By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

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oh, yeah?? is that what shame does?? it copulates with houseflies, does it?? gosh, i hope the maggot gets shame's eyes...i have no patience for this sort of thing.

Very divided about this book, hence the 3 stars. On the one hand, gorgeous gorgeous prose: there were many sentences I read over and over. And the subject matter--obsessive love--is conveyed with the sort of honesty that's humbling ("honesty" actually feels pretty pallid when applied to Elizabeth Smart, but I can't think of a word that means "beyond honesty"). Todo lo inunda el agua del amor: de todo lo que ve el ojo, no hay nada que el agua del amor no cubra. No existe un solo ángulo en el mundo que el amor en mis ojos no pueda convertir en símbolo de amor. Incluso la precisa geometría de su mano, cuando la contemplo, me disuelve en agua, y la corriente del amor me arrastra… El amor me posee, y no tengo alternativa. Cuando el Ford traquetea hasta la puerta, con cinco minutos (cinco años) de retraso, y él cruza el césped bajo los pimenteros, permanezco de pie detrás de las cortinas de gasa, incapaz de moverme para ir a su encuentro, o de hablar: estoy convirtiéndome en líquido para invadir cada uno de sus orificios en cuanto abra la puerta. Tenaz como un pájaro recién nacido, todo boca con su único deseo, cierro los ojos y tiemblo, esperando el paraíso: va a tocarme.” En Grand Central Station me senté y lloré' de Elizabeth Smart es un libro escrito en prosa poética y en un estilo delicado y sensual que ningún hombre podría imitar aunque lo intentara (un estilo que me recuerda terriblemente al de Jeanette Winterson, pero también un poco al de Janet Frame, o Jean Rhys, o A.S. Byatt). Elizabeth Smart es una escritora canadiense que se trasladó a Londres para estudiar música. Allí, un día, como por azar, entró en una librería y compró un libro de poesía de George Barker, y se enamoró no sólo de los poemas sino también del escritor. Pasó un tiempo, por fin lo conoció y, a pesar de que él ya estaba casado, empezaron una relación tempestuosa de la que nacieron cuatro hijos. La relación se terminó, pero ella no dejó de amarlo. 'En Grand Central Station' se basa en esta relación. Es una obra en la que los hechos externos nos son dados en cuentagotas. Más que narrar hechos, describe sentimientos, prescindiendo de prácticamente todo lo externo. Así la narradora describe por los estadios que pasa en su relación amorosa: esperanza, sentimiento de culpa, alegría, plenitud, duda, decepción, miedo, alejamiento, rabia, tristeza, vacío, etc. Chamber pop duo, Heavy Bell (made up of Matt Peters and Tom Keenan) released an album titled By Grand Central Station (2018), which they called "a paean to the novel: a song of praise and triumph". [6] Under the redwood tree my grave was laid, and I beguiled my true love to lie down. The stream of our kiss put a waterway around the world, where love like a refugee sailed in the last ship. My hair made a shroud, and kept the coyotes at bay while we wrote our cyphers with anatomy. The winds boomed triumph, our spines seemed overburdened, and our bones groaned like old trees, but a smile like a cobweb was fastened across the mouth of the cave of fate.

It stalled in the traffic and broke down outside her window. She was writing a letter: I love you very much: Careful Now in capitals. What hand of fate placed this book in my path after I'd finished a long series of Muriel Spark books I do not know. All I know is that I found myself taking this book home and loving it all evening, and all through the next day, and when I reached the end, I started loving it all over again from the beginning, this time reveling in the difference between it and Spark's books. Where Spark is all concision, Smart is all excess, where Spark is firm and trim, Smart is soft and yielding. I didn't know I needed this excess of words, this soft pulpy innerness, but I did. I see now that I was thirsty for writing that had feelings and heart instead of control and cleverness. I just didn't know it. A pesar de los esfuerzos de la familia de la autora para que el libro no viese la luz, en los círculos literarios de Nueva York y Londres terminó por convertirse en una obra de culto. Se volvió a publicar en 1966 y, en esta ocasión, su inmediato éxito permitió a Elizabeth Smart dedicarse por fin una carrera literaria que había comenzado a los diez años y que sus pasiones habían truncado. The title, as a foretaste of Smart's poetic techniques, uses metre (it is largely anapaestic), contains words denoting exalted or intensified states (grandeur, centrality, weeping), and alludes to Psalm 137 ("By the waters of Babylon we lay down and wept ...") which indicates metaphorical significance for the novel's subject matter.

This has survived as a cult book largely thanks to Morrissey. Grand Central Station has over a hundred times more readers on here than the memoir of the affair by Smart's lover George Barker. You've won, Liz... Though - as they remained, tempestuously and non-exclusively, involved until her demise - she'd no doubt think he was woefully underappreciated now. From the little I've read elsewhere, it sounds like his former fame had much to do with personal charisma, which meant it waned after his death in old age.) Just 2000 copies of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept were printed on its initial publication in 1945, and it did not achieve popularity at its initial release. Smart's mother Louise led a successful campaign with government officials to have its publication banned in Canada. She bought up as many copies as she could find of those that made their way into the country, and had them burned. [2] Barker himself, in a letter to Smart, described the novel as " a Catherine wheel of a book." [1]

But my eyes, like the bloody setting sun, peer through the veils and mists which rise from sorrow, towards that meeting which I must have or die. One day, while browsing in a London bookshop, Elizabeth Smart chanced upon a slim volume of poetry by George Barker – and fell passionately in love with him through the printed word. Eventually they communicated directly and, as a result of Barker’s impecunious circumstances, Elizabeth Smart flew both him and his wife from Japan, where he was teaching, to join her in the United States. Thus began one of the most extraordinary, intense and ultimately tragic love affairs of our time. They never married but Elizabeth bore George Barker four children and their relationship provided the impassioned inspiration for one of the most moving and immediate chronicles of a love affair ever written – ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’. O my dear, O my dear, drink a little milk, lie down and rest a little. I will comfort you. I can carry love like Saint Christopher. It is heavy, but I can carry it. It's the stones of suspicion I stumble on. Did I say suspicion? No. Not surprisingly, this book, which was first published in 1945, ends up in a lament--with mythical and biblical interpretations. It is the kind of book someone gives a 3-star rating, and the other, a 5-star rating. If you're a lover of the prose poem, chances are, you will love this. If poetry moves you, if you are patient with the line-by-line completion in poetry because you read it with the understanding that you will grasp its meaning only per its line and not its full body, then you will appreciate this piece. However, if you are not a lover of poetry, chances are, you will hate this prose poem, for you will expect scenes and plot and definition; you will expect a narrative thread, instead, you will find a thread of mood and imagery. I'm somewhere in the middle (as is evident by my rating), but this is one of those books that adheres to the definition of a classic because after reading it, I placed it on my shelf with the thought that I must revisit it in a year or two.

But with or without us, the Day itself must return, we insist, when the Joke at least sits basking in the sun, decorating her idle body with nameless red, once blood. That said, I don't think this would be for everyone. It is FLOWERY and DRAMATIC and would almost feel like teenaged angst except the metaphors and allusions are very literary and almost over my head at times. I have a hard time picturing armpits like chalices, and in moments like this, she does lose me a bit.Elizabeth Smart tuvo el valor, en el remilgado Canadá de los años cuarenta, de elegir libremente – “Sé lo que quiero, a quién quiero. Le escogí a él, de entre todas las cosas. Fría y deliberadamente le elegí. Pero la pasión no fue fría. Me prendió fuego. Incendió el mundo.” – y, lo que es más grave, no avergonzarse de ello, no esconderse. El “aura del deseo satisfecho” siempre provoca la envidia de los mediocres, de los puritanos, pero ella nunca se doblegó ni hizo concesiones.

Wherever we went, though, whatever we did, we had always to return like cornered foxes to the hotel room. And always the wallpaper dispersed with its heavy writing any optimism we might have gathered. There were no solutions in the writing on the wall. It urged us to despair. It is criminally responsible for all histories. The novel has been referenced many times by the British singer Morrissey. The title was adapted by the band The Kitchens of Distinction in the song "On Tooting Broadway Station". For who plans suicide sitting in the sun? It is the pile of dust under the bed, the dirty sheets that were never washed, that precipitate fatal action. ugh. i can feel raymond carver hurling an empty bottle of booze at this sentence in disgust, and for once, i am with him.De hecho, a pesar de todos los reveses recibidos, el amor que sentía la hizo sentir invencible, poderosa, fecunda. “¿Necesitáis alegría, necesitáis amor? ¿Sois hojas empapadas en algún patio olvidado? ¿Sufrís frío, hambre, soledad, parálisis, ceguera? Tengo lo que queráis, a puñados, a brazadas, para todos.” Una fecundidad capaz de alumbrar una obra tan bella y conmovedora como En Grand Central Station me senté y lloré; una joya literaria que sorprende por su plasticidad y por su pasión, pero también por el uso que Elizabeth Smart hace del lenguaje, tan rico y libre como su forma de amar.