Greg Kindall
@gregkindall.bsky.social
130 followers 120 following 200 posts
non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere
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gregkindall.bsky.social
Celebrating over here in my little corner: Krasznahorkai in the late lamented Music & Literature (#2, Spring 2013).
gregkindall.bsky.social
I read Ways of Seeing, by John Berger and some others (1972).
Should've been called Berger's Way of Seeing.
gregkindall.bsky.social
I read Twice-Told Tales, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1837).
The Library of America arranges the stories chronologically by first publication in various periodicals, but also offers an arrangement by the books in which they were first collected (see pg 1479), which is how I'm making my way through them.
gregkindall.bsky.social
In case you wanted to know the look of Mr Kinnell's signature...
gregkindall.bsky.social
I read Black Light, by the poet Galway Kinnell (1966, but extensively revised for this 1980 North Point Press edition).
Made me think at times of The Stranger, at times of The Sheltering Sky, with occasional wafts of Hafiz and Rumi.
gregkindall.bsky.social
I read The King Must Die, by Mary Renault (1958), the first of two novels inspired by the legend of Theseus.
gregkindall.bsky.social
I read Penitential Cries, by Susan Howe (New Directions, 2025). Two thirds of the book is her word collages (see attached example), the rest seems to have to do with getting old and hanging out at Yale's Sterling Library. Has a nice poem for her sister Fanny.
gregkindall.bsky.social
I read Autumn Journal, by Louis MacNeice (1939). Not a journal of just any autumn, it's the autumn of 1938 and much is afoot in the world.
gregkindall.bsky.social
I read Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America, by Ivan Doig (1980), his account of reading over the winter of 1978/79 the voluminous diaries of James Gilchrist Swan, an early settler on the Olympic Peninsula.
gregkindall.bsky.social
I read The Fall, by Albert Camus (1956).
Gotta love a good mad confessional monologue.
Reposted by Greg Kindall
gregkindall.bsky.social
my word of the day: 'grippleness,' which appears in William Watts' 1631 translation of Augustine's Confessions (for the Latin 'avaritia').
Arthur Golding had used it earlier in his 1571 translation of John Calvin's Latin Psalms, the first use found by the OED's philologists.
gregkindall.bsky.social
I read The Bible in Spain, by George Borrow (1843). The fascinating adventures of G.B., an agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society, who crisscrossed Spain peddling Spanish New Testaments in the midst of one of its civil wars and in the teeth of obscurantist Roman Catholic clergy.
gregkindall.bsky.social
One day I'll laminate it to some plywood and make a tabletop of it.
gregkindall.bsky.social
I read Fossil Sky, by David Hinton (2004). A curiosity from the early days of Archipelago Books, a map-folded poem, fragments that meander inside a 4' dia. circle, in no discernable order, to be wandered around in like you would a Chinese shan shui painting.
gregkindall.bsky.social
I read The Bible: A Very Short Introduction, by John Riches (2000). Less interested in what the Bible is than in the diversity of readings of it, of which he gives sundry examples. Vaporings about Ambiguity, Multiplicity, Appropriation, Identity, Alienation, etc.
gregkindall.bsky.social
Bunchberry (Cornus canadensis).
A photo I took with my new Nikon F2 in 1975 (I worked in a camera store in high school).
gregkindall.bsky.social
I read Omoo, by Herman Melville (1847).
I probably won't repeat the experience but it's nice finally to check this off my list.
gregkindall.bsky.social
I read The Poet Assassinated and Other Stories, by Guillaume Apollinaire (1916).
My copy is the 1984 North Point Press reprint of Ron Padgett's 1968 translation.
That's Apollinaire's own helmet on the cover.
gregkindall.bsky.social
I read Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner (1971).
Yep, one of the great novels of the American West, but it's almost as if it were calculated to appeal specifically to me, with its settings in places like Santa Cruz, New Almaden, Boise, Grass Valley, where I grew up or have spent lots of time.
gregkindall.bsky.social
The first was published on the occasion of the centenary of Trakl's birth, the second very nearly on the centenary of his death.
gregkindall.bsky.social
I read some Georg Trakl:
Song of the West (North Point Press, 1988) & Song of the Departed (Copper Canyon, 2012), in Robert Firmage's translation, the latter a revised & expanded edition of the first.
gregkindall.bsky.social
I read Alexis, by Marguerite Yourcenar (1929; 1984 translation by Walter Kaiser).
I forgive her because of the many fine books that followed, but I can't recall the last time I read a book more tedious than this.