It was about eight o’clock at night, and dark, and raining, and freezing, and the wind was noisy the way it is in spooky movies on the night the old slob with the will gets murdered. I stood by the cannon on the top of Thomsen Hill, freezing to death, watching the big south windows of the gym – shining big and bright and dumb, like the windows of a gymnasium, and nothing else (but maybe you never went to a boarding school).

I just had on my reversible and no gloves. Somebody had swiped my camel’s hair the week before, and my gloves were in the pocket. Boy, I was cold. Only a crazy guy would have stood there. That’s me. Crazy. No kidding, I have a screw loose. But I had to stand there to feel the goodby to the youngness of the place, as though I were an old man. The whole school was down below in the gym for the basketball game with the Saxon Charter slobs, and I was standing there to feel the goodbye.

I stood there – boy, I was freezing to death – and I kept saying goodbye to myself, ‘Good-bye, Caulfield. Good-bye, you slob.’

Stephen at Booktryst has a full post on the story.

Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek appears at Occupy Wall Street: Part 1, Part 2. And The Chronicle looks at the philosophical origins of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Author James Bradley provides a form guide for the Booker Prize.

In an ambitious project researchers have collected over 6,000 personal letters of Ernest Hemingway. They expect to publish them across 16 volumes and the first,  The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 1907-1922, is now available. Although Hemingway did not want his letters published his surviving son has said that the letters “will elucidate his humanity, which is what people are always looking for in a writer”.

This is a beautiful photograph of Caffè Florian a Venetian cafe that is one of the oldest coffee houses continuously in operation.

It attracted notable guests including Carlo Goldoni, Goethe, Casanova, Lord Byron, Marcel Proust, and Charles Dickens, Rousseau, Stravinsky, Modigliani, and Antonio Canova.

Click the image for the original.

The Occupy Wall Street has a library.

Every day, Varuna, The Writers House is publishing recordings made of authors reading from their own works in a series called ‘Writer-a-Day’. Eventually the contents will go toward an ‘app’.

NPR take a look at The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories by Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss.

In a Guardian interview with author Maurice Sendak he reveals some blunt opinions about eBooks (“I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex.”), Rupert Murdoch (“His name should be what everything is called now.”), Schubert (“a darling boy”), Salman Rushdie (“That flaccid fuckhead. He was detestable. I called up the Ayatollah, nobody knows that.”), Roald Dahl (“He’s dead, that’s what’s nice about him.”), Stephen King (“Bullshit”), Gwyneth Paltrow (“I can’t stand her”). Although he admits: “I’m not kind all of the time, I’m not nice all the time.”

Marilyn Monroe was obviously one of the most photographed women of her time but it is incredible the number of photos that show her reading – books, scripts, papers, cards. Actress Arlene Dahl said: “She wanted to learn everything. She felt she didn’t know enough. She wasn’t educated enough. She wanted to read. She wanted to know everything.”

There is a famous series of photographs by Eve Arnold taken in 1954 on Long Island of Monroe reading Ulysses by James Joyce. As Jeanette Winterson commented on the photograph:

This is so sexy, precisely because it’s Marilyn reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. She doesn’t have to pose, we don’t even need to see her face, what comes off the photo is absolute concentration, and nothing is sexier than absolute concentration. There she is, the goddess, not needing to please her audience or her man, just living inside the book. The vulnerability is there, but also something we don’t often see in the blonde bombshell; a sense of belonging to herself. It’s not some playboy combination of brains and boobs that is so perfect about this picture; it is that reading is always a private act, is intimate, is lover’s talk, is a place of whispers and sighs, unregulated and usually unobserved. We are the voyeurs, it’s true, but what we’re spying on is not a moment of body, but a moment of mind. For once, we’re not being asked to look at Marilyn, we’re being given a chance to look inside her.

And of course Monroe was married to playwright Arthur Miller for five years. There is a photo of her reading Miller’s adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People.

Monroe was encouraged to write by her psychoanalyst and her letters, poems and notebooks have been published. One of her poems reads:

Life,
I am of both your directions
Existing more with the cold frost
Strong as a cobweb in the wind
Hanging downward the most
Somehow remaining
Those beaded rays have the colors
I’ve seen in paintings–ah life
They have cheated you
Thinner than a cobwebs’s thread
Sheerer than any-
But it did attach itself
And held fast in strong winds
And singed by the leaping hot fires
Life-of which at singular times
I am both of your directions-
Somehow I remain hanging downward the most
As both of your directions pull me.

He stares hard in through the flyscreen, heavy red face glowering with thousands of midday suns. It’s hot, and he looks hot. His eyes, deeply recessed, tell her nothing except that it’s flaming hot. They are lakes of sweat threatening to burst their banks. The eyeballs are reflections of strange parallel suns. He pulls them back down further into the molten realm of his head, breaks the stare, then turns back to his vehicle, giving both kelpies a rub on the head before he gets in and drives off.

‘Song’ by Ali Cobby Eckermann

Another visitor to Koolunga is a lone kookaburra. The locals in the pub say there has never been a kookaburra known here, in living memory. He is heard most mornings, sometimes in the tree outside my store. But his call is never complete. Without a partner for back up, the verse remains unfinished. I heard one of the retirees followed the bird along the river, imitating the call, trying to teach him the song. But one cannot sing true with love. Nature teaches us that.

The best reader, is one who is most open to human possibility, to understanding the great range of plausibility in human actions. It’s not true that modern life is too fantastic to be written about successfully. It’s that the most successful work is so demanding…. the novel’s vitality requires risks not only by them [writers] but by readers as well. Maybe it’s not writers alone who keep the novel alive but a more serious kind of reader.

- Don DeLillo, ‘A Talk with Don DeLillo’, The New York Times