Hey folks if you haven't already, please check out this great article at CricketToes that Mary Dally-Muenzmaier wrote about my Book Passage visual journey.
If you are new to the blog the series begins with the post "What have you read lately" from February of this year.
Still looking for book passages so feel free to provide one in the comment section below or email me at wmzuback@backtothezu.com
Thanks and I hope you continue to enjoy the journey as much as I have.
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4 comments:
Dear Bill,
Scatter your Art like rye bread upon the waters and before you see it sounds come pecking into your ethers. Attached to those sounds is another receptive soul sensing that rye gathers more crusted poetry than tons of wonder bread. Congratulations on this aesthetic strike. You deserve it. Love Bill
Great article, Bill. It's nice to see you get some well-deserved recognition! (And yes, I know that's not why you do this.) :)
A book passage for your series, from Joseph O'Neill's Netherland:
"Well, it's delightful to see you," Chuck said. He was leaning back in his chair and, my explanation notwithstanding, considering why I, an important man with better things to do, had chosen to drop by. Chuck was too astute not to have detected that somewhere behind this impromptu visit lay some need on my part - and neediness, in business as in romance, represents an opportunity. But how, as I sat before him to the background tweeting of a Townsend's solitaire or black-tailed gnatcatcher, was he going to proceed? He knew that a cold pitch involving sales charts, cash flow projections, and marketing studies wouldn't work. Also, it would have been alien to him to be so uncomplicated in his methods. Chuck valued craftiness and indirection. He found the ordinary run of dealings between people boring and insufficiently advantageous to him at a deep level of strategy at which he liked to operate. He believed in owning the impetus of a situation, in keeping the other guy off balance, in proceeding by way of sidesteps. If he saw an opportunity to act with suddenness or take you by surprise or push you into the dark, he'd take it, almost as a matter of principle. He was a willful, clandestine man who followed his own instincts and analyses and would rarely be influenced by advice - not my advice, that's for sure. The truth is that there was nothing, or very little, I could have done to produce a different ending for Chuck Ramkissoon.
But it was a while before any of this came to me. Because his deviousness was so transparent and because it alternated with an immigrant's credulousness - his machinating and trusting selves seemed, like Box and Cox, never to meet - I found all of the feinting and dodging and thrusting oddly soothing. Then again, this was a time when I found solace in the patter of Jehovah's Witnesses who stopped me in the street, a time when I was tempted to consult the fat beckoning lady psychic who sat like an Amsterdam hooker in a basement window on West Twenty-third Street. I was glad of the considerateness, however misconceived. My life had shrunk to very small proportions - too small, certainly for New York's pickier and more plausible agents of sympathy. To put it another way: I was, to anyone who could be bothered to pay attention, noticeably lost. Chuck paid attention and thus noticed. So instead of immediately pouncing on me with business details, he came up with a different plan. He was going to fascinate me.
Thanks for the Book Passage, I appreciated it.
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