‘Davis’s skill is to notice the way feeling snags on the various contingencies which by their indifference to its clamour make it visible to itself: a cane, a rug, a furnace, a caterpillar, an old shirt, a plate of chilli.’
David Trotter on why Lydia Davis writes.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
"...an area of fascinating growth..."
Just hearing (and thinking) the same thing. Desperate.
Do it, it's brilliant!!
This film is a banger and well worth seeing on a big screen if you get the chance.
Agreed! The ending, I thought, was fantastic - so many ways for it to be cheap, or glib, or neat, or just dull - but he got it just right.
Just saw this today, too: it’s outstandingly good, isn’t it!
‘My own personal choice is to continue writing – simply because that is the only thing I can do to counterbalance the distortion. Someone has to use Russian as a language of love’
- Maria Stepanova on Disappearing Act
@fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social
shop.pushkinhouse.org/blogs/booksh...
Excellent!!
I hadn’t realised! She’s great here!
Missed The Secret Agent tonight, so here’s another man on the run…
It’s excellent: I hope you love it just as much!
“In the summer of 2023 the grass carried on growing as if nothing at all was wrong.” Maria Stepanova, The Disappearing Act, trans. @sashadugdale.bsky.social - I loved In Memory of Memory, and I’m loving this.
Flaubert, Three Tales (Trois Contes), trans. Roger Whitehouse. I feel like I should have / must have read this thirty years ago. Maybe I did: thank god for a bad memory. It hit me so hard: the last paragraph of A Simple Heart is so absurd, so devastating, so ecstatic., but all three left me reeling.
Any merit in the drivel I write comes from learning painstakingly how to write essays.
To assay - to test - exactly what I thought and knew about a matter.
Great essayists - Woolf, Orwell, Bacon, Montaigne, Hazlett - are utter intellectual joys as you read how they test themselves on topics too.
It did -- just so good! But I had also forgotten how funny it is, and having a (laughing) audience really brought that out too.
I think I know what you mean, yes 😄, and no, that wouldn't have been my cup of tea either! I don't find this film precious or mannered at all, though, and was really surprised by how un-dated it felt (in spite of being very much of its time). It has an amazing openness to experiment and experience.
Cleo from 5 to 7: my first time seeing this on the big screen. Brilliant, astonishing, overwhelming; this film just has everything.
Thank you! There’s so much love for these books: I’m certainly going to keep going!
I am persuaded!!
I will persevere! So many strong recommendations here, not least yours, which makes me think I just didn’t have my head in the right place for this one. Thank you!
Thank you! Am definitely going to read the third!
Thanks!
I really will stick with it!
That’s a really powerful recommendation, thank you, and also a real encouragement! Thank you! 🙏
A lean reading month, at the end of which I trudged through this. Powell’s prose slips down well enough, but I just couldn’t find much to chew on. I really did want this to be a 2026 project; I imagine it all works cumulatively, but… is it worth persevering with?
Congratulations!
It does feel like that, doesn't it! (Have you seen No Other Choice, by the way? I saw it last week: thought it was very good indeed.)
It’s wonderful, isn’t it!!
Mine too! It’s compulsive, isn’t it.
