying under a tree. He is thinking, “I like a book where there’s only one character and nothing happens to him.”
Good morning, friends!
There are some things (like first love and one’s first reviews) at which a woman in her middle years does not care to look too closely.
Stella Gibbons, from the foreword to ‘Cold Comfort Farm’
“For the first time in English, all the short fiction that Ingeborg Bachmann wrote in her lifetime in a single volume. Available Sep 29, 2026” (!!!) @ndbooks.bsky.social 🔥🔥🙌 www.ndbooks.com/book/the-com...
With Marguerite Duras and a blank notebook at the edge of the Black Sea. A few days of calm; months of storm thereafter. “There is nothing I can do about the eternity that I carry to the place of your final gaze.”
In Paris or here, when I have finished writing and walk out of the apartment building or strike out from the path over the hill, if I encounter a turd it destroys all my hours of work. That's what my pages are, it, him. Every turd I encounter is a torment every hour of the day. At night, the smell of them through the open window sneers at my next day's work. I shall write all the same. I want to be strong, like my mended basket hanging from the branch of a young oak, away from the ants, between the rocks where I am working. Yesterday I was sitting in X's basement. She combed my hair with her pocket comb. I told her that her comb in my hair felt like tenderness, that it was like kisses given to an old woman warming herself in the sun. How starved I must be! A thread. If it snaps I shall begin weeping again for a week, for months, for years. I shall blow my nose noisily, I will not weep. - Violette Leduc, La Bâtarde (tr. by Derek Coltman)
Violette Leduc on the sneering turds of her life.
I have wished for years for a British Gallimard/LOA.
Contact
When I began writing here I believed reading was collaboration. Sartre's word. The writer offers and the reader completes. What I didn't anticipate was how much of reading is loss. Books I loved that left nothing behind. Books I discarded that lingered unexpectedly. The unread shelves that…
Solitude and Gathering, Revisited
I once wrote a post about King Alfred's translations, and I have been thinking about it again. Not because I have changed my mind, but because I now stand closer to the thing I was describing. Alfred began his translations in middle age; when I wrote about him I…
The second-rate works of a great writer are worth reading because they offer the best criticism of his masterpieces.
—Virginia Woolf, from 'The Common Reader'
"I seemed only to stumble after my own voice."
Here in the few minutes that remain, I must record, heaven be praised, the end of The Waves. I write the words O Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity and intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice.
— Virginia Woolf
"Why read? Because you can know, intimately, only a very few people, and perhaps you never know them at all. After reading The Magic Mountain you know Hans Castorp thoroughly, and he is greatly worth knowing." — Harold Bloom
Three books on a dark surface: Melanie McDonagh's Converts, and both volumes of The Benson Diary edited by Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam.
New arrivals
Fascinatio Nugacitatis
Kafka wrote to his friend Oskar Pollak in January 1904 that a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. I have taken him at his word. I own hundreds of unread books and last weekend I compiled an eighteen-month reading plan to get through the ones most likely to…
Elizabeth Bowen died #otd in 1973, in University College Hospital, London, aged 73.
She is buried with her husband in St Colman's churchyard in Farahy, Co. Cork, close to the gates of her family seat, Bowen's Court.
The seductive power of the inessential.
So that passion can do no harm, let us act as it we had only one week to live. — Pascal
Three Views of Sleep
Charlotte Beradt collected the dreams of ordinary Germans under the Third Reich. In them, factory owners made involuntary Nazi salutes. Women dreamed erotically of Hitler. Sleep was where totalitarianism completed its work. This last private space invaded. Fernando Pessoa saw…
And now I’m sleepy, because I think – I don’t know why – that the meaning of it all is to sleep.
Fernando Pessoa
God Is the Fact That We Exist and That’s Not All
I'm reading Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet from cover to cover. It wasn't written that way, but Richard Zenith's choices cluster thematically. It's a book that teaches you how to read it as you go. Text 22 ends, God Is the Fact That We Exist…
Thanks. I shall be more diligent about avoiding such covers (and Amazon).
Yes, I've been rereading this for about the same time.
