Category: words

“Don Quixote is the most important Spanish literary work; its author, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, is one of the four main writers of world literature, along with Homer, Shakespeare and Dante; the plot and the various episodes of the novel are known by almost everyone, and everyone talks of Don Quixote and Sancho or have heard of them and their adventures; but only two out of ten Spaniards say have read Cervantes’ masterpiece complete. And four out of ten they have done for personal interest or general culture.”

Some quotes: “We need an improved type of professional personnel, a conception of administration which would make use of all the thinking, all the ideas and potential planning of the entire professional body in an institution, not just of departmental heads.”

“Spectacular recent heists from European libraries have exposed something rotten at the heart of the international rare book trade. … What has stunned the book world is not just the scale of the thefts, but how easily the stolen goods were fenced and resold.”

“Pablo Katchadjian decided in 2009 to remix one of Borges’s most renowned short stories, ‘The Aleph’, keeping the original text but adding a considerable amount of his own writing. The result was the short experimental book called El Aleph engordado (The Fattened Aleph) … Katchadjian has now been formally charged with the un-literary sounding crime of ‘intellectual property fraud’. If found guilty he risks spending up to six years in prison.”

Laments about neoliberalism, globalization, Americanization and the need for the great revolution that will destroy “late capitalism” itself are lazy and unproductive, for they provide no practical way forward. “It’s society’s fault, man,” is no coherent cultural plan. It actually would be very bad for all of us if any one of these giant publishers were to fail. And a purely government-funded system would end up giving us a carefully inoffensive and good-for-you national literature.

“The love song, whether from Shakespeare or his lessers, is to the currency of our feelings what the dollar bill is to our economy, the dining-room table to our family life – the necessary, inevitable thing. Exactly because everything is a love song, we sigh at another one, even as we prepare to sing it.”

Stephen Sparks: “I haven’t come closer to understanding the vicissitudes of literary fortune (the moment I do, I’ll open my own publishing house), but in studying these writers, I’ve come up with a set of categories into which many fall.”

A Japanese translator and editor: “Moby-Dick, Herman Melville; The American hunger to comprehend all, and the impossibility of it, permeated half by cheerful melancholy and half by demonic rage.”

It’s for re-reading instead: “I pull this or that beat-up, food-spattered volume off a shelf, whimsically hopeful that this time around it will be a different story: Anna Karenina will skip the train tracks and Sydney Carton will avoid the guillotine. Nothing has changed. But of course everything has changed.”

“In the dark void of the National Newspaper Building, the robots are afoot. Towering 20 metres high and stretching far into the distance is an imposing expanse of racks, heaving with trays bearing volume upon volume of newspapers, laid flat and strapped between metal sheets. Suddenly, an enormous autonomous crane zooms forwards, stops abruptly and, with a hydraulic gasp, shoots out an arm. Lifting a large metal tray off the scaffold, it deposits it on a conveyor belt and races into the dark.”