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On Dr. Zhivago

   Auntie has very little to say about fantasy as a kind of literature. So I  have to say it. In the Victorian and modernist periods, writers of fantasy  were  often apologetic about what they did, offering it as mere whimsy,  a sort of bobble-fringing to real literature, or passing it off, sneakily, as  Lewis  Carroll did, as being "for children" and therefore beneath serious  notice. Writers of fantasy are often less modest now that what they do is  recognised as literature, or at least as a genre of literature, or at least as a  subliterary genre, or at least as a commercial product.      Fantasy has, in fact, become quite a business. There are people who  turn out unicorns by the yard. Capitalism flourishes in Elfland.      But  when one night in Buenos Aires in 1937 three friends sat talking  together about fantastic literature, it wasn't yet a business. Even less so one  night ...
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Thơ Mỗi Ngày VI

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  Thơ Mỗi Ngày Love Flea He took a flea From her armpit To keep And cherish In a matchbox, Even pricking his finger From time to time To feed it Drops of blood. Charles Simic Rận Tình Hắn chôm con rận Từ bướm của nàng Giấu trong bao quẹt Lâu lâu nựng 1 phát Và chích máu đầu ngón tay Như 1 anh Bắc Kít, Không phải để viết đơn tình nguyện Xẻ dọc Trường Sơn Kíu Nước Mà để nuôi Rận tình! Relaxing in a Madhouse     They had already attached the evening's tears to the windowpanes.     The general was busy with the ant farm in his head.     The holy saints in their tombs were resting, all except one who was a prisoner of a dark-haired movie star.     Moses wore a false beard and so did Lincoln.     X reproduced the Socratic method of interrogation by demonstrating the ceiling's ignorance. "They stole the secret of the musical matchbook from me", confided Adam.     "The world's biggest rooster was goin...
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Emperor of Nostalgia

  Emperor of Nostalgia J.M. Coetzee February 28, 2002 issue Reviewed: The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth translated from the German and with an introduction by Michael Hofmann Norton, 281 pp., $27.95 1. At the apogee of a reign that commenced in 1848 and ran until 1916, Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, ruled over some fifty million subjects. Of these fewer than a quarter spoke German as a first language. Even within Austria itself every second person was a Slav of one kind or another—Czech, Slovak, Pole, Ukrainian, Serb, Croat, Slovene. Each of these ethnic groups had aspirations to become a nation in its own right, with all the appurtenances of nationhood, including a national language and a national literature. The mistake of the imperial government, we can see with hindsight, was to take these aspirations too lightly, to believe that the advantages of belonging to an enlightened, prosperous, peaceful, multiethnic state would always outweigh the pull of sep...
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