For majesty a throne
She stands in grace alone
Her smile equally dosed
Decisively composed
The peasant has his land
He stands to serve her end
His honor is to bow
and serve he is endowed
The moon is to the sun
Not his own that is done
But in the bigger light
He shines a little bright
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis (1991), 385p.
Without a doubt, one of the best books you can read to understand America in general, and Chicago and the Great West specifically. For a little more comprehensive review see the post about ‘The Devil in the White City‘.
Philip Roth, Indignation (2008), 231p
“of the terrible, the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.”
Marcus Messner is the son of Jewish parents, a kosher butcher and his wife, in Newark, New Jersey. Messner is phonetically close to the German word for knife: ‘Messer’. The knife and cutting is a returning and central symbol in Indignation, Marcus dies by the bayonet, his father’s livelihood depends on his knife skills, Olivia Hutton has cut her wrist in an attempted suicide.
Another thread in the story is the indignation Marcus feels about having to attend mass 40 times as a requirement at Winesburg college. At Dean Caudwell’s office, he recites two full pages from Bertrand Russel’s “Why I am Not a Christian.” This theme is closed at the end of the book, with the White Panty Raid. The ‘Panty Raid‘ was a historic phenomenon that started in 1949 and lasted through the 1950s at American colleges. In 1971, a student uprising at Winesburg college resulted in the abolishment of the mass attendance requirement. Marcus Messner’s final doom is caused by this requirement and Ziegler’s proxying for him at the chapel.
‘Indignation’ is associated to ‘American Pastoral’ and ‘I married a Communist’ and has been called the ‘American Trilogy’ by Roth.
Indignation (2016)
Through this dark night
Your heart is bright
Like a fair moonlight
My soul you guide
Into your loving bed
To suckle your breast
And clamp your chest
Into your womb my head
So you sooth
me like a boy
To be a man
Thus looted
By a woman coy
love uncanny
The short stubbles of his scruffy goatee blended like a brightly colored motion of a pointillist painting into the detailed foam of ginger waves and the freckled splashes of his reddish face under an orange sky lit by a spiky haircut. His light blue eyes looked gloomy.
Irrational Man, William Barrett (1958), 314p.
Henry Miller, The Books in my Life (1969), 315p.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead (1861), 357p.
Ivan Turgenev, First Love (1860), 107p (1980).
Mikhail Bulgakov, Morphine (1926), 55p
Bulgakov’s Morphine is a simple short story that uses his experience as a doctor and morphine addict in simple diary form. The most beautiful aspect of Morphine is the evidence of what a great short story requires, a genuine heartfelt compassion, the experience of real life, maybe the auto-biographical element sets the quality of any short story apart from a fantasy story. I’m a big fan of fictionalized auto-biographical material, Morphine proves why. The story reads easily in a day, without losing attention, as if it was written in equal amount of time.