July 2005

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by J. K. Rowling
Read during my faux-artist retreat at H's house, as intermittent rewards for book editing. I loved it, actually, more than the fifth one -- I thought this one was tighter and tenser and sadder and clearly leading up to a big grand finale.

History on a Personal Note, by Binnie Kirschenbaum
God, did I finish this? I think I finished this. It was good? I think? But maybe not that memorable?

Skinny Legs and All, by Tom Robbins
One of the first re-reads I'll have finished in a long time, but it's taking me a while to absorb it. Kind of like reading a philosophical treatise, on multiple levels. I also loved this book when I first read it in high school; now, it's still striking me as really profound, and also funny, and I'm wanting to quote from every page:

On politics:
What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over other people's property and make other people's decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it may be levity. (118)

On the Middle East:
Raoul closed his big brown eyes to picture Jerusalem. He saw the rocks and robes and gold domes and donkeys. He didn't see any angels, but he knew they were hanging around. Jerusalem was where it all went down, man. It was connected to heaven like Spanish Harlem was connected to Puerto Rico. (125)


On art:
If there's a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn't exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn't have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that's it. That's all an artist does. (179)

(And, on 144, "The purpose of art is to provide what life does not.")

On whatever, this was just funny:
Boomer: When I turned thirty, I broke off diplomatic relations with the Pepsi generation. Any hip young people want to communicate with me, they have to go through the Swiss. (81)