The Second Coming

I awoke very early this morning, coughing from a nasty chest cold, to the news that Trump had unleashed an unauthorized and unlawful attack on Venezuela. Yes, I thought,Yeats accurately envisioned this rise of fanaticism, the unwinding disintegration and the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem.

The Second Coming 

By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Dinner Party - Viola van de Sandt

I accidentally read this book, having confused it with The Dinner by Herman Koch who is also a Dutch author. It was only after finishing The Dinner Party that I noticed it was published just a few months ago and the other was a book I’d been meaning to read for years. Oh well. 

The Dinner Party opens with this paragraph: 

 “Stella says I should write a letter. It can be addressed to her, or to no one in particular, or perhaps to a friend. Someone I trust. Do I have anyone like that?”

We learn that Stella is Franca’s therapist who has Franca write down her thoughts in the form of a letter to aid in recovering her memories of a traumatic dinner party a year ago and something to do with a knife. There are many flashbacks and flash forwards that can be confusing.

Franca is a troubled young woman whose fiancé, the seemingly perfect Andrew, has informed her that he is hosting a dinner party at their home for some of his colleagues. She is expected to prepare a special meal for them and he suggests rabbit. She is less than enthusiastic but sets about shopping for food and drinks for the guests. There are many visceral descriptions of rabbit carcasses and violent acts committed on the kitten Andrew has brought home that leave us questioning what is real.

The guests are mostly obnoxious men. Unexpectedly Franca’s platonic friend, Harry, who she has not seen in a very long time is brought as a plus one by one of the other guests. Before, during and after dinner copious amounts of alcohol are consumed and the party goes from bad to worse. 

This is a novel about suppressed female rage with a surprise twist at the end. It held my interest despite some nauseatingly disturbing descriptions and a cast of mostly despicable characters.

A Philip Larkin Christmas

“What an awful time of year this is! Just as one is feeling that if one can just hold on, it won’t get any worse, then all this Christmas idiocy bursts upon one like a slavering Niagara of nonsense & completely wrecks one’s entire frame. This means, in terms of my life, making a point of buying about six simple inexpensive presents when there are rather more people about than usual, and going home. No doubt in terms of yours it means seeing your house given over to hoards of mannerless middle-class brats and your good food & drink vanishing into the quacking tooth-equipped jaws of their alleged parents. Yours is the harder course, I can see. On the other hand, mine is happening to me.” - Philip Larkin

Via Memo Of The Air

Ravishing

This is an excerpt from Eshani Surya's Ravishing. Surya is a chronically ill South Asian writer living in Philadelphia.

Her mouth drops into a hesitant o when she first looks at herself in the mirror.

The girl on the screen films whenever she can. Her phone’s camera, a hungry eye, beckons. But she doesn’t mind being wanted. The more people keep watching her, keep calling her the best of the best, the more her mind loops with clever visuals instead of memories she’d prefer not to fall asleep to. So she records. So she posts—online. So, she presses her phone to her chest and waits for the comments to come in, all of them for her.

Today, the girl on the screen uses her thumbnail to slice open a box. Inside, a tube. Inside that, a product she layers over her face. Now she starts filming, and as the cream is absorbed there is a twist and a tug, like something caught needs release. It hurts, but in a good way, like floss parting the gums around a tooth, startling the mouth with blood. The girl’s features rearrange and for a split second her whole face looks mangled. She doesn’t flinch. In editing, she speeds up the process so no one notices when things go gruesome.

The girl’s face sculpted, elongated, augmented exactly as she wanted it. She smiles, both at that and at how her view count ticks up as soon as she posts. Her followers send her blue hearts, green hearts, whatever color heart their fingers hit first. Some crimson ones, too. Blood, the girl thinks again, then makes herself forget.

Later, the girl on the screen deletes her video and reposts a better version of it. She edits out one clip—her mouth, in that hesitant little o.

Read More: Literary Hub 

The Lost Girls of Rome

I want to read Donato Carrisi’s murder mystery The Lost Girls of Rome  after reading about it at The Narrative Within. Sandra Vega, a forensic analyst with the Roman police department. A few months ago, in the dead of night, her husband, an up-and-coming journalist, plunged to his death at the top of a high-rise construction site. The police ruled it an accident. Sandra isn’t buying it. 

The last two books I’ve read (The Dinner Party and What We Can Know) have been heavy so I’m hoping a murder mystery will be an easier read in comparison.

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Christmas 1939

13th December 1939
Oh an English Christmas! We are not Christians; we are not social; we have no part in the fabric of the world, but all the same, Christmas flattens us out like a steam roller; turkey, pudding, tips, waits, holly, good wishes, presents, sweets...


Virginia Woolf
Letter to Jacques Raverat
26th December 1924


—The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume III: 1923-1928

A Seasonal Tip

 

What We Can Know - Ian McEwen

What We Can Know begins in 2119. Thomas Metcalfe is an academic who has travelled to the Bodleian Snowdonian Library to study the journals of Vivien Blundy, wife of the famous poet Francis Blundy. Metcalfe’s interest is in ‘The Second Immortal Dinner’ of 2014 at which Francis presented his famous love poem, A Corona for Vivien to his wife and a group of their friends. The only copy of the poem has disappeared. Metcalfe and his colleague, Rose, are hoping to find it.

We learn that the oceans have risen and England in the 22nd century has become an archipelago. The way people live has changed for the worse with floods, resource wars and roving gangs. Protein bars and acorn tea seem to be the main source of sustenance. All the data in the world is stored in Nigeria. It’s a dystopia.

The story shifts back to the dinner itself at the idyllic countryside retreat Francis has built for himself and Vivien. A few close friends are gathered to hear Francis read the poem. It will not be published as that would reduce the intimacy and weight of the work which has been handwritten on vellum.

We also get to read Vivien’s journal which puts a new spin on the story.

The book is about history and what we leave behind, climate change, love and grief  and human frailties. I was engaged from the start (McEwen is a master of the good opening) and when I was finished I went back to reread sections. It was the best novel I have read in years.

The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser

Original illustration © Daniel Gray-Barnett

Ten days after I called off my engagement I was supposed to go on a scientific expedition to study the whooping crane on the gulf coast of Texas. Surely, I will cancel this trip, I thought, as I shopped for nylon hiking pants that zipped off at the knee. Surely, a person who calls off a wedding is meant to be sitting sadly at home, reflecting on the enormity of what has transpired and not doing whatever it is I am about to be doing that requires a pair of plastic clogs with drainage holes. Surely, I thought, as I tried on a very large and floppy hat featuring a pull cord that fastened beneath my chin, it would be wrong to even be wearing a hat that looks like this when something in my life has gone so terribly wrong.

Ten days earlier I had cried and I had yelled and I had packed up my dog and driven away from the upstate New York house with two willow trees I had bought with my fiancé.


Ten days later and I didn’t want to do anything I was supposed to do.


I went to Texas to study the whooping crane because I was researching a novel. In my novel there were biologists doing field research about birds and I had no idea what field research actually looked like and so the scientists in my novel draft did things like shuffle around great stacks of papers and frown. The good people of the Earthwatch organization assured me I was welcome on the trip and would get to participate in “real science” during my time on the gulf. But as I waited to be picked up by my team in Corpus Christi, I was nervous—I imagined everyone else would be a scientist or a birder and have daunting binoculars.


The biologist running the trip rolled up in in a large white van with a boat hitch and the words BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES stenciled across the side. Jeff was forty-ish, and wore sunglasses and a backward baseball cap. He had a winter beard and a neon-green cast on his left arm. He’d broken his arm playing hockey with his sons a week before. The first thing Jeff said was, “We’ll head back to camp, but I hope you don’t mind we run by the liquor store first.” I felt more optimistic about my suitability for science.


Not long before I’d called off my engagement it was Christmas.

Read more: The Paris Review

Illustration for Sad Book

Illustration - Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, 2004 by Quentin Blake (b. 1932)

(Biblioklept)