Jude Hopkins
@heyjudenotjudy
My novel "Babe in the Woods" available. Essays in Los Angeles Times, Women Writers, Women's Books, other places, other times.
It's Gerard Manley Hopkins' birthday. In this excerpt below, his belief that "each separate creature exhibited one minute facet of the indivisible perfection of the Godhead" (MacKenzie) is exemplified. Even a bell has a "tongue" in which to sound its true, distinctive voice.
"It’s not the large things that send a man to the madhouse" — Charles Bukowski
"The candle-end had long been burning out in the bent candlestick, casting a dim light in this destitute room upon the murderer and the harlot strangely come together over the reading of the eternal book" — Dostoevsky, "Crime and Punishment" #SundaySentence
It's the birthday of Robert Graves, his poems described in my ancient Norton Anthology as showing "the tension between a romantic indulgence in emotion and a cool appraisal of its significance." In this one, he wrestles with irony, having a conversation with himself in doing so.
Almost every ex-boyfriend of mine married a rich woman and gave up his dreams. They should have memorized Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."
Kudos to Maureen Dowd for a column ("Low-T, High Chair") that truly landed.
Today is the 127th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's birth. In the story below, he reminds us that even the young are not immune from the life lesson that we're changed by what we experience.
"No one has any size in bed; you are all the same size and dimensions are perfect when you have each other and we lay and felt the blankets against the cold and our warmth that came slowly ...." — Ernest Hemingway, "Under Kilimanjaro" #SundaySentence
"The note...the 'ti' that wants by its nature to be brought back to 'do' ... lands with a pang, a note of unresolved longing and [Richard] Rodgers exploited this reality to the fullest. 'There's a sigh in the music that's emotional.'" Perhaps we're all lingering in the "ti," waiting for the "do."
O Canada! We're getting your wildfire smoke. When I opened my patio door, the smell reminded me of my grandpa's house from long ago—he being an inveterate smoker, his uniform a wifebeater shirt and a pair of shorts, a cigarette always in his fingers. Died hard from emphysema.
Before I shelve "American Pastoral," I wanted to highlight these sentences, just two among so many in this great, sprawling epic tale of the loss of the American Dream.
"But if maturity has its loss of 'splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower,' it has its compensating gains, and the mind, though altered, retains its power of radiant give-and-take with the external world" — Abrams on Wordsworth in "The Mirror and the Lamp" #SundaySentence
Such a powerful book, published in 1997, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Often considered his best work, perhaps for lines like this: "Why was it beyond her to strive—as he had every day of his life—to be all that one is, to be true to that?"
After a week of so many abstractions from a high-profile wedding ("love," "forever") and Fourth of July celebrations ("freedom," liberty," "patriotism"), I had to read William Carlos Williams' poem below for some earth to cling to.
From John Cheever's debut novel, "The Wapshot Chronicle," winner of the National Book Award for Fiction in 1958.
Fireworks, according to John Updike in his essay on the Fourth, are best viewed above and through trees, not unlike the moon. "They take impressiveness from a near horizon."
"The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after" — Hemingway, "Death in the Afternoon" #SundaySentence
Hemingway wrote about the body's importance. "In Another Country" spotlights the body's fragility, whether it's the Major's young wife who unexpectedly dies of pneumonia or his own hand wound that won't improve with therapy. "You should find things you cannot lose," he says.
"Whatever is best and most appealing in these books becomes a part of you, inextricable from your sense of self. And in the end, when you look back on these books, it's impossible to say what came from them and what was inside you all along" —Naomi Kanakia #SundaySentence
It's nice to see my book, "Babe in the Woods," listed as part of a three-for-two Amazon promotion (limited time offer with link in comments) that includes books like "Land" by Maggie O'Farrell, "Yesteryear" by Caro Claire Burke and "Theo of Golden" by Allen Levi, plus plenty more books and music.
Scholar Earl Wasserman uses some murder weapon images to describe "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "The more we tug at the final lines of the ode, the more the noose of their meaning strangles our comprehension of the poem...There is a knife-edge where the human and the immortal meet...."
"Her hands began to saw the air, and a sort of Hindu version of the Lohengrin wedding music streamed out of the theremin in eerie keening glissandos" — Herman Wouk, "Marjorie Morningstar," qtd. in "Strange Sounds" #SundaySentence
Today is W.B. Yeats' b-day. I got Bloom's book "Yeats" (1970) at a library sale—only checked out twice. We don't give "the reverence due the last of the High Romantics," Bloom says, "the last of those poets who asserted imaginative values without the armor of continuous irony."
Lack of nuance can signal a rotting culture, so I appreciate Shelley's phrase "their heaven of many a tangled hue" in the line from "The Sensitive Plant" (below). And from "Adonais," his elegy for Keats, how suns have perished, "have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime."
"Poetry is not constituted by what is made of references; it merely supplies better referents than the world itself for the evocation of the reader's flow of ideas, to permit exploration by the imagination to seize the revelations that world unfolds." #SundaySentence