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0a39f93
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Intellectual discussion, after all, is the real joy of the winter of life, when other pleasures have flown, as it were.
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John Barth |
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193c85a
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My classes commenced on the seventh of September, a tall blue day as crisp as the white starched blouses of the coeds who filed into my classroom and nervously took their seats. Standing behind the lectern at eight o'clock sharp, suit fresh-pressed and chin scraped clean, I felt my nostrils flare like a stud's at the nubby tight sex of them, flustered and pink-scrubbed, giggling and moist; my tighs flexed, and I yawned ferociously.
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John Barth |
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d8bc8f1
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In life," he said, "there are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and most historiography, are a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius's point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didn't think he was a minor character in anything, I daresay. Or suppose you're an usher in a wedding. From the groom'..
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mythotherapy
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John Barth |
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ad15d56
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Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement--a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder College. Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility, so he believed. One..
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John Barth |
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c0c2cf8
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All the same, they [young, twenty-somethings] can't help feeling that the aged and even the infirm have somehow
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John Barth |
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0b905bb
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I long ago learned that one's illnesses are both pleasanter and more useful if one keeps their exact nature to himself: one's friends, uncertain as to the cause of one's queer behavior and strange sufferings, impute to one a mysteriousness often subtly convenient.
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John Barth |
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ed9e0ea
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Brez pravega upanja upam, da sem fikcija.
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John Barth |
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686cb54
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But I reckon we can manage somehow. The important thing to remember, after all, is that it's meant to be a house; that is, a place of amusement. If people really got lost or injured or too badly frightened in it, the owner'd go out of business. There'd even be lawsuits. No character in a work of fiction can make a speech this long without interruption or acknowledgment from the other characters.
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John Barth |
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d0b0070
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In sum I'm not what either parent or I had in mind. One hoped I'd be astonishing, forceful, triumphant--heroical in other words. One dead. I myself conventional. I turn out I.
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John Barth |
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381f5ac
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Love it is that drives and sustains us!' I translate: we don't know what drives and sustains us, only that we are most miserably driven and, imperfectly, sustained. Love is how we call our ignorance of what whips us.
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John Barth |
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f08ba1f
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Como se escribe una novela? ?Como encontrar el canal, perdido en tantos arroyos y lagunas? La narracion no es mi ocupacion favorita; no es la de muchos; mi argumento no se eleva y desciende en significativas etapas, sino que se enrosca sobre si mismo como la concha de un buccino o las serpientes del caduceo de Hermes: disgresa, retrocede, duda, gime desde sus entranas, etcetera, se derrumba, muere.
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quimera
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John Barth |
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e439aa0
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That life sometimes imitates art is a mere Oscar Wilde-ish curiosity; that it should set about to do so in such unseemly haste that between notes and novel (not to mention between the drafted and the printed page) what had been fiction becomes idle fact, invention history--disconcerting! Especially to a fictionist who, like yours truly, had long since turned his professional back on literary realism in favour of the fabulous irreal, and onl..
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John Barth |
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b13b3ed
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Drolls & dreamers that we are, we fancy that we can undo what we fancy we have done.
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John Barth |
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11e78d6
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Mi e sempre parso, nei pochi romanzi che ho letto di quando in quando, che esigano parecchio dai lettori quegli autori che iniziano i loro racconti furiosamente, nel bel mezzo delle cose, invece che entrandovi, indietreggiando o di sbieco, con dolcezza.
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John Barth |
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1ef700a
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Now many crises in people's lives occur because the hero role that they've assumed for one situation or set of situations no longer applies to some new situation that comes up, or-the same thing in effect-because they haven't the imagination to distort the new situation to fit their old role. This happens to parents, for instance, when their children grow older, and to lovers when one of them begins to dislike the other. If the new situatio..
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mythotherapy
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John Barth |
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d57b2bd
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The wisdom to recognize and halt follows the know-how to pollute past rescue. The treaty's signed, but the cancer ticks in your bones. Until I'd murdered my father and fornicated my mother I wasn't wise enough to see I was Oedipus.
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John Barth |
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45b1da2
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One way or another, no matter which theory of our journey is correct, it's myself I address; to whom I rehearse as to a stranger our history and condition, and will disclose my secret hope though I sink for it.
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John Barth |
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4de9152
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Am I boring you? I don't really care, I suppose, but I'll be more comfortable if I knew all this interested you. No doubt when I get the hang of storytelling, after a chapter or two, I'll go faster and digress less often.
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John Barth |
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ff93ee4
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The Genie declared that in his time and place there were scientists of the passions who maintained that language itself, on the one hand, originated in 'infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, polymorphously perverse,' and that conscious attention, on the other, was a 'libidinal hypercathexis' -- by which magic phrases they seemed to mean that writing and reading, or telling and listening, were literally ways of making love.
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love
read
sex
speak
write
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John Barth |
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f0e9d04
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Daniel C. Dennett, un filosofo della Tufts University che ne sa sia di neuroscienze che di informatica, sostiene che la coscienza stessa ha un aspetto essenzialmente narrativo, radicato nell'evoluzione biologica del cervello. Non ho la competenza per riassumere le argomentazioni di Dennett, ma vengo persuaso d'acchito dalle sue conclusioni - perlomeno se considerate come una narrazione esplicativa. Egli concepisce la coscienza essenzialment..
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nonfiction
writing
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John Barth |