[1] Czeslaw Milosz's collected is out in a Penguin Modern Classics edition - very appropriate for an already classic poet I think. Also if you don't already have this volume in the earlier Ecco edition, you should get this Penguin for Milosz's mixture of earthiness and (almost mystic) loftiness of thought will do you good.

"We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part of the gift we received for our long journey.

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago - a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel staving its hull against a reef - they dwell in us, waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard, as are all men and women living at the same time, whether they are aware of it or not."

• from "Late Ripeness"

[2] John Sutherland continues his series on "How To Read A Novel" by exploring the novel as a classroom which we enter to learn things we didn't know before or to discover things we knew all along. And since he writes about the eductaional utility of pulp fiction (Frederick Forsyth, Michael Crichton, Arthur Haiely are the three authors he mentions) - I wonder if those years of my late youth - in which I did spend at least 50% of my reading time (which was nearly all of the time I wasn't in class under a professor's drone) consuming paper in this genre - have anything to do with my affectation for intruge and all things west?

[3]
Richard Brookhiser in a NYT essay takes a look at the marginalia left by John Adams, the second U.S president, in his extensive library. Since I am one of those people who have to read a book with a colorful pen (the latest color I have been using to markup is purple) in hand, this makes for entertaining reading. I must admit, however, that I am more free with invective than John Adams was, for example, towards the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft's 1794 book “Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution” - he merely exclaimed in the margins "this foolish woman".

[4] This article brought to my attention another photographer of the American South - that geographical place of "corrosive wet summer heat", demonic kudzu, church spires at every street corner, slight (and of an old vintage) racial prejudice pulsing under the graciousness of rolling and stretched language, and my first home in this continent - William Christenberry. The best aspect about his work that I liked is his use of color (most "art" photographers shy away from color) that brings to the surface the kind of lurking desolation that shows up in the novels set in the South.

[5] My amiga K (thanks K) emailed me last night with a pointer to the work of Mario Benedetti, an Uruguayan writer of suprising beauty. Follow the link to read two of his short stories "Completely Absentminded" & "Wounds and Contusions". Benedetti also writes poetry (here are a few poems) and plays (I could only find material in Spanish). My quick reading of these online snippets puts his work in the vicinty of the great Brazillian novelist Machado de Assis. And unlike another well known (at least to me) Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, Benedetti's work seems to be quiter, and more directly concerened by those baffling human states of the interior than with issues that fall under the shadows of social justice and politics. Here is an excerpt from a short story called "Death"

"At a given moment, his legs weakened; he told himself that he couldn’t arrive at the doctor’s office in that condition and decided to sit on a bench in the plaza. With the shake of his head he rejected an offer for a shoeshine (he didn’t feel strong enough to enter into the time-honored dialogue about the weather and inflation), and waited to calm down. Águeda and Susana. Susana and Águeda. Which should be the preferred order? Wasn’t he capable of deciding, even at this moment? Águeda was comprehension and incomprehension now stratified; the frontier now without litigation; the present repeated (but there was also an irreplaceable warmth in the repetition); the years and years of mutual prognostication, of knowing each other by heart; the two children, the two children. Susana was clandestinity, surprise (but surprise was also developing into habit), the zones of unfamiliar life, unshared, in shadow; the quarrel and the emotional reconciliations; the conservative jealousies and the revolutionary jealousies; the undecided frontier, the new caress (which was insensitively starting to look like a repetitive gesture), the not prognostication but prophesying, the not knowing each other by heart but rather by intuition. Águeda and Susana. Susana and Águeda. He couldn’t decide. And he couldn’t (he had just realized it at the precise moment in which he should wave a greeting to an old friend from work), simply because he thought of them as his own objects, as sectors of Mariano Ojeda and not as independent lives, as beings who lived at their own responsibility and risk. Águeda and Susana, Susana and Águeda, were part of his organism at this moment, as much as those abject, vexing entrails that were threatening him."

Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab winner of the Nobel prize for literature* (in 1987), died in Cairo yesterday.

I came upon his body of work, very indirectly, via his book of non-fiction, Echoes of an Autobiography", an elliptical and spare take, via brief (half page or so) meditations on his life as a writer, as a spiritual seeker, and other sundry topics that a human being living in a world might find fascinating as well as puzzling at the same time. After this I read his well know Cairo Triology, with its pampliset of middle class characters set in a slice of pre-colonial Cairo geography but in a way mirroring the larger world.

It is, perhaps, because of Mahfouz age, and the way I stumbled upon his work that for some reason he has come to sit at the writers table in my mind adjacent of the other grand fatherly figure, R.K. Narayan; a more tortured "The English Teacher" kind of Narayan. For a more learned look at Mahfouz's work, take a look at this Edward Said's essay (a variant of which also appeared in the New York Review of Books).

I guess it is time for me to take down the Cario Trilogy, and vanish into the alleys, the bazars, and the coffeehouses cut from the lines of Mahfouz.

*This choice wasn't without its critics and ironies. It was partly attributed to the Arab-Israeli peace manoeuvrings at that time even though the Arab establishment was suspicious of Mahfouz's western leanings. And at the same time, the more radical Arab elements have claimed that Mahfouz got the prize only because he was an apologist for the Egyptian dicatatorship (by not speaking out againt it, and for being employed by the Egyptian goverment); thus making him a safe "Arab" choice vs. say the more stringent voices such as the Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis or the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Mahfouz also survived a deadly knifing by a religious radical after he got the prize.