[John Whitworth]

You don't want too much poetry in novels in my opinion. You can't digest 600 pages of it. Dickens is sparing of the kind of thing he kicks off with in Bleak House. But in short stories...

Shena Mackay writes novels but I can't warm to them. But short stories. Try 'Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags'. What a title! This is the opening of 'Electric Blue Damsels'. The whole book is a masterpiece. I met her once. Very straightforward and unpoetic, thank God.

You see them in the Underground with their schoolbooks and across the counters of shops and waiting of tables in restaurants, slinging burgers and pushing brooms, girls and boys in whom an exotic cocktail of genes has been shaken into a startling and ephemeral beauty: birds of paradise nesting in garbage, or captive tropical fish shimmering in the gloomy backrooms of dank petshops.


And later in the same story:

His brain turned to coral: emperor and clown, harlequins, rainbows, unicorns, angels and devils, queens, jewels, damsels, glowlights, butterflies, cardinals, swordfish, surgeons, anemones, starfish, sea-horses, dancing shrimps, golden rams and silver sharks, flying foxes, albino tigers, lyretails, parrots and corals; freshwater and marine tropicals from the Indian Ocean and the Pacific swam through its branches. He took out a stack of library books.

She's terrific with lists. Why she is not a Dame of the British Empire or whatever it is these days (usually awarded to sportswomen) I cannot imagine.

[John Beaton]

This, from "Beautiful Losers" by Leonard Cohen. As I was reading the novel many years ago, I was blown away by that passage and went over and over it, almost to the point of memorization.

I had the pleasure of sitting through a poetry reading by Ann Michaels once. She was inspirational.

John

[John Beaton]

I also enjoy Cormac McCarthy's prose and the early part of "The Crossing" has some of his best passages. Here are some quotes from that book.

John

[W.F. Lantry]

Janice,

You may be interested to know there's a similar thread going on right now on reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/literature/c...have_read_and/

Most of these particular redditors aren't writers, they're book lovers. Their choices are surprisingly diverse. And before the haughty high-brows hereabout scoff at their selections, it might be best to remember: these are our readers. It's worth a look.

Thanks,

Bill

[Janice D. Soderling]

And before the haughty high-brows hereabout scoff...

Haughty highbrows? Here?

[Cally Conan-Davies]

And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.

Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the serenity became less brilliant but more profound. The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the august light of abiding memories. And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes, "followed the sea" with reverence and affection, than to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled—the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her round flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen's Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests—and that never returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith—the adventurers and the settlers; kings' ships and the ships of men on 'Change; captains, admirals, the dark "interlopers" of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned "generals" of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.

The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear along the shore. The Chapman lighthouse, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway—a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.

"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."


The beginning of Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness.

[R. Nemo Hill]

"I used to think," Nora said, "that people just went to sleep, or if they did not go to sleep that they were themselves, but now—" she lit a cigarette and her hands trembled—"now I see that the night does something to a person's identity, even when asleep."

"Ah!" exclaimed the doctor. "Let a man lay himself down in the Great Bed and his 'identity' is no longer his own, his 'trust' is not with him, and his 'willingness' is turned over and is of another permission. His distress is wild and anonymous. He sleeps in a Town of Darkness, member of a secret brotherhood. He neither knows himself nor his outriders; he beserks a fearful dimension and dismounts, miraculously, in bed!

"His heart is tumbling in his chest, a dark place! Though some go into the night as a spoon breaks easy water, others go head foremost against a new connivance; their horns make a dry crying, like the wings of the locust, late come to their shedding.

"Have you thought of the night, now, in other times, in foreign countries—in Paris? When the streets were gall high with things you wouldn't have done for a dare's sake, and the way it was then; with the pheasants' necks and the goslings' beaks dangling against the hocks of the gallants, and not a pavement in the place, and everything gutters for miles and miles, and a stench to it that plucked you by the nostrils and you were twenty leagues out! The criers telling the price of wine to such effect that the dawn saw good clerks full of piss and vinegar, and blood letting in side streets where some wild princess in a night shift of velvet howled under a leech; not to mention the palaces of Nymphenburg echoing back to Vienna with the night trip of late kings letting water into plush cans and fine woodwork!

"No," he said, looking at her sharply, "I can see you have not! You should, for the night has been going on a long time!"

She said, "I've never known it before— I thought I did, but it was not knowing at all."

"Exactly," said the doctor. "You thought you knew, and you hadn't even shuffled the cards—now the nights of one period are not the nights of another. Neither are the nights of one city the nights of another....."

Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)

[RCL]

Open Moby-Dick randomly and listen to Elizabethan music, especially Shakespeare's.