(Silence has Settled by Nikolay Dubovskoy, 1890 via David Irvine on Fb)
English into Volapuk into English again. On the same page: "If Miss Dickinson had undergone the austere curriculum indicated, she would, I am sure, had become an admirable lyric poet of the second magnitude." (1892)
"JW: What your 5 favorite “experimental” novels?
WG: Here are six experimental (by my definition) novels I think have outstanding literary value, but I am reverse-engineering the experiment.
Denis Johnson, Jesus’s Son: Write a collection of short stories in which the reader can neither prove nor disprove that the protagonists are all the same person. Extra credit if a reader unfamiliar with the book cannot figure out a thing about the author, even whether they are male (“Dennis”) or female (“Denise”).
Thomas Bernhard, Extinction: Write a novel in two halves, each one paragraph, in which the first half is all interior monologue with no action, and the second half is action, like a toy being wound way too tight and then let go. Extra credit for Nazi anxiety.
Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch: Write a novel in which the chapters can be read in two different, explicitly stated orders, such that the ending is radically different each way. Extra credit if the writing is heartbreakingly lovely.
David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress: Write a novel in short, digressive paragraphs, that manages to avoid asking or answering the story’s silently screaming central questions. Extra credit if the book is infuriatingly unreadable the first time, and deliciously seductive by the third.
F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. Write a novel in which the first-person narrator is the central character in the story, whose point of view the entire story is told from, but who somehow manages not to be the protagonist. Extra credit if this narrator, who writes beautifully, has no interest in writing.
Cormac McCarthy. Suttree. Write a difficult book that William Gillespie nevertheless reads five times, and cries each time from an emotion he can’t name." (via)
"A novelist hears of a glass eye that can destroy all lizards, and dedicates her life to finding it." --@MagicRealismBot
"A forest in Tokyo is made of silence." --ibid
"...in the age of the dying of the word compassion will pass as understanding." --Howard Jacobson, Zoo Time (2012)
Vesp.
(via @NASANewHorizons)
(blue image by alex schomburg via bruce sterling on ello)
