Adam's books

the emotional ... sometimes

2010-10-04T13:21:00.009-04:00

the emotional state / this interruption, for short / what that consists of. / always pulling people into / novel terms but / somebody says something / sentiments, only sometimes

In prison or in the tekkes, the rebetes did not have the luxury of a small orchestra. In prison this would have been forbidden, and in the tekkes it would have attracted the unwanted attention of the police.

As a Roman citizen I decided to notify the civil power and rescue myself from my dreadful predicament by appealing to the Emperor....I managed to shout 'O' loudly and distinctly, but that was all; I was unable to pronounce the word 'Caesar'. My discordant bray so annoyed the bandits that they whacked and poked at my miserable hide until it felt hardly fit even to make one of those leather sieves for bolting corn.

Somatic jolts and intellectual stability -- two conflicting interpretations, to be sure, but perhaps also two extremes on the continuum of mid-eighteenth-century culture and aesthetics. But above all, it is in the specific formulation of violently clashing sounds as antidotes to ennui, in the perceived ability of dissonance to jolt bodies and at the same time keep in check the effects of such violence through aestheticization, that mid-eighteenth-century concepts of auditory perception transcended the obsolete aesthetics of affect and began to articulate a concept of the listener as an ego.

“I should have thought,” said Murphy, “that the radiator was secondary to the gas.”

He had brought the radiator to the garret, set it down on the floor and stood back to imagine it lit. Rusty, dusty, derelict, the coils of asbestos falling to pieces, it seemed to defy ignition. He went dismally away to look for gas.

He seemed illuminated by his discovery, but undecided: was he going to transform it into uncontrollable laughter, or into oratorical procedures?

"What an idiot I am!" said he, choosing the second course.

This seems a fairly plausible view of the status of the arts and sciences in human society. The occurrence of a supply independent of Corpus demands, its possibility or presence, is a question that the social limitations of our critical language prevent us from raising with any degree of humane intelligibility.

(And what is perfect English?) Its strange lurches of idiom and vocabulary remind us, as "A"-18 did, that dictionaries are poor guides to a language. "Overcome" in "have not / overcome the / age of / 35...." (p. 412) probably seemed a logical synonym for "attained."

Like a tropical storm,
I, too, may one day become "better organized."

Petropoulos, Elias. Songs of The Greek Underworld: The Rebetika Tradition. London, Saqi Books, 2000.
Apuleius, tr. Robert Graves. The Transformations of Lucius Otherwise Known as The Golden Ass. NYC, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1984.
Erlmann, Veit. Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality. NYC, Zone Books, 2010.
Beckett, Samuel. The Grove Centenary Edition: Volume 1: Novels. NYC, Grove Press, 2006.
Queneau, Raymond, tr. Barbara Wright. The Sunday of Life. NYC, New Directions, 1977.
Riding, Laura, ed. Lisa Samuels. Anarchism Is Not Enough. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001.
Ahearn, Barry. Zukofsky's "A": An Introduction. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983.
Davis, Lydia. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. NYC, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2009.

Loisaida Mockingbird

2010-07-14T09:46:00.000-04:00

Park Slope Mockingbird

2010-07-14T09:44:00.004-04:00

Bed-Stuy Mockingbird

2010-07-14T09:44:00.003-04:00

occasionally at sea. In all such cases,

2009-11-09T22:43:00.004-05:00

The feeling is first one of strongish love, then even stronger love, then slightly less love (though he is still loving, rather than hating), then extreme love, then suddenly quite a strong feeling of dislike, then love again, and then more or less mixed feelings. This series of alternating emotions will continue and, in fact, the emotional state varies chaotically.

We looked round, surprised at this interruption, for Short had apparently returned to his slumbers, but we now saw that he had emerged from the banner and was standing behind us, fully dressed (I discovered later on that he had discarded dressing and undressing as frivolous waste of time), a queer uncouth figure with his long touzled black hair and sallow, unhealthy face. He had a short clay pipe firmly set between his teeth, and his large lips were parted with a smile.

I bet that he won't tell you anything about what he does. He doesn't just write books, he is a professor of philosophy at the University of Vincennes; hence he does philosophy. No one has ever been quite sure what that consists of.

We would miss the pathos of authority in the era of high capitalism if we were to think so. Pullman went to great effort to offer his workers something more than a job. Throughout the 19th Century, paternalistic controls were similarly motivated by a desire to make personal, face-to-face contacts -- to make a community -- in an economic system always pulling people into paths of individual striving and mutual competition.

Even the colophons of the printers they relied on often reflected a desire not to attract potential customers to bookshops (as was the usual purpose of early colophons), but to distract officials and avoid fines or arrest. Products issued from "Utopia" and "Cosmopolis" helped to publicize these novel terms but also added to the sense of unreality and impracticality associated with the circulation of ideas.

"It isn't that we laugh because we hear these fine words," replied Parlamente. "But the fact is that everyone is inclined to laugh when they see somebody fall over or when somebody says something unintentional, as often happens, even to the most modest and best spoken of ladies, when they make a slip of the tongue and say one word instead of another.

You have seen
A rain of dried peas does not stick to a screen,
A non-stop reflector,
(Not the black sheet of a bed),
But an heroic
Which excretes and laughs.

4

These are not my sentiments,
Only sometimes does one feel that intimate.

God, LL.D.,

I want to resign

1 - Richard J. Bird, chaos and life: complexity and order in evolution and thought. Columbia University Press (NYC), 2003.
2 - Isabel Meredith, A Girl Among The Anarchists. University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln), 1992.
3 - Jean-Francois Lyotard (tr. Bill Readings & Kevin Paul Geiman), Political Writings. University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis), 1993.
4 - Richard Sennett, Authority. Knopf (NYC), 1980.
5 - Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution In Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press (NYC), 1997.
6 - Marguerite of Navarre, Story Fifty-Two, from Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson. University of Georgia Press (Athens), 1987.
7 - Louis Zukofsky, Complete Short Poetry. Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore), 1997.

"shining constellation/ ... of / eyes, and again saw nothing."

2009-09-16T16:50:00.007-04:00

shining constellation / each allusion / recognizes the silence / the scorching contiguity of the frantic / sex in this category / hardly ever humiliates / our living in hundreds of / eyes, and again saw nothing

It frequently happens, of course, in crowded harbors that more than two vessels are involved in an approaching situation. The same thing may even happen occasionally at sea. In all such cases, special circumstances may be deemed to exist the moment any of the vessels is prevented from obeying the usual rules.

This puts one beside oneself, this irritates and exasperates, and the language for saying it is exasperated. (It would be better to let another speak, and in a language that would remain, somewhat, on the side:7
"Laura the basilisk made entirely of asbestos, walking to the fiery stake with a mouth full of gum.

We quiver as we hear a voice, and what we are hearing and learning to love is a theory of the body. I, who can't carry a tune, am caught within this economy of vocal production as surely as if I were a singer.

"Red lines denote vocal sensations of soprano and tenor singers," writes Lilli Lehmann in How to Sing. Look at Lehmann's diagram of the singer: a ghoul, a skeleton, a survivor, shorn of identity's specifics.

Nothing but bread and dates and milk and coffee, and little enough of that. Often the bread runs short, and only dates and milk remain. It was a wild looking party that was gathered round the coffee pot. There's lots of negro blood in them, owing, I think, to their having negro slaves, one of whom was with them.

I kept an eye on her, though, without seeming to. After all, she was as unpredictable as I was. She could pick up a candlestick or a vase and hit me with it. And whip or no whip, I wasn't going to stand passively and let her really hurt me.

1-Captain Raymond F. Farwell, rev'd. Lieutenant Alfred Prunski, The Rules Of The Nautical Road. United States Naval Institute (Annapolis), 1954.
2-Jean-Luc Nancy, ed. Peter Connor, The Inoperative Community. University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis), 1991.
3-Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire. Vintage (NYC), 1993.
4-The Letters of Gertrude Bell, edited by Lady Bell. Penguin (Harmondsworth), 1939.
5-Octavia E. Butler, Kindred. Beacon (Boston), 1988.

seem / rhymeless / minutes, / especially / continued.

2009-07-24T14:12:00.006-04:00

Silence, a black abyss, a turbulent void. And in the midst of the turbulence (Katasia having withdrawn) there suddenly loomed an irresistible, shining constellation of mouths, with two mouths unquestionably related to each other.

Gesture by gesture, as if idea by idea, the drama is built up. The audience watches for each allusion in turn; it follows point by point. The interest becomes like that of a detective story.

The phone rings and rings and rings and then someone picks up. Jeremy recognizes the silence on the other end. “Everybody came over and fell asleep,” he whispers. “That’s why I’m whispering.”

…and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral.

The phonebook – already so outmoded as to be a relic – is an (almost impenetrably) concrete example of how a specific technology effects a printed text. Basic capitalism spawned ‘seedier’ aspects of phone communication: scams, sales, solicitations (though I wouldn’t place phone sex in this category).

Instead of a site of domination and surrender, the body of the dance partner becomes a site – or rather, a point of reference – for association and coordination. This is the “deindividualizing” principle (Jelavich, 179ff.) of the kick-lines which conquer the revue stages, transforming the individual bodies of the “girls” into complex systems of well-coordinated limbs. [see Revues] This is also why the role of the gigolo does not turn into a role of surrender and therefore hardly ever humiliates male gender-pride.

We could earn our living in hundreds of ways, why got it from killing animals? Any foods can fill our stomach, why took the risk of incarnation by consuming meats? Why don’t we become a vegetarian from now on?

I lowered my eyes, and again saw nothing but a little hand on the tablecloth, a double mouth with double lips, innocent and yet corrupt, pure and yet evil and darting, I gazed at it intently, gasping for breath, whereupon the whole place suddenly started swarming with hands, Leo’s and Fuchs’s and Kulka’s and Louis’s, a whole multitude of hands were being agitated in the air. What on earth could this be? It was a wasp. A wasp had flown into the room.

1 - Witold Gombrowicz (tr. Eric Mosbacher), Cosmos. Grove (NYC), 1970.
2 - Edwin Denby (ed. Robert Cornfield), Dance Writings and Poetry. Yale (New Haven), 1998.
3 - Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters. Viking (NYC), 2008.
4 - Herman Melville (ed. Charles Child Walcutt), Moby Dick. Bantam (NYC), 1981.
5 - Emily Beall, The Communicative Contract For Telemarketers: One Section Of The Phonebook. (Brooklyn), 2009.
6 - Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living At The Edge Of Time. Harvard (Cambridge), 1997.
7 - [Unknown Author], The True Stories Of Cause & Effect. Shing Tak Temple (Queens), 2008?.
8 - [see 1]

"a homonym ... within a planet"

2008-12-11T14:17:00.010-05:00

a homonym that must / be a criteria / talking for him,” thereby colluding / all bananas belonging to the class / we saw in Chapter 1. Each flower / held within a planet’

***

But his words seem to us cryptic, and their meaning has hardly survived. What he appears to say is this: ‘The Muses, who love country life, have granted to Virgil delicacy and graceful charm.’ It is possible that this is a piece of semi-technical literary criticism, intending to ascribe to Virgil’s rural poetry those qualities which are the opposite of heroic or pretentious.

1226. Rhymeless (anti-authoritarian : compare Whitman). On the fear of the atom Bomb, the castratory nature of which is popularly perceived only as fear of “sterilization” after-effects. Compare the classic womb-return fantasy, with the incestuous element boldly prominent, in “The Wish” by the Earl of Rochester (d. 1680) :

Oh, that I now cou’d by some Chymick Art
To Sperm convert my Vitals and my Heart,
That in one thrust I might my Soul translate,
And in the Womb my self regenerate :
There steep’d in Lust, nine months I wou’d remain,
Then boldly fuck my Passage out again.

1230. Joke, about married men on a hunting trip, none of whom could get to sleep until the guide gave each of them a hairbrush to hold.

After a few minutes each actor finds that the comic mask is stuck. S/he cannot remove it no matter how hard s/he tries. S/he is fixed permanently with the smiling face of the comic mask, and the internal despair of the trapped mask-maker.

The principle here is that you can recreate the appropriate muscular tension and, in finding the shape of the body or facial muscles and related breathing states, emotion becomes apparent. You are internally passive and externally active, focusing only on the doing of the task.

Especially among Euro-Americans, there is a tendency to reduce a complex physical-verbal-musical phenomenon to the merely verbal. Thus, the Shout is often discussed as a kind of folk song. And the same reduction has been worked on rap, where the dance components of the form are almost always ignored in favor of the verbal.⁴¹

THE DECLINE OF THE DANCE INSTRUCTION SONG

At the end of the 1960s, popular music was developing at a remarkable rate. Yet, dance per se was not the focus of forms such as psychedelic music, heavy metal, and art rock. Increasingly, songs about dances became not merely wannabe dances, but conceptual dance instruction songs – songs about dances that did not exist.

But when I continued to insist that I was innocent, he suddenly leaped up and, pointing to the can of sardines, asked:

“And what does that mean?”

“Nothing,” I replied, nonplussed.

“We shall see. Remove this provocateur!” he shouted.

With that the interrogation was concluded.

***

1 - Michael Grant, Roman Literature. Pelican Books (Harmondsworth), 1958.
2 - G. Legman, ed., The Limerick: 1700 Examples, with Notes, Variants and Index. Bell Publishing Company (NYC), 1969.
3 - Dymphna Callery, Through The Body: A Practical Guide to Physical Theatre. Nick Hern Books (London), 2001.
4 - Sally Banes and John F. Szwed, From "Messin' Around" to "Funky Western Civilization": The Rise and Fall of Dance Instruction Songs, from Thomas F. Defrantz, ed., Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance. University of Wisconsin Press (Madison), 2002.
5 - Stanislaw Lem (tr. Michael Kandel), The Star Diaries. Harcourt (NYC), 1985.

pretext. He himself declared, as we

2008-11-25T12:09:00.009-05:00

One is thus inaugurating another word, in sum, a homonym that must be put forward cautiously between quotation marks. Another word-concept is thus staged whose event one causes to come about.”¹⁶

Whereas Sontag concerns herself with how quotation marks make camp, or camp the quotidian, Marjorie Garber, in her essay “ “ ” (Quotation Marks),” highlights authenticity as a central problem for quotation. Garber notes that “paradoxically … quotation marks, when either written or spoken, can convey both absolute authenticity and veracity, on the one hand, and suspected inauthenticity, irony or doubt, on the other.” ¹⁷

The crowd to her, so
many marks

*

Individious

*

“Fabulous, fabulous”

*

If smoothness is to be a criteria
Then you’re definitely inferior

The researchers quoted prominent jazz critics, such as Barry Ulanov, in support of the thesis that the musicians’ supposed lack of training in moral philosophy and the liberal arts contributed to their “immaturity and disorganization.”⁴ Moreover, displaying extreme naivete concerning black musicians’ access to white media, the two scholars maintain that the jazz musician was “relatively illiterate in respect to the verbal expression of his own art … the musician has remained silent and allowed others to do the talking for him,” thereby colluding in his own isolation from the world.

Up until then, everything had been for me one of a kind. I could not conceive of different examples of the same thing existing simultaneously in more than one place at once. Thus in my dream, all bananas belonging to the class of bananas had had to be contiguous. Bananas existed at my behest and without that there could be no place for them. Annie Sullivan expresses concern in one of her letters about my number obsession:
June 12, 1887
I am teaching Helen the square hand letters as a sort of diversion. It gives her something to do, and keeps her quiet, which is desirable while this enervating weather lasts.

Zygogynum trees produce many flower buds, but only a few open each day. Consequently one small tree may remain in flower for months, despite the fact that each blossom lives no more than two days. This is a common flowering strategy of many tropical trees, as we saw in chapter 1. Each flower usually has two rings of stiff petals. The petals of some species have a pinkish tinge while others are yellowish-orange or a deep burgundy.

The pollen-making stamens and seed-making carpels live together in the same Zygogynum flower, but they mature at different times…. By isolating the sexual organs from each other in this way, Zygogynum trees avoid accidental self-pollination.

In the 1920s, Blue Tit birds in Southhampton learned to tear the tops off milk bottles and drink the cream inside. Soon, Blue Tit birds more than a hundred miles away were exhibiting the talent -- even though the birds rarely flew more than fifteen miles -- and by 1947, the habit was universal among the species. This owed to morphic resonance, a collective memory held within a planet’s morphogenetic field, and passed on to each new generation of life. The same effect was witnessed in monkey creatures four million years in the future, on the planet Endarra.⁸¹⁴

*****

1 - Jennifer DeVere Brody, Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

2 - Charles Bernstein, The Sophist. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1987.

3 - George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

4 - Madeline Gins, Helen Keller or Arakawa. Santa Fe: Burning Books, 1994.

5 - Peter Bernhardt, Wily Violets and Underground Orchids: Revelations of a Botanist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

6 - Lance Parkin, Ahistory: An Unauthorized History of the Doctor Who Universe (2nd Edition). Des Moines IA: Mad Norwegian Press, 2007.

You mustn't forget about spiders.

2008-11-22T06:56:00.010-05:00

“Garrett, let’s hear from you.”

“Well,” Garrett said, but declined to elaborate.

“They keep the money,” Rondo reminded them, “in banks.”

“Listen, guys,” the Bear began.

“Don’t say. A fucking. Thing,” Hatwell warned him.

The Bear deferred, and they drank some so-called beers.

The logical response was to substitute other forms of international liquidity. The problem to which this was a solution was not a global liquidity shortage but the need to substitute a new reserve asset for the dollar in order to prevent the process described by Triffin from destabilizing the Bretton Woods system. As mentioned above, this was favored by weak-currency countries and opposed by their strong-currency counterparts. Discussions were complicated by the fact that the dollar was both weak and strong.

Those words kept going through my head, and I just kept on walking. That man sort of followed me, shouting that he needed directions. Finally, the man yelled, “What are you, deaf?!” And I stopped, and I just gave him the directions, and that’s all he wanted, after all. But I was scared to death of him!

After the first day, one of his fellow smugglers suggested he get a fishing rod and pretend to be fishing so as not to arouse suspicion. Muscles went to a sporting goods store, bought seventeen rods and assorted tackle, and returned to the pier. He sat there for hours, trying to figure out how to put everything together.

After two months of struggle, I concluded that I could not solve these problems. It seemed it was in part because of the terrible privations of postwar life. Soon, however, I made some lucky discoveries: it was not the result of my limitations that I could not solve these problems; they are unsolvable! For various reasons, which I no longer remember, my conviction grew.

This doesn’t mean that for Menocchio the book was incidental, or a pretext. He himself declared, as we shall see, that at least one book had moved him deeply, encouraging him to think new thoughts by its startling assertions. It was the encounter between the printed page and the oral culture, of which he was one embodiment, that led Menocchio to formulate -- first for himself, later for his fellow villagers, and finally for the judges -- the “opinions … [that] came out of his head.”

Have you ever tried such a thing? I have, and it’s impossible, something only a few natural writers or journalists can do, be talking about politics, for example, and at the same time writing a little article on gardening or spondaic hexameters (which I can tell you, boys, are a rare phenomenon.) And that was how she spent her days at the general’s office, and when she had finished her work, sometimes quite late at night, she would say goodbye to everyone, gather up her things, and leave on her own.

***

1 - Rafi Zabor, The Bear Comes Home. WW Norton (NY) 1998.
2 - Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History Of The International Monetary System. Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ) 1996.
3 - Sarah L. Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany with Amy Hill Hearth, Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years. Dell (NY) 1994.
4 - “Roy Graham”, COWBOY MAFIA: The Finest Story in True-Crime History. Roy Graham 2000.
5 - Mariko Yasugi and Nicholas Passell, Memoirs of a Proof Theorist: Godel And Other Logicians. World Scientific Publishing (Singapore) 2003.
6 - Carlo Ginsburg (tr. John and Anne Tedeschi), The Cheese And The Worms: The Cosmos Of A Sixteenth Century Miller. Penguin (NY) 1982.
7 - Roberto Bolano (tr. Natasha Wimmer), The Savage Detectives. Picador (NY) 2008.

Knowledge of these conditions cannot begin too early.

2008-05-23T22:55:00.011-04:00

Indeed, it seems to me that the art of our country has for many years past been introduced to the public of Europe and America in all sorts of ways, and hundreds of books have appeared in several foreign languages; but I have been privately alarmed for the reason that a great many such books contain either superficial observations made during sightseeing sojourns of six months or a year in our country or are but hasty commentaries, compilations, extracts or references, chosen here and there from other volumes.

The masks represent the Himalayan atmosphere of awe-inspiring mighty peaks and deep-sounding river gorges, of eerie rustlings of haunted forest leaves in the valleys and desert-like mirages appearing among the giant mountain landscapes. When the cult of the Devi captured the people’s imagination, and more and more temples were erected in almost every hamlet, these masks were in great demand because the local temples which could not afford to commission a complete idol of the goddess could still do her honour through such symbols. With the passage of time, the practice became a custom so that even when the temples were more prosperous and their imagery more resplendent, masks still occupied the principal altar – and were no longer made of wood or clay, as in the past, but cast or beaten in metals such as copper, silver and even gold.

We admire their terracotta colour, at the same time as our incurable anthropomorphism leads us to classify them as repugnant, disgusting, slimy and other equally unjust epithets. Actually, they’re very beautiful slugs, with a smooth and shiny front part followed by a dorsal section that looks like the work of Piza, our friend the Brazilian painter, I mean a surface filled with little gathers and grooves that look hand-made, although it’s hard to imagine a hand working on a slug, and much less Piza’s. As is their custom, this cohort of slugs advance millimetre by millimetre, giving the clear impression they’re not going anywhere, except where pedestrians and vehicles will irrefutably crush them; but we’re falling back onto anthropomorphism because slugs know better than us why they leave their woodland shelters and make their entrance into the rest area, although it might also be ingenuous to imagine themselves so sure of themselves, poor little things.

“You mustn’t forget about spiders,” Carol reminds me after I’ve consulted her regarding certain details about slugs in Canada.

“I’m inclined to think he does,” said I; and Fritz, who had been by my side, dropped respectfully behind.

CHAPTER IX
A NEW USE FOR A TEA-TABLE

If I were to detail the ordinary events of my daily life at the time, they might prove instructive to people who are not familiar with the inside of palaces; if I revealed some of the secrets I learnt, they might prove of interest to the statesmen of Europe. I intend to do neither of these things.

“How do you account for what my father saw and heard there?” asked Leo.

“Coincidence. No doubt there are bluffs on the coast of Africa that look something like a man’s head, and plenty of people who speak bastard Arabic. Also, I believe that there are lots of swamps. Another thing is, Leo, and I am sorry to say it, but I do not believe that your poor father was quite right when he wrote that letter.

Since his map is not a descriptive, but an analytical and selective representation of Istanbul, it certainly reflects the city vision or concept of the 16th century Ottoman intellectual such as Matrakçi Nasuh, who was a typically educated Ottoman military man. He wrote books on history and on mathematics and he was a calligrapher and a painter. Before carrying out any analysis, however, we have to remember that there are rules imposed by the size of the pages, by the nature of the miniature painting itself, such as the lack of perspective, a lack of realism in depicting the correct shape of the site and the almost total absence of motivation for a representation of the third dimension.

The most remarkable characteristic of Matrakçi’s map is the absence of roads, streets and open public places. His map is directionless.

******

1 - Henry P. Bowie, with prefatory remarks by Iwaya Sazanami and Hirai Kinza, ON THE LAWS OF JAPANESE PAINTING, Dover (NY) 1952
2 - Madanjeet Singh, HIMALAYAN ART, Macmillan (NY) 1971
3 - Julio Cortazar & Carol Dunlop, tr. Anne McLean, AUTONAUTS OF THE COSMOROUTE, Archipelago (Brooklyn) 2007
4 - Anthony Hope, PRISONER OF ZENDA, Penguin (NY) 2007
5 - H. Rider Haggard, SHE, Penguin (NY) 2007
6 - Dogan Kuban, ISTANBUL AN URBAN HISTORY, The Economic And Social History Foundation of Turkey (Istanbul) 1996

******

float, but pre-digested.

2007-09-21T17:29:00.001-04:00

Names collect their own crowds. They are greedy and live their own separate lives, scarcely connected with the real natures of the men who bear them.

The crowd which the seeker after fame envisages consists of shadows, that is, of creatures who do not even have to be alive so long as they are capable of one thing, which is to repeat his name. He wants them to repeat it often, and to repeat it in front of others, so that as many as possible may hear it and learn how to say it themselves. But what these shadows are apart from this -- their height, their appearance, how they live and work -- is a matter of total indifference to the man whose fame they spread.

Another question was presented which was yet more perplexing: It had been decided that thirty-six women should be admitted to the royal table. But in what proportion should they be selected for the municipal banquet from the new nobility, which held their titles by the terms of the Charter, and the old nobility, which had regained theirs? This was the problem to be solved. The new nobility was confounded when it saw that only five places were reserved for it. The common citizens considered themselves still more humiliated, since, among all the thirty-six ladies, there were only two who did not belong to the nobility, and because at a fete given by the city the municipal body was not represented by any woman.

Following is the list of the thirty-six ladies, as it appeared in the Moniteur: The Duchess of Fleury, the Duchess of Duras, the Countess of Blacas, the Marchioness of Avaray, the Marchioness of Boisgelin, the Countess of Escars, the Marchioness of Breze, the Duchess of Serent, the Countess of Damas, Madame de Choisy, the Duchess of Vauguyon, the Princess of Beaufremont, the Countess of Narbonne, the Viscountess of Narbonne, the Duchess of Maille, the Countess of Durfort, the Countess of Nansouty, the Marchioness of Lagrange, the Marchioness of La Rochejacquelein, the Duchess of Rohan-Montbazon, the Princess of Chalais, the Duchess of Coigny, the Duchess of Mouchy, the Duchess of Rohan, the Princess of Solre, the Princess of Wagram, the Countess of Bournonville, Madame Ferrand, Countess Maison, Marechale Suchet, the Duchess of Albufera, Marechale Oudinot (Duchess of Reggio), the Princess of Laval, the Duchess of Harcourt, the Marchioness of Tourzel and the Baroness of Montboissier.

Resignation is the salve for wounded self-love. Difficulties of etiquette are arranged according to inexorable laws. The fete takes place on the 27th of August. It is very fine.

We shall explain later the situation of these women.

It should be recalled that every time the Inca kings wanted to promulgate a new law, they always attributed its authorship to their ancestor Manco Capac who, they said, had promulgated certain laws during his lifetime and left others dormant in order that his successors might make them public whenever they proved to be necessary. They added that all of these laws had been taught him by his father the Sun, before he was sent to the earth.

This fact makes it doubly certain that knowledge of these conditions can not begin too early.

The principles governing confinement and recovery are so simple to-day, compared with the past, that we are confident that we shall see the day when the laborious child-birth will be looked upon as proof of a mistake. Among other great reforms may be mentioned the limitation of offspring, the defects of heredity, skin troubles, etc.

Foremost in these movements stand the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.

1- Elias Canetti, tr. Carol Stewart. Crowds and Power. NYC: FSG, 1984.

2- Imbert De Saint-Amand, tr. James Davis. Famous Women of the French Court. NYC: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1892.

3- Garcilaso de la Vega, tr. "A.G." The Royal Commentaries of the Incas. Orion Press, 1961.

4- Mary R. Melendy, M.D., Ph.D. ("Graduate of Hahnemann Medical College, Chicago; Graduate of the Bennett Eclectic Medical College, Chicago; Student at Rush Medical Clinic, Cook County Hospital; Lecturer on Diseases of Women and Children in the American Health University, Etc., Etc."). The Ideal Woman: for Maidens-Wives-Mothers: a book giving full information on all the mysterious and complex matters pertaining to women. E.E. Miller, 1915.

We should all love a great picture.

2007-08-12T20:18:00.000-04:00

***

Inside Rampart Cave was a mound of dung deposited, he and his colleagues concluded, by untold generations of female sloths who took shelter there to give birth. The manure pile was five feet high, 10 feet across, and more than 100 feet long. Martin felt like he’d entered a sacred place.

When vandals set it on fire 10 years later, the fossil dung heap was so enormous that it burned for months.

***

61. KITTENS IN THE STUDIO

Madame Ronner loved any kind of cat, but she adored that furry, sprightly, roguish spark of life – a kitten. She watched the ways of kittens until she could paint them better than any other artist. Here we have a delightful example of her art. Leaving her room for a few minutes, she came back and found her mischievous little models playing in her paint-box and disarranging everything. Instead of being angry, however, she sketched the kittens and their mother, and so obtained a prettier, livelier, and more amusing picture than the one she had intended to make.

***

Tears came to her eyes. I felt I’d best not ask why. I kissed her hands across the table: “You’ll be beautiful whatever.”

After the meal I hurried off to the bathroom (the normal proportion between what I drink what I excrete has yielded to a magic process that produces a liter of piss from a glass of anything, and vice versa); once alone I remembered these pages waiting to be filled. Not only filled but provided for. A full account of my life requires a full life. Example: I can’t report what I read unless I read. Having scribbled these paragraphs, I’m going to do precisely that. Young Days in Bratislava – not comparable to Goethe or Henri Beyle, but good enough to make me want to write memoirs of some sort. I’m no writer, but if I ever became one, what greater gift to readers (at least I’m a reader!) than that of past times judiciously salvaged in the written word?

***

THIS BOOK
Is the growth of a lifetime. Portions
have been written: portions dictated
through the years of blindness.
Always has rung in my ears the
wail of that old Greek threnody:

Ai! Ai! Ai!
The dead that come not back!

***

In a book I am reading Fellini says that and that
Augustine never advocated caprice
An unknown woman says to my mother
I’m so sorry for your loss

***

“Since you possess the sum I ask for, sir, and my guarantee is sufficient, why do you refuse me?”

“Because men have their caprices as well as women, madame.”

“But what is this caprice, which makes you act thus against your interest? for, I repeat to you, make your conditions; whatever they may be, I accept them!”

“Your grace will accept all the conditions?” said the notary, with a singular expression.

“All! two, three, four thousand francs – more, if you will; for I tell you,” added the duchess, frankly, in a tone almost affectionate, “I have no resource but in you, sir – in you alone. It will be impossible for me to find elsewhere that which I ask you for to-morrow; and it must be – you understand – it must be absolutely. Thus, I repeat to you, whatever condition you impose on me for this service, I accept.”

In his blindness, he had interpreted in an unworthy manner the last words of the duchess. It was an idea as stupid as it was infamous; but we have already said that sometimes Jacques Ferrand became a tiger or a wolf; then the beast overpowered the man. He arose quickly and advanced toward the duchess. She, thunder-struck, rose at the same moment and regarded him with astonishment.

***

“Well then, and now I want to tell you what Mendel Teichmann had to say about Pechmann: that he was an attempt on the part of nature to make a good man. There are a million such attempts. Inexhaustible Nature is patient in its inventions. That’s what Mendel Teichmann said.”

“Yech,” said Pepe, bored, “we can’t use good people right now. What we need are heroes, fighters, executioners, knife-grinders, desperadoes.”

“You will need all sorts of people,” I said, “when the revolution has taken place.” I gasped—it wasn’t me speaking, it was Mendel Teichmann speaking through me. What had Teichmann done to me? What had Pechmann done to me? And what would Pepe do to me?

***

1 - Alan Weisman. The World Without Us. NYC: St. Martins, 2007.

2 - Arthur Mee and Holland Thompson, eds. The Everyday Library for Young People, Volume V: Plays, Pictures and Poems. NYC: The Grolier Society, 1916.

3 - Harry Mathews. The Journalist. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1997.

4 - Joseph P. Widney ("Author of: Race Life of The Aryan Peoples; The Lure and the Land; Genesis and Evolution of Islam and Judaeo-Christianity; The Faith That Has Come To Me; The Three Americas. In Preparation: LIFE AND ITS PROBLEMS AS SEEN BY A BLIND MAN AT NINETY-THREE"). Whither Away? The Problem of Death and the Hereafter. Los Angeles: Pacific Publishing Company, 1934.

5 - Laura Solomon. Blue and Red Things. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling, 2007.

6 - Eugene Sue. Mysteries of Paris. NYC: A.L. Burt, no date but probably late 1800s.

7 - Fred Wander, tr. Michael Hoffman. The Seventh Well. NYC: Norton, 2007.

Link Of The Week

2007-07-24T21:59:00.000-04:00

I have often believed that book dust contains a brain toxin that slowly makes people crazy in a particular way. If you have met a lot of used book dealers, you probably know what I'm talking about -- anecdotal evidence suggests that the longer you hang around old books, the nuttier you become...

And so I refer you to today's SITE OF THE WEEK:

The main point is that, looking carefully to the mechanism of dust accumulation on the books and the way it transfer to our respiratory organs; makes the case of books dust special and needs new revision.

The new findings reveal that the problem is beyond our current knowledge about dust mite or allergy and asthma due to dust. The health damage is more serious than we would want to ignore because of economical concern. This problem is of concern not only to librarians but anybody who keeps books at home or deals with books. We clean everything carefully in the house except books. The study shows that, long time exposure to books dust can create many illnesses like lung cancer, heart attack, allergy, asthma, skin problem, depression etc. This site is created to sensitize the public for taking action against this serious health hazard.

This is the result of two entire years working for days and nights. I did this for the love of people and science. I did my best. I did my part. I cannot do anything alone. I now need your help and support.

The spirit of the place / as dogma, the heart / I cannot cite

2007-07-18T13:43:00.000-04:00

I first learned the word orthoepy when Keith Waldrop, at the San Francisco Poetry Center in 2003, held up a placard, in lieu of reading the word aloud, when his poem contained it, on which the word was spelled:

Jacob Delafon locates the word orthoepy, meaning the “correct pronunciation of words.” The Word seems to him unpronounceable.

Two years later, at a library sale, Tyler Carter came across a copy of that grand old book: The Orthoepist: A Pronouncing Manual, containing about three thousand five hundred words, including a considerable number of the names of foreign authors, artists, etc., that are often mispronounced, by Alfred Ayres. Some months afterward, forgetful that we already had a copy in our household, I checked another copy of the same book out of the same library. We stayed up late that evening, drinking ouzo and discussing pronunciatory varietals until our own slurred speech rendered all one. “Dude,” I said, “The more things change.”

I am sometimes fond of a radio show on which the host likes to say

These are troubled times we live in. There are some strange things happening out there.

in response to almost anything. I once grew accustomed to arguing with Jenn Guitart about the need to distinguish between Dawn and Don, or lack thereof. When I recorded her own pronunciations and played them back to her, she could not say which were which. But later I found this map:

Whereas today I found, on my desk, a copy of Alfred Ayres’ later (1883) book, The Verbalist: A Manual, devoted to brief discussions of the right and the wrong use of words, and to some other matters of interest to those who would speak and write with propriety, which states quite clearly on page 109:

“However, my dear James, let this strong and striking instance of the misuse of the word it serve you in the way of caution. Never put an it on paper without thinking well of what you are about. When I see many its in a page, I always tremble for the writer.”
Jeopardize. This is a modern word which we could easily do without, as it means neither more nor less than its venerable progenitor to jeopard, which is greatly preferred by all careful writers.
Just going to. Instead of “I am just going to go,” it is better to say, “ I am just about to go.”
Kids. “This is another vile contraction. Habit blinds people to the unseemliness of a term like this. How would it sound if one should speak of silk gloves as silks?”
Kind. See POLITE.
Knights Templars.

Mencius, whose philosophical attitude is not entirely unlike that of Alfred Ayres, says this:

If prevented by statutory regulations from making their coffins in this way, men cannot have the feeling of pleasure.

Erle Stanley Gardner, who likewise enjoys rationalizing death, presents the following image in The Case of the Screaming Woman:

“A ray of black light,” Mason said. “It’s fixed so that, when they swing one of their cars in the driveway, the garage doors all open....”
“But, Chief,” Della Street said, “doesn’t that make the garage vulnerable to any prowler or--?”
“They can undoubtedly turn a switch on the inside of the house and shut this mechanism off,” Mason told her. “The fact that it’s been left on indicates they intend to be back within a short time.”

Embleme XXXIIII of The Theater of Fine Devices, containing an hundred MORALL EMBLEMES, a facsimile of the unique copy of the book of emblems published by Richard Field in London 1614 and now in the collections of the Huntington Library starts with the motto

Some that in knowledge diue most deepe
know least from hurt themselues to keep

, continues with a crude etching of a bird falling, belly up, from a tree, and concludes with the following verse:

The Nightingale hath such a daintie note,
No other bird the harmonie can mend;
Sometimes to sing she straineth so her throte,
That therewithall her song and life doth end.
Eu’n so likewise some students do so dote,
When others do their prose and verse commend,
That to attaine vnto more perfect skill,
With studying too hard themselues they kill.

A tendency to show upward when drilled I

2007-07-07T17:44:00.000-04:00

What if I were tell you a fairy tale?
The Old Witch might wander through the night
in search of an ending, only to find her role
in this story had never really been worked out.

It would be interesting to see from a study of their works, what idea the various artists had not only of Agnes’ character, but of the kind of death she died; unfortunately this would take far too long.

For the same reason, I cannot cite all the poets; for that reason, and for another too, which is not to their credit: it is rare that Agnes has inspired anything very good.

Will I ever be able to say “Today it writes,” just like “Today it rains,” “Today it is windy”? Only when it will come natural to me to use the verb “write” in the impersonal form will I be able to hope that through me is expressed something less limited than the personality of an individual.

And for the verb “to read”? Will we be able to say “Today it reads” as we say “Today it rains”? If you think about it, reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing. If we assume that writing manages to go beyond the limitations of the author, it will continue to have a meaning only when it is read by a single person and passes through his mental circuits. Only the ability to be read by a given individual proves that what is written shares in the power of writing, a power based on something that goes beyond the individual. The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say “I read, therefore it writes.”

This is the special bliss that I see appear in the reader’s face, and which is denied me.

A very old man who had sung in Rabbi Shmelke’s choir when he was a boy, used to tell this: “It was the custom to lay out the notes for each text, so that it would not be necessary to fetch them when the praying before the pulpit began. But the rabbi paid no attention to the notes and sang utterly new melodies which no one had ever heard. We singers fell silent and listened to him. We could not understand from where those melodies came to him.”

“We think we smell with our noses [but] this is is a little like saying that we hear with our earlobes,” wrote Gordon Shepherd, a neuroscientist at Yale University.

Explorer: Don’t forget the knee cap. That’s missing in the arm.
Camel: I wonder if I have knees in my arms?
Explorer: This gentleman had good-sized feet for his height. Look at the length of these bones.
Camel: How firm a foundation!
Helper: Who’s mumbling in his beard now, Professor? Well, now that we’ve got him, what are we going to do with him?
(Enter Genii)
Genii: That’s what I’d like to know.
Explorer: Who are you?
Helper: Where did you come from?
Camel: I thought it was about time for you to show up.
Genii: This is Can’t-Believe-Your-Eyes-or-Ears Oasis. I’m the spirit of the place.
Helper: Does every place have a spirit?
Genii: Of course. Isn’t there an American spirit?
Helper: Why, yes, I guess there is.
Genii: And school spirit?
Helper: I hadn’t thought of that.

For the heart he put it as dogma: the heart dances in the line. Where the intellect shapes. In this concept of a syntax where there is no duality of body and spirit, the organic forces are reflected in the counterpoint of the poem. There is no “body” as there is in closed-form poetry to be inhabited by the spirit of the poem — as a sonnet is inhabited by the poet’s. Projective verse is a process. The poet practices it as a science (there is no duality between science and art, knowing and creating).

1 - Jonah Winter. The Continuing Misadventures of Andrew, the Headless Talking Bear. Lincoln, NE: Octopus Books, 2006.

2 - Louise Andre-Delastre (tr. Rosemary Sheed). Saint Agnes: Child-Martyr (Your Name Your Saint Series). New York: Macmillan, 1962.

3 - Italo Calvino (tr. William Weaver). If On A Winter's Night A Traveler. New York: Harcourt, 1981.

4 - Martin Buber (tr. Olga Marx). Tales of the Hasidim: Early Masters. New York: Schocken, 1966.

5 - Alexander Tsiaras. Body Voyage: A Three-Dimensional Tour of a Real Human Body. New York: Warner, 1997.

6 - Frances W. Butterfield (ill. Dorothy M. Weiss). From Little Acorns: The Story of Your Body. New York: Renbayle House, 1951.

7 - Robert Duncan. Introducing Charles Olson, 1957 — a handout. Reprinted in Minutes of the Charles Olson Society #18 (November 1996). http://charlesolson.ca/files/Duncan.htm

Thursday Linkday

2007-07-05T22:48:00.000-04:00

Link of the Week:

Before the word blog existed, I googled with Altavista. Those were the text-centered days of html, when babelfish was easily made recursive, allowing one to translate entire pages from English to Russian and back again with a single cut-and-paste. On several occasions this led me to something called The Hotsy Totsy Club, which was a serialized, real-time hypertext published in blocks of text the size of a computer screen. The Hotsy Totsy Club had a tendency to show up when I, bored, altavistaed any of my more peculiar cultural obsessions: Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Jack Spicer, Blind Willie McTell, Samuel R. Delany, George Herriman. I imagined a bustling community of outsider scholars, perhaps an alliance of computer programmers with queer taste in music and literature (which happened to coincide, in large parts, with my own -- I had never met anybody who agreed with me about anything before!), who had simply decided to make public all their internal deliberations.

Gradually I started reading The Hotsy Totsy Club for its own sake, following its links into the greater world of hypertext, and it wasn't long before I discovered that the Club was actually some guy named Ray Davis, and that there were other people, with very different cultural obsessions, keeping similar web pages. One day the word "blog" appeared, and suddenly everybody had one. But Ray's, my first, has always been my prime example of what a blog can be.

Davis's webwriting practice has meandered and mutated for something like a decade now, and he keeps changing the name of his site. For a while it was "Kokonino Kounty", which implied a spatial conception of hypertext -- a strange landscape to be stumbled through, with the occasional brick tossed lovingly your way (I have always identified Ray with Ignatz, not Krazy, in my own allegorical whaleworld, though he may think otherwise himself). Then it became "The Bellona Times", which was a way of formalizing both the serial, timestamped nature of blogging and its arbitrary relationship to time, while at the same time insisting (by allegory, again, here to Delany's Dahlgren) upon its power-dependent construction of a public sphere amid the deliriously fragmented anarchy of the internet. Nowadays he calls it "Pseudopodium", a clever portmanteau which downplays his own power as a public speaker, and emphasizes (instead?) his amoebic articulations of thought.

As for me: Despite a lifelong attachment to computers, I am but a fool in html. How do I get my blockquotes to show up in those neat little boxes that Ray uses on his page?

Recursive Babelfish

2007-07-05T22:25:00.000-04:00

On several cases this conducted me to that caused something by club Hotsy Totsy, which was published by series, in real time hypertext the published in blkakh of text size of the screen of computer. Club Hotsy Totsy had a tendency to show upward when drilled I, altavistaed any of my more specific cultural obsession: Thinking Connection Local 282 fellers, Jack Spicer, Dazzles Willie McTell, Samuel R Are made, George Herriman. I it presented bustling the community of the scholars of outsider, is possible the alliance of programmer with queer by taste in notes and literature

Today my desktop, whales the world

2007-07-01T16:20:00.000-04:00

***

In the future, people may be able to talk with chimpanzees and dolphins. Imagine what we may be able to learn from them. They may know about many things which we do not know about. New genetically engineered animals may roam in the forests. Wild places of the earth may be quite different from those of today.

The world of the future will be more complex than ours.

***

This is a ridiculous pretension. Nonetheless facts are fascinating and Melville has an insatiable curiosity. From a simple and seemingly tongue-in-cheek enumeration of the whale’s various characteristics, something of the whale will come to light. Parody at first conceals a fascination and later goes thoroughly astray. The heavily disguised mannerisms in Moby Dick are closer to mimesis than to parody.

Instinctively an allegorist, Melville creates a whale-world and imprisons us in it.

***

What we still don’t fully understand is how sperm whales catch their prey. There are no pictures or film of sperm whales eating. The relatively small squid they consume are bioluminescent...; but seeing is one thing, catching is another....

How, then, do the whales capture the squid? As one comes to expect with sperm whales, there are many theories but few answers. The sounds that sperm whales make might be focused into a powerful pulse of sound, or sonic boom, which stuns the squid, allowing the whales to gather them up at a leisurely pace. Perhaps the whale’s white teeth or the bright white flesh on the inside and the edges of its mouth act as beacons, luring the squid into the whale’s maw....

Among the more unusual items that have been found in a sperm whale’s stomach are shoes, rubber boots, toy cars and toy guns, bundles of insulated wire, dolls, coconuts, cosmetic jars, flesh from baleen whales, and fishing nets.

But surely the most unusual item is a man.

***

My other favorite design is of water lilies printed on silk. It is an iridescent fabric because of the fact that the warp and weft threads are different colors. She had the pattern of water lily blossoms and leaves printed on the warp (vertical threads) before the solid-colored weft (horizontal threads) were added. When the warp and weft were woven together, the pattern softened and fell slightly out of alignment, creating a shifting and shimmering quality, like real water lilies floating on water.

I also curate something called miscellaneous natural substances, which are all the things no one else wants to deal with in the decorative arts and have been dumped on me. There are strange bits of things on ivory, weird pieces of folk sculpture, fire buckets made of leather, plates made out of trees. We have a horrible little profile portrait of Ben Franklin in wax, now half melted, and odd bits and pieces, like scrimshaw, whale teeth that have been carved on by sailors. Apparently the boredom of being on a whaling ship was extreme, and the sailors would make decorative objects out of these things to bring home to their wives and families.

The museum is a big part of my life, but I have many other things in my life.

***

1 - Simon Lamblin (ill. Christian Bessiere, adaptation Howard E. Smith Jr.) . The World We Live In. New York: Larousse, 1982.

2 - Jean Jacques Mayoux (tr. John Ashbery). Melville. New York: Grove, 1960.

3 - Eric Jay Dolin. Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America. New York: Norton, 2007.

4 - Amelia Peck, as told to Danny Danzinger. from Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Viking, 2007.

My desk

2007-07-01T13:01:00.001-04:00

Incomplete recently every intention tomorrow

2007-06-29T23:36:00.000-04:00

This poem from Kristin Prevallet's altogether extraordinary I, Afterlife:

[DISTRACTION]

The lack is consumed with his thoughts.
I now believe that this world is nothing more than a means of being in another.
There is the orchestra, the lawn, and the buzz.
The echo outside of my dreaming that occurs within me but is actually only a projection. An antenna tuning in to the noises of the forest.
Epictetus: play around with the power of moving towards an object and retiring from it.
This gesture of approach is the closest you will get to the other side.

: of which we wanted only a fragment, but couldn't. I hereby transcribe this poem entirely. No kidding, transcribing, I mean it. If you must have a fragment, have this, from Gil Ott's Amputated Toe:

Where is she headed, is she running away, and if so, away from what or whom? Answers to these questions might make an interesting story, but they are not relevant to this one.

And this, from The World We Live In (1982, Larousse):

Grandmother may ride around in her own little helicopter. There will continue to be a family life. People will still cook meals. Committees will meet, people will have friends.... Interestingly, some objects may not change: rolling pins, spoons and shoes. There are no aliens from other planets in the picture.

Jean Jacques Mayoux (tr. John Ashbery), says in Melville (Grove Press, 1960):

No one will ever know exactly how Moby Dick was written. In the book which has come down to us, which is the only one we have, Melville's mixed and conflicting intentions are not easy to unravel: for example, the epic tone (a universally accepted convention) of the temptation to parody (a more dubious convention) and of the idea of the real greatness of modern man (proposition of a new truth).

[...]

...and when Queequeg squints at the signs on his own body ("he's found something there in the vicinity of his thigh -- I guess it's Sagittarius, or the Archer," says Ahab) one cannot shut one's eyes to the sexual motivation, or separate it absolutely from Ahab's madness, dissociate from a supreme humiliation that unatonable pain he feels, that suffering which inspires Melville to see "a crucifixion in his face." It is, in any case, a despair of ever existing which leaves intact only the "mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him."

Look at text while I

2007-06-29T13:12:00.001-04:00

A partial list of my incomplete readings:

(These are books that I have recently started to read, with every intention of finishing them tomorrow)

Advanced Number Theory, by Harvey Cohn
American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853, by Meredith L. McGill
Angle of Yaw, by Ben Lerner
Bear Comes Home, by Rafi Zabor
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, by Dinaw Mengestu
Bed, by Tao Lin
A Book of the Book, by Jerome Rothenberg and Stephen Clay
Collected Poems, by Basil Bunting
Folly, by Nada Gordon
Girly Man, by Charles Bernstein
Hopscotch, by Julio Cortazar
I, Afterlife, by Kristin Prevallet
Lilith's Brood, by Octavia Butler
Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight In Heaven, by Sherman Alexie
The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick
Mason and Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon
Mere Anarchy, by Woody Allen
Radiotext(e), by Neil Strauss and David Mandl
The Revisionist, by Miranda Mellis
Shakespeare and the Book, by David Scott Kastan
Storming The Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics, by Rebecca Solnit
Varieties of Disturbance, by Lydia Davis
Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant Garde, by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead
A Worldly Country, by John Ashbery

A book is mistaken for the appropriation of its / tongue, implying that it is spoken / "with all my heart," I say

2007-06-26T20:42:00.000-04:00

I picked up a YA novel for E at the BEA -- The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian -- because I know that she is a Sherman Alexie fan, and we both love Ellen Forney. I discovered the book some few mornings later at my bedside, next to the buzzing alarm. I took it to the kitchen and placed it on the counter, because I like to look at text while I drink my morning coffee.

A couple hours later, E came home to find me lying on the couch, now on my third cup of coffee. I barely looked up from the text. "OH THAT BOOK," she said, "IT IS TOTALLY CAPTIVATING AND HEARTBREAKING."

I thought she was making fun of me by sarcastically quoting a blurb from the back of the book. But I was indeed on the verge of tears or laughter, and had neglected to feed or dress myself -- I became angry, I know she doesn't approve of my YA habit, but -- but --

Of course, the book doesn't have any blurbs yet, because it is an advance reader. It'll be coming out in the fall. I hate to use this blog to blurb a book, but E was being totally sincere.

What do heaven bears do things?

2007-06-23T17:04:00.000-04:00

Reads The Last Novel, by David Markson:

Anybody can be nobody.
Said Eugene V. Debs.

Novelist's personal genre. For all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.

Wondering why one is surprised to realize that Thoreau was dead at forty-five.

A lament of Schopenhauer's:
Over how frequently the mere purchase of a book is mistaken for the appropriation of its contents.

Two pages of The Mill on the Floss are enough to start me crying.
Said Proust.

Meanwhile, on page 93 of A History of Modern Computing, the words

The word "language" turned out to be a dangerous term, implying much more than its initial users foresaw. The English word is derived from the French langue, meaning tongue, implying that it is spoken.

can be found. Dinaw Mengestu's narrator, the shopkeeper Sepha Stephanos, has this to say:

On those good days, which come once or twice a week, I make just over four hundred dollars. I walk home at the end of the night feeling better, not only about my store, but about this country. I think to myself, America is beautiful after all. There is more here. Gas is cheap. This is not a bad place. Things could be worse. And what else could I have done?

"So then, you hate America today?" Kenneth says. He smiles a half-smile. He pours a little scotch into a Styrofoam cup he stole from his office and hands it to me. I know that if I let him, he would pull from his pocket the missing $26.16 and slide it into the cash register. Anything to make me feel better.

"With all my heart," I say to him.

STAY ALIVE / the electric bass, I would have

2007-06-23T10:10:00.000-04:00

One of the reasons I am keeping this blog: I hope to discover, or invent, hitherto unaware themes in my reading. I will be using the word "unaware" where others might use the word "subconscious". You might say that I may be investigating, as Jung wouldn't say, the "collective ignorance" of my books.

Collective Ignorance Artifact No. 1: BEARS.

I have recently read, for example, Rafi Zabor's excellent jazz novel, Bear Comes Home, in which a highly intelligent talking bear plays the saxophone (after Bear's first gig, Ornette Coleman helpfully suggests that he stop transposing his music into human). I have also read Tao Lin's Eeeee Eee Eeee, which involves talking bears as part of the scenery of depression. As you read this blog over the coming weeks, keep an eye out for BEARS -- especially talking ones -- and we'll see if they carry any meaning.

AND SO TODAY: As I work a 14-hour day at the store, I will be reading The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, by Dinaw Mengestu, in my spare moments. Whenever I read the title, I think it is missing a verb at the end. I will also continue my browsing through David Markson's The Last Novel -- I'll let you know if I find any bears within.

Difficult where there are small trees to climb.

2007-06-20T18:52:00.000-04:00

I can't stop looking at photographs of dead people.

I also keep reading How To Stay Alive In The Woods.

Why is everybody's mother reading Ishiguro?

Have you read the latest Linh Dinh? I have.

I also finished Harry And The Everything.

My first hit from google: somebody searched "rowled."

If I wanted to learn to play the electric bass, I would have plenty of books to choose from.

Its realism created a furor in the dizzy days of the last decade.

2007-06-17T16:41:00.000-04:00

The March 30, 1935, issue of The Literary Digest contains the results of a symposium wherein Hamlet was voted "most popular play".

The compilation of the votes of the three hundred contributors was recently given out and the table showed:

"Hamlet" ............................. 80
"Rain" .................................. 64
"What Price Glory?" ......... 46
"Cyrano de Bergerac" ....... 44
"Peter Pan" ........................ 41
"The Jest" .......................... 40
"The Green Pastures" ...... 40
"Journey's End" ................. 36
"Reunion in Vienna" .......... 30
"The Cherry Orchard" ...... 25

9 years later, Saul Bellow's Dangling Man tells us:

My talent, if I have one at all, is for being a citizen, or what is today called, most apologetically, a good man. Is there some sort of personal effort I can substitute for the imagination?

How To Stay Alive In the Woods, by Bradford Angier, gives this relevant advice:

If you are unarmed and really need the bear's meal, you will want to plan and execute your campaign with all reasonable caution. This will probably mean, first of all, spotting with the minutest detail, preferably at least two paths of escape in case a fast exit should become advisable. This should not be too difficult where there are small trees to climb.

Page 154 of Orton & Sadler's 1888 Business Calculator and Accountant's Assistant gives the following examples of 10-letter code phrases for use in marking the cost and price of goods:

BLACK HORSE.
CASH PROFIT.
IMPORTANCE.
NOW BE SHARP.
GOD HELP US. X.

Read one line repeatedly for two days.

2007-06-13T12:05:00.000-04:00

Some books I've read during my absence from this blog:

- most of the rest of The Number System
- several poems from A Worldly Country, by J. Ashbery
- pages 15-23 of Pauper, Brawler and Slanderer, by Amos Tutuola
- the beginning of Hopscotch (chapters 73, 1, and 2)
- more of 39 microlectures
- a readers copy of Harriet and Isabella, by Patricia O'Brien (quickly deciding"NO", but unable to look away from the wreck. I probably read about a third of it, in fragments.)
- Imagine. You Are Landing. A book by Vittorio Santoro.
- some more again of Blues People, by LeRoi Jones
- HP and the..., up through the beginning of book 5.
- The Pines, Vol. 4

This blog will become more interesting if I write in it.

Substitute the new and destroy the old, thus necessitating but one reference.

2007-06-09T14:08:00.000-04:00

The 1975 New York Social Register includes the January 1975 peach-colored insert DILATORY DOMICILES, which contains the above instructions. I found Caroline's and Penelope's families, but oddly nobody named Cohen or Rosenberg...

Matthew Goulish's 39 Microlectures in proximity of performance (signed by author) begins with some important instructions: "When reading this book, please take your time.... Start anywhere; stop anywhere....Don't read the whole book if you don't want to....Read one line repeatedly for two days...."

...With that in mind, you may want to avoid reading this book altogether. Go directly to the source notes, and read the books from which I have quoted or misquoted.

A sidebar in Angus Hall's The Supernatural: Signs of Things to Come is illustrated: "DREAMS FOR SALE: This 18th-century engraving shows a London street peddler with her dream books for sale." We thus learn that

...to dream that you are whistling popular songs denotes that you can't carry even the simplest and easiest tune.

Looking Out For #1, by Robert J. Ringer (author of Winning Through Intimidation), features a cartoon on page 68: the tortoise protagonist is visiting the "People Store", where the people are divided into ROSES (broadly grinning); WEEDS (frowning); and NEUROTICS (making funny faces). The tortoise says to the salesman: "I have two neurotics and a weed in the car. I'd like to trade them in on a couple of roses."

Gentleman's estate a cultivated farm by whom?

2007-06-05T11:23:00.000-04:00

Sick as I am, on Sunday night at work I finished HP2. Last night I read a chapter of The Number System aloud to E, until she fell asleep and I continued to myself. I've in the meantime read fragments of several other books, but nothing I can mention now. I need rest.

I don't know, I've never rowled.

2007-06-05T10:31:00.002-04:00

On Friday afternoon I took the G train, though it be by far the least efficient way to get to work, because I wanted to read The Number System and eat a vietnamese sandwich. The NYC subway system is in all the world my favorite space in which to read and think, with its aggressive admixture of public and private noise and silence. I managed to prove the laws of arithmetic from my underground seat, but by the time I walked the short mile from the station to the store (it was very hot) I was feeling rather ill and sorry for myself. I've been suffering from a respiratory infection ever since.

Although I promised myself to wait until I had finished another book before starting HP#2, by late in the evening I was unable to take in anything but take-out and Rowling. One has an awkward tendency to read these books as a substitute for sleeping, as a faint simulacrum of one's own dreams. I woke up (too) early on Saturday to visit the terrible belly of the BEA, stumbling again underground with a copy of Herodotus-- a classic with which to steel my mind against the flash and bang of the horrid new books at the tradeshow. I collected so many freebies and catalogs that I had to take a taxi back to brooklyn.

(not classed as major)

2007-05-31T13:06:00.000-04:00

I read the next 170 pages of HP1 in bed last night, quietly while E slept -- I feel it my professional duty, as the obligatory host of a midnight release party, to get myself genuinely excited in anticipation of the Deathly Hallows, so I am trying to read the first 6 books before July 21. I'd successfully avoided them until yesterday, and had explained to strangers by way of analogy to their own teen jobs: Nobody wants to eat ice cream after scooping all day.

Over coffee this morning I read the introduction to Shakespeare and the Book, by David Scott Kastan. I am excited by the subject, and sympathetic to Kastan's approach, but I think I'll learn more by reading the footnotes (and following the citations) than by reading the actual text.

Jessi brought back the book I've been reading on subways, The Number System by H.A. Thurston, which I left in Kensington on Monday, when I had brunch with her mother, and I'm looking forward to reading it again. It strongly resembles Cortazar's Hopscotch in its structure. She also brought back All Poets Welcome, by Daniel Kane, which she had borrowed from E.

Apparently "Bouwerie" is derived from the dutch word meaning "cultivated farm" or "gentleman's estate".

Is your war a lemon?

2007-05-30T15:49:00.000-04:00

I just read pages 12-13 of The June 30th Manifesto*, while thinking about what to blog. Earlier I read the beginning of the first Harry Potter book in the bathroom. I also perused the Official Baseball Guide for 1979 -- pages 120-121, which features the Slugging Leaders for each year in the history of the American League, starting in 1901.

Actually, there is an entry for 1900, but in place of a player's name it says "(Not classed as major)". A picture of "Boston's Jim Rice, 1978 American League Pacesetter" takes up most of page 121. According to Scott Helmes, John Ashcroft's phone number is 202/353-1555.

*compiled by John M. Bennett & Scott Helmes (Luna Bisonte Prods StampPad Press, 2004)