warps woofs words

Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

2012-01-27T10:58:00.004Z

"White? You raising them white?"
"Don't be silly. We're trying to raise them... beyond race." The only stable and survivable world.
"'Beyond' means white. Only people who can afford 'beyond'."

Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (London: Vintage, 2004), 487.

Leontia Flynn, Profit and Loss

2011-12-07T14:34:00.006Z

'The Spirit's hardly wearing thin/ so much as changing shape' ('Letter to Friends')

'[...] magpies
are untranscendent and corporeal;
they are grounded. They are guardians. They keep guarded
the black and white beneath the feathers' gloss.
('Magpies')

Leontia Flynn, Profit and Loss (London: Cape, 2011), 42; 58.

Slavoj Žižek, Violence

2011-12-07T14:25:00.005Z

The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to 'be active', to 'participate', to mask the nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, 'do something'; academics participate in meaningless debates, and so on. The truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw. Those in power often prefer even a 'critical' participation, a dialogue, to silence - just to engage us in 'dialogue', to make sure our ominous passivity is broken. The voters' abstention [in Saramago's Seeing] is thus a true political act: it forcefully confronts us with the vacuity of today's democracies.

Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile Books, 2009), 183.

Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

2011-12-07T14:08:00.003Z

If you are lucky you won't hit love in the face.

Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011), 49.

2011-09-07T10:59:00.001+01:00

A Pitiful Man

2011-08-29T22:35:00.002+01:00

His wife was sitting up under the mosquito-net, and for a moment he had the impression of a joint of meat under a meat-cover.

Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter (London: Penguin, 1962), 22-3.

Jack on the Nativity

2011-08-22T18:27:00.004+01:00

I wriggle around on her lap now to look at my favourite painting of Baby Jesus playing with John the Baptist that's his friend and big cousin at the same time. Mary's there too, she's cuddled in her Ma's lap that's Baby Jesus's Grandma, like Dora's abuela. It's a weird picture with no colors and some of the hands and feet aren't there, Ma says it's not finished. What started Baby Jesus growing in Mary's tummy was an angel zoomed down, like a ghost but a really cool one with feathers. Mary was all surprised, she said, "How can this be?" and then, "OK let it be." When Baby Jesus popped out of her vagina on Christmas she put him up in a manger but not for the cows to chew, only warm him up with their blowing because he was magic.

Emma Donoghue, Room (London: Picador, 2010) 22-3.

Sidereal

2011-08-17T14:34:00.005+01:00

There is no other place from which empathy
can begin but in negative space.
And perhaps that's what it means
to go the extra mile,
to get the right amount of distance

between how you started out
and where you arrive. Driving back
from the airport, she started thinking aloud,
wondering if the reason Blake gave Behemoth
such a remarkably human ear was to say:

only we know creation is a brilliant atrocity.
Yes, Job replies, glancing in the wing mirror,
the point being, when we remember this, something'll give -
time, most likely - a torn veil which uneclipses
the heavenly bodies, cures the navel gaze.

From 'The Extra Mile'.

Rachael Boast, Sidereal (London: Picador, 2011), 31.

Traps at every turn

2011-08-11T17:04:00.004+01:00

Outside in the snow, the For Sale sign looks fresh as the day it was hammered home. No one knows what the house is worth now. No one will buy it, so that's how much it is worth. Nothing. Despite which, we will owe tax based on that 'two and a bit'. For a house that is currently worth whistling for. I can't figure out the fake money from the real. I walk around this magic box, this trap, with its frost-flowered windows, weeping condensation as the morning proceeds. I gather my briefcase from the console table in the hall. I open the same door I have opened since I could reach the latch. And I head out to earn some money.

Anne Enright, The Forgotten Waltz (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011), 148.

Patti Smith, Just Kids

2011-08-11T16:59:00.003+01:00

These kids make me want to change my life.

Oh So Lucky

2011-07-11T21:43:00.002+01:00

The thought of his daughter filled him with spurts of nervous warmth, and with the alarm of someone who has dropped a plate and is watching it in the the last seconds of its wholeness, before it hits the floor.

Rachel Cusk, The Lucky Ones (London: Harper Perennial, 2003), 39.

2011-07-03T19:08:00.002+01:00

It was so hard to be friendly, in any genuinely human way, towards female strangers if you were a male. You could be courteous and pleasant, which wasn't the same thing at all; it was the way you'd treat the staff at the Job Centre. You couldn't tell a strange woman that you liked her earrings, or that her hair was beautiful - or ask her how she came to have mud on her clothes.

It was over-civilization that caused that, maybe. Two animals, or two primitives, would never worry about that sort of thing. If one was muddy, the other would just start licking or brushing or whatever was needed. There was nothing sexual about it.

Michel Faber, Under the Skin (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000), 201-2.

The search for the sublime

2011-06-17T17:08:00.001+01:00

'As children, we love who we can.'

'It's the first law of human conflict: whoever is prepared to do the most damage, no matter what damage he suffers in return, will be the eventual victor. It's one of the qualities that distinguishes us from the animals, this readiness to throw caution to the wind. Faced with a real fight, most animals will compromise. If the odds look bad, one or another will back off, or the fight will be discontinued by mutual consent. Humans are the only animals prepared to fight for a Pyrrhic victory.'

John Burnside, The Dumb House (London: Vintage, 1998) 5; 97-8.

Note to Christians and Atheists

2011-06-10T10:10:00.002+01:00

"A hunger for absolute justification is a neurosis, not a tenacity to be admired". (124)

The Courage Consort

2011-06-05T21:31:00.004+01:00

Catherine sat at the kitchen bench, staring abstractedly into Ben's porridge bowl. It was so clean and shiny it might have been licked, though she imagined she would have noticed if that were the case. She herself tended to half-eat food and then forget about it. Roger didn't like that for some reason, so, back home in London, she'd taken to hiding her food as soon as she lost her appetite for it, in whatever nook or receptacle was closest to hand. I'll finish this later, she'd tell herself, but then the world would turn, turn, turn. Days, weeks later, ossified bagels would fall out of coat pockets, furry yoghurts would peep out of the jewellery drawer, liquefying bananas would lie like corpses inside the coffins of her shoes.

Michel Faber, The Courage Consort (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002), 42-3.

the gleam of summer, sex and bloody marys

2011-06-01T21:35:00.003+01:00

Every morning when Alex woke he thought of Danny; his thoughts emerged from the watery interview or vanishing railway-carriage of dreams, stumbled on for a few forgetful instances, pale and directionless, and then fled towards Danny in a grateful glow of remembered purpose. It was love, and all the day would be coloured by it. Or perhaps love was the primary thing, onto which the events of the day were transiently projected - that was how it seemed afterwards, when his memory gave back rather little from these months. Alex could never picture Danny as a whole - he was an effect of light, a cocky way of walking, a smooth inner thigh, a lithe sweaty weight, a secretive chuckle, a mouth drawn back before orgasm as though he was about to be sick. Alex woke up, thought of Danny, and on these lucky days felt his breath on his neck, or the curve of his hip under his hand.

Alan Holinghurst, The Spell (London: Vintage, 1999), 162-3.

2011-05-25T11:20:00.002+01:00

For some time then, no one would appear in this landscape; the sea would roar softly and withdraw without witnesses or spectators. It did not need her watching, and in these hours, she thought, or during the long reaches of the night, the sea was more itself, monumental and untouchable. It was clear to her now, as though all week had been leading up to the realisation, that there was no need for people, that it did not matter whether there was people or not. The world would go on. The virus that was destroying Declan, that had him calling out helplessly now in the dawn, or the memories and echoes that came to her in her grandmother's house, or the love for her family she could not summon up, these were nothing, and now, as she stood at the edge of the cliff, they seemed like nothing.

Imaginings and resonances and pain and small longings and prejudices. They meant nothing against the resolute hardness of the sea. They meant less than the marl and the mud and the dry clay of the cliff that were eaten away by the weather, washed away by the sea. It was not just that they would fade: they hardly existed, they did not matter, they would have no impact on this cold dawn, this deserted remote seascape where the water shone in the early light and shocked her with its sullen beauty. It might have been better, she felt, if there never had been people, if this turning of the world, and the glistening sea, and the morning breeze happened without witnesses, without anyone feeling, or remembering, or dying, or trying to love. She stood at the edge of the cliff until the sun came out from behind the black rainclouds.

Colm Tóibín, The Blackwater Lightship (London: Picador, 1999), 260.

Second try

2011-05-25T11:10:00.002+01:00

I tried reading Wuthering Heights again, dutifully, after it featured in Cusk's Arlington Park. I've always felt a bit guilty about having never read it. But I found it unbearable. Take away my Eng Lit badge if you like. I'm sick of rain and moody people and chinese box narration (someone tell me the damn story already!) and bloody Yorkshire accents. Sorry everyone who loved it - but picking up Toibin again instead I am reminded that I don't want to waste my time with unbearable prose.

Fluorescent purpose-built self-service purgatory

2011-05-14T21:24:00.006+01:00

The restaurant was on the top floor and had vast semi-circular windows on three sides that showed three grey views: one of the car park, one of the slip road and the distant motorway, and one of the grilles, pipes and vents that characterised the domed roof of Merrywood when seen from above. There was a dead seagull lying in one of the gullies, its livid yellow beak flat against the roof, its oiled feathers moving stiffly in the wind.

Inside, a field of formica-topped tables and chairs covered the carpeted expanses of a hangar-like space that seemed permanently on the brink of generalised chaos. People threaded through displaced chairs and tables with laden plastic trays. Everywhere landslides of shopping bags spilled out into the aisles, and children's toys and coats lay unnoticed on the floor. Uniformed workers moved around the tables with big sacks, sweeping the discarded casings of dead lunches, the plastic cartons and cardboard and cellophane, the straws and water bottles and paper napkins, the entire packaged forms of the restaurant's Kids Lunchboxes like an unbroken set of geological remains, into their rustling depths.

Rachel Cusk, Arlington Park (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 100.

Home

2011-05-13T19:58:00.004+01:00

And here is the world, she thought, just as we left it. A hot white sky and a soft wind, a murmur among the trees, the treble rasp of a few cicadas. There were acorns in the road, some of them broken by passing cars. Chrysanthemums were coming into bloom. Yellowing squash vines swamped the vegetable gardens and tomato plants hung from their stakes, depleted with bearing. Another summer in Gilead. Gilead, dreaming out its curse of sameness, somnolence.

[...]

In college all of them had studied the putative effects of deracination, which were angst and anomie, those dull horrors of the modern world. They had been examined on the subject, had rehearsed bleak and portentous philosophies in term papers, and they had done it with the earnest suspension of doubt that afflicts the highly educable. And then their return to the pays natal, where the same old willows swept the same ragged lawns, where the same old prairie arose and bloomed as negligence permitted. Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile?

Marilynne Robinson, Home (London: Virago, 2008), 293-4.

Candide, or Optimism

2011-05-09T10:55:00.000+01:00

Candide decided at last in favour of a poor scholar who had done ten years' hack work for the Amsterdam publishers, his view being that there was no profession on earth with which a man should be more disgusted.

Voltaire, Candide (1759) (London: Penguin, 1947), 90.

Steppenwolf

2011-05-07T17:55:00.002+01:00

The bourgeois is [...] by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule. Therefore he has substituted majority for power, law for force, and the polling booth for responsibility.

'Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours -'

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (London: Penguin, 1965), 64; 177.

Apes, Angels and Ages

2011-05-07T17:39:00.002+01:00

Enchantment, Utopia, epiphany, sublime insight - the grand words of Romanticism are not Darwinian words. (In fact, they never occur anywhere in his writing.) Slight, small, varied, struggle, helpful, hopeful, natural, seclection, modification (not revolutionary change) - these are the words of Darwinism, and they have become the words of liberalism. By giving us a new set of words, Darwin changed our minds.

Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages (London: Quercus, 2009), 203.

Notre-Dame of Paris

2011-05-07T17:15:00.002+01:00

Thus, up until Gutenburg, architecture was the chief, the universal form of writing. [...] In its printed form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, elusive, indestructible. It mingles with the air. In the days of architecture, thought had turned into a mountain and took powerful hold of a century and of a place. Now it turned into a flock of birds and was scattered on the four winds, occupying every point of air and space simultaneously.

Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame of Paris (1831) (London: Peguin, 1978), 194; 196.

Personality

2011-04-27T14:59:00.002+01:00

A man dies to the sound of laughter escaping from Blankety Blank. A nurse loses her temper with a bunch of flowers too cumbersome for their vase. A woman goes up in the lift to see the mother she has never met. Porters smoke on the stairwell and remember the worst and the best of Friday night. A Pakistani gentleman says prayers to himself, too old to wait, and ignores the football commentary coming from an adjacent radio. A doctor checks a chart and remembers his wife's birthday, and out in the corridor a confectionary machine jams and keeps the money. A bone is set, and a lady who grew up in Cornwall remembers the long walk to school.

There will always be the words to other people's songs, but Michael is here now, and I am here, and the fresh air my God you wouldn't believe it. When I look up I think of all the miles the air has come to reach us, I think of it passing stars and planets, falling through clouds, and blowing over the English Channel, our mouths open to catch the air and to say what we want to say, to speak now, to speak out loud, and before long the land begins to appear over there, another coast. The day is beautiful, we are far from home, and the boat moves like a prayer over the water.

Andrew O'Hagan, Personality (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 160; 327.

2011-04-22T22:00:00.002+01:00

'Years ago the old women spent their lives praying. Now, we get our hair done and play bridge and go to Dublin on the free travel, and we say what we like. But I've to be careful what I say in front of Frank, he's very holy. He got that from his father. It's nice having a son, a priest who's very holy. He's one of the old school. But I can say what I like to you.'
'There are many ways of being holy,' Father Greenwood said.
'In my time there was only one, ' she replied.

Colm Tóibín, Mothers and Sons (London: Picador, 2006), 152.

2011-04-22T21:44:00.003+01:00

There's nothing like a desert watering-hole for making good, brief neighbours out of animals that have nothing much in common other than a thirst. There is the story of the leopard and the deer, standing patiently in line while vipers drink. And the tradition amongst travellers that anyone who pushes at a well will die from drowning. Their bones will never dry. So these four strangers, gathered round the cistern, were more careful and polite than they might have been if they had met, say, at a crowded market stall, where the sharpest elbows and the shrillest voice would get the leanest meat.

Jim Crace, Quarantine (London: Penguin, 1998), 49.

Disgrace

2011-03-17T12:17:00.000Z

"His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul." (4)

A book about the gap between fantasy and experience; and about how bad we are with dealing with our desire

2011-03-15T12:32:00.004Z

'I told myself that it was subversive of me to be doing something so conventional.'
(108)

John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

2011-03-15T12:28:00.001Z

I can't praise Gray highly enough.

'Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion', the book begins. And from there Gray shows how modern political movements are by-products of (eschatological and apocalyptic) Christian thought. Liberal secular faith in progress by piecemeal reform (with occasional violence and torture) is merely a belief in salvation by another name.

'If anything defines 'the West' it is the pursuit of salvation in history. It is historical teleology - the belief that history has a built-in purpose or goal - rather than traditions of democracy or tolerance, that sets western civilization apart from all others. By itself this not produce mass terror - other conditions including large-scale social dislocation are required before that can come about. The crimes of the twentieth century were not inevitable. [...] there is nothing peculiarly western about mass murder. What is unique to the modern West is the formative role of the faith that violence can save the world.' (103)

An important critique of the faith/science dichotomy; of evangelicalism and new atheism; and of liberalism. And a plea to accept the irreducible reality of religion in our time and, therefore, to critique and dismantle its violent legacies in both secular and religious guises.

All in all, not a bad way to spend an afternoon. Or twenty.

Wolves

2011-02-12T22:38:00.003Z

I do not want to be reflective any more
Envying and despising unreflective things
Finding pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting
And young girls doing their hair and all the castles of sand
Flushed by the children's bedtime, level with the shore.

The tide comes in and goes out again, I do not want
To be always stressing either its flux or its permanence,
I do not want to be a tragic or philosophic chorus
But to keep my eye only on the nearer future
And after that let the sea flow over us.

Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle,
Join hands and make believe that joined
Hands will keep away the wolves of water
Who howl along our coast. And be it assumed
That no one hears them among the talk and laughter.

Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 26-7.

2011-01-24T12:48:00.002Z

The Realists are not to her taste. She prefers the metaphors of Yeats, prefers his extravagances and symbols and terrible beauties, shares his disdain for peering and peeping persons and the hawkers of stolen goods. I should have remembered before choosing Flaubert that language for her is not about precision, it is not about verisimilitude or the perfect description of person, things, time, but a burning tessellation of images and instincts, of deeply felt, half-real things. In her world reality, imagination and emotion are indivisible - in deed, in thought. She is never detained by detail.

We have, in a way, made up some lost ground. I have no illusions. Nothing has been settled. We neither of us are certain where we stand with the other or what the future holds. It is just for that for the time being there is a different, quieter context in which to be together.

Ronan Bennett, The Catastrophist (London: Review, 1998), 127-8.

Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

2011-01-20T16:16:00.002Z

"When I was your age I was without knowing that one day I would be so far. You are wiser than that, Eliot. You already taste the way things must be." (123)

The Ghost Rider

2011-01-12T21:19:00.003Z

An endless stream of people dragged the story behind them but were yet drawn forward by it. As they sought to give it a shape they found acceptable, they were themselves altered, bruised or crushed by it.

Ismail Kadare, The Ghost Rider (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2010) 47-8.

The Naming of the Dead

2011-01-12T21:02:00.002Z

'POETS day,' he reminded Siobhan.
'Piss Off Early, Tomorrow's Saturday,' she recited.
(403)

Freedom

2010-12-28T19:25:00.007Z

In a plastic-seated booth, Walter touched the rim of his beer glass to Lalitha's gin martini, which she proceeded to make short work of. He signaled to their waitress for another and then suffered through perusal of the menu. Between the horrors of bovine methane, the lakes of watershed-devastating excrement generated by pig and chicken farms, the catastrophic overfishing of the oceans, the ecological nightmare of farmed shrimp and salmon, the antibiotic orgy of diary-cow factories, and the fuel squandered by the globalization of produce, there was little he could ever order in good conscience beside potatoes, beans, and freshwater-farmed tilapia.
"Fuck it," he said, closing the menu. "I'm going to have the rib eye".

Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (London: Fourth Estate, 2010), 306.

One thing is clear: after decades of the welfare state, when cutbacks were relatively limited and came with the promise that things would soon return to normal, we are now entering a period in which a kind of economic state of emergency is becoming permanent: turning into a constant, a way of life. It brings with it the threat of far more savage austerity measures, cuts in benefits, diminishing health and education services and more precarious employment. The left faces the difficult task of emphasizing that we are dealing with political economy—that there is nothing ‘natural’ in such a crisis, that the existing global economic system relies on a series of political decisions—while simultaneously being fully aware that, insofar as we remain within the capitalist system, the violation of its rules effectively causes economic breakdown, since the system obeys a pseudo-natural logic of its own. So, although we are clearly entering a new phase of enhanced exploitation, rendered easier by the conditions of the global market (outsourcing, etc.), we should also bear in mind that this is imposed by the functioning of the system itself, always on the brink of financial collapse.

[...] Ours is thus the very opposite of the classical early 20th-century situation, in which the left knew what had to be done (establish the dictatorship of the proletariat), but had to wait patiently for the proper moment of execution. Today we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequence of non-action could be disastrous. We will be forced to live ‘as if we were free’. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss, in totally inappropriate situations; we will have to reinvent aspects of the new, just to keep the machinery going and maintain what was good in the old—education, healthcare, basic social services. In short, our situation is like what Stalin said about the atom bomb: not for those with weak nerves. Or as Gramsci said, characterizing the epoch that began with the First World War, ‘the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters’.

Slavoj Žižek, 'The Necessity of the Impossible', New Left Review 64, July - August 2010.

pullman's alpha course

2010-12-02T11:56:00.001Z

"I have always tried to let the truth irradiate the history".
p.125

Quietly breathtaking

2010-11-27T23:09:00.003Z

"There's a big moon shining on the yard, chalking our way onto the lane and along the road. Kinsella takes my hand in his. As soon as he takes it, I realise my father has never once held my hand, and some part of me wants Kinsella to let me go so I won't have to feel this. It's a hard feeling but as we walk along I begin to settle and let the difference between my life at home and the one I have here be."

Claire Keegan, Foster (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 61.

I finished this with tears in my eyes. Then I turned back to the first page and read it again. Again, with tears. The subtlety in atmospheres and emotions conveyed through Keegan's deft prose is astonishing.

secret histories

2010-11-26T00:01:00.003Z

Horrific as it was, the present dark, I was afraid to leave it for the other, permanent dark - jelly and bloat, the muddy pit. I had seen the shadow of it on Bunny's face - stupid terror; the whole world opening upside down; his life exploding in a thunder of crows and the sky expanding empty over his stomach like a white ocean. Then nothing. Rotten stumps, sowbugs crawling in the fallen leaves. Dirt and dark.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History (London: Penguin, 1992), 551.

some days feel like this

2010-11-24T23:19:00.000Z

Intolerable blankness.

2010-11-21T17:01:00.004Z

Depression is a lifting of the veil, what I saw when I was right down, was, I believed, what was actually there to be seen. Intolerable blankness. It could not be lived with long term, but from time to time I had to look at it, to know what was really there. When things looked better, I should keep a memory of how I had seen them in other, less protected moods. I thought that was vital. I still do. My attraction to blankness, to oblivion, was just as Melville described it, a sense that at source absence was everything. Colour was light and made the world livable in, but from time to time it was necessary to get back to the blank reality. Depression is not good for one, it's an anguish I can do without. But the hunger for blankness could be assuaged, perhaps, in other ways. While walls, staring into peopleless landscapes, heading for the snow and ice. Not to stay, but to be in it for a while. Death, of course, as Melville knows, is what it is. A toying with the void that finally toys with us. In the face of the waiting I can't escape, I head straight for its image and rest there for a while.

Jenny Diski, Skating to Antarctica (London: Virago, 1997), 182-3.

Secularism Humanism is Christianity in a Tracksuit

2010-10-28T11:55:00.001+01:00

"Humanism is a secular religion thrown together from the decaying scraps of Christian myth." (31)
"Postmodernism is just the latest fad in anthropocentrism." (55)
"Genocide is as human as art or prayer". (91)
"Justice is an artefact of custom". (103)
"Choice has become a fetish; but the mark of a fetish is that it is unchosen." (110)
"We think of modernity as an idea in the social sciences, when actually it is the last hiding place of 'morality'." (173)
"Action preserves a sense of self-identity that reflection dispels". (194)

Françoise Sagan

2010-10-22T22:59:00.002+01:00

"It is always through the body of another that one discovers one's own, at first with suspicion and then with gratitude."
A Certain Smile, 121.

the road

2010-10-22T22:49:00.000+01:00

"He tried to stay awake all night but he could not. He woke endlessly and sat and slapped himself or rose to put wood on the fire. He held the boy and bent to hear the labored suck of air. His hand on the thin and laddered ribs. He walked out on the beach to the edge of the light and stood with his clenched fists on top of his skull and fell to his knees sobbing in rage." (250)

True Deception

2010-08-23T18:06:00.001+01:00

"The promises made by a guilty conscience acknowledge and settle no debts..." (125)

2010-08-23T17:51:00.002+01:00

"I have thought about Jacques' question since. The question is banal but one of the real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road - and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous when it seems most bright - and it's true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden. Jacques' garden was not the same as Giovanni's, of course. Jacques' garden was involved with football players and Giovanni's was involved with maidens - but that seems to have made so little difference. Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare."

James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room (London: Corgi, 1956), 23.

red dust road

2010-08-23T17:43:00.001+01:00

"You are part fable, part porridge." (47)

seasons change

2010-08-23T17:38:00.003+01:00

Squalor and decadence,
the rackety global-franchise rush,
oil wars and water wars, the diatonic
crescendo of a cascading world economy
are audible in the hectic thrash
of this luxurious cadence.

[...]

The angry downpour swarms
growling to far-flung fields and farms.
The drains are still alive with trickling water
a few last drops drip from the broken gutter;
but the storm that created so much fuss
has lost interest in us.

Derek Mahon, 'The Thunder Shower', An Autumn Wind (Oldcastle: Gallery Press: 2010), 19.

'untied we stand, untied we fall'

2010-04-27T03:41:00.004+01:00

this deep wisdom came to me in a fcbk status update from my step-brother. he is dyslexic. and a man united fan.

Philip Roth's "mythic... healthy, dumb, fruit-eating Jews"

2010-03-29T05:14:00.005+01:00

'We're all going to Temple Friday night. Why don't you come with us? I mean, are you orthodox or conservative?'
I considered. 'Well, I haven't gone in a long time... I sort of switch...' I smiled. 'I'm just Jewish,' I said well-meaningly, but that too sent Mrs. Patimkin back to her Hadassah work. Desperately I tried to think of something that would convince her I wasn't an infidel. Finally I asked: 'Do you know Martin Buber's work?'
'Buber... Buber,' she said, looking at her Hadassah list. 'Is her orthodox or conservative?' she asked.
'...He's a philosopher.'
'Is he reformed?' she asked, piqued either at my evasiveness or the possibility that Buber attended Friday night services without a hat, and Mrs. Buber had only one set of dishes in her kitchen.
'Orthodox,' I said faintly.
'That's very nice,' she said.

Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus (New York: Vintage, 1993) 88.

chabon setting sail

2010-03-29T05:03:00.003+01:00

"I had never read Goodbye, Columbus, and as I got back into bed with it I remarked, in its lyric and conversational style, its evocation of an Eastern summer, its consciously hyperbolic presentation of the mythic Brenda Patimkin and her family of healthy, dumb, fruit-eating Jews, and its drawing of large American conclusions from small socio-erotic situations, how influenced Roth had clearly been by his own youthful reading of the Fitzgerald novel. That gave me encouragement: it made me feel as if I were preparing to sail to Cathay along a route that had already proven passable and profitable for others."

Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Across the Borderlands. (New York: HarperPerennial, 2008) 139-140.

Long have I loved this woman

2010-03-28T16:28:00.007+01:00

"I have this habit of continuity. I love continuity. The continuum of life: knowing people for a long, long, long time gives me great pleasure...

You're allowed to say 'arse' on Desert Island Discs?! Times have changed!

I think it was John Ruskin said - he was talking about capitalism - and he said, the acquisition of each new thing just engenders a new form of weariness.

[Of her dad] He was funny. And very witty people are often cruel as well. And he knew that. But very funny too.

[Of being stuck on the island] I'll have to make relationships with the island, within the island, and then within those relationships tell stories. I think that's how I'll survive it, is by creating stories.

[Of acting] I find it joyous and life-giving and fun even if it's traumatic. An escape from myself, which I'm ashamed to say I enjoy very much.

Q: What are you escaping?

Oh, you know. {laughs} Me! Me! The voices in my head. The constant 'must do better', 'must try harder' 'plus you're too fat and you're not really a very good mother'. That punitive conscious is part of my psychiatric problem {laughs}. Not to put too fine a point on it, listeners!

Q. And as a loved daughter, where did that come from? Where did the 'not good enough' come from? Where did that voice originate?

I don't know. {exhales} I mean I think that mum and dad both came from the post-war semi-puritanical upbringing. My mum's Scottish, so the Presbyterian thing is strong within us. The force is strong! I think it was a creation of my own making and was always there. Something to do with justice and I couldn't cope with suffering. Of any kind. I had to put it right somehow. And of course that's very arrogant to think that you can alleviate the world's suffering. You can't. And so one of the most important things for me to learn over this life that I've had is that I can't save the world. I can do what I can do. And that has to be enough... It's just the way I am. It's, it's it's never quite enough."

From Desert Island Discs with Emma Thompson.

Emma on Ellen. And on Cheers. Brilliant.

I had no idea her dad was responsible for bringing The Magic Roundabout to my childhood. I'm thrilled. And I already love her mother.

Wonderful woman.

sewn together

2010-03-28T04:50:00.005+01:00

"Some people just break you", I said to a friend.

Some poems do too. Or so it seemed yesterday, when tears formed in my closed eyes where I sat in a fold-up metal chair in a community centre on Charlotte.

It all comes rushing back. You bring your hands together. And it's here when you wake up.

Tears formed again today. At a bus stop in Green Hills. The phone rang. A friend came. There was ice-cream. Sunshine. A park. Cartwheels. And wind.

Great gusts of it. Enough to rattle the nerves and blow back the hair.

I don't know what I thought would happen. But I found myself running towards the kite. Gesturing to the man downhill, as if to say 'Stay where you are, I'll launch it for you'.

Instead, he laid his best kite out for me. I took the strings. A tug. And up.

It's hard to put into words. So I won't.

Except to say that holding those strings and staring into the sky is the closest I come to joy.

Tensing my thighs and shifting my feet beneath it's sway, I'm pulled - as usual - every which way. But this time I'm elated.

This world is bright and bold, and in it we are tugged and entangled.
And there is always the sky, its endless paths, its staggering gusts.
On we whip and whirl.

'For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand'

2010-03-26T17:59:00.003Z

"I must have been sixteen or so when, in whatever anthology of French verse we were studying at my Belfast grammar school, I came upon Vigny's line, 'Dieu, que le son du cor est triste au fond des bois!' and it has remained with me ever since, like the refrain of Yeats's 'The Stolen Child', its echo reverberating down the years."

Derek Mahon, introduction to The Hunt by Night (1982).

yoga

2010-03-26T04:33:00.006Z

this week i took my first iyengar class. and my second and third. after vinyasa it's another world. and a good one. our teacher actually has a skeleton at the front of her class. a mr. lovely bones. at one point on sunday she put her hand on his hip while explaining something. i loved this moment.

it's been refreshing to have the mysticism taken out of things. to look at the body. its muscles and bones. its alignments. to know that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. to see cause and effect.

no music. no smoke and mirrors. just bodies in motion and at rest.

and everything happening in opposite directions at once.
the four corners of the feet press into the floor as the sternum and side ribs lift. the right heel pressing back as the left thigh presses forward.

it's given me a method for thinking, and it's also given me things to think about.
on tuesday night: we are not spiders.

tonight: everyone loves to be watched.

whiskers and claws

2010-03-23T20:28:00.002Z

cat misses bird.
bird misses cat.

here is a poem about pangur ban by michael schmidt.

"... Prowl out of now and go down
Into time's garden, wary with your tip-toe hearing."

I think I just might...

Carnation Milk

2010-03-22T02:06:00.005Z

Carnation Milk is the best in the land;
Here I sit with a can in my hand -
No tits to pull, no hay to pitch,
You just punch a hole in the son of a bitch.

Anon.

On using what we have...

2010-03-22T00:50:00.000Z

'The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb'

Whatever he needs, he has or doesn't
have by now.
Whatever the world is going to do to him
it has started to do. With a pencil and two
Hardy Boys and a peanut butter sandwich and
grapes he is on his way, there is nothing
more we can do for him. Whatever is
stored in his heart, he can use, now.
Whatever he has laid up in his mind
he can call on. What he does not have
he can lack. The bus gets smaller, as one
folds a flag at the end of a ceremony,
onto itself, and onto itself, until
only a heavy wedge remains.
Whatever his exuberant soul
can do for him, it is doing right now.
Whatever his arrogance can do
it is doing to him. Everything
that's been done to him, he will now do.
Everything that's been placed in him
will come out, now, the contents of a trunk
unpacked and lined up on a bunk in the underpine light.

-Sharon Olds, from Blood, Tin, Straw.

because it seemed like time to make a few squiggles to mark these days...

2010-03-22T00:10:00.008Z

...these days, these days...

Their growing pains.
Their unabated joy.

My childishness. My adulthood. Their conversation.
Standing back and watching them. At play. At war.

My conversations with Calvin.
With the ghosts at my shoulder.

My shoulder. Tightening. Pain spreading to my arm.
My right arm. My writing arm.

My father's shoulders...

Language haunted by ellipsis -
Calvin, again.

Rebuking a stranger
on an anniversary
otherwise unmarked.

My mess. My rage for order.

My introversion. My extroversion.
My impatience with complexity.

My learning. Our negotiation.

The grace I am given.
The gifts of anger.

The safety discovered
on the tightrope
through a dark valley.

Working by touch.

Red and black fabrics.

Brunch rush. Old photographs.
A bottle of wine in good company.
And another. Singing down West End.

The twigs in my hair.
The view from the top.
And the view from right here.

Me telling her,
'Mary saw the bear for us'.

Sleeping like spoons.

On falling and failing...

2010-03-04T02:27:00.003Z

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

From Worstward Ho.

"If I had the use of my body I would throw it out of the window".

From Malone Dies.

Of All Times...

2010-03-03T02:44:00.007Z

Of all times, now is not the time,
given the world's old vague condition,

to hang in my mind the plumb-bob weight
of original sin and watch it twist

around like a tire at the end of a rope
looped over a tree branch.

From 'The Doctrine of an Axe' by Maurice Manning.

Clock Without Hands

2010-02-27T20:20:00.002Z

"Death is always the same, but each man dies in his own way. For J.T. Malone it began in such a simple ordinary way that for a time he confused the end of life with the beginning of a new season."

Jim the Boy

2010-01-06T14:47:00.004Z

"While Jim's mother and uncles had known and lived with Jim Glass, Sr., and Jim had constructed a man named Daddy from their stories, nothing had made Jim's father so real as the beating heart of Amos Glass. He had always felt as if he were playing a type of game with his father, that his father was just out of sight ahead of him, watching as Jim looked behind this door, or under that bed. And, although he knew that such things didn't happen, he had always secretly felt as if tomorrow might be the day he tracked his daddy down, that tomorrow he might meet him on a path in the woods, or find him sitting on a rock by the river. But now he understood that Amos made this possible. Once Amos died, Jim's father would become as ancient and faceless as a man in the Bible, a man walking away until he is finally impossible to see. Once Amos was gone, Jim would be alone in the world in a way he had never been alone before."

Tony Earley, Jim the Boy (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000) 223.

The Common Wisdom

2009-12-07T04:01:00.004Z

"It was well known among the citizens of the state that the university had pots of money and that there were highly paid faculty members in every department who had once taught Marxism and now taught something called deconstructionism which was only Marxism gone underground in preparation for emergence at a time of national weakness.

It was well known among the legislators that the faculty as a whole was determined to undermine the moral and commercial well-being of the state, and that supporting a large and nationally famous university with state monies was exactly analogous to raising a nest of vipers in your own bed.

It was well known among the faculty that the governor and the state legislature had lost interest in education some twenty years before and that it was only a matter of time before all classes would be taught as lectures, all exams given as computer-graded multiple choice, all subscriptions to professional journals at the library stopped, and all research time given up to committee work and administrative red tape. All the best faculty were known to be looking for other jobs, and this was known to be a matter of indifference to the state board of governors.

It was well known among the secretaries in every office and every department that the faculty and administrators could, in fact, run the Xerox and even the ditto machines. They were just too lazy to do so.

It was well known among the janitorial staff in every office that if you wanted to maintain your belief in human nature, it was better never, ever to look, even by chance, into any wastebasket, but to adopt a technique of lifting and twisting the garbage bag in one motion and tossing it without even remarking to yourself that was unusual in weight or bulk or odor.

[...]
It was well known to all members of the campus population that other, unnamed groups reaped unimagined monetary advantages in comparison to the monetary disadvantages of one's own group, and that if funds were distributed fairly, according to real merit, for once, some people would have another think coming."

Jane Smiley, Moo (New York: Columbine, 1995), 20-21.

On Running Away

2009-11-01T01:05:00.003Z

"I looked up the rue Jean Nicot and could see lights twinkling, like fireflies, right across the Seine, filling the trees. I went to investigate another day and found out that they were just lights strung in the trees to draw tourists to the bateaux-mouches.

The hardest thing to convey is how lovely it all is and how that loveliness seems all you need. The ghosts that haunted you in New York or Pittsburgh will haunt you anywhere you go, because they're your ghosts and the house they haunt is you. But they become disconcerted, shaken confused for half a minute, and in that moment on a December at four o'clock when you're walking from the bus stop to the rue Saint-Dominique and the lights are twinkling across the river - only twinkling in the bateaux-mouches, luring the tourists, but still... - you feel as if you've escaped your ghosts if only because, being you, they're transfixed looking at the lights in the trees on the other bank, too, which they haven't seen before, either.

It's true that you can't run away from yourself. But we were right: you can run away."

Paris to the Moon, 269-270.

A Machine to Draw the World

2009-11-01T00:41:00.005Z

"Just after the move, for my birthday, Luke and Martha gave me a wonderful toy, La Machine à Dessiner le Monde, a machine to draw the world. Really, all it is is a camera lucida, but nicely done in plastic, with a viewing stand on top. You put a piece of vellum on it, and if the light's bright enough, and it has to be very bright, it projects the thing you're looking at right onto the paper. All you have to do is trace it.

All! For just tracing turns out to be the hardest thing of all. All the clichés and exasperating French abstractions about the insuperable difficulties of realism turn out to be plain truth when you have your machine to draw the world pointed out the window at the plane trees on the boulevard Saint-Germain, your pencil poised, and then you try to decide where to make the first mark. The world moves so much - shimmers and shakes like a nautch dancer, more than you can ever know when you're in it rather than looking at it. You bless any leaf that holds still long enough for you to get it. Hold still, you tell the tree, the light leaping up and down the balustrade, as though you were talking to a small child as you try to get on its galoshes. Just hold still. Where you finally make the mark is mostly a question of when you finally get fed up.

Tracing becomes a deep, knotty problem, a thing to solve, and I am completely absorbed in it. I take the Machine to Draw the World to the Palais Royal or the Luxembourg Gardens and just watch the screen, pencil poised, at the translation of Paris into this single flat layer of translucent, lucid shimmer. I no longer try to circus it, or mourn it, or even learn from it, since just drawing it is enough. What you really need from the world in order to draw it is a lot of light and for everything to just stand still."

Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon (New York: Random House 2000), 255-6.

(Listen here...)

2009-09-29T05:31:00.004+01:00

FUNDAMENTALS

A brilliant poem by Ian Duhig.

hoped-for chord

2009-09-24T16:59:00.005+01:00

"If our days could be like piano keys, black and ivory across the floor,
could I lift you up with one single phrase as my fingers shape into a chord?"

Denison Witmer, 'From Here On Out' from Carry the Weight (Militia, 2008).

flung

2009-09-23T04:36:00.003+01:00

"The earth was suddenly more than many separate things, more than houses, rocks, concrete roads, a horse here or there, a human in a shallow, boulder-topped grave, a prickling of cactus, a town invested with its own light surrounded by night, a million apart things. Suddenly it all had one pattern encompassed and held by the pulsing electric web.

She spilled out swiftly into rooms where life was rising from a slap on a naked child's back, into rooms where life was leaving bodies like the light fading from an electric bulb - the filament glowing, fading, finally colorless. She was in every town, every room, making light-patterns over hundreds of miles of land; seeing, hearing everything, not alone anymore, but one of thousands of people, each with his ideas and his faiths.

Her body lay, a lifeless reed, pale and trembling. Her mind, in all its electric tensity, was flung about this way, that, down vast networks of powerhouse tributary.

Everything balanced. In one room she saw life wither; in another, a mile away, she saw wineglasses lifted to the newborn, cigars passed, smiles, handshakes, laughter. She saw the pale, drawn faces of people at white deathbeds, heard how they understood and accepted death, saw their gestures, felt their feelings, and saw that they, too, were lonely in themselves, with no way to get to the world to see the balance, see it as she was seeing it now.

[...]

Her grief was but one part of a vast grief, her fear only one of countless others. And this grief was only a half thing. There was the other half; of things born, of comfort in the shape of a new child, of food in the warmed body, of colors for the eye and sounds in the awakened ear, and spring wild flowers for the smelling."

-Ray Bradbury, 'Powerhouse' from A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 102-3.

grin-enducing

2009-08-27T17:52:00.000+01:00

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

2009-01-31T07:34:00.003Z

The house is quiet and I am the only one awake. The rain patters against the glass. I came across this poem by Wallace Stevens.

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

five things i read

2009-01-14T10:50:00.001Z

El Tornillo walks the streets of Melo. People in town think he's crazy. He carries a mirror in his hand and he looks at himself with furrowed brow. He doesn't take his eyes off the mirror. 'What are you doing, Tornillo?' 'I'm here,' he says, 'keeping watch on the enemy.'
-Eduardo Galeano

Henry Thoreau was languishing in jail after he had refused to pay the Massachusetts poll tax in 1843 [to protest the Mexican-American war]. Ralph Waldo Emerson came to visit him and asked him why he was there. 'Waldo, why are you NOT here?' said Thoreau.
-Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes

Not all forms of commitment... are equally healthy. The grand inquisitors of the medieval Catholic Church were utterly dedicated to their 'holy' work, and Hitler and many of his associated were fanatically committed to their Nazi doctrines.
-Albert Ellis

The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.
-Lorriane Hansberry

I am more afraid of an army of one hundred sheep led by a lion than of an army of one hundred lions led by a sheep.
-Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord

now one of my favourites: trumpet by jackie kay

2009-01-06T18:09:00.004Z

When he gets down, and he doesn't always get down deep enough, he loses his sex, his race, his memory. He strips himself bare, takes everything off, till he's barely human. Then he brings himself back, out of this world. Back, from way. Getting there is painful. He has to get to the centre of a whirlwind, screwballing in musical circles till he is very nearly out of his mind. The journey is so whacky, so wild that he sometimes fear he'll never return sane. He licks his chops. He slaps and flips and flies. He goes down, swirling and whirling till he's right down at the very point of himself. A small black mark. The further he goes, the smaller he gets. That's the thing. It's so fast, he's speeding, crashing, his fingers going like the hammers, frenzied, blowing up a storm. His leather lips. His stachelmouth.
And he is bending in the wind, scooping pitch, growling. Mugging heavy or light. Never lying. Telling it like it is. O-bop-she-bam. Running changes. Changes running faster, quicker, dangerous. A galloping piano behind him. Sweating like a horse. Break it down. Go on, break it down. It is all in the blood. Cooking. Back, from way. When he was something else. Somebody else. Her. That girl. The trumpet screams. He's hot. She's hot. He's hot. The whole room is hot. He plays his false fingers. Chokes his trumpet. He is naked. This is naked jazz. O-bop-she-bam. Never lying. Telling it like it is.

my ipod's stuck on this...

2009-01-06T10:01:00.002Z

a poem i like by kay ryan

2008-12-23T09:51:00.003Z

Paired Things

Who, who had only seen wings,
could extrapolate the
skinny sticks of things
birds use for land,
the backward way they bend,
the silly way they stand?
And who, only studying
birdtracks in the sand,
could think those little forks
had decamped on the wind?
So many paired things seem odd.
Who ever would have dreamed
the broad winged raven of despair
would quit the air and go
bandylegged upon the ground,
a common crow?

My Father's Diary

2008-12-07T13:13:00.007Z

Yesterday The Writer's Almanac sent me this poem by Sharon Olds.
I wish/ I wonder whether I wish I had my own father's diary...

My Father's Diary

When I sit on the bed, and spring the brass
scarab legs of its locks, inside
is the stacked, shy wealth of his print.
He could not write in script, so the pages
are sturdy with the beamwork of printedness,
WENT TO LOOK AT A CAR, DAD IN A
GOOD MOOD AT DINNER, LUNCH WITH MOM,
TRIED OUT SOME RACQUETS—a life of ease,
except when he spun his father's DeSoto on the
ice, and a young tree whirled up
to the hood, throwing up her arms—until
LOIS. PLAYED TENNIS WITH LOIS, LUNCH
WITH MOM AND LOIS, DRIVING WITH LOIS,
LONG DRIVE WITH LOIS. And then,
LOIS! I CAN'T BELIEVE IT! SHE IS SO
GOOD, SO SWEET, SO GENEROUS, I HAVE
NEVER, WHAT HAVE I EVER DONE
TO DESERVE SUCH A GIRL? Between the tines
of his W's, and liquid on the serifs, moonlight,
the self of the grown boy pouring
out, kneeling in pine-needle weave,
worshiping her. It was my father
good, it was my father grateful,
it was my father dead, who had left me
these small structures of his young brain—
he wanted me to know him, he wanted
someone to know him.

--- from Blood, Tin, Straw (1999).

sharply observed, sharon olds...

2008-10-05T18:35:00.003+01:00

Rite of Passage

As the guests arrive at our son’s party
they gather in the living room—
short men, men in first grade
with smooth jaws and chins.
Hands in pockets, they stand around
jostling, jockeying for place, small fights
breaking out and calming. One says to another
How old are you? —Six. —I’m seven. —So?
They eye each other, seeing themselves
tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their
throats a lot, a room of small bankers,
they fold their arms and frown. I could beat you
up, a seven says to a six,
the midnight cake, round and heavy as a
turret behind them on the table. My son,
freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks,
chest narrow as the balsa keel of a
model boat, long hands
cool and thin as the day they guided him
out of me, speaks up as a host
for the sake of the group.
We could easily kill a two-year-old,
he says in his clear voice. The other
men agree, they clear their throats
like Generals, they relax and get down to
playing war, celebrating my son’s life.

spellbinding

2008-09-25T23:51:00.004+01:00

lisa hannigan at the empire. the girl's going far...

let there be light, at thirty-two

2008-09-07T03:22:00.005+01:00

while clearing out old email folders, i came across this poem i had saved from the writer's almanac. it's by Michael Blumenthal and is wonderful.

Light, at Thirty-Two

It is the first thing God speaks of
when we meet Him, in the good book
of Genesis. And now, I think
I see it all in terms of light:

How, the other day at dusk
on Ossabaw Island, the marsh grass
was the color of the most beautiful hair
I had ever seen, or how—years ago
in the early-dawn light of Montrose Park—
I saw the most ravishing woman
in the world, only to find, hours later
over drinks in a dark bar, that it
wasn't she who was ravishing,
but the light: how it filtered
through the leaves of the magnolia
onto her cheeks, how it turned
her cotton dress to silk, her walk
to a tour-jeté.

And I understood, finally,
what my friend John meant,
twenty years ago, when he said: Love
is keeping the lights on. And I understood
why Matisse and Bonnard and Gauguin
and Cézanne all followed the light:
Because they knew all lovers are equal
in the dark, that light defines beauty
the way longing defines desire, that
everything depends on how light falls
on a seashell, a mouth ... a broken bottle.

And now, I'd like to learn
to follow light wherever it leads me,
never again to say to a woman, YOU
are beautiful, but rather to whisper:
Darling, the way light fell on your hair
This morning when we woke—God,
It was beautiful. Because, if the light is right,
Then the day and the body and the faint pleasures
Waiting at the window ... they too are right.
All things lovely there. As the first poet wrote,
in his first book of poems: Let there be light.

And there is.

-from Days We Would Rather Know.

2008-09-05T00:59:00.002+01:00

"So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us - that's snatched right out of our hands - even if we are left completely changed people with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness."

Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart (London: Vintage, 2002) 225.

In spite of everything.

2008-09-03T16:56:00.002+01:00

"I opened the telegram and said, 'He's dead -' and as I looked up into Graham Mill's gaze I saw that he knew who, before I could say. He had met Max, my first husband, several times, and of course he had heard all about him, he had helped me get to see him when he was in prison. 'How?' he said, in his flat professional voice, putting out his hand for the telegram, but I said, 'Killed himself!' - and only then let him have it."

Nadine Gordimer, The Late Bourgeois World (1966) (London: Penguin, 1982), 7.

What an opening paragraph...

smiles all round

2008-08-28T14:43:00.003+01:00

i'm just back from greenbelt where a most delightful time was had talking with old friends, making new ones, and cooking and eating and listening to music together. some of those lovely new friends inhabit other parts of the blogosphere, so i thought i'd post some links to their homes so i can trundle there from time to time, and you may wish to do likewise. aaron roche lives here, nathan phillips lives here and there, julie lee here and tom wills here.

people are exceptional. they expand the heart in my chest.

Wooster Sauce

2008-08-13T00:13:00.003+01:00

"I blotted the last page of my manuscript and sank back, feeling more or less of a spent force. After incredible sweat of the old brow the thing seemed to be in pretty fair shape, and I was just reading it through and debating whether to bung in another paragraph at the end, when there was a tap at the door and Jeeves appeared.
'Mrs Travers, sir, on the telephone.'
'Oh?' I said. Preoccupied, don't you know.
'Yes, sir. She presents her compliments and would be glad to know what progress you have made with the article which you are writing for her.'
'Jeeves, can I mention men's knee-length underclothing in a woman's paper?'
'No, sir.'
'Then tell her it's finished.'
'Very good, sir.'"

P.G. Wodehouse, Carry on, Jeeves (1925) London: Penguin, 1999: 198.

from the wilderness...

2008-08-08T23:44:00.003+01:00

"The story of Hagar and Ishmael came to mind while I was praying this morning, and I found a great assurance in it. The story says that it is not only the father of a child who cares for its life, who protects its mother, and it says that even if the mother can't find a way to provide for it, or herself, provision will be made. At that level it is a story full of comfort. That is how life goes - we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness onto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord's. I need to bear this in mind."

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004) 118-119.

a day well spent

2008-08-04T19:44:00.005+01:00

"I spent that year in the traditional Irish manner - drinking heavily, singing songs, and wearing sheer-to-waist panty hose."

Jennifer Finney Boylan, She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders (New York: Broadway Books, 2003) 112.

Highly recommended reading: a funny, fascinating, insightful, compassionate, wise, painful memoir by a transsexual English Literature Professor and fiction writer. I started and finished this the same day. Brilliant.

the gathering

2008-08-01T18:01:00.002+01:00

"I look at my own children and I think you know everything at eight. But maybe I am wrong. You know everything at eight, but it is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find."

Anne Enright, The Gathering (New York: Black Cat, 2007) 147.

this week's reading:

2008-07-18T23:25:00.002+01:00

After the Talking Bird, the nice man at the Tavistock Clinic kept asking me why I stole books and birds, though I told him I had only ever stolen one of each.
I told him it was about meaning, and he suggested, very politely, that might be a kind of a psychosis.
'You think meaning is psychosis?'
'An obsession with meaning, at the expense of the ordinary shape of life, might be understood as psychosis, yes.'
'I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We all make it ordinary, but it is not.'
He twiddled his pencil. His nails were very clean.
'I am only asking questions.'
'So am I.'
There was a pause.
I said, 'How would you define psychosis?'
He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil: Psychosis, out of touch with reality.
Since then, I have been trying to find our what reality is, so that I can touch it.

Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping (London: Harper Perennial, 2005) 195-6.

duhig of the day

2008-07-16T16:04:00.003+01:00

From the Irish

According to Dineen, a Gael unsurpassed
in lexicographical enterprise, the Irish
for moon means 'the white circle in a slice
of half-boiled potato or turnip'. A star
is the mark on the forehead of a beast
and the sun is the bottom of a lake, or well

Well, if I say to you your face
is like a slice of half-boiled turnip,
your hair is the colour of a lake's bottom
and at the centre of each of your eyes
is the mark of the beast, it is because
I want to love you properly, according to Dineen.

-Ian Duhig, The Bradford Count (Bloodaxe Books, 1991)

everything is spinning; everything is going to be all right.

2008-07-07T18:33:00.003+01:00

even if i wanted to, i wouldn't know where to begin.
so perhaps i'll end with a poem:

How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.

Derek Mahon, 'Everything Is Going To Be All Right', Collected Poems (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1999) 113.

a brief meditation on love in three parts

2008-07-01T17:21:00.002+01:00

"..when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all."

2008-07-01T17:18:00.003+01:00

"Love wounds. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet. Love's exquisite happiness is also love's exquisite pain. I do not seek pain but there is pain. I do not seek suffering but there is suffering. It is better not to flinch, not to try to avoid those things in love's direction. It is not easy, this love, but only the impossible is worth the effort."

2008-07-01T17:11:00.004+01:00

"The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world."

Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000) 46; 222; 223.

carver and sedaris rave for good reason

2008-06-27T18:38:00.001+01:00

this, my first encounter with wolff, marks the beginning, i hope, of a long friendship.

mahon, the master?

2008-06-16T21:52:00.005+01:00

happy bloomsday! instead of posting something by joyce, i thought i'd post this poem by derek mahon. it is, i think, one of the most intelligent poems in the english language, partly, of course, because of its initial instances of unintelligibility. he speaks joycean better than james... enjoy.

The Joycentenary Ode

Aged twenty-odd, I spent
A night stretched
Between blankets on

The cold floor
Of your squat tower,
Gymsoul, my ho head heavy

As yonder stone among
Half-empty rosbif
And electricity glasses.

There I dreamed
The wholething from
Once upon a time

To riverrun, from
Creak of dawn
To crack of doom,

And woke to find
The snotgreen glittering
Like razor-blades.

What can I tale you,
Jerms, where you stretch
In the Flutherin Symatery?

Who pome of mine might
Healp aliviate
Youretournal night?

What news of the warld
You loft bihand
Widdamuse you now?

The goodguise bate
The badgoys in
Diturrible fright

That drove you from
Parease to die
In switzoccluion.

Women no longer run
Panting into cake-shops,
Though we have still

To instal emergency
Phones in coffins
As you proposed.

Everbaddy reads
Your wooks now in
Unlimited eruditions;

And if you never won
The Noble Praise,
Well, that reflects upon

Our precontraceptions
About lutherature, and erges
Your origeniosity.

Gemsbounder has replaced
Hopalongcarcity
At the Pavlodeography;

The pap democrisy
You realished has become
Thanew art forrum.

Spundrawers in every
Kirtschen! Airwickers
In ivery bahrfrheum!

A noddindog in the rear
Winda of avery carr!
A bonne in overy hoven!

The bairdboard
Bombardment screen
And gineral californucation

Have revolationized
Ourland beyond raggednition.
Nialson came down

A tunderish clap,
Aye-eye in the dust;
And soon there will be

Anew ring-roarrrd built
On reclaimed land
Offa Sandymount Strand.

But some things change
So slowly they
Are still there when

Time comes round again,
Like the dark rain
Muttering on the grave

Of the consumptive
Boy from the gas-works
Who died for love.

Gazing wrist, folden
Gavriels, childers of leidt,
We cmome to a place

Beyond cumminity
Where only the wind synges.
Words faoil there

Bifar infinity,
One evenreal stare
Twintinkling on the si.

This is the dark adge
Where the souil swails
With hurtfealt soang,

Hearing the sonerous
Volapuke of the waives,
That ainchant tongue,

Dialect of what thribe,
Throb of what broken heart –
A language beyond art

That not even you,
If you lived
To a hundred and wan,
Could begin to danscribe.

Derek Mahon, The Hunt by Night (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982): 45-8.

the fluidity of a possible life

2008-06-13T23:57:00.002+01:00

“Those events [of 1968], which began as a social protest and degenerated into a mere religious war, have become increasingly depressing in from and outcome; but this is only the start. Battles have been lost, but a war remains to be won. The war I mean is not, of course, between Protestant and Catholic but between the fluidity of a possible life (poetry is a great lubricant) and the rigor mortis of archaic postures, political and cultural.”

Derek Mahon, 'Poetry in Northern Ireland', Twentieth Century Studies 4 (Nov 1970): 93.

rabbit, run

2008-06-06T17:43:00.003+01:00

When you twist a rope and keep twisting, it begins to lose its straight shape and suddenly a kink, a loop leaps into it. Harry has such a hard loop in himself after he hears Eccles out. He doesn't know what he says to Eccles; all he is conscious of is the stacks of merchandise in jangling packages he can see through the windows of the phone-booth door. On the drugstore wall there is a banner bearing in red the one word PARADICHLOROBENZENE. All the while he is trying to understand Eccles he is reading this word, trying to see where it breaks, wondering if it can be pronounced. Right when he finally understands, right at the pit of his life, a fat woman comes up to the counter and pays for two bottles of vitamins. He step into the sunshine outside the drugstore swallowing, to keep the loop from rising in his body and choking him. It's a hot day, the first of summer; the heat comes up off the glittering pavement into the faces of pedestrians, strikes them sideways off the store windows and hot stone facades. In the white light faces wear the American expression, eyes squinting and mouths sagging open in a scowl, that makes them look as if they are about to say something menacing and cruel. In the street under glaring hardtops drivers bake in stalled traffic. Above, milk hangs in a sky that seems too exhausted to clear. Harry waits at a corner with some sweating footsore shoppers for a Mt. Judge bus, number 16A; when it hisses to a stop it is already packed. He hangs from a steel bar in the rear, fighting to keep from doubling up with the kink inside. Curved posters advertise filtered cigarettes and suntan lotion and C.A.R.E.

John Updike, Rabbit, Run (1960) 231.

uncle walt, again

2008-05-29T21:06:00.003+01:00

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body…

-- from the Preface to Leaves of Grass.

dismiss whatever insults your own soul
today's the day
when the beckettian absurd makes all the sense (of the nonsense) in the world

dismiss whatever insults your own soul
and live in the fluency of your flesh...

labels are for jars*

2008-05-27T04:51:00.005+01:00

'So on a scale, are you like, fifty-fifty?'
She smiled ruefully as she licked pear juice off her thumb. 'I don't know anyone who's fifty-fifty. Nah, my libido is more like a compass needle, swinging all over the place. For the past while it's been jammed at women, but I can't predict what it'll point at next.'
'Phallic or what!'
'Point taken.' They groaned simultaneously.

Emma Donoghue, Stir-Fry (New York: HarperCollins, 1994) 186.

*said the loser, baby.

words for salad days

2008-05-16T23:20:00.003+01:00

"Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany and countless others (including countless). Where would we be without them?"

"His real gift was as a phrasemaker. 'Shakespeare's language,' says Stanley Wells, 'has a quality, difficult to define, of memorability that has caused many phrases to enter the common language.' Among them: one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all description, cold comfort, to thine own self be true, more in sorrow than in anger, the wish is father to the thought, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, be cruel to be kind, blinking idiot, with bated breath, pomp and circumstance, foregone conclusion... roughly one tenth of all the most quotable utterances written or spoken in English since its inception - a clearly remarkable proportion."

Bill Bryson, Shakespeare, London: HarperPress, 2007 (113-4).

tove jansson: fair play

2008-05-14T22:51:00.003+01:00

oh i loved this. a wise book about the silence, distance and conversation we need in creativity, friendship and love, from the creator of the moomins.