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eldashraheb.bsky.social
Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
@eldashraheb.bsky.social
3.4K followers 4.7K following 2.3K posts
https://www.abeelraheb.com
Egyptian-American
Editor and Writer (WGA West)
Desperately trying to learn Spanish
We are such stuff as dreams are made on.
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Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · Jun 18
Once again, I’m reading Nabakov shit on your (and my) faves, while praising them too. Always a great time. #booksky 💙📚
Chesterton, G. K. A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14. Essentially a writer for very young people. Romantic in the large sense. • Conan Doyle, Arthur. A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14, but no longer. Essentially a writer for very young people. Romantic in the large sense. • Conrad, Joseph. A favorite between the ages of 8 and 14. Essentially a writer for very young people. Certainly inferior to Hemingway and Wells. Intolerable souvenir-shop style, romanticist clichés. Nothing I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, hopelessly juvenile. Romantic in the large sense. Slightly bogus. • Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Dislike him. A cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. A prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. Some of his scenes are extraordinarily amusing. Nobody takes his reactionary journalism seriously. • The Double. His best work, though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's "Nose." • The Brothers Karamazov. Dislike it intensely. • Crime and Punishment. Dislike it intensely. Ghastly rigmarole. • Douglas, Norman. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter. • Dreiser, Theodore. Dislike him. A formidable mediocrity. • Eliot, T. S. Not quite first-rate. • Emerson, Ralph Waldo. His poetry is delightful. • Faulkner, William. Dislike him. Writer of corncobby chronicles. To consider them masterpieces is an absurd delusion. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me. • Flaubert, Gustave. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. Read complete works between 14 and 15. • Forster, E. M. Only read one of his novels (possibly A Passage to India?) and disliked it. • Freud, Sigmund. A figure of fun. Loathe him. Vile deceit. Freudian interpretation of dreams is charlatanic, and satanic, nonsense. • Galsworthy, John. A formidable mediocrity. • García Lorca, Federico. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. • Gogol, Nikolai. Nobody takes his mystical didacticism seriously. At his worst, as in his Ukrainian stu… • Hemingway, Ernest. A writer of books for boys. Certainly better than Conrad. Has at least a voice of his own. Nothing I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, hopelessly juvenile. Loathe his works about bells, balls, and bulls. • The Killers. Delightful, highly artistic. Admirable. • The Old Man and the Sea. Wonderful. The description of the iridescent fish and rhythmic urination is superb. • Housman, A. E. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter. • Ilf and Petrov. Two wonderfully gifted writers. Absolutely first-rate fiction. • Ivanov, Georgy. A good poet but a scurrilous critic. • James, Henry. Dislike him rather intensely, but now and then his wording causes a kind of electric tingle. Certainly not a genius. • Joyce, James. Great. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter. Let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is patball to Joyce's champion game. A genius. • Ulysses. A divine work of art. Greatest masterpiece of 20th century prose. Towers above the rest of Joyce's writing. Noble originality, unique lucidity of thought and style. Molly's monologue is the weakest chapter in the book. Love it for its lucidity and precision. • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Never liked it. A feeble and garrulous book. • Finnegans Wake. A formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book. Conventional and drab, redeemed from utter insipidity only by infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations. Detest it. A cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory. Indifferent to it, as to all regional literature written in dialect. A tragic failure and a frightful bore. • Kafka, Franz. • The Metamorphosis. Second-greatest masterpiece of 20th century prose. • Kazantzakis, Nikos. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. • Keats, John. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. • Khodasevich, Vladislav. The gr… • Lawrence, D. H. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. Mediocre. Fakes realism with easy platitudes. Execrable. • Lowell, Robert. Not a good translator. A greater offender than Auden. • Mandelshtam, Osip. A wonderful poet, the greatest in Soviet Russia. His poems are admirable specimens of the human mind at its deepest and highest. Not as good as Blok. His tragic fate makes his poetry seem greater than it actually is. • Mann, Thomas. Dislike him. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. • Death in Venice. Asinine. To consider it a masterpiece is an absurd delusion. Poshlost. Mediocre, but anyway plausible. • Maupassant, Guy de. Certainly not a genius. • Maugham, W. Somerset. Mediocre. Fakes realism with easy platitudes. Certainly not a genius. • Melville, Herman. Love him. One would like to have filmed him at breakfast, feeding a sardine to his cat. • Marx, Karl. Loathe him. • Milton, John. A genius. • Odoevsky, Vladimir. Indifferent to his works. • Yury Olesha. Some absolutely first-rate fiction. • Orczy, Baroness Emmuska. • The Scarlet Pimpernel. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, but no longer. • Pasternak, Boris. An excellent poet, but a poor novelist. • Doctor Zhivago. Detest it. Melodramatic and vilely written. To consider it a masterpiece is an absurd delusion. Pro-Bolshevist, historically false. A sorry thing, clumsy, trivial, melodramatic, with stock situations and trite coincidences. • Pirandello, Luigi. Never cared for him. • Plato. Not particularly fond of him. • Poe, Edgar Allan. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, but no longer. One would like to have filmed his wedding. • Pound, Ezra. Definitely second-rate. A total fake. A venerable fraud. • Proust, Marcel. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, and thereafter. • In Search of Lost Time. The first half is the fourth-greatest masterpiece of 20th-century prose. • Queneau, Raymond. • Exercises de style. A thrilling masterpiece, one of the greatest stories in French literature. • Zazie. Very fond of it. • Ransom, John Crowe. • Captain Carpenter. Admire this poem. • Rimbaud, Arthur. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. • Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Great. A favorite. How freely one breathes in his marvelous labyrinths! Lucidity of thought, purity of poetry. Magnificently poetical and original. • Rolland, Romain. A formidable mediocrity. • Salinger, J. D. By far one of the finest artists in recent years. • "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." A great story. A particular favorite. • Sartre, Jean-Paul. Even more awful than Camus. • Nausea. Second-rate. A tense-looking but really very loose type of writing. • Schwartz, Delmore. • "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities." A particular favorite. • Schweitzer, Albert. Detest him. • Shakespeare, William. Read complete works between 14 and 15. One would like to have filmed him in the role of the King's Ghost. His verbal poetic texture is the greatest the world has ever known, and immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. It is the metaphor that is the thing, not the play. A genius. • Sterne, Laurence. Love him. • Sue, Eugène. Melodramatic, second-rate. • Tagore, Rabindranath. A formidable mediocrity. • Tolstoy, Aleksey. A writer of some talent with two or three science fiction stories or novels which are memorable. • Tolstoy, Leo. A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. Read complete works between 14 and 15. Nobody takes his utilitarian moralism seriously. A genius. • Anna Karenina. Incomparable prose artistry. The supreme masterpiece of 19th-century literature. • The Death of Ivan Ilyich. A close second to Anna Karenina. • Resurrection. Detest it. • The Kreutzer Sonata. Detest it. • War and Peace. A little too long. A rollicking historical novel written for the general reader, specifically for the young. Artistically unsatisfying. Cumbersome mes…
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
birdrespecter.bsky.social
Jack White + Eminem halftime show
November 27, 2025 at 7:46 PM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
hoovybaby.bsky.social
My feed desperately needs De-Nuzzification
November 27, 2025 at 7:28 PM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
srirachachau.bsky.social
He looks like a Satoshi Kon character. Del Griffith is beautiful and my friend
November 27, 2025 at 7:32 PM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
rufustsuperfly.bsky.social
Netflix making BTTF look like Rumble Fish
November 27, 2025 at 7:03 PM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
dezmiller.bsky.social
English is ideas French is feelings German is things
November 27, 2025 at 10:25 AM
eldashraheb.bsky.social
Kinda surprised that Nabakov didn’t like Pound.
November 27, 2025 at 6:06 AM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
osmote.net
Yoda running on all fours like a cat
November 27, 2025 at 5:42 AM
eldashraheb.bsky.social
Best show on television

m.youtube.com/watch?v=-yXm...
The Chair Company E7 - Tamblay's hippie shirt scene
YouTube video by Thomas Z.
m.youtube.com
November 27, 2025 at 5:46 AM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
beel.bsky.social
November 27, 2025 at 5:38 AM
eldashraheb.bsky.social
Last name Marner, first name Silas,
Like a bruised weaver, miss Eppie’s my heiress
November 27, 2025 at 5:27 AM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
jazzpomegranate.com
silas marner by george eliot
November 27, 2025 at 4:43 AM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
robertcpadilla.bsky.social
The decline into old age is like falling in love.

At first it's gradual.

Then it's sudden and breathtaking.
November 27, 2025 at 4:13 AM
eldashraheb.bsky.social
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: The Last Waltz is on Tubi
notnotnuanced.bsky.social Not the Guy @notnotnuanced.bsky.social · 17h
turn it up
turn it up
little bit higher
ya radiooo
turn it up
that’s enough
so ya know
it’s got soul
November 27, 2025 at 4:13 AM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
notnotnuanced.bsky.social
turn it up
turn it up
little bit higher
ya radiooo
turn it up
that’s enough
so ya know
it’s got soul
November 27, 2025 at 4:02 AM
eldashraheb.bsky.social
Gregg Turkington, movie buff
November 27, 2025 at 4:05 AM
eldashraheb.bsky.social
From Seamus Heaney’s “Act of Union”
#booksky 💙📚 #poetry
From Seamus Heaney’s “Act of Union” II And I am still imperially Male, leaving you with the pain, The rending process in the colony, The battering ram, the boom burst from within. The act sprouted an obstinate fifth column Whose stance is growing unilateral. His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum Mustering force. His parasitical And ignorant little fists already Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked At me across the water. No treaty I foresee will salve completely your tracked And stretchmarked body, the big pain That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again.
November 27, 2025 at 4:01 AM
eldashraheb.bsky.social
A beautiful encapsulation of 21st Century Man’s relationship to Nature.
saxxon.bsky.social Saxxon Fox 🔜 Furfest @saxxon.bsky.social · 1d
nose down ass up
that's the way we cyberstuck
Cybertruck stuck nearly vertically on a utility pole's support wire
November 26, 2025 at 9:48 PM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
stabbyabby.bsky.social
My opinion on the book pirating discourse is that there shouldn’t be any discourse. Libraries literally will let you read the book for free. They’re really excited about giving you a book to read for free even.
November 26, 2025 at 7:51 PM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
bakoon.bsky.social
whenever the cowboys win now jerry jones steal a piece of the losing city to keep his body alive. you can see it when he lifts his shirt up like freddy krueger
November 24, 2025 at 12:04 PM
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bakoon.bsky.social
November 26, 2025 at 8:32 AM
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guntoucher.bsky.social
stills from Tokyo Story (1953) Kyoko: Isn't life disappointing? Noriko: (beaming smile) Yes, it is.
May 26, 2025 at 11:55 PM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
ruinsofdespair.bsky.social
In Goethe's version of the Faustian pact, the sacriface ought to give you pause:

If you ever come across a moment in life so beautiful that you wish it never to end, the devil will claim your life and soul.

#WyrdWednesday #romanticism #books #booksky
It is, in practice, Marguerite who ends up paying the price of her life for indiscretions of Faust, but her soul is spared. Image: Faust and Mephisto in prison, colored lithograph by Joseph Fay 1846
November 26, 2025 at 8:14 AM
eldashraheb.bsky.social
m.youtube.com/watch?v=q2_n...
Such A Night - The Band w/ Dr. John - The Last Waltz
YouTube video by Just A Account
m.youtube.com
November 26, 2025 at 6:30 AM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
marawilson.bsky.social
I JUST SAW THE LAST WALTZ FOR THE FIRST TIME
November 26, 2025 at 6:28 AM
Reposted by Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer
stabbyabby.bsky.social
In-n-out is pretty good when I want a burger at midnight. That’s the function it serves for me.
November 26, 2025 at 6:13 AM