End OF The Year BookList

Very little time is left between now and Dec. 31st. The way it looks to me at least. So, the book list has to be about comprehensive wish list for next 90 days instead of the usual monthly targets.

1 - Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolano
2 - Divina Commedia - Dante Alighieri
3 - Journey To The End Of Night - Louis Ferdinand-Celine (if time permits)

Under The Volcano - pg. 215

Nevertheless the desire remained - like an echo of Yvonne's own - to find her, to find her now, to reverse their doom, it was a desire amounting almost to a resolution ... Raise your head, Geoffrey Firmin, breathe your prayer of thankfulness, act before it is too late. But the weight of a great hand seemed to be passing his head down. The desire passed. At the same time, as though a cloud had come over the sun, the aspect the roller skates, the cheerful if ironic music, the cries of the little children on their goose-necked steeds, the procession of queer poctures - all this had suddenly become transcendentally awful and tragic, distant, transmuted, as it were some final impression on the senses of what the earth was like, carried over into an obscure region of death, a gathering thunder of immedicable sorrow; the Consul needed a drink ...

Under The Volcano - pg. 213

The Consul felt a pang. Ah, to have a horse, and gallop away, singing, away to someone you loved perhaps, into the heart of all the simplicity and peace in the world; was not that like the opportunity afforded man by life itself? Of course not. Still, just for a moment, it had seemed that it was.
"What is it Goethe says about the horse?" he said. " 'Weary of liberty he suffered himself to be saddled and bridled, and was ridden to death for his pains.' "

Under The Volcano - pg. 198

He strolled back into Jacques' room, leaving Yvonne on the porch. Laruelle's voice floated up from downstairs. Was it here he had been betrayed? This very room, perhaps, had been filled with her cries of love. Books (among which he did not see his Elizabethan plays) were strewn all over the floor and on the side of the studio couch nearest the wall, were stacked, as by some half-repenting poltergeist, almost to the ceiling. What if Jacques, approaching his design with Tarquin's ravishing strides, had disturbed this potential avalanche! Grisly Orozco charcoal drawings, of an unexampled horrendousness, snarled down from the walls. In one, executed by a hand of indisputable genius, harpies grappled on a smashed bedstead among broken bottles of tequila, gnashing their teeth. No wonder; the Consul, peering closer, sought in vain for a sound bottle. He sought in vain around Jacques' room too. There were two ruddy Riveras. Expressionless Amazons with feet like legs of mutton testified to the oneness of the toilers with the earth. Over the chevron-shaped windows, which looked down the Calle Tierra del Fuego, hung a terrifying picture he hadn't seen before, and took at first to be a tapestry. Called "Los Borrachones" - why not Los Borrachos? - it resembled something between a primitive and a prohibitionist poster, remotely under the influence of Michelangelo. In fact, he now saw, it really amounted to a prohibitionist poster, though of a century or so back, half a century, God knows what period. Down, headlong into hades, selfish and florid-faced, into a tumult of fire-spangled fiends, Medusae, and belching monstrosities, with shallow dives or awkwardly, with dread backward leap, shrieking among falling bottles and emblems of broken hopes, plunged the drunkards; up, up, flying palely, selflessly into the light toward heaven, soaring sublimely in pairs, male sheltering female, shielded themselves by angels with abnegating wings, shot the sober. Not all were in pairs however, the Consul noted. A few lone females on the upgrade were sheltered by angels only. It seemed to him these females were casting half-jealous glances downward after their plummeting husbands, some of whose faces betrayed the most unmistakable relief. The Consul laughed , a trifle shakily. It was ridiculous, but still - had anyone ever given a good reason why good and evil should not be thus simply delimited? Elsewhere in Jacques' room cuneiform stone idols squatted like bulbous infants: on one side of the room there was even a line of them chained together. One part of the Consul continued to laugh, in spite of himself, and all this evidence of lost wild talents, at the thought of Yvonne confronted in the aftermath of her passion by a whole row of fettered babies.

Under The Volcano - pg. 201

Christ, oh pharos of the world, how and with what blind faith, could one find one's way back, fight one's way back, now, through the tumultuous horrors of five thousand shattering awakenings, each more frightful than the last, from a place where even love could not penetrate, and save in the thickest flames there was no courage? On the wall the drunks eternally plunged. But one of the little Mayan idols seemed to be weeping ...

The Wounded Angel - Hugo Simberg

Le Manifeste du Symbolisme

"Ainsi, dans cet art, les tableaux de la nature, les actions des humains, tous les phénomènes concrets ne sauraient se manifester eux-mêmes ; ce sont là des apparences sensibles destinées à représenter leurs affinités ésotériques avec des Idées primordiales."

"(In this art, scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena will not be described for their own sake; here, they are perceptible surfaces created to represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial Ideals.)"

Jean Moreas, Le Manifeste du Symbolisme

Under The Volcano - pg. 182

Afraid; and yet not afraid; I know what the sea is like; can it be that I am returning to it with my dreams intact, nay, with dreams that, being without viciousness, are more child-like than before. I love the sea, the pure Norwegian sea. My disillusionment once more is a pose. What am I trying to prove by all this? Accept it; one is a sentimentalist, a muddler, a realist, a dreamer, coward, hypocrite, hero, an Englishman in short, unable to follow out his own metaphors.

Goethe

Whosoever unceasingly strives upward ... him can we save.

interesting book cover

Under The Volcano - pg. 163

Certainly Sokotra only became the symbol to him much later, and that in Karachi homeward bound he might have passed within figurative distance of his birthplace never occurred to him ... Hong Kong, Shanghai;

Under The Volcano - pg. 150

Twenty-nine clouds. At twenty nine a man was in his thirtieth year. And he was twenty nine. And now at last, though the feeling had perhaps been growing on him all morning, he knew what it felt like, the intolerable impact of this knowledge that might have come at twenty-two, but had not, that ought at least to have come at twenty-five, but still somehow had not, this knowledge, hitherto associated only with people tottering on the brink of the grave and A. E. Housman, that one could not be young forever - that indeed, in the twinkling of an eye, one was not young any longer... I am not a prodigy any longer. I have no excuse any longer to behave in this irresponsible fashion. I am not such a dashing fellow after all. I am not young. On the other hand: I am a prodigy. I am young. I am a dashing fellow. Am I not? You are a liar, said the trees tossing in the garden.

James Wood's excellent point on sketching characters sparsely ...

Coetzee is always praised for his dignified bleakness, for the "tautness" or carefulness or grim efficiency of his prose, which is certainly good enough to embarrass the superfluous acreage of supposedly richer stylists. But there is a point beyond which pressurized shorthand is no longer an enrichment but an impoverishment, and an unnatural containment. It is the point at which ellipsis becomes a formalism, a kind of aestheticism, in which fiction is no longer presenting complexity but is in fact converting complexity into its own too-certain language. Hemingway at his worst represents one extreme, as when the narrator of A Farewell To Arms sees his dead friend, and tells the reader, bathetically: "He looked very dead. It was raining. I had liked him as well as anyone I ever knew."

The effect of such writing, when passed through the jaded or cynical eyes of the protagonist, is a nullification of what is described. The language simply refuses to extend the consequences of its findings. Among contemporary writers, Robert Stone and Joan Didion straiten themselves in this way; and Coetzee does so, I think, in his new novel. Thus at the simplest level, no one is ever adequately described as simply "tall and wiry ... a thin goatee and an ear-ring ... black leather jacket." This is only the beginning of description, and a prose that treats it as finale is merely servicing its own requirements, rather as, when we find ourselves in a country whose language we barely know, we limit ourselves to what we know we can say, for self-protection.

At such moments, fiction is not open to reality. Instead it is efficiently reproducing its own fictive conventions. One of those conventions is precisely that characters, and characters' bodies, are swiftly describable. Another is that a character can quickly range over the memory of many years, and produce an instant summation. David Lurie is very much this kind of character; all his reflections and memories and thoughts are tightly marshalled in a spare line or two.

Under The Volcano - pg. 129

Yet this opportunity to be brilliant was, in turn, more like something else, an opportunity to be admired; even, and he could at least thank the tequila for such honesty, however brief its duration, to be loved. Loved precisely for what was another question: since he'd put it to himself he might answer: loved for my reckless and irresponsible appearance, or rather for the fact that, beneath that appearance, so obviously burns the fire of genius, which, not so obviously, is not my genius but in an extraordinary manner that of my old and good friend, Abraham Taskerson, the great poet, who once spoke so glowingly of my potentialities as a young man.

Under The Volcano - pg. 116

Hugh looked down at some blue wildflowers like forget-me-nots that had somehow found a place to grow between the sleepers on the track. These innocents had their problem too: what is this frightful dark sun that roars and strikes at our eyelids every few minutes? Minutes? Hours more likely. Perhaps even days: the lone semaphores seemed permanently up, it might be sadly expeditious to ask about trains oneself.

Untitled

you deserve to die
my secret heart
living inside you is
her blood; on the trail
jets zooming past
leaving twilight-rays
on wide-open, blue skies;
her sinuous raptures,
grand gestures;
not enough to deliver
eternal grace,
that unriven trace;
so kill - what's after all -
a little secret to
end it all

Under The Volcano - pg. 111

And here indeed it was again, the temptation, the cowardly, the future-corruptive serpent: trample on it, stupid fool. Be Mexico. Have you not passed through the river? In the name of God be dead. And Hugh actually did ride over a dead garter snake, embossed on the path like a belt to a pair of bathing trunks. Or perhaps it was a Gila monster.

Under The Volcano - pg. 108

But now it spoke of the Mexico of Juan's childhood, of the year Hugh was born. Juan had lived and died. Yet was it a country with free speech, and the guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? A country of brilliantly muralled village and where even each little cold mountain village had its stone open-air stage and the land was owned by its people free tp express their native genius? A country of model farms: of hope? - It was a country of slavery, where human beings were sold like cattle, and its native peoples, the Yaquis, the Papagos, the Tomasachics, exterminated through deportation, or reduced to worse than peonage, their lands in thrall or the hands of foreigners. And in Oaxaca lay the terrible Valle Nacional where Juan himself, a bonafide slave aged seven, had seen an older brother beaten to death, and another, bought for forty-five pesos, starved to death in seven months, because it was cheaper this should happen, and the slave holder buy another slave, than simply have one slave better fed merely worked to death in a year. All this spelt Porfirio Diaz: rurales everywhere, jefes politicos, and murder, the extirpation of liberal political institutions, the army an engine of massacre, an instrument of exile. Juan knew this, having suffered it: and more. For later in the revolution, his mother was murdered. And later still Juan himself killed his father, who had fought with Huerta, but turned traitor. Ah, guilt and sorrow had dogged Juan's footsteps too, for he was not a Catholic who could rise refreshes from the cold bath of confession. Yet the banality stood: that the past was irrevocably past. And conscience had been given man to regret it only in so far as that might change the future. For man, every man, Juan seemed to be telling him, even as Mexico, must ceaselessly struggle upward. What was life but a warfare and a stranger's sojourn? Revolution rages too in the tierra caliente of each human soul. No peace but that must pay full toll to hell -

Under The Volcano - pg. 100

"Goats," he said, twisting Yvonne firmly out of his arms. "Even when there are no wars think of the damage they do," he went on, through something nervous, mutually dependent still, about their mirth. "I mean journalists, not goats. There's no punishment on earth fit for them. Only the Malebolge ... And here is the Malebolge."

Under The Volcano - pg. 99

"That was the point. I fell out of an ambulance with three dozen beer bottles and six journalists on top of me and that's when I decided it might be healthier to go to California."

-- Hugh Firmin

Calexico - Gardun Ruin album cover

on American folk artists

“There are three kinds of American folk artist: those who sit, contented, on a back porch contemplating America's landscape and ways; those for whom its landscape and ways are something to stand against or move boldly through; and those whose America is a shadowy, impressionistic place that moves inside of them."

-- The Guardian

Under The Volcano - pg. 85

Ah, a woman could not know the perils, the complications, yes, the importance of a drunkard's life! From what conceivable standpoint of rectitude did she imagine she could judge what was anterior to her arrival?

a thought...

One curious thing about writing is that it is incredibly obsessive. To a certain extent, it is a positive thing but one must always maintain a distance from the work-in-progress specially when it is close to finishing. The work should never be allowed the luxury to possess the writer about its self-importance - in fact a work when finished must be discarded and thrown out the window as soon as possible.

Under The Volcano - pg. 65

"Regard: see how strange, how sad, familiar things may be. Touch this tree, once your friend: alas, that that which you have known in the blood should ever seem so strange! Look up at that niche in the wall over there on the house where Christ is still, suffering, who would help you if you asked him: you cannot ask him. Consider the agony of the roses. See, on the lawn Concepta's coffee beans, you used to say they were Maria's, drying in the sun. Do you know their sweet aroma any more? Regard: the plantains with their queer familiar blooms, once emblematic of life, now of an evil phallic death. You do not know how to love these things any longer. All your love is the cantinas now: the feeble survival of a love of life now turned to poison, which only is not wholy poison, and poison has become your daily food, when in the tavern - "

Under The Volcano - pg. 63

The street was now absolutely deserted and save for the gushing murmurous gutters that now became like two fierce little streams racing each other, silent: it reminded her, confusedly, of how in her heart's eye, before she'd met Louis, and when she'd half imagined the Consul back in England, she'd tried to keep Quauhnahuac itself, as a sort of safe footway where his phantom could endlessly pace, accompanied only by her own consoling unwanted shadow, above the rising waters of possible catastrophe.

To Do List

• getnoncslinks
• devise a way to get hidden nodes
• bidirectionality is assumed for links to interfere
• compose prob_idle code
  

Against The Day paperback cover...

Under The Volcano - pg. 50

"how, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old woman from Tarasco who plays dominoes at seven o'clock in the morning?"

Under The Volcano - pg. 49

Yet they had loved one another! But it was as though their love were wandering over some desolate cactus plain, far from here, lost, stumbling and falling, attacked by wild beasts, calling for help - dying, to sigh at last, with a kind of weary peace: Oaxaca -

on theatre...

"theatre has no memory, which makes it the most existential of the arts...I keep coming back in the hope that someone in a darkened room somewhere will show me an image that burns itself into my mind."

--Sarah Kane

Under The Volcano - pg. 35

......Night: and once again, the nightly grapple with death, the room shaking with daemonic orchestras, the snatches of fearful sleep, the voices outside the window, my name being continually repeated with scorn by imaginary parties arriving, the dark's spinnets. As if there were not enough real noises in these nights the color of grey hair. Not like the rending tumult of American cities, the noise of the unbandaging of great giants in agony. But the howling pariah dogs, the cocks that herald dawn all night, the drumming, the moaning that will be found later white plumage huddled on telegraph wires in back gardens or fowl roosting in apple trees, the eternal sorrow that never sleeps of great Mexico. For myself I like to take my sorrow into the shadow of old monastries, my guilt into cloisters and under tapestries, and into the misericordes of unimaginable cantinas where sad-faced potters and legless beggars drink at dawn, whose cold jonquil beauty one rediscovers in death.

The Changes LP Cover

To Do List

1. working on probability of idle time modelling in matlab
2. running getnoncslinks.m file with multiple routing and maclayer rate info
3. finish 1

Haruki Murakami - Folklore of Our Times

Even now, looking back on it all, I think that those years were special. I'm sure that if you were to examine the attributes of the time one by one, you wouldn't discover anything all that noteworthy. Just the heat generated by the engine of history, that limited gleam that certain things give off in certain places at certain times - that and a kind of inexplicable antsiness, as if we were viewing everything through the wrong end of a telescope. Heroics and villainy, rapture and disillusionment, martyrdom and revisionism, silence and eloquence, etcetera, etcetera... the stuff of any age. Only, in our day - if you'll forgive the overblown expression - it was all so colourful somehow, so very reach-out-and-grab-it palpable. There were no gimmicks, no discount coupons, no hidden advertising, no keep-'em-coming point-card schemes, no insidious, loopholing paper trails. Cause and effect shook hands; theory and reality embraced with aplomb. A prehistory to high capitalism: that's what I personally call those years.

Billy Collin's Sonnet

an interesting idea as a meta-poem
------------------------------------------------------------
All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
And after this next one just a dozen
To launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here while we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

What is Ironic?

Isn't ironic becoming the most misused word? ... so now even 21 year olds can seamlessly find their way out of a conversation by making it "ironic". Dana was trying to make a good conversation which turned ironic .. Espressos are losing their intensity at the coffeeshop.

Under The Volcano - pg. 15

Halfway across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he'd been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down. It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage! Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country, though the coincidence could hardly have impressed anyone then! It was on this bridge the Consul had once suggested to him he make a film about Atlantic. Yes, leaning over just like this, drunk but collected, coherent, a little mad, a little impatient - it was one of those occasions when the Consul had drunk himself sober - he had spoken to him about the spirit of the abyss, the god of storm, "huracan," that "testified so suggestively to intercourse between opposite sides of the Atlantic." Whatever he had meant.

Under The Volcano - pg. 10

He watched the clouds: dark swift horses surging up the sky. A black storm breaking out of its season! That was what love was like, he thought; love which came too late. Only no sane calm succeeded it, as when the evening fragrance or slow sunlight and warmth returned to the surprised land! M. Laruelle hastened his steps still further. And let such love strike you dumb, blind, mad, dead - your fate would not be altered by your simile. Tonnerre de dieu ... It slaked no thirst to say what love was like which came too late.

Under The Volcano - pg. 9

The leaves of cacti attracted with their freshness; green trees shot by evening sunlight might have been weeping willows tossing in the gusty wind which had sprung up; a lake of yellow sunlight appeared in the distance below pretty hills like loaves. But there was something baleful now abut the evening. Black clouds plunged up to the south. The sun poured molten glass on the fields. The volcanoes seemed terrifying in the wild sunset. M. Laruelle walked swiftly, in the good heavy tennis shoes he should have already packed, swinging his tennis racquet. A sense of fear had possessed him again, a sense of being, after all these years, and on his last day here, still a stranger. Four years, almost five, and he still felt like a wanderer on another planet. Not that that made it any the less hard to be leaving, even though he would soon, God willing, see Paris again. Ah well! He had few emotions about the war, save that it was bad. One side or the other would win. And in either case life would be hard. Though if the Allies lost it would be harder. And in either case one's own battle would go on.

Under The Volcano - pg. 7

He crossed, making for the station. Although he would not be traveling by train the sense of departure, of its imminence, came heavily about him again as, childishly avoiding the locked points, he picked his path over the narrow-gauge lines. Light from the setting sun glanced off the oiltanks on the grass embankment beyond. The platform slept. The tracks were vacant, the signals up. There was little to suggest any train ever arrived at this station, let alone left it...

Under The Volcano - Opening

Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaus. Overlooking one of these valleys, which is dominated by two volcanoes, lies, six thousand feet above sea level, the town of Quauhnahuac. It is situated well south of the Tropic of Cancer, to be exact of the nineteenth parallel, in about the same latitude as the Revillagigedo Islands to the west in the Pacific, or very much further west, the southernmost tip of Hawaii- and as the port of Tzucox to the east on the Atlantic seaboard of Yucatan near the border of British Honduras, or very much further east, the town of Juggernaut, in India, on the Bay of Bengal.

Text copyright 1947 by Malcolm Lowry
Introduction copyright 1965 by J. P. Lippincott Company

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Journey To The End Of The Night - pg. 145

That's the way it goes with men - it's certainly very hard to accomplish all that's required of one in life, first as a butterfly when young, and then as a maggot when the end comes.

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - Closing

That evening, the fantastic silence, branches cracking in the cold. The sunset, frigid and subtle, essence of winter. The dark trees stretch down the slope toward the shining black ice of the river in shadow. The colors of the sky are rose, blue, pale yellow, and violet - almost amethyst. Let me say that it is amethyst. A small perfection. Dick and April stand outside the house, happy in the quiet. Civilized. April strokes her husband's thigh, Dick holds April about the waist. Delicate amethyst in the sky, growing slowly indigo. They stand again, after supper, the brilliant ice-cream moon of the poet and his wife: you and I and moonlight in Vermont. Dick thinks this, then he sings the line and laughs. April laughs. They are in Vermont! Vermont! They are in the moonlight in Vermont!

Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Letter of Vincent van Gogh on Amazon.com

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - pg. 215

There is more profit in an hour's talk with Billy Graham than in a reading of Joyce. Graham might conceivably make you sick, so that you might move, go somewhere to get well. But Joyce just sends you out into the street, where the world goes on, solid as a bus. If you met Joyce and said "Help me," he'd hand you a copy of Finnegan's Wake. You could both cry. Why is it that this should be? It is because fiction is real.

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - pg. 218

Dick often confused, as now, sexual anticipation and activity with all other emotional profundities. It was a kind of shiny anchor to which his life was chained. To fuck is to feel: deeply.

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - pg. 215

Everything literature teaches is useless insofar as structuring your life: you can't prop up anything with fiction. It, in fact, teaches you just that. That in order to attempt to employ its specific wisdom is a sign of madness.

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - pg. 197

As a matter of fact, Pound's entire career, the tragedy of his career, might be said to consist of an obsessive need to create straw men so that he can knock them over. In other words, he's very strange and literary.

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - pg. 193

What a bore she is! Can you imagine being a novelist and having to make her up, make her - believable? I have a mildly interesting idea, though, for those readers, - and they are, I understand, legion - who insist on a character they can "get ahold of." Let's say that Bart's wife is Lolita. I mean, she is the exact Lolita that Nabokov stitched together. O.K. Now you've got Bart's wife - there she is, already made, grown up, yes, as she is at the end of the book, with Humbert dead. And Bart has got this Lolita for a wife. Bart married Lolita in Judson Memorial Church. Afterward, Lincoln Gom, who showed Bart, gave them a little reception at his apartment. These people are lost from the start. And successful. One is nonplussed by the idea of those who are lost and failures too.

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - pg. 190

You have to give the rich credit for the dignity of their enormous vulgarity. They will be shit on only by the best.

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - pg. 189

Many times he would create a use for things that, to the unskilled observer, seemed utterly useless. Many people thought he was chintzy prick bastard fuck.

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - pg. 188

Bart's feeling was, for every share they own, let there be a painting! One of his own, preferably, but this was too good to be true, and, in less than a month, there were many more people on the scene, so that now it is impossible to prove that Bart first saw the rubes advancing, plenty of dollars in their hands, a lust to speak real American words with real American painters, hang these real paintings with real oil on their real walls. Bart saw them all coming, through those lean years, living on Delancey Street, drinking ten-cent dark beer in a dump under his studio, saw it all on the way: a hip nouveau-riche, a class so modern that they call themselves parvenus.The idea is that one is to forgive them because of their candor.

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - pg. 179

Never trust a poet, or anyone else in the arts, for that matter, who says, "Well, to be alive, to be in life, is more important than any poem." When they say this they are first of all insulting you, since they assume that they have discovered some profound idea, and secondly, they are apologizing - in an aggressive way - for the mediocrity of their productions.

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - pg. 169

People who write "mawning" think the language has a true "reality" off the paper. The difference between a good writer and a bad one - or, the difference between a writer (take your choice out of the millions around) and an artist - is that the former thinks the words are pictures, and so on. He thinks they "represent" things, and take their place. The artist is a slave to the fact (it takes a great while to realize this) that they represent nothing, and you pay homage to them on their terms. This is one of the reasons artists are so politically decadent, right? There are the words, which will not come forth to greet anybody.

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - pg. 158

So his poems were hard lumps, for all their celebration of "the good things". Have you ever read those free and open poems, filled with joyous rapture about sex and youth, yet there is this accurate and sharp odor of venom from them? As if they were written in poison. So Anton's poems were these chilled, hard objects, the emotion on the poem, coats of varicolored paint. In a way, I was (and am) reminded of screwdrivers and hammers, monkey wrenches, when I see these poems. You've seen them before, you'll see them again. But he had all the time in the world for producing this Bakelite. His leisure, given to Art. So could his writing develop. The silly little bastard!

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - pg. 151

Those eight brilliant poems I spoke of: I went back a few days ago to the magazine they appeared in and reread them. They are indeed brilliant. The last he composed. They were composed for a woman, but are for himself. The particular configuration made by his life and by hers prevented his possession of her and these poems so eased his anguish. This woman has never seen them, yet they had the ability to act as a charm, a talisman, whereby his desire for her was stilled. Yet, in a way that artists understand, the lineaments of these poems, the fibers out of which the words came to be arranged, were taken from his love and need for Ellen. Only in his composition will his lust assert itself. His love for Ellen is so strong that it leaves him quiescent in the face of his desires. He wants to have them - both of them. So he expires in his imagination, and is reborn in his poems. They glitter: for one, so he thinks, and from the other: the fact. So is he momentarily saved from destruction. It is sometimes at this sort of crisis in the artist's career that his art is freshened. It may, however, on the other hand grow stale and stink.

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - pg. 128

Curse of art. Terror of art. Only you know what you did, maybe a few others. I'm trying to get at something here that pertains to Leo and to many others: if you must fail then fail in the terms of your art. Don't abandon it for something that looks like art but which is apple pie to you. So that, in the pursuit of its easy crafting, you become a Great Man. It then becomes sour grapes for anyone even to breathe that you once had something real occurring in your work. Because, now, ah, now, you have dazzled the bushers. Normal Mailer knows what I mean. What is the difference between twenty shiny armies of the night and one failed deer park? Fail in the terms you are helpless within. Terror of art.

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - pg. 117

It's hard to describe her overall look, because I can remember only how she looked later, when she was Leo's wife and the mother of two daughters. I always see full skirts, sandals, peasant blouses, hair in a thick braid down her back. She always looked as if she was going out to some wheat field in the Ukraine with black bread for the harvesters. But her face escapes me - a bright, glowing, Scots-Irish face, the father of such a face could easily grow tobacco in North Carolina and serve as lay minister. Sunday suppers of fried eggs, red beans, lettuce, cold ham, apple pie, tapioca, iced tea, and lemonade. Blue haze in the valleys, smell of magnolia and honeysuckle. To marry Leo!

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - pg. 113

Most artists bore you to tears in their lives, anyway, because they refuse ever to forget how things felt. They don't know how to play "New Day," nor can they successfully turn memory into sentiment. This trait of the artist is often confused with bitterness or cynicism, but it is simply an insistence upon remembering the specific emotional responses that were once actual. All frozen in the artist's nerve centers, so that at any moment he may embarrass the company by some remark better left unsaid. His life a clutter of dead event, preserved with the exquisite care of a master taxidermist. Never can tell when some of those dusty birds up in the attic might come in handy.