Emir.

Books I think you should read: The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene

From The Paris Review interview with Graham Greene, Autumn 1953:

INTERVIEWER

You made Scobie say in The Heart of the Matter: “Point me out the happy man and I will show you either egotism, selfishness, evil or else an absolute ignorance.” What worries us is that you yourself seem to be so much happier than we had expected. Perhaps we are being rather naive but the seventy-four miniature whiskey bottles, the expression on your face, so different from the fixed, set look of your photograph, the whole atmosphere, seem to be the products of something much more positive than that very limited optimum of happiness that you described in The Power and the Glory in this passage: “the world is all much of a piece: it is engaged everywhere in the same subterranean struggle . . . there is no peace anywhere where there is life; but there are quiet and active sectors of the line.”

GREENE

(With a smile) Oh yes, I see what troubles you. I think that you have misjudged me and my consistency. This flat, my way of life—these are simply my hole in the ground.

INTERVIEWER

A moderately comfortable hole.

GREENE

Shall we leave it at that?

Urban ruin across the IJ.

The continual production of ‘more excellent fiction … than anyone has time to read’ is the essence of the problem. That’s the torture of walking into a bookshop these days: it’s not that you think the books will all be terrible; it’s that you know they’ll all have a certain degree of competent workmanship, that most will have about three genuinely beautiful or interesting sentences and no really bad ones, that many will have at least one convincing, well-observed character, and that nearly all will be bound up in a story that you can’t bring yourself to care about. All that great writing, trapped in mediocre books! Who, indeed, has time to read them?

from Get a Real Degree, Elif Batuman

(via Rumpus, long-- but worth it.)

Zane Grey Holding a Koala.

Stencils from Venice.

Found in Venice, 2010