MOVE OVER, JABBERWOCKY AND ALICE IN WONDERLAND.

Now we have Auri and the whimsical, lyrical prose of Patrick Rothfuss’ The Slow Regard of Silent Things. Here is a taste:

In the ancient passageways deep inside the earth, there are whispers of dim light.

Something vital up above was all alack, Auri thought, and the waiting grit on her.

The air was thick and shuddersome. The walls were full of spite. The stones begrudged her every step. All everything was snarling allapart.

The atmosphere in the underground changed from day to day. Burning days were flickersome. Too frangible by half. Other days were trumpet-proud. They heralded like thunder.

And how does Auri pass the time?

She sweeps the floor of her room, swingling wildly about, making the shadows spin and skirl.

She makes a smooth, curved dome of pale, sweet soap. It felt wicked and delicious. It was the color of fresh cream with just a single drop of blood.

She makes a sorrel colored candle pressed with lavender. It smelled of bay and bees. It was a perfect thing.

Auri’s mood is changeable. Sometimes her heart is stiff, at other times she had no crying left. She was full of broken glass and burrs. Then again, she felt dry as paper written on both sides.

Readers expect certain things, Rothfuss says about his book. They are going to read this and be disappointed. It doesn’t do what a normal story is supposed to do.

Right. But some people like paranormal.

IF YOU ARE A LAWYER YOU WON’T FIND THIS FUNNY. BUT I’M NOT.

#amreading Showey Yazdanian’s hilarious new book Loopholes, which hits lawyers very hard.

It begins with a page of Terms and Conditions:

Reading Loopholes (hereinafter “the novel”) constitutes a legally binding agreement… The print on the page becomes progressively smaller, ending with half a page of blah,blah,blah. So like all the publishing contracts I signed unread!

Other quotable bits:

The top one percent of law students shot across the border to the big new York law firms within five minutes of graduation, renouncing their citizenships during layovers in Chicago.

This is no reflection on Canada. It’s not personal, it’s just freezing up here.

But of course you don’t have to go to America. You can make a handsome living on Toronto’s Bay Street or work for the government in Ottawa, conveniently located mere steps from the North Pole, where literally everyone works for the government, so rush hour starts at 3:45 p.m and maternity leave lasts for seven years.

The hero of the novel, Walter Roger, passes the first year of his studies with flying colours thanks to outsourcing his essays and take-home exams to a guy called Basu in Kolkata.

Unfortunately Basu dies in the hero’s second year. The rest, as they say, is history. I’m throwing this sentence in because this blog is supposed to be about history.

Upon graduation, Walter ends up articling with a Bulgarian law firm in a suburban strip mall where the burbling rill of Cyrillic-only clients always paid cash.

For the rest of his adventures, read Loopholes published by Quattro.

As the Terms and Conditions state: No lawyers were harmed in the writing of this work of fiction.

VIENNA 1954, SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF A RETURNING JEW.

Hitler's speech on the Heldenplatz, Vienna

From an untitled novel manuscript by journalist Elizabeth de Waal (b.1899), published posthumously by her grandson, Edmund de Waal:

Kuno Adler, who escaped to New York in 1938, returns to Vienna:

There he was, on the Ring: the massive pile of the Natural History Museum on his right, the ramp of the Parliament building on his left, beyond it the spire of the Town Hall, andin front of him the railings of the Volksgarten and the Burgplatz…He sat down on a bench in a deserted avenue, and wept.

In postwar Vienna, Adler finds only a mild kind of anti-Semitism, like a suppressed toothache, but the past is still very much alive.

He encounters a scientist who had worked in a concentration camp, testing and researching with the only biological material that can yield convincing results in the field of medical science (he says) -- not with rats and mice and rabbits, but with live human subjects…but I can tell you for your comfort that our material – I mean my colleagues’ material—were not Jews. They were gypsies.

The infamous Heldenplatz, where Hitler gave a triumphant speech from the balcony of the New Palace in 1938, is the locale of a new beginning for Adler. It is there that he sees the woman he loves. He describes the Heldenplatz in romantic terms:

What first meets the eye and impresses the mind are the broad avenues of chestnut trees lining it on three sides, chestnut trees that bear a profusion of red candles in the spring. They give the square its peaceful, almost countrified look; they are conducive to slow perambulation and quiet contemplation.

My own recollections of the Heldenplatz are very different. The New Palace was headquarters to the Allied Forces occupying Austria until 1955. Every week the armed guard rotated. American, French, British, and Russian soldiers took their turn. When the Russians were on duty, we children were told to take a different route to school. The Russians were known to harass passersby and shake them down, especially women and girls. To them the place was anything but conducive to quiet contemplation.

(Source: De Waal, The Exiles Return, 2013)

MORE FROM KAFKA’S LETTER TO HIS FATHER: LIKE A NOOSE AROUND HIS NECK.

Your most effective method of education (it had an effect on me at any rate) was verbal: abuse, threats, irony, evil laughter and – oddly – self-pity…

I was terrified by your threats, for example: “I’ll tear you to pieces like a fish”. I knew of course that you would not follow up on it (as a small child, however, I did not know that), but the words matched my idea of your power, so that I thought you might be able to realize even that threat. It was terrifying also when you ran around the table, screaming at me, pretending you wanted to catch me (even though you had no real intentions), and my mother finally had to “save” me…

There were cases, where I was entirely in favour of your mean irony, that is, when it was directed toward others, for example, [my sister] Ellie, with whom I was on bad terms for many years. It meant a round of gloating and malice for me when you said at almost every dinner: “She has to sit 10 metres back from the table, my fat gal!” and when you imitated her pulling back your own chair without the faintest trace of good-natured chafing. Like a bitter enemy you exaggerated what was so very distasteful to you in her manner of sitting at table…

That is how you suffered, and how we suffered. In your eyes you were fully justified grinding your teeth and giving out that gurgling laughter (which made a fiendish impression on me as a child) and saying in a bitter tone: “What a bunch of people!”


...It is true that you rarely beat me up, but your shouting and your red face, and the hurried unbuttoning of your garters, which you hung over the back of a chair to have it at the ready – that was almost worse than a beating. The feeling was like that of a man about to be hanged. If he is actually hanged, he is dead, and the whole thing is over. But if he is made to witness all the preparations for the hanging and is told of his pardon only when the noose is already dangling in front of his face, the experience may make him suffer for the remainder of his life.  In addition, there were all those incidents when you made me understand very clearly that I deserved a beating in your opinion, and that I narrowly escaped it on account of your mercy. Collectively, these occasions gave me a profound feeling of guilt. Whichever way you looked at it, I was in your debt.
(Source: Letter to my Father, text at www.kafka.org; my translation)

WHAT KNAUSGAARD THINKS ABOUT IT ALL.

Heaven Up Here by Echo & the Bunnymen: A tremendous wailing springs from them, all longing and beauty and gloom.

Girls: Inside me, a consciousness shot up from below, like a water spout, it was heavy and dark, there was abandon, resignation, impotence, the world closing in on me. There was the awkwardness, the silence, the scared eyes. There were the flushed cheeks and the great unease.

Hemingway: Straight to the point. Simple and clear. With weight behind it.

Familiar places: If I hadn’t had my previous attachment to the area I wouldn’t have noticed anything. The trees would have been any trees, the farm any farms, the bridge any bridge.

Separation: We don’t live our lives alone, but that doesn’t mean we see those alongside whom we live our lives. When dad moved to Northern Norway and was no longer physically in front of me with his body and his voice, his temperament and his eyes, in a way he disappeared out of my life.

Postmodernism: I liked it, or the whole world that I suspected lay behind what stood in the text, but I didn’t know what it was or where it actually existed.

Living in a small place: I was depressed by being under constant observation, by everyone always knowing who I was, by never being allowed to have any peace.

Booze: Alcohol makes everything big, it is a wind blowing through your consciousness… all objections and all judgement are cast aside in a wide sweep of the hand, in an act of supreme generosity, here everything, and I do mean everything, is beautiful. Why say no to this?

(From: Dancing in the Dark)

Anders Breivik: a person who has erected a make-believe reality, in which his significance is undisputed.

(http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/the-inexplicable)