Err, how does this thing work again?
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Back.
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winterputting so muchaway leaves toomuch room to see. —A.R....
winter
putting so much
away leaves too
much room to see.
—A.R. Ammons, “Density”
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Sun day noun \ˈsən-(ˌ)dā, -dē\ : What you call the time spent waiting for Downton to come...
Sun day noun \ˈsən-(ˌ)dā, -dē\
: What you call the time spent waiting for Downton to come on.
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"The false kind of nostalgia promotes the superiority of life past; the true kind captures the..."
“The false kind of nostalgia promotes the superiority of life past; the true kind captures the sadness of life passing.”
- Adam Gopnik, in a New Yorker piece on Joseph Cornell, 2.17&23.03
- Adam Gopnik, in a New Yorker piece on Joseph Cornell, 2.17&23.03
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...it requires something to remain in touch with poetry, a certain innocence. Technically speaking, that's all it requires.
Michel Houellebecq, Public Enemies, tr. Frendo & Wynne (Random House, 2011), 246.
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There was an Old Man of Hong Kong, Who never did anything...
There was an Old Man of Hong Kong,
Who never did anything wrong;
He lay on his back,
With his head in a sack,
That innocuous Old Man of Hong Kong.
—Edward Lear, from More Nonsense, 1862.
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There was an Old Person of Woking, Whose mind was perverse and...
There was an Old Person of Woking,
Whose mind was perverse and provoking;
He sate on a rail,
With his head in a pail,
That illusive Old Person of Woking.
—Edward Lear, More Nonsense, 1862.
Looking at Lear’s stuff for the first time in a long while. Finding him deeply, deliciously strange, sometimes straight-up disturbing. It’s easy to gloss over this Unheimlichkeit of his when we consign him to the “light verse” basket. There’s something dreamlike and unsettling in many of these limericks and ditties, which were originally composed, if I remember correctly, to entertain the children of a friend.
The illustrations are his as well, by the way, and it’s clear from looking at just a few that to quote the text without the pictures—as often happens in the case of Lear—is to miss so much of what is subversive and macabre in them. Looking at the drawings—which you can do here, for example, or here—I’m reminded, perhaps oddly, of Hieronymous Bosch. In fact, Lear was a highly gifted draftsman and painter…
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“Tortoise,” by Edward Lear (1812–1888). Plate 7, in:...
“Tortoise,” by Edward Lear (1812–1888). Plate 7, in: Tortoises, Terrapins and Turtles (1872) by James de Carle Sowerby, Edward Lear, and John Edward Gray; Henry Sotheran, Joseph Baer and Co., London. Testudo radiata image courtesy MBL/WHOI Library.
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Lear watercolor.
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This post was too long; therefore you did not read it.
Remember that T-shirt from the eighties that said “High on Stress”? It was sort of true and sort of a way to bluff it out and sort of a protest—it had that “any number of meanings” quality we now prefer to depth. That’s because the any-number-of-meanings quality keeps you in motion, but depth asks you to stop. Depth is to your life what dead air is to a talk show.
Being numb isn’t antithetical to being totally stressed, 24-7—and asking for more. Over-scheduled busyness might seem like the opposite of numbness, but it is just the active aspect of living in a flood of fabricated surfaces. Consider the guiding metaphor again. The (absence of) sensation that is physical numbness is constituted by a multitude of thrills and tingles at a frequency beyond which you feel nothing. The numbness of busyness works on the same principle, but it relies upon its agents to abide by an agreement they must keep secret, even from themselves. The agreement is this: we will so conduct ourselves that everything becomes an emergency.
Under that agreement, stress is how reality feels. People addicted to busyness, people who don’t just use their cell phones in public but display in every nuance of cell-phone deportment their sense of throbbing connectedness to Something Important—these people would suffocate like fish on a dock if they were cut off from the Flow of Events they have conspired with their fellows to create. To these plugged-in players, the rest of us look like zombies, coasting on fumes. For them, the feeling of being busy is the feeling of being alive.
Partly, it’s a function of speed, like in those stress dramas that television provides to keep us virtually busy, even in our downtime….Sheer speed and Lives on the Line. That’s the recipe for feeling real.
The irony is that after we have worked really hard on something urgent for a long time, we do escape numbness for a while—stepping out of the building, noticing the breeze, the cracks in the sidewalk, the stillness of things in the shop window. During those accidental and transitional moments, we actually get the feeling of the real we were so frantically pursuing when we were busy. But we soon get restless. We can’t take the input reduction. Our psychic metabolism craves more.
—Thomas de Zengotita, “The Numbing of the American Mind,” Harper’s, April 2002. My italics.
How much truer is this a decade on? Hyper-busyness is just another way to guarantee numbness, that loss of actual feeling caused by an excess of stimulation. Sometimes—almost all the time, lately—I can’t feel my self anymore, never mind my toes.
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buffleheadcabin: Lynn Tomlinson - I Heard a Fly Buzz When I...
Lynn Tomlinson - I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died by Emily Dickinson
[Thanks to Dave Bonta for the link.]
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schubertiade:steelylaceribbon: Auguste Toulmouche, La fiancée...
schubertiade:steelylaceribbon:
Auguste Toulmouche, La fiancée hésitante (The Reluctant Bride), 1866.
I love the look of complete disdain on her face.
For real. Looks like a movie poster for The Godmother.
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“It is this ‘other tradition’ which we propose to explore. The facts of history have been too...
“It is this ‘other tradition’ which we propose to explore. The facts of history have been too well rehearsed (I’m speaking needless to say not of written history but the oral kind that goes on in you without your having to do anything about it) to require further elucidation here. But the other, unrelated happenings that form a kind of sequence of fantastic reflections as they succeed each other at a pace and according to an inner necessity of their own—these, I say, have hardly ever been looked at from a vantage point other than the historian’s and an arcane historian’s at that. The living aspect of these obscure phenomena has never to my knowledge been examined from a point of view like the painter’s: in the round, bathed in a sufficient flow of overhead light, with ‘all its imperfections on its head’ and yet without prejudice of the exaggerations either of the anathematist or the eulogist: quietly, in short, and I hope succinctly. Judged from this angle the whole affair will, I think, partake of and benefit from the enthusiasm not of the religious fanatic but of the average, open-minded, intelligent person who has never interested himself before in these matters either from not having had the leisure to do so or from ignorance of their existence.”
—From John Ashbery’s “The System” (in Three Poems)
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Headline: "Stressed-out Adults Spend 36 Minutes a Day in Despair"
Headline: "Stressed-out Adults Spend 36 Minutes a Day in Despair":
—From the Department of Unintended Satire.
This just in: The typical American teen spends 82 minutes a day in acedia, while adults average 960 minutes in a state of akrasia.
(Seriously, though, don’t bother clicking. Boilerplate minimally-edited-press-release tabloid “culture” report from the UK Daily Mail.)
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"How to resist nothingness? What power Preserves what once was, if memory does not last? For I..."
“How to resist nothingness? What power
Preserves what once was, if memory does not last?
For I remember little. I remember so very little.”
- Czeslaw Milosz, “On Parting with my Wife, Janina,” in The Collected Poems (Ecco, 1988), 459.
Preserves what once was, if memory does not last?
For I remember little. I remember so very little.”
- Czeslaw Milosz, “On Parting with my Wife, Janina,” in The Collected Poems (Ecco, 1988), 459.
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"Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone, and the word solitude..."
“Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone, and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.”
- Paul Tillich (via rahgheer)
- Paul Tillich (via rahgheer)
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You had me at "deep divan"
You had me at "deep divan":
Hi there, Jonathan Franzen. We hope you are having a lovely Tuesday. So you say Edith Wharton was a prude, confined largely to a sexless marriage, hemmed in by plainness and haunted to write about the very beauty and passion that was lacking in her own life?
But have you read her porn?
Here’s a passage from an unfinished work, Beatrice Palmato:
“And now, darling,” Mr. Palmato said, drawing her to the deep divan, “let me show you what only you and I have the right to show each other.” He caught her wrists as he spoke, and looking straight into her eyes, repeated in a penetrating whisper, “Only you and I.” But his touch had never been tenderer. Already she felt every fiber vibrating under it, as of old, only now with the more passionate eagerness bred of privation and of the dull misery of her marriage. She let herself sink backward among the pillows, and already Mr. Palmato was on his knees at her side, his face close to hers. Again her burning lips were parted by his tongue, and she felt it insinuate itself between her teeth and plunge into the depths of her mouth in a long, searching caress, while at the same moment his hands softly parted the thin folds of her wrapper.
One by one they gained her bosom, and she felt her two breasts pointing up to them, the nipples hard as coral, but sensitive as lips to his approaching touch. And now his warm palms were holding each breast as if in a cup, clasping it, modeling it, softly kneading it, as he whispered to her, “Like the bread of the angels.”
…………………
And…scene. Erm, how does she not cock her head at him and laugh? Was going fine, there, heating up to be a real corker. And then the shameless Mr. Palmato gets truly freaky. (I guess.) Then again, what seducin’ patter is more proven than the ol’ “bread of the angels” line. Right? I mean—Ladies—am I right? — “And now his warm palms were holding each breast as if in a cup, clasping it, modelling it, softly kneading it, palpating it, plumping and flattening it, manhandling it, molding it, folding it and even pounding it, rolling it and working it and working it more, shaping it into a swollen, throbbing mound, covering it with saran wrap and letting it sit for one hour before baking it in a 375-degree oven…”
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doylewesleywalls: © Doyle Wesley Walls — Oregon Landscape with...
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Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible--time-freed, existential youth forever. It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth. And literature, being lasting, is their ticket.
Dick Ford, The Sportswriter (Vintage, 1986), 222-3. It continues:
Everything about the place was meant to be lasting—life no less than the bricks in the library and the books of literature, especially when seen through the keyhole of their incumbent themes: eternal returns, the domination of man by the machine, the continuing saga of choosing middling life over zesty death, on and on to a wormy stupor. Real mystery—the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book—was to them a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words….
Explaining is where we all get into trouble.What’s true, of course, is that they were doing exactly what I was doing—keeping regret at arm’s length, which is wise if you understand it exactly. But they had all decided they really didn’t have to regret anything again! Or be responsible to anything that wasn’t absolutely permanent and consoling. A blameless life. Which is not wise at all, since the very best you can do is try and keep the regret you can’t avoid from ruining your life until you can get a start on whatever’s coming.
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"Some things can’t be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually..."
“Some things can’t be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually forever, or become interesting in another way. Literature’s consolations are always temporary, while life is quick to begin again. It is better not even to look so hard, to leave off explaining. Nothing makes me more queasy than to spend time with people who don’t know that and who can’t forget, and for whom such knowledge isn’t a cornerstone of life.”
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Richard Ford, The Sportswriter (Vintage, 1986), 223-4.
Ford was born today in 1944. Shamefully, I only recently got around to reading this novel, and about five sentences in I sensed that it was something truly special; by chapter two or three I realized that it would end up high on my list of personally treasured books.
Some people complain about the ample commentary of the narrator, Frank Bascombe, but I have no problem with it. In my opinion, people tend to reflexively finger-wag on the “Show, don’t tell” stuff like it’s an inviolable law engraved in stone by Hemingway’s great-great-great-etc-uncle Hammurabi. The problem is not with telling, it’s with telling stuff that no one wants or needs to hear. It’s when you’re a bore or a boor, and have no ear for your own bathos.
Frankly, I think it’s easy for people with nothing to say to hide behind endless overgrown shrubberies of banal “description.” In fact, bad “showing” is generally worse than bad “telling,” because at least in telling you expose the contents of your brain to potentially fruitful evaluation and dialogue.
At the end of the day, if you can write, and you have ideas that can be teased out into interesting truths, go ahead and tell ‘em, man. I’ll read that shit.
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