tongues: “spluttrous inheld explosions of dont-laugh,” “lamplit oil house flimmered in a glub of night trees,” “incarnate dirt behung in drapes of grain by level deep doop dung,” “spermatazoing in all directions,” or “a rosecovered cottage flat on the dreaming lurps and purls of the Merrimac. . .”
Some words about Jack Kerouac (b. 12 March 1922): I love the moments—kin to a guitarist stretching a string, pulling out a long blue grace note, or air-thrashing amp-tight in full-feedback, making electronic overload do the talking—where Kerouac simply makes up words, little splurges of talking in
Noted: the final nod to Pynchon’s _Gravity’s Rainbow_ (1973), precisely mimicking its ending (“Now Everybody—“). Here, apparently the only survivor of a firestorm, an “Idiot Child,” sings into the void, enjoining the gone city’s gone inhabitants to all join in. The way we do, idiots all.
Finished: László Krasznahorkai’s big drafty apocalyptic novel _Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming_ (2019, translated by Ottilie Mulzet). Whose long ariatic sentences make any others seem oddly stingy, clipped, officious.
A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points, of actions … Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature.
-Ezra Pound,
The Chinese Written Character
as a Medium for Poetry
Citation d'Albert Camus : "Chaque génération, sans doute, se croit vouée à refaire le monde. La mienne sait pourtant qu'elle ne le refera pas. Mais sa tâche est peut-être plus grande. Elle consiste à empêcher que le monde se défasse."
Extrait du discours d'Albert Camus lorsqu'il reçoit le prix Nobel de littérature le 10 décembre 1957 à Stockholm www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1957/camus/25232-banquet-speech-french/
That's even better. "Just put it in your ardor-sepulchre and be done with it."
Thanks, Rachel. I'm honored. My ambivalences probably show up less readily: just finished a ho-hum bio (of Jim Harrison), a sort of workmanlike bit of ardor-squelcher . . .
The pleasures of tracking others’ readerly ardors and ambivalences. Susan Howe, out of “Melville’s Marginalia” (in 1993’s _The Nonconformist's Memorial_):
1825: Intend to call my Natural History of Helpstone 'Biographys of Birds & Flowers' with an appendix on Animals & Insects - The frogs have began to croke & spawn in the ponds & dykes.
Nandalal Bose (bits & pieces, no date)
When John Ashbery writes “The songs decorate our notion of the world / And mark its limits, like a frieze of soap-bubbles” is he rather hazily recalling one of Ezra Pound’s two kinds of consciousness, the “reflective” (as opposed to the “germinal”)—in _The Spirit of Romance_ (1910)? (Probably not.)
“So much of my material comes from a generalized wandering around the United States. Travel, walking. I never get an idea while sitting still.”
And: “You’re either preternaturally alive to language or you’re not. You go into long dull periods when you’re not.”
—Jim Harrison
Zuigan Ryūsei / Su Shi (Dongpo) in a Bamboo Hat and Clogs, before 1460
Breakfasted tête à tête with the English phlegmatic—he said nothing & I ditto.
—Herman Melville, Journal
John Baldessari. I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, 1971
Art by Max Neumann, out of László Krasznahorkai’s _Chasing Homer_ (New Directions, 2021)
Somewhat relatedly, Krasznahorkai (“mathematics makes no allowance for . . . the actual reality of moral questions”), hints at a kind of unmodelable phenomenal continuum, a world indivisible.
Art by Max Neumann, out of László Krasznahorkai’s _Chasing Homer_ (New Directions, 2021)
László Krasznahorkai, in _Chasing Homer_ (2021, translated by John Batki), pointing at the grand inadjudicable smeariness of the temporal.
the large open serial form of the “Hammertown” trilogy, a work routed in place, capacious, renegade, local. Here: the triggering lines by Perec—used as epigraph to _Hammertown_ (2003), and the opening lines of the whole.
Thinking of Georges Perec (b. 7 March 1936) and, somehow inexorably, of Canadian poet Peter Culley—how, out of a tiny mention in Perec’s La Vie mode d'emploi /Life: A User's Manual (1978 / 1987 translated by David Bellos), Culley conceived of
Photographie de Georges Perec
« Écrire : essayer méticuleusement de retenir quelque chose, de faire survivre quelque chose : arracher quelques bribes précises au vide qui se creuse, laisser, quelque part, un sillon, une trace, une marque ou quelques signes. »
Georges Perec (7 mars 1936 ~ 3 mars 1982), Espèces d’espaces, 1974.
“Je cherche en même temps l’éternel et l’éphémère!”
[I seek at once the eternal and the ephemeral.]
— Georges Perec, Les Revenentes (1972)
Later used as the epigraph to the last chapter of *Life: A User’s Manual* (1978):
postcard of dog with collage and aphorism, writing in German from original sender at bottom
stay tender somehow
a reminder from @dinalrelles.bsky.social and me
A stream that flows down, now gentle, under the winter sun. - Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, March 17, 1933 - a cool brisk wind - the morning sunlight - a little reddish brown bird - a warbler, sitting in a willow tree - singing madly.
March Sunlight
Charles Burchfield 1932
Balinese palm leaf manuscript (Ramayana) / from Isamu Noguchi’s collection
(a charm for sleep)
Sound, silence
river, sea
drop, ocean
When a reading of text has proceeded by laborious stages within the test-rig of detailed study, pause to allow the overall effect to integrate back into a coherent human reading, and ponder whether your life may even have been changed, just a little, or your beliefs about large questions; whether your habits of feeling have been flattered or boastfully challenged, or whether your relation to the text builds up a kind of trust. This aspect is what you will take away with you when all the study is finished, and it should last you through a lifetime.
J. H. Prynne, on reading
Thank you, Robert. That’s wonderful! I like the rest of Guston’s remarks, too, made at a lecture at the University of Minnesota in 1978:
Philip Guston, “Cherries,” 1976
Mu Qi, “Six Persimmons,” 13th century
Wondering, under the tumult of my usual breezy wrongheadedness, whether Philip Guston knew of the thirteenth century monk and painter Mu Qi’s “Six Persimmons” when he painted the 1976 “Cherries.”
