RIP: Antonioni, Bergman...

“Each time I have tried to communicate with someone, love has disappeared.”

Monica Vitti's character in Le Notte

Marcovaldo - Opening

The wind, coming to the city from far away, brings it unusual gifts, noticed by only a few sensitive souls, such as hay-fever victims, who sneeze at the pollen from flowers of other lands.

Italo Calvino

A Harvest/HBJ Book 1963
A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
Harcourt Brace Johanovich, Publishers
San Diego New York London

The Road - Closing - pg. 241

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

The Road - pg. 181

Still he could see open country to the east and the air was different. Then they came upon it from a turn in the road and they stopped and stood with the salt wind blowing in their hair where they'd lowered the hoods of their coats to listen. Out there was the gray beach with the slow combers rolling dull and leaden and the distant sound of it. Like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of. Out on the tidal flats lay a tanker half careened. Beyond that the ocean vast and cold and shifting heavily like a slowly heaving vat of slag and then the gray squall line of ash. He looked at the boy. He could see the disappointment in his face. I'm sorry it's not blue, he said. That's okay, said the boy.

The Road - pg. 111

He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

feels like a Blue Dog

Oh just a dog, running around: office-floors are getting waxed and stripped and re-waxed which makes the dog to run for another spot. Night outside is warm. Eyes of a blue dog, that's how it looks. The whole scene.

The Road - pg. 46

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy, I have you.

To Do List

• Mixed Integer Quad. Problem Solver code
• Stochastic model paper reading for Constraint Satisfaction Problems
• MeshNets-VoIP paper Framework: lit. survey
  

August Book List

• Mahabaharta - C. RajgopalAchari
  
• Journey To The End Of The Night - Louis Ferdinand-Celine
  
• Hamlet - some guy
  
• Marcovaldo - Italo Calvino
  
• Mr. Palomar - Italo Calvino
• The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri
  
• The Waste Land - T. S. Eliot
  

from Tradition and the Individual Talent

Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

The Road - Opening

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.

- Cormac McCarthy

ALFRED A. KNOPF
NEW YORK
2007

The Recognitions - pg. 956

When he was left alone, when he had pulled out one stop after another (for the work required it), Stanley straightened himself on the seat, tightened the knot of the red necktie, and struck. The music soared around him, from the corner of his eye he caught the glitter of his wrist watch, and even as he read the music before him, and saw his thumb and last finger come down time after time with three black keys between them, wringing out fourths, the work he had copied coming over on the Conte di Brescia, wringing that chord of the devil's interval from the full length of the thirty-foot bass pipes, he did not stop. The walls quivered, still he did not hesitate. Everything moved and even falling, soared in atonement.
He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward, most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.

[last sentence]

St. Vincent

"The most powerful weapon to conquer the devil is humility. For, as he does not know at all how to employ it, neither does he know how to defend himself from it."

-Saint Vincent de Paul (b. 1581 - d. 1660)

Dave at the Bar

Hey! you didn't go to hospital to operate my memory out of your body.

regarding: Rain.

Ran into David R. outside Starbucks on my way home. Had a ten minutes of brainstorming with him about the plot of a story I'd been working on. I liked his idea of taking the main thunderstorm scene at the end - the crescendo effect at the end. Let's see how it pans out.

The Recognitions - pg. 896

- Now .. If she comes to him carrying lilies that turn to fire? And the fire, what do you think it is? If that was the only way he could learn? So now do you see why he sends me on? If somewhere I've ... done the same thing? And something's come out of it, something ... like ... he has. While I've been crowding the work alone. To end there, or almost end running up to the doors there, to pound on the doors of the church, do you see why he sent me on? Look back, if once you're started in living, you're born into sin, then? And how do you atone? By locking yourself up in remorse for what you might have done? Or by living it through. By locking yourself up in remorse with what you know you have done? Or by going back and living it through. By locking yourself up with your work, until it becomes a gessoed surface, all prepared, clean, and smooth as ivory? Or by living it through. By drawing lines in your mind? Or by living it through. If it was sin from the start, and possible all the time, to know it's possible and avoid it? Or by living it through. I used to wonder how Christ could really have been tempted, if He was sinless, and rejected the first, and the second, and the third temptation, how was He tempted? ... how did He know what it was, the way we do, to be tempted? No, He was Christ. But for us, with it there from the start, and possible all the time, to go on knowing it's possible and pretend to avoid it? Or ... to have lived it through, and live it through, and deliberately go on living it through.

The Recognitions - pg. 883

The distinguished novelist attacked the fish on the plate before him. It stared up with one round insolent eye, and he severed the head at one blow. The world of art settled, that of religion reared intrepidly.

The Recognitions - pg. 874

- You'll say I should have microscopes for this ... delicate work. Yes, egg white, egg yolk, gums, resins, oils, glue, mordants, varnish, you'll be surprised how they're put together just to bind the pigments. We could take X-ray pictures, infra-red, ultra-violet ... Layers and layers of colors and oils and varnish, and the dirt! The dirt! Look at that, that picture there, look at the crackle on the surface, that's from the wood panel expanding and contracting and the paint crackles when it gets dry. If we had a microscope with a Leitz mirror-condenser, we could turn it up to five hundred diameters, put on a counting disc and make a particle count of the pigment. Then we measure its thickness with a micrometer, put the Micro-Ibso attachment on the camera and you ... If we had a micro-extraction apparatus we could bore holes in it too and get some nice cross sections out, put them in wax and then you slice them in half just like that with a microtome knife. And when you get that under a microscope with polarized incident light then you can really see what's going on with a carbon arc lamp, you'll see when we get into the high oil immersion series of lenses. You'll see, if we can fix a microscope up with polarized light and put a particle of the pigment under it, we can see whether it's isotropic or anisotropic, for that we use nicol prisms. Then we determine the refraction index of the particles of pigment and then, well then of course, then we know exactly ... the dirt that collects in every little ridge and crack century after century, then we 'll know. Here's the secret, laying transparent oils on heavy thick ones. Bosch ... not Bosch. The transitions ... Leonardo put on wet paint with the palm of his hand ... dark brown underpainting all the way, and ... that plasticity, that plasticity. And ... and ... if we can get a good reliable particle count, the refraction index on each particle and whether it's isotropic or ... when you get down to the gesso, you ... what was it? What was it? ... You ... yes, the El Greco, I ...

The Recognitions - pg. 870

- Art couldn't explain it, the voice went on clearly, but low as though he were talking to himself, as he worked the blade. - But now we're safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf. He didn't even know they were clapping for him at the first performance. They didn't have an applause meter, you understand. Somebody had to turn him around to the audience so he could see them clapping for him. Then Stephen turned his face up abruptly.

The Recognitions - pg. 869

- You can't explain to him that you don't shout about beautiful things, you don't try to ... you know what I mean.
- You suffer them, Stephen said evenly, and the blade went right on, and the smoke rose against his face filling his brows.

Alejo Carpentier

Cuban writer of "Lost Steps" - Amazon Link


adding it in Fall Book List.

To the awesomeness of the great American writers working:

Chabon, Roth, Pynchon, McCarthy, Foer, Ellis, DFW, DeLillo, Moody, Salter...

Three shots of Jameson

didn't mess up my system last night. Lindsey and Dana wanted to be at HG. It was quiet on the street and inside at the bar. There was a talk of going to the beach and Israel's unique theological problem of not letting the Sinai become geographically obsolete for say, maritime purposes. Murtaza called from the other side, on his way to work. He thought I was lonely. Dard now works in Islamabad. He didn't know which Waqar was I talking about. I don't think anyone of us who were present on that brightly fucked-up spring day have gone back to say 'Hi' to Waqar. Or perhaps that's not surprising given what stuff (Dain wanted to know the word for stuff in Urdu @ the bar: tough question) happened right in front of us which brought on that morning like a bright, fucked-up, tragic in a big way kind of day. It is a shame.

...

Blue storm-clouds in hot heavens of mid-July
Hung heavy, brooding over land and sea:
Our hearts, a-tremble, throbbed in harmony
With the wild, restless tone of air and sky.
Shall we not call him Prospero who held
In his enchanted hands the fateful key
Of that tempestuous hour’s mystery,
And with controlling wand our spirits spelled,
With him to wander by a sun-bright shore,
To hear fine, fairy voices, and to fly
With disembodied Ariel once more
Above earth’s wrack and ruin? Far and nigh
The laughter of the thunder echoed loud,
And harmless lightnings leapt from cloud to cloud.

- Emma Lazarus

Book List (July-August)

In the order of precedence:

1. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
2. Mahabharata
3. Journey To The End Of Night - Louis Ferdinand-Celine

John Crowley - Little, Big (P.S)

Amazon Link

John Crowley's masterful Little, Big is the epic story of Smoky Barnable, an anonymous young man who travels by foot from the City to a place called Edgewood—not found on any map—to marry Daily Alice Drinkawater, as was prophesied. It is the story of four generations of a singular family, living in a house that is many houses on the magical border of an otherworld. It is a story of fantastic love and heartrending loss; of impossible things and unshakable destinies; and of the great Tale that envelops us all. It is a wonder.

The Recognitions - pg. 827

- He could not get her out of his mind. When they were together, her smile, or often when she did not know he was looking the empty sadness of her face, forced him to lower his eyes, and fumble for something to handle, or something to say; and he usually found that tooth in his pocket, as he did now, and said nothing.

[Stanley, Esme]

The Recognitions - pg. 826

- Why do you keep singing that? Stanley broke out, seizing her wrist at the rail. Then he loosed his hold and apologized for startling her so; and a moment later a cry escaped him, and he lunged. Beneath him a book washed up on a crest, was gone, and reappeared in the white foam. He stared at that invitation to mortal sin being borne away by the sea, and then raised his face to the sea itself, as though to try to bring it all into his vision, and he said something like that to her, something about its immensity. He looked at her. She was looking at the sea. And then she said, but not to him,
- For some fishes the sea is a great big sky.

Mahler's Symphony No. 5

Leonard Bernstein conducting. The third movement packs a mighty punch. This is truly an aural miracle.

The Recognitions - pg. 823

- The love hoarded all your life ... for the work, and his lips still moved silently over that last word


[Wyatt]

The Recognitions - pg. 821

The outside shutters were almost closed on the narrow balcony, but sounds came up from Alphonso del Gato, the sound of voices and a barrel organ somewhere in the lame joy of some indistinguishable tune, through the shutters and the imposition of joy in the red-figured drapes that hung there motionless. Before him the mirrors, from the one tall and narrow mounted in the armoire to the small square one over the one-spigot washstand, and back, embraced one another's images, as the rain took up against the shutters, and reached the glass, and he stood there, chilled, his memory frantic for something precious left out in the rain, or a window left open, the rain pounding in, in the dark, engulfing a consciousness alert now in all the sudden perspicacity of terror, deepening round it, so that it seems to have been falling all the time: sounds came from a great distance, a strange city, in a foreign land, and the sense, he'd just been put down here this instant, alone, and for the first time, engulfed in the sense of something lost. He spun around on his feet, to confront who had come in the door behind him, but he saw no one there. He stood, off balance but still for a moment, and then he moved sidling toward the door, as though she were waiting for him to get out before she could enter, and once at the door he left like a crowd leaving, and the door open behind him.

The Recognitions - pg. 804

Pastora, at every instant with him as near to joy as to woe, waiting to be told, for joy to burst over her at the slightest assurance, despair at the first sigh, tears of helpless anger at indifference, recovering in surly contempt, but still waiting to be told, - Me quierres? She with nothing of her own, not even her words but in question, until forced to cry out atlast, - Yo te quiero y tu no me quieres.

The Recognitions - pg. 788

In that quiet village, stacked three thousand feet above the sea against the southwestern slopes of the Sierra de Guadarrama, the province of Madrid, and the kingdom of New Castile laid out barren at its feet, there are thirty seven bars, where, as in most of that country, the visitor is free to enjoy that privilege which distinguishes him from the natives to such advantage, and get morbidly, or helplessly, riotously, or roaring, drunk. No one minds. He is looked upon as a curiosity, one who has, perhaps, worked out an ingeniously obvious solution to unnecessary problems, and is mortgaging a present which is untenable to secure a future which does not exist.

The Recognitions - pg. 762

Are you there, an island in their past, afloat, or a rock shoal, and sailing back do they sight you with cries of happiness and recognition? Indeed do they cruise back just to reach you, to land and enter the same pleasance with recognition even delight, share it with others who have languored there, or meet those others, upon the beach and do battle? Or cruising somewhere else beyond do they sight you casually, remark your presence with a smile, or do they mark you severely upon the chart and sail by far to leeward and out of sight, to meet further on others past bound forward and warn them of your dangers where you lie in the past there though it is for these bound forward the future and they will set their course accordingly. Or sailing back do they sail past however near or far offshore with a shrug and a glance of dismissal recalling nothing but an arid coast. Or do you float, as they told us the Sagasso Sea floats partly under the surface and none is certain exactly where necessitating vigilance and uncertain anxious care.

Roberto Bolaño

Like I mentioned to someone that I would have donated my liver. This guy should not have died so young. I finished his beautiful book "The Distant Star" today. It held me and didn't let me go. I tried three times to put it down but every time I would sit at a spot, I was outside, the day was gorgeous and he opened up to me from behind his words: "Look!". This book did strike me somewhere very close as it talked about dictatorships, lost friends, torture-givers, politics pulling strings and ruining lives; all of it I had breathed once myself. And the photograph of the author at the back-flap of the novel is just a great one.

Distant Star - pg. 144

When I looked again at Carlos Wieder, he had turned side on. It struck me that he had a hard look peculiar to certain Latin Americans over the age of forty, quite different from the hardness you see in Europeans or North Americans. A sad, irreparable sort of hardness. But Carlos Wieder (who had won the heart of at least one of the Garmendia sisters) did not appear to be sad and that is precisely where the infinite sadness lay. He seemed adult. But he wasn't adult, I knew that straightaway. He seemed self-possessed. And in his own way, on his own terms, whatever they were, he was more self-possessed than the rest of us in that sleepy bar, or most of the people walking by on the beach or invisibly at work, getting ready for the imminent tourist season. He was hard, he had nothing or very little and it didn't seem to bother him much. He seemed to be going through a rough patch. He had the face of a man who knows how to wait without losing his nerve or letting his imagination run wild. He didn't look like a poet. He didn't look as if he had been an officer in the Chilean Air Force. He didn't look like an infamous killer. He didn't look like a man who had flown to Antarctica to write a poem in the sky. Not at all.

Distant Star - pg. 94

The reports of Carlos Wieder's activities from that night on are vague and contradictory. His shadowy figure makes a number of brief appearances in the shifting anthology of Chilean literature. According to some rumor, he was expelled from the air force at a secret court martial, held at night, which he attended in full-dress uniform, although his die-hard fans prefer to imagine him wearing a black greatcoat and a monocle, smoking a long pipe made from an elephant's tusk. The most unbalanced minds of his generation claim to have seen him wandering around Santiago, Valpraiso and Concepcion, working at a variety of jobs and participating in strange artistic projects. He changed his name. He was associated with various ephemeral literary magazines, to which he contributed proposals for happenings that never happened unless (and it hardly bears thinking about) he organized them in secret.

The Recognitions - pg. 748

- I mean when I come down here all these people remind me of parts of me that never grew up.

[Ed Feasely]

The Recognitions - pg. 736

It's too simple. It's too goddamn simple for them to understand. They still think their cigarettes would cost them half as much without advertising. The whole goddamn high standard of American life depends on the American economy. The whole goddamn American economy depends on mass production. To sustain mass production you got to have a mass market. To sustain a goddamn mass market you got to have advertising. That's all there is to it. A product would drop out of sight overnight without advertising. I don't care what it is, a book or a brand of soap, it would drop out of sigh. We've had the goddamn Ages of Faith, we've had the goddamn Age of Reason. This is the Age of Publicity.

The Recognitions - pg. 726

The sun had melted into the shape of a keyhole on the horizon, and the Island Trader moved as though enclosed by the sea and the dull beauty of the sky, with only a glimpse, through that open door, of the outside, real world of fire.

The Recognitions - pg. 700

The sun rose at seven, and its light caught the weathercock atop the church steeple, epiphanized it there above the town like a cock of fire risen from its own ashes. In the false dawn, the sun had prepared the sky for its appearance: but even now the horned moon hung unsuspecting at the earth's rim, before the blaze which rose behind it to extinguish the cold quiet of its reign.

Sibelius on Nature

Sibelius loved nature, and the Finnish landscape often served as material for his music. He once said of his Sixth Symphony, "[It] always reminds me of the scent of the first snow." The forests surrounding Ainola are often said to have inspired his composition of Tapiola. On the subject of Sibelius' ties to nature, one biographer of the composer, Erik Tawaststjerna, wrote the following:

Even by Nordic standards, Sibelius responded with exceptional intensity to the moods of nature and the changes in the seasons: he scanned the skies with his binoculars for the geese flying over the lake ice, listened to the screech of the cranes, and heard the cries of the curlew echo over the marshy grounds just below Ainola. He savoured the spring blossoms every bit as much as he did autumnal scents and colours.

The Recognitions - pg. 677

The panoplied figure reached the landing in one fall, taking a long time, so it seemed afterward to those who saw it happen; and making a good deal less of noise than they might have expected, hitting head-on at the turn, attacked by shadows leaping to meet a moment when the whole room silenced and all the eyes were brought into one equation, the quick eyes stilled, and the still eyes of the wart hog, the face in the youthful portrait, the blind eyes of Valerian stretched on his rack and the all-seeing eyes of the pale underclothed figure in the middle of the low table, those and the eyes in the tapestry, turned in the other direction, alerted.

- There, of course, I disagree with Dante, came on a voice from the far end, restoring the unconscious balance, rescuing what was alive from what was not; and enough voices to deliver one another from the isolation from separate identity took up and spread in a slow wave toward the broken weight poised on the edge of the landing, whose clinging shadows leaped away as it moved, and repeated their concerted attacks as it fell from one step to another, stifling it in their last embrace at the bottom.

David Mitchell (new writer)

Cloud Atlas - 2004.

Apart from the central story (Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin After'), which is uninterrupted, each story breaks off abruptly half-way through, to be followed by the first half of the next story. The interrupted story then appears within the next one, with the protagonist reading or watching the first half of its text; for example, in "An Orison of Sonmi~451," Sonmi~451 describes watching a film about the life of Timothy Cavendish, but she is only able to watch 50 minutes before her story is also interrupted. Each story ends with its protagonist finding the second half of this story, which is then printed after it.

Pre-Waking Up Thoughts: Meta-Logical

Meta-Logical:
A system of reasoning that originates from underlying precepts that are inherently illogical.

Wines

Wishing Tree Shiraz (2005) - Western Australia

Dates, numbers, digits...

They keep on going on like the shadow at the window glass keeps moving and the register keeps clanging. There are bits and fragments though that don't go away, no matter how many times the shadow traverses the same tread. No matter, what giant distances the digits separate us in time. There lingers these bits and fragments: clear blue skies and the sudden thunders of early-evenings, smell of burnt leaves and gathering hustle on the street anticipating jameson laced whimsies. The shadow keeps moving, distances too, everything stays the same. Digits order themselves neatly: numbers turn into curses turn into dates that refuse to change.

The Recognitions - pg. 689

- Vulgarity, cupidity, and power. Is that what frightens you? Is that all you see around you, and you think it was different then? Flanders in the fifteenth century, do you think it was all like the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb? What about the paintings we've never seen? the trash that's disappeared? Just because we have a few masterpieces left, do you think they were all masterpieces left, do you think they were all masterpieces? What about the pictures we've never seen, and never will see? that were as bad as anything that's ever been done. And your precious van Eyck, do you think he didn't live up to his neck in a loud vulgar court? In a world where everything was done for the same reasons everything's done now? for vanity and avarice and lust? and the boundless egoism of these Chancellor Rolins? Do you think they knew the difference between what was bizarre and what was beautiful? that their vulgar ostentation didn't stifle beauty everywhere, everywhere? the way it's doing today? Yes, damn it, listen to me now, and swear by all that's ugly! Do you think any painter did anything but hire himself out? These fine altarpieces, do you think they glorified anyone but the vulgar having men who commissioned them? Do you think a van Eyck didn't curse having to whore away his genius, to waste his genius, to waste his talents on all sorts of vulgar celebrations, at the mercy of people he hated?
Blood flowed over his broken tooth. He'd turned away, but swung about again unable to stop. - Yes, I remember your little talk, your insane upside-down apology for these pictures, every figure and every object with its own presence, its own consciousness because it was being looked at by God! Do you know what it was? What it really was? that everything was so afraid, so uncertain God saw it, that it insisted its vanity on His eyes? Fear, fear, pessimism and fear and depression everywhere, the way it is today, that why your pictures are so cluttered with detail, this terror of emptiness, this absolute terror of space. Because maybe God isn't watching. Maybe He doesn't see. Oh, this pious cult of Middle Ages! Being looked at by God! Is there a moment of faith in any of their work, in one centimeter of canvas? or is it vanity and fear, the same decadence that surrounds us now. A profound mistrust in God, and they need every idea out where they can see it, where they can get their hands on it. Your ... detail, he commenced to falter a little, - your Bouts, was there ever a worse bourgeois than your Dierick Bouts? and his damned details? Talk to me of separate consciousness, being looked at by God, and then swear by all that's ugly! Talk to me about your precious van Eycks, and be proud to be as wrong as they were, as wrong as everyone around them was, as wrong as he was. And Basil Valentine flung out a hand to the broken hulk on the floor, toward which he backed the retreating figure before him. -Separation, he said in a voice near a whisper, - all of it cluttered with separation, everything in its own vain shell, everything separate withdrawn from everything else. Being looked at by God! Is there separation in God!

Writers to check out

In no particular order:

• William Gaddis: possibly have to reread The Recognitions.
• William T. Vollman
• Roberto Bolano
• Borges (yes? yes indeed.)
  
• Cortazar
• Louis Ferdinand-Celine (He is coming up next, what's with that friggin' book club 2007 version2.0 picking up "Journey To The End of Madness"; here you are on my table)
• Peter Carey
• James Coetzee (more stuff by him)
• Beckett (Murphy trilogy)
  
• Jean Genet's plays
• Nabokov: Pale Fire
  

a thought...

I am beyond anything and everything that I ever did in my life... I operate on high. I feel high on double-espressos.

mp3: Destroyer's nyc song...

New tune from New Porno's album.

Has an interesting guitar chorus at the end which started to make sense at the fourth listen. Last two lines are pure indestructible genius!

The Recognitions - pg. 633

- That's what it is, that's all any of it is ... But he could not break it, and he looked up and away, instantly found the blond girl earlier accused of putting a t in genial made up, composed, as pretty (she would never be beautiful), as inanimate and stale as a photograph, once accused of taking the v out of live; now, of putting an f in lie: - Arse gratias artis, he muttered, - that's all any of it is.


[Art for Art's sake]

The Recognitions - pg. 616

-... Because we get time given to us in fragments, that's the only way we know it. Finally, we can't even conceive of a continuum of time. Every fragment exists by itself, and that's why we live among palimpsests, because finally all the work should fit into one whole, and express an entire perfect action, as Aristotle says, and it's impossible now, it's impossible, because of the breakage, there are pieces everywhere ...

The Recognitions - pg. 580

-Bathysiderodromophobia. And that's only one of his troubles.



[fear of subways]

The Recognitions - pg. 602-603

- You listen to me. I've just taken a lot from you. I've taken a lot from people just like you. Just like you. That's tough, isn't it, just like you, that this town is loaded with people just like you, the world is loaded with people just like you. The honest men who are too good to fit anywhere. You're one of the people, aren't you. Look at your hands, have you ever had a callus? You don't get them lifting glasses. Who are you, to be so bitter? Have you ever done one day of work?
- Look
- And now I understand. And you talk to me about life, about real life, about human misery, Benny went on. He was not speaking loudly, nor fast, still the cold but vehement and level tone of his voice drew several people to turn around, and listen and watch. The other sat his ground with a patient sneer. - I offered you work, and you were too good for it. We buy stuff from guys like you all the time, writing under pen names to protect names that are never going to be published anywhere else, but they keep thinking they'll make it, what they want to do, but never quite manage, and they keep on doing what they're too good for. It's a joke. It's a joke, Benny repeated, and it was now that his voice began to rise.
-I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room aren't you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that's real. What is real, then? Nothing's real to you that isn't part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal, ... spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don't know what real life is, you've never been near it. All you have a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard. Benny started to laugh. He knocked an empty glass from the end of the couch, who was silent, looking at Benny, and the sneer almost squeezed from his face. Most of the people in the room were aware that something was happening...

The Recognitions - pg. 599

- No, that's ... you see, that's the trouble, Agnes, he said. - It's as though this one thing must contain it all, all in one piece of work, because, well it's as though finishing it strikes it dead, do you understand? And that's frightening, it's easy enough to understand why, killing the one thing ... you love. I understand it, and I'll explain it to you, but that, you see, that's what's frightening, and you anticipate that, you feel it all the time you're working and that's why the palimpsests pile up, because you can still make changes and the possibility of perfection is still there, but the first note that goes on the final score is ... well that's what Nietzsche.

Nietzsche: "the melancholia of things completed"

The Recognitions - pg. 597

The boy who had got an advance on his novel said, - I wanted to sort of celebrate, but what the hell. Where are the nice places? They're all business lunchrooms, do you know what I mean? Expense accounts. They're all supported by expense accounts. It's depressing as hell.

The Recognitions - pg. 589

- Ignorance and desire, you've told me ... Oh, you've told me so many things, haven't you. All of our highest goals are inhuman ones, you told me, do you remember? I don't forget. But remorse binds us together in ignorance and desire, and ... and ... not salt tears then, but ... She gasped again, shuddered but would not give in.
- And what is it now, this reality you used to talk about, she went on more quietly. - As though you could deny, and have nothing to replace what you take away, as though ... Oh yes, zero does not exist! And here I ... I watched you turn into no one right here in front of me, and just a ... a pose became a life, until you were trying to make negative things do the work of positive ones. And your family and your and ... when I married you we used to talk about all that intelligently, and I thought you were outside it, and understood it, but you're not, you're not, and you never will be, you never will get out of it, and you never ... you never will let yourself be happy. Esther was talking rapidly again, and she paused as though to give effect to the softness of her voice as she went on, though her memory crowded details upon her and it was these she fought. - There are things like joy in this world, there are, there are wonderful things, and there is goodness and kindness, and you shrug your shoulders. And I used to think that was fun, that you understood things so well when you did that, but finally that's all you can do, isn't it. Isn't it.

The Recognitions - pg. 571

- I think we really like books that make us hate ourselves ...

The Recognitions, Sibelius, Mendelssohn

I was sitting at the bar where Jeremy poured me the second beer and Elizabeth mentioned the changes in her life: changes in routine, only two nights at bar for work etc. And I was at a party in The Recognitions reading where characters, 40s version of NYC hipsters at a cocktail party spewing opinions like mad crazy vipers in heat. And one of them mentioned Mendelssohn and Sibelius' works which threw me off because just the other day I bought Mendelssohn'1 and 4 and Sibelius' no. 2 at the Rainbow. I was like wow! While at the bar there was too much noise. Barely managed to read 10 pages. It is all good!

Richard Yates (new writer)

Fall Book List: The Revolutionary Road.

The Recognitions - pg. 530

GORDON: Suffering, my dear Priscilla, is a petty luxury of mediocre people. You will find happiness a far more noble, and infinitely more refined ...

[Otto's play]

Malcolm Lowry - Under The Volcano (new writer)

This needs to be put in Fall Book List.

The Recognitions - pg. 473

The painter knows, sadly enough, that experience does not suffice unto itself, has no proportion, dimension, perspective, mournfully he eats his life but is not allowed to digest it, this being reserved for others, not knowing, but who must somehow, at any sacrifice be made to know, then punished for the sight of this knowledge, by aiding it on its journey from brain to brain.

-Esme's letter

The Recognitions - pg. 469

- I dream and wake up. The love I have from others is not love of me, but where they try to find themselves, loving me. I dream and I wake up, and then at that moment you are somewhere being real to other people; and they are a part of your reality; and I am not ... But you are the only person I am real with ...

The Recognitions - pg. 462

- She says the reason you were clever was because you didn't know how to be honest.
- Well the only reason she's honest is because she's too God damn dumb to be clever, I mean if she was honest, but she . . .

The Recognitions - pg. 461

- You want everybody to be like you, that's your trouble Stanley.
- I want everyone to be like I want to be, Stanley answered.

Detective Bureau 2-3: Go To Hell Bastards

is a film by Seijun Suzuki and like every movie by Suzuki has one of the best titles. I can literally think up a plot involving chase-murder scenes, blood splattered walls and forced-fucked level-beaters looking for one last escape from the "Agencies" on the streets of Karachi. This is a plot worthy to come back to.

Tova Reich - The Jewish War (new writer)

Only 288 pages, must read before end of August.

Amazon Link

The Recognitions - pg. 418

- Do you know what happens to people in cities? I'll tell you what happens to people in cities. They lose the seasons, that's what happens. They lose the extremes, the winter and summer. They lose the means, the spring and the fall. They lose the beginning and end of the day, and nothing grows but their bank accounts. Life in the city is just all middle, nothing is born and nothing dies. Things appear, and things are killed, but nothing begins and nothing ends.

mp3: Wolf Parade - Grounds For Divorce

Grounds For Divorce

You said you hate the sound
Of the busses on the ground
You said you hate the way they scrape their brakes all over town
Said pretend it's whales
Keeping their voices down
Such were the grounds for divorce i know

On the radio
And the bouncing bodies' drone
Found eighteen reasons I can't pick up on the phone
I said look at the clouds
It's a show all on its own
Such were the grounds for divorce I know

But the darling is dead
We hit her on the head
It looked like a wedding cake
Though the darling is dead
We hit it on the head
It looked like a newlywed

But look at the lovers
And they way they stand
And the way they move and the way move their hands
And look at their babies
And their tiny little hands
And the way they get loved and the way they get loved oh

Oh look at the lovers
And they way they stand
And the way they move and the way move and the way move their hands

Said you hate the sound
Of the busses on the ground
Said you hate the way they scrape their brakes all over town
Said pretend it's wales
And keeping their voices down
Such were the grounds for divorce i know

Looked like a newlywed

On the radio
And the bouncing bodies' drone
Found eighteen reasons I can't pick up on the phone
Said look at the clouds
It's a show all on its own
Such were the grounds, such were the grounds, for divorce I know

[amazing song!]

The Recognitions - pg. 409

Why, travel's become the great occupation of people with nothing to do, you find second-hand kings and all sorts of useless people at it. There now, it's always the heroic places you find them intruding, trying to have a share in the work of great men, looking at fine paintings and talking as though they knew more of the thing than the man who painted it, and the same thing listening to fine music, because they suspect the truth but they won't pay the price, they all suspect that a man needs something to do, he finished, standing over the light cloud of steam he left rising from the gray boards of the barn.

The Recognitions - pg. 405

Suffer barbaric childhood to give and receive remorselessly; civilized age learns to protect what it has, to neither give nor accept freely, to trust its own mistrust above faith, and intriguing others above the innocent. Intrigue, after all, is rational, something the mind can sink its teeth into, and defeat it with the good digestion of reason, a hopeless prospect for the toothless heart, and God only knows what innocence will do next. So prudence rescues the emotions, and exiles them out of reach, countenancing only anxious glances from what another hero came forth from the desert to call "the hesitating retinue of finer shades."

The Fairfield Four

Found them on the soundtrack of "O'Brother Where Art Thou". Their melodies are haunting and the rhythms of their a-cappella singing ebbs and flows like a water-current in a river. Bought one of their records.

General Book List - (July-August)

• Poetics by Aristotle
• Mahabaharta
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy [Thanks Jeremy]
  
• Journey To The End Of Night by Celine
• Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

To Do List

• 802.11 a co-channel interference numbers
• randomized searching algos
• LP programming setup for a centralized algo

Jameson on Bookclub 2007

A shot of Jameson can make you stronger. It heals the internal abrasions, cellular distortions, quiet desperations. I had a shot with Freddy at the bar and said something really obnoxious and narcissistic to him. Elizabeth and Ed were working at the bar. I gave Blood Meridian to Elizabeth to give it to Jeremy. Jeremy had left The Road on the rack above the taps, with a piece of paper inside it. No one had read the book, well except me and Freddy and Dain. Every one else was just there to show up to have a good time and that we did. I tried Emily's wine and did find some sort of chocolate notes going on which was kind of surprising. It was not bad. hey ordered it without knowing much about the it from the wine list. Danielle insisted about the importance of family, folks and other such themes. I tried not to get into an argument. it was definitely a weird night. Brett could not show up which sucked. He was the fourth person of the book club who actually did finish up the book. We did have a brief discussion on the book because Freddy wanted to. We ended up at Shaggy's later that night where I ran into Dana/Lindsey duo. It turned out it was Dana's birthday so I bought her a shot. She was pretty far gone by that time and thus ended our another anonymous midsummer evening at the main street of this town. On a second thought, we made a trek to the diner where we played Bob Dylan at a jukebox for old time's sake. Like a rolling stone...

Parameters

Things to look for in WMNs channel assignment problem:

1 - Localized solution (not necessrily ?)
2 - Minimize interference
3 - Map radios to channels
4 - Load Sharing among links -> directly related to interference on particular channels
5 - Tree connections
6 - Co-channel Interference 802.11x (check the numbers on the spec)

The Recognitions - pg. 349

- Effluvium? Brown muttered, under his breath.

Sweet Norah Winebisquit bedewed with sleep
Swept down through sooted flues of chimney-sweep.
And where? she cried, can be this sceptered rod
That men call Recktall Brown, and I call god.
Straight through a frosted glass-partitioned door
They led her, and she doubted now no more.
(The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she)
Might no more question wherewithal of he:
Dreadful he sat, bastioned in golden oak,
The humanizing of some dirty joke
The gods tell one another ere they stand
To attend the last obscenity, called man.
.
.
.
Heaven's crown, brown-bought, fell lightly on his brow,
Lay heavy on her perspicacious Now.
(Still on the dreadful teeth of time she trod,
And marveled at the maleness of god.)
Sweet Norah Winebisquit, bedewed with sleep,
Awoke this decorated painted heap
Of present woman: could she doubt her sin?
Sought furiously for the flame within,
Presented in a naked leaping cry
The burning plunder of the present I.
Pride drew her garments up, and swathed her face
In lineaments incapable of disgrace.
Slipped then away, her face bedewed with do,
Beyond the glass, and knowing all, she knew
That the immortals have their ashcans too.

(probably Esme wiritng, I am not sure)

the lost song

later, we meet at a bar
so, bats leap out of the walls
the ring comes - shines in neon
whoever you are

our drinks taste of tar
your eyes blind me: a curse
Ishwars casts a shadow
wherever you are

on our minds: a door sits ajar
you leave; distance goes away,
I sign my name, I look away
knowing: you are.....

- © Khan Boha

The Recognitions - pg. 363

You leave feelings to other people, you do the thinking. Look at them. They'd rather feel than think, and look at them. You let them do your feeling and believing for you, you do thier thinking for them, or you'll end up the same creek all of them are. In his throat, the two veins, either of them viral, pulsated under rolls of flesh. The two before him stood out in invitation to any passing blade.

Alexander Borodin

from Wikipedia:

Alexander Porfiryevich Borodin (Russian: Александр Порфирьевич Бородин, Aleksandr Porfir'evič Borodin) (31 October/12 November 1833 – 15 February/27 February 1887) was a Russian composer of Georgian parentage who made his living as a notable chemist. He was a member of the group of composers called The Five (or "The Mighty Handful"), who were dedicated to producing a specifically Russian kind of art music^{[1] [2] [3]}. He is best known for his symphonies, his opera Prince Igor, and for later providing the musical inspiration for the musical Kismet.

To Get: Alexander Borodin's Symphony No. 3
Borodin was part of The Five: The Five or The Mighty Five was the loose collection of five Russian composers in St Petersburg, who met during 1856-1862, including: Mily Balakirev (the leader), Alexander Borodin, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

The Recognitions - pg. 346

If a mahn try to lead the good Christian life, and he find his path vexed by what he consider evil, sar, ... can he righteously and justly have a recourse to the bahd method to combat the adversary?

- Fuller

The Recognitions - pg. 341

He dropped on the bed and lay still in the cold. What was it she had cried out as he ran, the cry and the voice of her a thing almost tangible hurled through the air between them, which entered and froze him in flight, as though an eternal abstraction were materialized in cast metal and bone, and Love showed its scarred steel jaws edged with broken teeth.

The Recognitions - pg. 324

He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?

The Recognitions - pg. 323

every piece of created work is the tomb of its creator

The Recognitions - pg. 322

How could Bach have accomplished all that he did? and Palestrina? the Gabrielis? and what of the organ concerti of Corelli? Those were the men whose work he admired beyond all else in this life, for they had touched the origins of design with recognition. And how? with music written for Church. Not written with obsessions of copyright foremost; not written to be played by men in worn dinner jackets, sung by girls in sequins, involved in wage disputes and radio rights, recording rights, union rights; not written to be issued through a skull-sized plastic box plugged into the wall as background for seductions and the funnypapers, for arguments over automobiles, personalities, shirt sizes, cocktails, the flub-a-dub of a lonely girl washing her girdle; not written to be punctuated by recommendations for headache remedies, stomach appeasers, detergents, hair oil ... O God! dove sei Fenestrula?

The Recognitions - pg. 320

But there was more to it than gross tyranny of business enterprise; and advertising, whose open chancres gaped everywhere, only a symptom of great disease, this plague of newness, this febrile, finally paretic seizure dictated by a beadledom of time monitored by clocks, observatories, signals on the radio, the recorded voice of a woman (dead or alive) who dissected the latest minute on the telephone when you dialed NERVOUS.

The Recognitions - pg. 315

It broke up and spread itself, in couples and threes and figures of stumbling loneliness, into the streets, into doorways, they all went into the dark repeating themselves and preparing to meet one another, to reassemble, rehearse their interchangeable disasters; and the place looked like a kingdom stricken by papal anathema ...

The Recognitions - pg. 302

-If I am not real to him, she said aloud, staring at the dead lilies, -then where am I real?

Esme

Spring in Fialta

Spring in Fialta is cloudy and dull. Everything is damp: the piebald trunks of the plane trees, the juniper shrubs, the railings, the gravel. Far away, in a watery vista between the jagged edges of pale bluish houses, which tottered up from their knees to climb the slope (a cypress indicating the way), the blurred Mount St George is more than ever remote from its likeness on the picture postcards which since 1910, say (those straw hats, those youthful cabmen), have been courting the tourist from the sorry-go-round of their prop, among amethyst-toothed lumps of rock and the mantelpiece dreams of sea-shells. The air is windless and warm, with a faint tang of burning. The sea, its salt drowned in a solution of rain, is less glaucous than grey with waves too sluggish to break into foam.

inviting the Man

I can't go on, I will go on.

The Recognitions - pg. 300

It was the uncircumscribed, unbearable, infinitely extended, indefinitely divisible void where she swam in orgasm, soaring into a vastness away from the heaving indignity of the posture she shared; the world of music so intensely known that nothing exists but the music; it was the world of ecstasy they all approximated by different paths, one world in which temporary residence is prohibited, as the agonies of recall attest: "Love's dart" that wounds but does not kill; the ill complained of, but prized above every joy and earthly good; "sweet cautery", the "stolen heart," the "ravished understanding," the "rape of love": in Provencal, conoscenza. Thus Saint Teresa, quadrupedis, "dying of not being able to die".

The Recognitions - pg. 299

The sole way, it seemed to her often enough when she was working at writing a poem, to use words with meaning, would be to choose words, for themselves, and invest them with her own meaning: not her own, perhaps, but meaning which was implicit in their shape, too frequently nothing to do with dictionary definition. The words which the tradition of her art offered her were by now, in chaos, coerced through the contexts of a million inanities, the printed page everywhere opiate, row upon row of compelling idiocies disposed to induce stupor, coma, necrotic convulsion; and when they reached her hands they were brittle, straining and cracking, sometimes they broke under the burden which her tense will imposed, and she found herself clutching their fragments, attempting again with this shabby equipment her raid on the inarticulate.

Sinai

the wandering armies of Nimrod
find no battles to win,
seek no mercy to score;
grins, the horizon baked in glass
Sinai crawls on its back everyday

men left with claw-hammered retorts
their humor becomes their armor
sights burn in the distance, unattended;
Hope lay inverted beneath the weary:
Sinai crawls on its back every day

sands savor the Blood of Lost
specks of dust invade the senses
a slit tears open the Eye of Yahweh;
towers of hot-air rise up: a storm!
Sinai crawls on its back everyday

- © Khan Boha

mp3: Album Leaf - Into The Sea

as, the days inch forward out of the giant orange-shaped unknown: bright, blistery, bursting... I am reminded of San Diego of summer '06 and Album Leaf

Album Leaf - Into The Sea

mp3: Patrick Watson - Great Escape

Patrick Watson - Great Escape.mp3
Bad day, looking for a way
Oh, looking for the great escape
Gets in his car and drives away
Far from all the things that we are
Puts on a smile and breaths it in and breaths it out
He says bye-bye, bye to all of the noise
Oh he says bye-bye bye to all of the noise

Hey child, things are looking down,
That’s OK you don’t need to win anyways
Don’t be afraid just eat up all the gray
and it will fade away
Don’t let yourself fall down

Bad day, looking for the great escape
He says bad day, looking for the great escape
On a bad day, looking for the great escape
Great escape

The Recognitions - pg. 290

Reason, one of whose first accomplishments was to effectively sever itself from the absurd, irrational, contaminating chaos of the past. Obtruding over centuries of gestation appeared this triumphal abortion: Reason supplied means, and eliminated ends.
What followed was entirely reasonable: the means so abruptly brought within reach, became ends in themselves. And to substitute the growth of one's bank account for the growth of one's self worked out very well.

Concert Music List

• Leonore, Overture NO.3 OP.72A - Ludwig van Beethoven
• Symphony No. 7 Op. 70 - Antonin Dvorak
  

M. Ferger

I am thinking about you, right at this moment.

The Recognitions - pg. 271

- I know, like I remember Baby and I were baked in a pie. And sometimes I try to write a poem and I cannot; and so I write down something I remember. It is the same feeling. I wrote down the poem about Baby and I were baked in a pie and some silly boy thought it was my po-em! Then she said, -I dreamt about you. She paused. -I dreamt you came to visit me. But when you knocked on the door, I opened the door and there was no one there. No one was there.
He was grinding something in a mortar. He did not stop.
- But I dreamt about you again. That was a terrible dream and I will tell you about it now because the mirrors are put away. Do not put them up again.

The Recognitions - pg. 262

- After all, my dear fellow, you are an artist, and nothing can happen to you. An artist does not exist, except as a vehicle for his work. If you live simply in a world of shapes and smells? You're bound to become just that. Why your life, the way you live ...

The Recognitions - pg. 259

- Esme. She says that's why she's a good model, because she hasn't got any stomach.

The Recognitions - pg. 252

He's surrounded by untalented people, as we all are. Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people, and protect themselves from talented people...
- Valentine, this is the last time ...
- Most original people are forced to devote all their time to plagiarizing. Their only difficulty is that is they have a spark of wit or wisdom themselves, they're given no credit. The curse of cleverness. Now wait, Brown. Stop. Stop there where you are and relax for a moment. We still have some business to straighten out. He needs to talk or he'll come to pieces, isn't that what you told me before he got here? Well let him talk, he's said some very interesting things. But don't let him talk to himself, that's all he's been doing, that's all he does when he talks to you and you don't listen, he knows you don't. Let him talk, then, but listen to him. He may not say anything clever, but that's just as well. Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest. He paused.
- Come, my dear fellow. If you don't say anything I shan't be able to use you in this novel, the one in which Brown figures so monumentally since everyone thinks he's honest because he doesn't know how to be clever.

The Recognitions - pg. 251

- Like everything today is conscious of being looked at, looked at by something else but not by God, and that's the only way anything can have its own form and its own character, and ... and shape and smell, being looked at by God.

The Recognitions - pg. 247

- Because, my dear fellow, no one knows what you're thinking. And that is why people read novels, to identify projections of their own unconscious. The hero has to be fearfully real, to convince them of their own reality, which they rather doubt. A novel without a hero would be distracting in the extreme. They have to know what you think, or good heavens, how can they know that you're going through some wild conflict, which is after all the duty of a hero.