Now, if you’re like me, you may be skeptical of any book about a man with a pet penguin.
—
The 1996 novel Death and the Penguin is a fast-paced, witty read and what critic John Powers calls “an almost perfect novel.” (via nprfreshair)
a more recent like
View Larger if i were any less hungover and any more brave, i would definitely come up with something wittier than “Hamlet is the original Simba” as a reply.
Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
—
Jorge Luis Borges
It’s in my nature to be cynical, and I know that with all of my criticisms of cuddly She & Him or The Notebook (why, Gosling? You could’a had it all!), and even more so, with my apparent inability to connect with other human beings, you might not expect that I’m a romantic. And I’m not, because based on my experience, just about everything you hear is regurgitated, clichéd bullshit that makes you feel stupid in the end for believing it at all.
Sometimes, though—be it rarely—I read a passage that surprises me. A genuine thought that I actually gives me some hope for the prospect of affection (or even love) at all. Borges can do that. So can Neruda. Or Saint-Exupéry. And I suppose that’s the way it should be, because sincere words are more valuable when you have to dig for them.
may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
for even if it’s sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there’s never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile
In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts.
It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.
we know God is dead, they’ve told us, but listening to you I wasn’t sure.
— Bukowski
If you have the guts to be yourself, other people’ll pay your price.
—
John Updike, Rabbit Run
God this is so gorgeous.
Guess what though? I’ll probably never read Moby Dick.
(Source: a-case-of-me)
Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about—he wasn’t no home-run hitter or fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock.
And except for one period early in his life, dude never had much luck with the females (how very un-Dominican of him).
He was seven then.
In those blessed days of his youth, Oscar was something of a Casanova. One of those preschool loverboys who was always trying to kiss the girls, always coming up behind them during a merengue and giving them the pelvic pump, the first nigger to learn the perrito and the one who danced it any chance he got. Because in those days he was (still) a ‘normal’ Dominican boy raised in a ‘typical’ Dominican family, his nascent pimp-liness was encouraged by blood and friends alike. During parties—and there were many parties in those long-ago seventies days, before Washington Heights was Washington Heights, before the Bergenline became a straight shot of Spanish for almost a hundred blocks—some drunk relative inevitably pushed Oscar onto some little girl and then everyone would howl as boy and girl approximated the hip-motism of the adults.
You should have seen him, his mother sighed in her Last Days. He was our little Porfirio Rubirosa.
View Larger I found this poster at the English faculty library in here in Cambridge. I contemplated stealing it, but then I remembered that broad daylight is not the most strategic time for theft.
You just wait, English faculty library. I still have some books to return, and when I do… it’ll be after sunset.
