The Sound And The Fury - pg. 177

"... but you are still blind to what is in yourself to that part of general truth the sequence of natural events and their causes which shadows every mans brow even benjys you are not thinking of finitude you are contemplating an apotheosis in which a temporary state of mind will become symmetrical above the flesh and aware both of itself and of the flesh it will not quite discard you will not even be dead and i temporary and he you cannot bear to think that someday it will no longer hurt you like this now were getting at it you seem to regard it merely as an experience that will whiten your hair overnight so to speak without altering appearance at all you wont do it under these conditions it will be a gamble and the strange thing is that man who is conceived by accident and whose every breath is a fresh cast with dice already loaded against him will not face that final main which he knows before hand he has assuredly to face without essaying expedients ranging all the way from violence to petty chicanery that would not deceive a child until someday in very disgust he risks everything on a single blind turn of a card no man ever does that under the first fury of despair or remorse or bereavement he does it only when he has realised that even the despair or remorse or bereavement is not particularly important to the dark diceman and i temporary and he it is hard believing to think that a love or a sorrow is a bond purchased without design and which matures willynilly and is recalled without warning to be replaced by whatever issue the gods happen to be floating at the time no you will not do that until you come to believe that even she was not quite..."

William Faulkner describing "Dawn"

"Roofed by the woven canopy of blind annealing grass-roots and the roots of trees, dark in the blind dark of time’s slit and rich refuse—the constant and unslumbering anonymous worm-glut and the inextricable known bones—Troy’s Helen and the nymphs and the snoring mitred bishops, the saviors and the victims and the kings—it wakes, upseeping, attrive in uncountable creeping channels: first, root; then front by frond, from whose escaping tips like gas it rises and disseminates and stains the sleep-fast earth with drowsy insect-murmur; then, still upward-seeking, creeps the knitted bark of trunk and limb where, suddenly louder leaf by leaf and dispersive in diffusive sudden speed, melodious with the winged and jeweled throats, it upward bursts and fills night’s globed negation with jonquil thunder."

- The Hamlet

To Do List

- Contact Yohannes (done)
- Library (too many Absaloms) [Library has 8 different editions of Absalom!, wow!]
- Mesh Network Paperwork and homework for meeting with Stephen (work in progress)
- Contact Diane Harper (done)
- Finish "The Sound And The Fury"

The Sound And The Fury - pg. 147

"We passed that house, and three others, and another yard where the little girl stood by the gate. She didn't have the bread now, and her face looked like it had been streaked with coal-dust. I waved my hand, but she made no reply, only her head turned slowly as the car passed, following us with her unwinking gaze. Then we ran beside the wall, our shadows running along the wall, and after a while we passed a piece of torn newspaper lying beside the road and I began to laugh again. I could feel it in my throat and I looked off into the trees where the afternoon slanted, thinking of afternoon and of the bird and the boys in swimming. But still I couldn't stop it and then I knew that if I tried too hard to stop it I'd be crying and I thought about how I'd thought about I could not be a virgin, with so many of them walking along in the shadows and whispering with their soft girlvoices lingering in the shadowy places and the words coming out and perfume and eyes you could feel not see, but if it was that simple to do it wouldn't be anything and if it wasn't anything, what was I..."

Two Poems By Theodore Roethke

In A Dark Time
by Theodore Roethke

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

The Waking
by Theodore Roethke


I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

I thank Marcel.

Quoting TedG (from FilmsFolded.com)

"Some time ago, I had the opportunity to attend an Ichibana lecture and demonstration. It was given by those close to emperor and was tailored for westerners. That meant that there were plenty slides that contrasted western flower arranging with this highest Japanese art. The western values all had to do with perfect symmetry, balance, coherent, simple shapes. Each element should be beautiful by itself. Harmonies were all within this lovely melody of perfect pace. Bach.

Contrasted with this was the Ichibana we saw constructed before us. Dissymmetries, tension, motion and peace. Some elements were dead, even damaged. The base or container was as likely to be misshapen, even ugly. Where the western arrangements were music, this was life. It had soul, katachi. The whole thing was quite an experience for me and was my most visceral introduction to a corner of Japan that I have since enfolded into my own life and eye. At the root of this is dissymmetry (which is different from asymmetry), the presence of items that have sibling states which are not expressed. It gives a tension that springs, the pumps blood and makes real beauty because it provides space for the definition of beauty."

The Sound And The Fury - pg. 128

"Because women so delicate so mysterious Father said. Delicate equilibrium of periodical filth between two moons balanced. Moons he said full and yellow as harvest moons her hips thighs. Outside outside of them always but. Yellow. Feet soles with walking like. Then know that some man that all those mysterious and imperious concealed. With all that inside of them shapes an outward suavity waiting for a touch to. Liquid putrefaction like drowned things floating like pale rubber flabbily filled getting the odor of honeysuckle all mixed up."

The Sound And The Fury - pg. 120

"I walked upon my shadow, tramping it into the dappled shade of trees again. The road curved, mounting away from the water. It crossed the hill, then descended winding, carrying the eye, the mind on ahead beneath a still green tunnel, and the square cupola above the trees and the round eye of the clock but far enough. I sat down at the roadside. The grass was ankle deep, myriad. The shadows on the road were as still as if they had been put there with a stencil, with slanting pencils of sunlight. But it was only a train, and after a while it died away beyond the trees, the long sound, and then I could hear my watch and the train dying away, as though it were running through another month or another summer somewhere, rushing away under the poised gull and all things rushing."

June Book List

Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner
Light Years - James Salter
Journey To The End Of Night - Louis Celine

Total number of pages to read = 1176

Destroyer

Watercolors Into The Ocean

Listening to "Strawberry Wine" for the 131st time, it was 1987.
It was spring.
Now it's 1987 all the time...

Were you even there?
Too thin, too fair, downing your third drink.
Standing at arms length in the square, just off a mildly successful killing
rampage where good writers go to find one thing and stick with it.

Oh, life - it's bigger than a life on the run from the United States and her
friends on This Night made of jewels.

It took three carabinieri to peel him off the streets of the town
she's named after.
Dragging the lagoon was a disaster.
They found him alive and relatively well...

Some situations seek redress.
Some songs just go - "testing, testing..."
I took a picture: I was sick of motion...

And wore her watercolours into the ocean...

The Sound And The Fury - pg. 85

"...Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. The hands were extended, slightly off the horizontal at a faint angle, like a gull tilting into the wind. Holding all I used to be sorry about like the new moon holding water, niggers say. The jeweller was working again, bent over his bench, the tube tunnelled into his face. His hair was parted in the center. The part ran up into the bald spot, like a drained marsh in December."

Jeff Buckley

Jeff Buckley died today ten years ago...

The Sound And The Fury - pg. 75

"The room went black, except the door. Then the door went black. Caddy said, "Hush, Maury" putting her hand on me. So I stayed hushed. We could hear us. We could hear the dark.
It went away, and Father looked at us. He looked at Quentin and Jason, then he came and kissed Caddy and put his hand on my head.
"Is Mother very sick." Caddy said.
"No." Father said. "Are you going to take good care of Maury."
"Yes." Caddy said.
Father went to the door and looked at us again. Then the dark came back, and he stood back in the door, and then the door turned black again. Caddy held me and I could hear us all, and the darkness, and something I could smell. And then I could see the windows, where the trees were buzzing. Then the dark began to go in smooth, bright shapes, like it always does, even when Caddy says that I have been asleep."

Louis Celine's Book

Journey To The End Of Night By Louis Celine

Wikipedia:

"Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (May 27, 1894 – July 1, 1961) was a French writer and doctor who wrote under the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Céline is considered one of the most influental and greatest writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and World literature. He remains, however, a controversial figure due to his political beliefs and the allegiances he adopted during the Second World War"

June Book List:

1 - Absalom, Absalom!
2 - Journey To The End Of Night

mp3: Battles - Atlas

dangerous work. This could score the ending credits of a film adaptation of Gravity's Rainbow.

Battles - Atlas

The Sound And The Fury - pg. 54

"Our shadows were on the grass. They got to the trees before we did. Mine got there first. Then we got there, and then the shadows were gone. There was a flower in the bottle. I put the other flower in it."

Guns Of Brixton - Nouvelle Vague's interesting spin.

Guns Of Brixton - The Clash cover and Forest - The Cure cover by Nouvelle Vague

How things pop up sometime? I looked into this French ensemble band the day I was going to go hang out with Chrissy, Devin and the gang in NYC in March. And it felt like the kind of music I wanna listen to right now. They had done a curious sounding cover of The Cure's - Forest which is kind of loungy (and so it works!), so different from the original yet steer itself very close to the essence of that five minute pop-song.

Another very good example of Nouvelle Vague's unique spin is The Clash's Guns of Brixton. I am not sure about the vocalist Camille who guested for this take but it is pretty good! The song itself would have fit right in Jean Genet's "Notre-Dame Des-Fleurs" as the soundtrack of life for our Lady of the Flowers.

Guns of Brixton
When they kick at your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun

When the law break in
How you gonna go?
Shot down on the pavement
Or waiting on death row

You can crush us
You can bruise us
But you'll have to answer to
Oh, the guns of Brixton

The money feels good
And your life you like it well
But surely your time will come
As in heaven, as in hell

You see, he feels like Ivan
Born under the Brixton sun
His game is called survivin'
At the end of the harder they come

You know it means no mercy
They caught him with a gun
No need for the Black Maria
Goodbye to the Brixton sun

You can crush us
You can bruise us
But you'll have to answer to
Oh, the guns of Brixton

When they kick at your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun

You can crush us
You can bruise us
Yes, even shoot us
But oh-the guns of Brixton

Shot down on the pavement
Waiting in death row
His game is called survivin'
As in heaven as in hell

You can crush us
You can bruise us
But you'll have to answer to
Oh, the guns of Brixton

Asobi Seksu

Asobi Seksu (meaning playful sex in japanese) is an NYC band that uses japanese word-fragments in their lyrics. Oh, my-bloody-valentine, here you are again.
Asobi Seksu - Thursday

Notre-Dame Des-Fleurs (Our Lady Of The Flowers)

Jean Genet's brilliant novel, Note-Dame Des-Fleurs has left me feeling kind of sad. I finally finished it after struggling with last 30 pages for last 3 days.

""Dearest,
I'm writing a few lines to give you the news, which isn't good. I've been arrested for stealing. So try to get a lawyer to handle my case. Arrange to pay him. And also arrange to send me a money order, because you know how lousy things are here. Also try to get permission to come and see me and bring me some linens. Put in the blue and white silk pajamas. And some undershirts. Dearest, I'm awfully sorry about what's happened to me. Let's face it, I'm plain unlucky. So I'm counting on you to help me out. I only wish I could have you in my arms so I could hold you and squeeze you tight. Remember the things we used to do together. Try to recognize the dotted lines. And kiss it. A thousand big kisses, sweetheart from
Your Darling."

The dotted lines that Darling refers to is the outlines of his prick. I once saw a pimp who had a hard-on while writing to his girl place his heavy cock on the paper and trace its contours. I would like that line to portray Darling."

Notre-Dame Des-Fleurs, last page.

Rainbow Records

Chris found me Mahler's 5th with Leonard Bernstein conducting. Just perfect! I bow down to his greatness.

Our Lady Of The Flowers - pg. 283

"The greatness of a man is not only a function of his faculties, of his intelligence, of whatever gifts he may have; it is also made up of the circumstances that have elected him to serve them as support. A man is great if he has a great destiny; but this is of the order of visible, measurable greatness. It is magnificence seen from without. Though it may be wretched when seen from within, it is then poetic, if you are willing to agree that poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible."

TedG commenting on Jane Eyre

"But before that we had these three sisters, working exclusively on individuals. There are only two humans in this story: all else aren't people in the same sense: they're conditions only, conditions that affect and constrain these two lives that bind to each other. And why not? They're the only humans.

Reading such a thing comes easily enough. But dramatizing it presents challenges. It is primarily an internal dialog that the title character has about her situation. The book isn't centered on that situation narratively, but on her observation of it, and on her soulmate."

Newark

There is a bright, beautiful day stretching out on the streets outside( and the anticipation of a lazy evening that would surely follow). I guess, we are unofficially in the summer here in Newark. Notre-Dame Des-Fleurs has one of the craziest structures as a book. It is ostensibly a narration by a guy who is writing the book from his prison cell and using the paper cuttings of crime reports from various old newspapers to base his story, yet he uses the memory of old friends and subjects their memories to serve "his story" while at the same time annotating the proceedings in the novel in a true french new-wave style. Jean Genet is crazy.

Rebecca F.

Thanks for introducing me to the goodness of "Old Crow Medicine Show" besides other stuff. Cheers.

Our Lady Of The Flowers - pg. 226

"Poetry is a vision of the world obtained by an effort, sometimes exhausting, of the taut, buttressed will. Poetry is willful. It is not an abandonment, a free and gratuitous entry by the senses; it is not to be confused with sensuality, but rather, opposing it, was born, for example, on Saturdays, when, to clean the rooms, housewives put the red velvet chairs, gilded mirrors, and mahogany tables outside, in the nearby meadow."

Our Lady Of The Flowers - pg. 120

"To love a murderer. To love to commit a crime in cahoots with the young half-breed pictured on the cover of the torn book. I want to sing murder, for I love murderers. To sing it plainly. Without pretending, for example, that I want to be redeemed through it, though I do yearn for redemption. I would like to kill. As I have said above, rather than an old man, I would like to kill a handsome blond boy, so that, already united by the verbal link that joins the murderer and the murdered (each existing thanks to the other), I may be visited during days and nights of hopeless melancholy, by a handsome ghost of which I would be the haunted castle. But may I be spared of giving birth to a sixty-year-corpse, or that of a woman, young or old. I am tired of satisfying my desire for murder stealthily by admiring the imperial pomp of sunsets. My eyes have bathed in them enough. Let's get to my hands. But to kill, to kill you, Jean. Wouldn't it be a question of knowing how I would behave as I watched you die by my hand?"

Our Lady Of The Flowers - pg. 99

"Slowly but surely I want to strip her of every vestige of happiness so as to make a saint of her. The fire that is searing her has already burned away heavy bonds; new ones are shackling her: Love. A morality is being born, which is certainly not the usual morality (it is consonant with Divine) though it is a morality all the same, with its Good and Evil. Divine is not beyond good and evil, there where the saint must live. And I, gentle than a wicked angel, lead her by the hand".

Our Lady Of The Flowers - pg. 84

"The only way to avoid the horror of horror is to give in to it. He therefore wished, with a kind of voluptuous desire, that one of the names were his. Besides, I know that you finally tire of that tense, heroic attitude of the outlaw and that you decide to play along with the police in order to reassume your sloughed-off humanity. Divine knew nothing about this aspect of Darling. Had she known it, she would have loved him all the more, for to her love was equivalent to despair."

Our Lady Of The Flowers - pg. 65

"Without bringing her back to reality, for she never left reality, the arrangement of the setting obliged her to shake off the dream. She went to get the revolver, which had long since been loaded by a most considerate Providence, and when she held it in her hands, weighty as a phallus in action, she realized she was big with murder, pregnant with a corpse."

Our Lady Of The Flowers - pg. 57

"Divine died yesterday in a pool of her vomited blood which was so red that, as she expired, she had the supreme illusion that this blood was the visible equivalent of the black hole which a gutted violin, seen in a judge's office in the midst of a hodge-podge of pieces of evidence, revealed with dramatic insistence, as does a Jesus the gilded chancre where gleams His flaming Sacred Heart. So much for the divine aspect of her death. The other aspect, ours, because of those streams of blood that had been shed on her nightshirt and sheets ( for the sun, poignant on the bloody sheets, had set, not nastily, in her bed), makes her death tantamount to a murder."

The Adventures Of Augie March - Chapter XXV

"You bet your sweet life. It's of the utmost significance too. Do you remember how the great Sherlock Holmes doped things out in his room on Baker Street? But compared to his brother Mycroft he was no place. That Mycroft! There was a brain, March! He never budged from his club, and he was a real mastermind and knew everything. So when Sherlock was stumped he came to Mycroft, who gave him the answer. You know the reason? Because Mycroft sat tighter than Sherlock. Sitting tight is power. The king sits on his prat, and the common folks are on their feet. Pascal says people get in trouble because they can't stay in their rooms. The next poet laureate of England - I figure - prays God to teach us to sit still. You know that famous painting of the gypsy Arab traveler sleeping with his mandolin and the lion gazing on him? That doesn't mean the lion respects his repose. No, it means the Arab's immobility controls the lion. This is magic. Passivity plus power. Listen to me, March, that old Rip van Winkle conked out on purpose."

The Adventures Of Augie March - Chapter XXIV

" "Complications, lies, lies, and lies!" he said. "Disguises, vaudevilles, multiple personalities, diseases, conversations. Even in a few minutes' conversation, do you realize how many times what you feel is converted before it comes out as what you say? Somebody tells you A. Your response is B. B you can't say, so you transform it, you put it through the coils of your breast. From DC to AC, increased four hundred volts, filtered. So instead of B there comes out gamma sub one. The longer the train of transformation, the worse the stink of gamma sub one. Mind you, I'm a great admirer of our species. I stand in awe of the genius of the race. But a large part of this genius is devoted to lying and seeming what you are not. We love when this man Ulysses come back in disguise for his revenge. But suppose he forgot what he came back for and just sat around day in, day out in the disguise. This happens to many a frail spirit who forgets what the disguises are for, doesn't understand complexity, or how to return to simplicity. From telling different things to everyone, forgets what the case is originally and what he wants himself. How rare is simple thought and pureheartedness! Even a moment of pureheartedness I bow to, down to ground. That's why I think well of you when you tell me you're in love. I appreciate this durability, and I'm a lover myself" "

The Adventures Of Augie March - Chapter XXIV

"You may be as interested as I was, though, in what a clever fellow once said to me about the connection of love and adultery. On any certain day, when you're happy, you know it can't last, but the weather will change, the health will be sickness, the year will end, and also life will end. In another place another day there'll be a different lover. The face you're kissing will change to some other face, and so will your face be replaced. It can't be helped, this guy said. Of course he was a lousy bastard himself and a counterfeit no-good mooch, and he was in and out of Bellevue, and women supported him all his life; he deserted his kid and nobody could depend on him. But love is adultery, he said, and expresses change. You make your peace with change. Another city, another woman, a different bed, but you're the same and so you must be flexible. You kiss the woman and you show how you love your fate, and you worship and adore the changes of life. You obey this law. Whether or not this bum was right, may God hate his soul! don't think you don't have to obey the laws of life."

May Book List (Revised)

The Sound And The Fury - William Faulkner
Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon
Notre-Dame Des-Fleurs - Jean Genet

Another day another author.

Jean Genet's plays: The Balcony and Notre-Dame-Des-Fleurs

The Adventures Of Augie March - Chapter XXIII

"If the great Andromeda galaxy had to depend on you to hold it up, where would it be now but fallen way to hell? Why, March, let the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come (S. T. Coleridge) summon its giants and mobilizers, Caesars and Atlases. But you! you pitiful recruit, where do you come in? Go on, marry a loving wife and settle at March's farm and academy, and don't get in the way when the nations are furiously raging together. My friend, I said, speaking to myself, relax and knock off effort. The time is in the hands of mighty men to whom you are like the single item in the mind of the chief of a great Sears, Roebuck Company, and here come you, wishing to do right and not lead a disappointed life (sic!)."

Cary Tennis - Interesting Quote

"When faced with such a bleakly intractable problem as yours, I like to start by boldly imagining an ideal outcome, however implausible such an outcome might at first appear."

The Adventures Of Augie March - Chapter XXI

"I'd better be cured of my attitudes. The reason why I didn't see things as they were was that I didn't want to because I couldn't love them as they were. But the challenge was not to better them in your mind but to put every human weakness into the picture - the bad, the criminal, sick, envious, scavenging, wolfish, the living-on-the-dying. Start with that. Take the fact that people generally were full of loathing and it cost them an effort to look at one another. Mostly they wanted to be let alone. And they dug for unreality more than for treasure, unreality being their last great hope because they could doubt that what they knew about themselves was true."

The Adventures Of Augie March - Chapter XXI

"I hadn't had a look at Chicago yet since my return. Well, here it was again, westward from this window, the gray snarled city with the hard black straps of rails, enormous industry cooking and its vapor shuddering to the air, the climb and fall of its stages in construction or demolition like mesas, and on these the different powers and sub-powers crouched and watched like sphinxes. Terrible dumbness covered it, like a judgment that would never find its word."

The Adventures Of Augie March - Chapter XIX

"No, no, wives don't own husbands, nor husbands wives, nor parents children. They go away, or they die. So the only possessing is of the moment. If you're able. And while any wish lives, it lives in the face of its negative. This is why we make the obstinate sign of possession. Like deeds, certificates, rings, pledges, and other permanent things."

The Adventures Of Augie March - Chapter XIX

"My real fault was that I couldn't stay with my purest feelings. This was what tore the greatest hole in me. Maybe Theresa couldn't stand many happy days in a row either, that did occur to me as a reason for her cooling off. Perhaps she had this trouble too, with her chosen thing. The year before, when Mimi was in trouble, Kayo Obermark had said to me that this happened to everyone. Everyone got bitterness in his chosen thing. It might be in the end that the chosen thing in itself is bitterness, because to arrive at the chosen thing needs courage, because it's intense, and intensity is what the feeble humanity of us can't take for long. And also the chosen can't be one that we already have, since what we already have there isn't much use or respect for. Oh, this made me feel terrible contempt, the way I felt, riled and savage. The fucking slaves! I thought. The lousy cowards!"

The Adventures Of Augie March - Chapter XIX

"If I didn't have money or profession or duties, wasn't it so that I could be free, and a sincere follower of love?"

May Book List

It is weird. I am reading The Adventures of Augie March but as I am about to finish up with it. I need to line up a book I could find in the library. That will be

The Sound And The Fury - William Faulkner.

but also, I want to harass the library people to get Michael Chabon's latest "Yiddidh Policemen's Union". That will be the one after Faulkner's. Mahabaharta has to wait for now. I think.

Words for Love by Ted Berrigan

for Sandy
Winter crisp and the brittleness of snow
as like make me tired as not. I go my
myriad ways blundering, bombastic, dragged
by a self that can never be still, pushed
by my surging blood, my reasoning mind.

I am in love with poetry. Every way I turn
this, my weakness, smites me. A glass
of chocolate milk, head of lettuce, dark-
ness of clouds at one o'clock obsess me.
I weep for all of these or laugh.

By day I sleep, an obscurantist, lost
in dreams of lists, compiled by my self
for reassurance. Jackson Pollock René
Rilke Benedict Arnold I watch
my psyche, smile, dream wet dreams, and sigh.

At night, awake, high on poems, or pills
or simple awe that loveliness exists, my lists
flow differently. Of words bright red
and black, and blue. Bosky. Oubliette. Dis-
severed. And O, alas

Time disturbs me. Always minute detail
fills me up. It is 12:10 in New York. In Houston
it is 2 pm. It is time to steal books. It's
time to go mad. It is the day of the apocalpyse
the year of parrot fever! What am I saying?

Only this. My poems do contain
wilde beestes. I write for my Lady
of the Lake. My god is immense, and lonely
but uncowed. I trust my sanity, and I am proud. If
I sometimes grow weary, and seem still, nevertheless

my heart still loves, will break.

Destroyer - Priest's Knees

I was just another west-coast maximalist exploring the blues,
ignoring the news from the front where they're taking her children away.
Taking them where they wanna go: Tall ships made of snow invading the sun.

Some people call me 'Angel' on their deathbed, in a dream.
That's right, the Czar's father thought things could've gone differntly
last night, but they didn't...

And I couldn't bear to follow you there, where trauma exists in the sky.
20th Century Masters welcome these disasters, and so do I.
But, no!
Oh baby, please don't go up into it!

Historical Clawhammer Banjo Recordings on NPR

Chanced upon this interesting NPR item on old clawhammer banjo recordings. It's got four recordings on share. Good stuff!

The Adventures Of Augie March - Chapter VI

"The return of the hearse from the newly covered grave leaves a man to pass through the last changes of nature who found Chicago a swamp and left it a great city. He came after the Great Fire, said to be caused by Mrs. O'Leary's cow, in flight from the conscription of the Hapsburg tyrant, and in his life as a builder proved that great places do not have to be founded on the bones of slaves, like the pyramids of Pharaohs or the capital of Peter the great on the banks of Neva, where thousands were trampled in the Russian marshes. The lesson of an American life like my father's, in contrast to that of the murderer of the Strelitzes and of his own son, is that achievements are compatible with decency. My father was not familiar with the observation of Plato that philosophy is the study of death, but he died nevertheless like a philosopher, saying to the ancient man who watched by his bedside in last moments..."

-- Einhorn Jr. writing the obituary of his father

Spengler quoting an Arab poet

"When this divine Revelation came to take the place of poetic inspiration, it claimed to be the sole source of knowledge, and banished poetry and poets from their kingdom. Poetry was no longer the word of truth, as the pre-Islamic poets had claimed it was. Nevertheless ... Islam did not suppress poetry as a form and mode of expression. Rather, it nullified poetry's role and cognitive mission, endowing it with a new function: to celebrate and preach the truth introduced by the Koranic Revelation. Islam thus deprived poetry of its earliest characteristics - intuition and the power of revelation and made it into a media tool.

... Poetry in Arab society has languished and withered precisely insofar as it has placed itself at the service of religiosity, proselytism and political and ideological commitments."

Saul Bellow on Joseph Conrad

"There he said that art was an attempt to render the highest justice to the visible universe: that it tried to find in that universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what was fundamental, enduring, essential. The writer's method of attaining the essential was different from that of the thinker or the scientist. These, said Conrad, knew the world by systematic examination. To begin with the artist had only himself; he descended within himself and in the lonely regions to which he descended, he found "the terms of his appeal". He appealed, said Conrad, "to that part of our being which is a gift, not an acquisition, to the capacity for delight and wonder... our sense of pity and pain, to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation - and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts... which binds together all humanity - the dead to the living and the living to the unborn." "

- from Saul Bellow's Nobel Lecture

The Adventures Of Augie March - Chapter IV

"After that we had a diminished family life, as though it were care of Georgie that had been the main basis of household union and now everything was disturbed. We looked in different directions, and the old woman had outsmarted herself. Well, we were a disappointment to her too. Maybe she had started out by dreaming she might have a prodigy in one of us to manage to fame. Perhaps. The force that directs these things in us higher beings and brings together lovers to bear the genius that will lead the world a step or two of the slow march toward its perfection, or find the note that will reach the ear of the banded multitude and encourage it to take that step, had come across with a Georgie instead, and with us. We were far from having the stuff in us that she must have wanted. Our parentage needn't have mattered so much, and it wasn't just a question of high or even legal birth. Fouche got as far as Talleyrand. What counted was natural endowment, and on that score she formed the opinion bitterly that we were not born with talents. Nonetheless we could be trained to be decent and gentlemanly, to wear white collars and have clean nails, brushed teeth, table manners, be brought up to fairly good pattern no matter what office we worked in, store we clerked in, teller's cage we reliably counted in - courteous in an elevator, prefatory in asking directions, courtly to ladies, grim and unanswering to streetwalkers, considerate in conveyances, and walking in the paths of a grayer, dimmer Castiglione."

Leonard Bernstein documentary on PBS

I caught the last half of a documentary on Leonard Bernstein which was on PBS (thanks Rebecca for letting me know). Some "expert" in the documentary commented about how Leonard Bernstein wanted to be a sort of a reincarnation of Mahler in his work. I thought that was a pretty big thing to say. Mr. Bernstein also conducted Beethoven's 9th Symphony on the either side of the crumbling Berlin Wall in 1989. I have to look out if I could find a recording of him conducting Mahler's 5th.

The Adventures of Augie March - Chapter IV

"All the influences were lined up waiting for me. I was born, and there they were to form me, which is why I tell you more of them than of myself."