Wrote Elias Canetti, quoted in "A Nobel Prize winner’s brilliant tirade against mortality/Elias Canetti described 'The Book Against Death' as 'the only book that I was born to write,' but it was also a book he could not finish, or even properly start" (WaPo).
Some of Canetti’s meditations span several pages; others are brisk aphorisms. Many are straightforward; a handful are downright gnomic. “He only wants to be kissed by very old ravens,” one particularly mysterious entry reads. Canetti sometimes chronicles his personal life in the book — he writes wistfully about his first wife, who died in 1963, and he cannot resist a few joyful remarks about the birth of his daughter — but he also includes short, grotesque fictions. In one, he imagines “a people made up of individuals who have kangaroo-like pouches, into which they stuff their shriveled dead and carry them around with them.”
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Surrealism is sometimes symbolic, sometimes just unreal. A funeral cortege of snail pall bearers would be a slow trip to the cemetery, and kisses from ravens might leave nipped lips. The images are vivid, if not rational, like the painting of dogs playing poker, but perhaps just as unimportant.
I have a game camera recording of a snail laboriously, slowly, traversing the entire length of a long wooden plank, from one end to the other, finally reaching the far end of its constrained world in a triumph of persistence. A gray fox happened to pass at that moment, and ate the snail off the end of the plank. Make of this imagery what you will, it happened, but while the snail seemed to have accomplished a great feat, from the fox's perspective this was merely an opportunity to make a quick crunchy snack out of a critter that exposed itself to predation. No pall bearers needed.
A guy comes out his front door one morning and there's a snail on his porch. He says, "Eww", picks up the snail and throws it as far as he can.
Two years later, he comes out his front door and there's the snail again. The snail says, "So what was that all about?"
Immortality will not always be a negation. - Lautreamont
Jean Shepard relates a cartoon - two snails on the back of a turtle. Hold on! Here we go!
Alternate Headline:
An essay on an obscure dead for 30 years Jewish-German writer no one cares about"
The indiscernible partition of life and death is an emergent property of ostensibly secular narcissism.
Here’s a quote from his Amazon page:
“He embarked on no adventures, he was in no war. He was never in prison, he never killed anyone. He neither won nor lost a fortune. All he ever did was live in this century. But that alone was enough to give his life dimension, both of feeling and of thought.”
Next Sunday, WaPoo will publish a new interview with the Bat Boy, including Elvis's latest diet advice.
It rained this morning. I went out in search of snails, but all I found was worms...who basically snubbed me.
If you crack a whip over their head, a snail will break into a gallop, but it's still a snail's pace so...
Elias Canetti lived in a world of his own construct, much as Donald Trump does - with one huge difference. Canetti didn't hate everyone who might disagree with his weirdness. So Canetti didn't believe he was the world and no one was expected to bow to His Majesty while our former president has always lived deep inside himself - King of kings!
I nominate n.n for the "most gnomic" commenter.
I had to look up gnomic (and a couple of other words) as I read the article and found that the Dictionary.com word of the day is "bumfuzzle."
I plan to use it at the first best opportunity. Yes, that will probably involve Kamala. Or snails, could be either.
It’s not hard to spot the commenter with TDS
Does Trump really hate his opponents? He rather likes toying with them, and he even called up some reporters who hated him to have long conversations. Trump loves name-calling, but he seems to be less of a real hater than the average congressman or congresswoman is nowadays, certainly less of one than Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden.
IIRC, Canetti was quite a dick to Iris Murdoch. If they were still alive, he might have been #Metoo'ed by now. Or maybe not. There have already been several theses and papers about them. Without past misconduct, humanities scholars would have a lot less to talk and write about.
Kurtz: “I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. This is my dream, this is my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor, and surviving.”
I wonder how the snails got word of the demise?
Mail?
This is not the kind of snippet that encourages one to go out and buy his books. Beyond that, he won a Nobel Prize so that clenches the contra argument. Some people love snails. Some people love escargots. It's a big world
“This is not the kind of snippet that encourages one to go out and buy his books.”
There’s no accounting for taste (maybe mine). I bought 2 of them.
How many mistakes can one person squeeze into 16 words?
Not counting punctuation, RCOCEAN II has at least three blatant ones in his 11:53 comment: "An essay on an obscure dead for 30 years Jewish-German writer no one cares about."
A Nobel-prize-winner is hardly obscure, lots of people (me, for one) care about this one, and Canetti was a Sephardic Jew from Bulgaria who became a British citizen, not German at all, though he did choose to write in German. His first language was Ladino, the Spanish dialect spoken by the Jewish refugees expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. Other prominent Sephardim include philosopher Spinoza, economist David Ricardo, and Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo. It's the Ashkenazim, the other main branch of Judaism, who speak Yiddish, a dialect of German.
Snails
I've had a few
But then again
Too few to mention
Forget it, Dr. Weevil, it's RCOCEANII.
I first encountered Canetti when he was cited in John Keegan's "The Face of Battle" for his exploration of crowds and power. Keegan adapted the observation that "in every crowd there's a mob struggling to get out" to the morale of armies.
Canitti wrote in German, but wasn't German. Got it. As for his not being obscure, he is to Anglo-Americans, probably because...he wrote in German.
I'm not too sure what the Nobel Prize in Literature means. It certainly doesn't mean great writer. BTW, read much Abdulrazak Gurnah, Joseph Brodsky, or Nellie Sachs lately?
At least a dozen of Canetti's works (note spelling of his name) have been translated into English and published by major publishers. He is only "obscure" to Anglo-Americans who are ignorant of 20th-century literature, which is a lot of them, but far from all. Advertising that you are one of them is . . . unwise, but not unprecedented.
Ah, Canetti. Haven't heard his number called in a while. I never read the guy, but I did read a 1982 novel titled O Brasileiro Que Ganhou O Prêmio Nobel, and he is in there. Not in a star capacity: the leading character of the story, himself named Anonymus Gourmet, refers to a neighbor who won the literature prize in 1940, and when the narrator objects, saying that no Brazilian ever won such a thing, Mr. Gourmet not only insists that one did but that the obscurity of the laureates in general is so great that even a guy with the background and the curriculum vitae of Elias Canetti can be one. Not that Jeremias Ramos Brudbeck was so unproductive. He did write and publish, although you'll have to take the novelist's word for it. The rest of this decently short book is not too contrived, and does give almost plausible reasons for Ramos's having escaped fame - it was a matter both of modesty and of wanting to stay out of trouble with Brazil's dictatorship. Anyway, there is a character who used to be a Caribbean pirate, set the unofficial Canal Zone record for pisco sours drunk (26) in one morning, and, later, while in exile in Stockholm from another Brazilian dictatorship, met Brudbeck, himself in town to give the most eggheaded of seminars on literary theory. Something he agreed to do periodically, as a favor to the Swedish Academy, which had flattered him with the award. Sure.
Anyway, just had to share! It will be agreed that few if any Brazilians should ever win any literary prizes. But if any do, they're probably at least as good as Elias Canetti.
For some posts, Prof needs a "Jew" tag.
One Brazilian should have won the Nobel Prize, and might have if he'd lived longer. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (alphabetize under Machado), who died in 1908, was one of the greatest late-19th-century novelists in any language. Seriously, read him!
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