Marks Of Identity - pg. 99

You both laughed at the same time. The night before - before you had gone to the professor's burial - you and she had made love as you had in the old days, and when you felt the beat of your own heart as you ran your tongue across Dolores's soft stomach, her firm thighs, her hidden and moist sex, you thought about the fateful news of President Falleres in the arms of his mistress. Was not an orgasm a small death perhaps?

Ballad of a Comeback Kid

Pray for content, settle for free rent,
the tenements recall Rome.
High five, look up, look alive, as the scions of history
guess another mystery wrong.

Recite your lines, and I'll quote scripture.
Everything was fine until membership lost its privileges.
Everyone in town wanted to be around you,
this went on for awhile until they finally found you.

Ever-so-careful, on the strip we cruise,
crippled in someone else's shoes.
Who knew? Mind you,
I never had to stand in line, you did,
for the Ballad of a Comeback Kid.

Watch your step as you step down from the podium,
returned from the war to a hero's welcome, what's more you just had to win.
Blazing new trails, waving goodbye to the audience.
Held captive, the crowd was inactive, it made such perfect sense.

Ever-so-careful on the strip we cruise,
crippled in someone else's shoes.
Who knew? Mind you,
I never had to stand in line, you did.

But you won't, Kelly says she could have.
But you won't, Kelly says she could have.

Like a bat out of hell, time has come for.
Like a bat out of hell, time has come for.
Like a bat out of hell, time has come for you.

Ever-so-careful on the strip we cruise,
crippled in someone else's shoes.
Who knew? Mind you,
I never had to stand in line, you did.
Ever-so-careful, on the strip we cruise,
crippled in someone else's shoes.
Who knew? Mind you,
I never had to stand in line, you did,
for the Ballad of a Comeback Kid.

To Do List

• Last Chapter
• 802.11n recap
• Matlab Curves
  

Flying To America: 45 More Stories: Review quote

Barthelme’s parlor tricks and satiric ploys were accused early on of being cerebral, preeningly clever, hermetically sealed, and lacking in “heart”of supplying the clattering sound track to the cocktail party of the damned.

-- James Wolcott at BookForum.com

Marks Of Identity - pg. 64

Such a strange religion, your people's, you were thinking, and so strange what it tells - a god cheated by the fiasco of his own creation to such a degree that he feels obliged to descend to earth to correct and fulfill it; with the well-known results: was it not another obvious failure? What moral lesson can be deduced from a rocambolesque fable like that?

Marks Of Identity - Opening

"Established in Paris comfortably established in Paris with more years of residence in France than in Spain with more French habits than Spanish ones including even the classic one of living with the daughter of a well-known exile a regular resident of the Ville Lumiere and an episodic visitor to his homeland in order to bear Parisian witness to aspects of Spanish life that might serve to epater le bourgeois an expert in that vast European geography that is traditionally hostile to our values and also present in his itineraries the well-known hand of the great bearded saint of that ex-paradise of a Caribbean island transformed today by work and the grace of Red semi-Reds and useful idiots into a silent and lugubrious floating concentration camp evading the realities of the moment with an easy comfortable and advantageous non-comformity showing himself with prudent niceties and calculated tactics in all the social circles of the Boetian world beyond El Ferol in order to gain for us the forgiveness and pardon of the malicious critics beyond the Pyrenees at the same time that the sum of our authentic cinematographic values remains the object of wishful ignorance bolted doors and a conspiracy of silence such are the characteristics of the individual in question and his contacts and coordinates abroad raised to the level of official photographer for France Presse and announced beyond our borders with the bass drum and cymbals of that international and well-worn repertory of noise and show which anything from far or near that smells anti-Spanish is always greeted in certain circles for having filmed a brief documentary that was defective and dull in its planning horribly put together and without photographic grace or poetry a fact that does not startle those of us accustomed as we are to acts and attitudes whose sad reiteration reveals the impotent hatred of our adversaries no matter what the Regime in our homeland since the Counter-Reformation up till the present Spain has suffered under the most unjust irritating and intolerable attacks that any nation could receive attacks which systematically and periodically emerge from the crafty hole of lies resentment ill-intentioned and tendentious information everything that implies an attack against the sovereign decision of a country to govern itself in its own way without outside interference or arbitrary impositions and if these attacks are irritating when they come from a foreign hand they only deserve a sneer when they are the work of a fellow countryman ready to sink his turbine into the sewer with the idea of making himself a famous little person by aligning himself with political positions of which we have had our fill of knowledge at a time like this which is so suspiciously exhausted by restless disagreements it is exceedingly simple to turn out scenes of the poor suburbs nor does one even have to bother to make them real a few extras dressed as policemen can beat a worker strip a little boy cover him with coal dust and seat him on a pile of manure this is within the reach of any careless person but one who does it reveals such moral taste that it is best not to mention him even though all we need is a preposition and two nouns for an all-out attack an artful insult vituperation opprobium and mocking all lit up by the livid lights of a lie there can be no freedom or leeway or any tolerance which would be criminal that there does exist misery and grief in Spain no one can deny taking pictures of miserable huts is a common thing not only in the civilised countries of Europe but also in the golden land of the United States finding some skinny child with hs belly swollen is not hard either in any country no matter how its standard of living when the gangsters of the camera decide to photograph it and reveal the defects of human society to a foreign public made up of intellectuals and snobs but it is not right or honest to see with only one eye one cannot refuse to see the whole understand only the part of course there is hunger drought and lack of housing in the marrow of all these scenes of Murcia and Andalusia but there is also something that the affected little big shot from Paris had forgotten and that something is hope more than anywhere else one must look at these century-old poor regions with clear eyes and an open heart without harboring the stupid idea of transposing their secret through a fleeting and hazy vision more worthy of a second-rate Merimee than that of the heir of a wealthy and respectable family whose father was basely murdered by the Red hordes a fine child with all of his pleasures and whims taken care of with a Christian education in an old reilgious institution under the tutelage and protection of irreproachable and worthy men what is essential we repeat is to go down on one's knees before this broad and arid panorama look up at the sky in an attempt to keep the cloud there and scratch in the earth to find the redeeming spring any other way would be walking blindly wrapped up in the dazzling dust storms of the Yeste mountains living in a dramatic and inconsolable Polyphemus complex bearing witness with the pimples of one's soul insisting on being a know-it-all in mourning and a mendacious pimp..."

To Do List

• Meeting at 2 pm.
• Fixing the bug in the model
• Presentation
• Don Quixote
• Masks of Identity
  

Don Quixote - pg. 25

"Fortunate the time and blessed the age when my famous deeds will come to light, worthy of being carved in bronze, sculpted in marble, and painted on tablets as a remembrance in the future. O thou, wise enchanter, whoever thou mayest be, whose talk it will be to chronicle this wondrous history! I implore thee not to overlook my good Rocinante, my eternal companion on all my travels and peregrinations."

Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear - Closing

Because I did recognize her voice, and I opened the front door for her from upstairs without wondering why she was entering my house that night and coming upstairs to speak to me.

July, 2002

Don Quixote

Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear - pg. 334

'Adiós, gracias; adiós, donaires; adiós, regocijados amigos ; que yo me voy muriendo ... '

Farewell, wit; farewell, charm; farewell, dear, delightful friends; for I am dying ...

Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear - pg. 292

That's the trouble of being so famous: lose concentration for a moment and you could become the subject of a ballad.

Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear - pg. 244

No, the past is simply not to be borne; we cannot bear not being able to do anything about it, not being able to influence it, to direct it; to avoid it. And so, if possible, it is twisted or tampered with or altered, or falsified, or else made into a liturgy, a ceremony, an emblem and, finally, a spectacle, or simply shuffled around and changed so that, despite everything, it at least looks as if we were intervening, even though the past is utterly fixed, a fact we choose to ignore. And if it isn't, if that proves impossible, then it's erased, suppressed, exiled or expelled, or else buried.

Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear - pg. 221

There is nothing worse than looking for a meaning or believing there is one. Or if there is one, even worse: believing that the meaning of something, even of the most trivial detail, could depend on us and on our actions, on most trivial detail, could depend on us and on our actions, on our intention or our function, believing that there is such a thing as the will or fate, and even some complicated combination of the two. Believing that we do not owe ourselves entirely to the most erratic or forgetful, rambling and crazy of chances, and that we should be expected to be consistent with what we said or did, yesterday or the day before. Believing that we might contain in ourselves coherence and deliberation, as the artist believes is true of his work or the potentate of his decisions, but only once someone has persuaded them that is so.

Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear - pg. 176

Some people can't forgive you for behaving decently towards them, for being loyal to them, for defending them and giving them your support, let alone doing them a favor or getting them out of some difficulty, that can, on occasions, sound the death knell for the benefactor. I'm quite sure you can come up with your own examples. It's as if they humiliated by being the object of someone's affection and good intentions, or thought that this implied a degree of contempt towards them, it's as if they could not stand to feel indebted, however imaginary the debt, or to be obliged to feel grateful. Not that they would want to be treated otherwise, of course, heavens, no, they're always terribly insecure. They would be even more unforgiving if you behaved badly or disloyally towards them, if you denied them favors and left them firmly stuck in their own mire. Some people are simply impossible, and the only sensible thing to do is to remove yourself from their presence and keep them at a distance, and not to let them near you for good or ill, or count on you for anything, quite simply, to cease to exist for them, not even in order to fight them.

Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear - pg. 176

Bear in mind that when you look at your life as a whole the chronological aspect gradually diminishes in importance, you make less of a distinction between what happened before and what happened afterwards, between actions and their consequences, between decisions and what they unleash.

To Do List

• Presentation Complete
• Stephan Meeting
• Drive
• Don Quixote
  

Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear - pg. 159

How can I not know today your face tomorrow, the face that is there already or is being forced beneath the face you show me or beneath the mask you are wearing, and which you will only show me when I am least expecting it?

Jameson+PBR

Book Cover of a Tom Stoppard's play

Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear - pg.153

We always aspire, I suppose, to being the chosen ones, and it is unlikely otherwise that we would be prepared to live out the entire course of an entire life, which, however short or long, gradually gets the better of us.

Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear - pg. 125

The article said:

Salamanca, 24th. French news reports state that following the loss of Bilbao, the Government of Valencia has gone on the offensive against the POUM and other dissident parties, in order to prevent the contrary happening.

(An almost unintelligible sentence, incidentally, the Right always was more stupid than the Left.)

According to these reports, Andres Nin, Gorkin and a third leader whose name we do not know, have been taken to Valencia and executed. All the Trotskyite leaders have been arrested by order of the Soviet consul, Ossenko, who has received orders from his Government to carry out a purge in Catalnoia similar to that carried out in Russia against Tukachewsky and his friends.

Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear - pg. 66

It is nothing, nothing is nothing, the same things, the same actions and the same people are themselves as well as their opposite, today and yesterday, tomorrow, afterwards, long ago. And in between there only time that takes such pains to dazzle us, which is all it wants and seeks, which is why none of us is to be trusted, we who are still traveling through time, all of us foolish and insubstantial and unfinished, foolish me, no one should trust me either .. Of course I had had it up to here already and even before it began, I'd never been interested in that job with the BBC, it had merely been the one reasonable way of ceasing to be irrelevant and phantasmagoric and so very silent, the one way of leaving there and disappearing.

Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear - pg. 47

She smelled good, of her own smell - one of those women whose pleasant, sour smell -- a very sexual, physical smell - prevails over any other, this would doubtless be what most excited her boyfriend (that and her much-flaunted thighs).

mp3: White Whale - What's an ocean for?

White Whale mp3s

Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear - pg. 30

Who knows who will replace us, all we know is that we will be replaced, on all occasions and in all circumstances and in whatever we do, in love and friendship, as regards work, influence, domination, even hatred, which also wearies of us in the end; in the houses we live in and in the cities that receive us, in the telephones that persuade or patiently listen to us, laughing into our ear or murmuring agreement, at play and at work, in shops and offices, in the childhood landscape we thought was ours alone and in the streets exhausted from seeing so much decay, in restaurants and along avenues and in our armchairs and between our sheets, until no trace of our smell remains, and they are torn up to make strips or rags, even our kisses are replaced, and they close their eyes as they kiss, in memories and in thoughts and in daydreams and everywhere, I am like the snow on someone's shoulders, slippery and docile, and the snow always stops ...

Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear - Opening

One should never tell anyone anything or give information or pass on stories people remember beings who have never existed or trodden the earth or traversed the world, or who, having done so, are now almost safe in uncertain, one-eyed oblivion.

Copyright Javier Marias 2002
English Translation Margaret Jull Costa 2005

Originally published with the title Tu rostro mañana (1 Fiebre y lanza) by Alfaguara, Spain, 2002.

Published by arrangement with Mercedes Casanova Agencia Literaria, Barcelona, and in association with Chatto & Windus, Random House UK, London.

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Manufactured in the United States of America.
New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada, Ltd.
First published clothbound in 2005.
Jacket Design by Semadar Megged.

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue
New York, New York 10011

Little, Big - Closing

One by one the bulbs burned out, like long lives come to their expected ends. Then there was a dark house made once of time,made now of weather, and harder to find; impossible to find and not even as easy to dream of as when it was alight. Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there was ever a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn't as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.

Little, Big - pg. 490

The morning was huge, and went on in all directions before her, and blew coldly past her into the house. She stood a long time in the open doorway, thinking: one step. One step, which will seem to be a step away, but which will not be; one step into the rainbow, a step she had long ago taken, and which could not be untaken, every other step was only further. She took one step. Out on the lawn, amid the rags of mist, a little dog ran toward her, leaping and barking excitedly.

-- Alice

Little, Big - pg. 437

He poured himself a small whiskey (gin was verboten, but his adventure had left him with a persistent small habit, more like a sweet tooth than an addiction) and addressed himself to the mail which Fred had brought from uptown.

Little, Big - pg. 426

Lilac said something that made no sense, about clouds and houses, and then no more, for she was asleep. Asleep, never having noticed the moment when she began, dreaming of it already as she would go on dreaming of it from now on; dreaming of all that she had seen, and all that would come of it; dreaming of the spring when she would dream of the autumn when she fell asleep, and dreaming of the winter when she would wake; in the involution of her dream, turning and altering those things she dreamed even as she dreamed them and as elsewhere they came to pass. She drew up, though unaware she did so, her knees; she drew her hands close to her chin, which drew down, till she took the same S-shape she had taken when she had lived within Sophie. Lilac was asleep.

Little, Big - pg. 392

The Art of Memory could make a plan of his past where all this had perhaps a place, but it couldn't have restored to him this fullness: these odors, sweet and moist and vivifying, as though the air had a clear liquid texture; the constant low nameless sound filling up the air, whispering loud to his dull ear, pricked out with birdsong; the very sense of volume, of far distances and middle distances made out of lines and groups of new-leaving trees and the roll and heap of the earth.

100 "Great" Novels

Another list of 100 Novels

Little, Big - pg. 365

The cold compassion of bartenders, he came to see, was like that of priests: universal rather than personal, with charity for all and malice toward almost none. Firmly situated (smiling and making ritual and comforting gestures with glass and cloth) between sacrament and communicant, they commanded rather than earned love, trust, dependence. Best always to placate them. A big hello, and the tips subtle but sufficient.

Little, Big - pg. 318

Auberon wouldn't ever decide whether he loved her more when her attention was on him, or when as now it was fixed on some task or thing in the real world. He couldn't write a story about her: it would consist only of catalogues of her actions, down to the most minute.

Little, Big - pg. 299

Like all lovers, they had soon assembled (as on a revolving stage) the places where the scenes of their drama alternately took place: a little Ukrainian diner whose windows were always occluded with steam, where the tea was black and so was the bread; the Folding Bedroom of course; a vast gloomy theater encrusted with Egyptian decoration, where the movies were cheap and changed often and played into the morning; the Nite Owl market; the Seventh Saint Bar & Grill.

The great virtue of the Seventh Saint, besides the price of its drinks and its nearness to Old Law Farm, a train stop away, was its wide front windows, nearly floor to ceiling, in which as in a shadow-box or on a movie screen the life of the street outside passed. The Seventh Saint must once have been somewhat splendid, for this glass wall was tinted a rich, expensive brown, which added a further unreality to the scene, and which darkened the interior like dark glasses. It was like being in Plato's cave, Auberon told Sylvie, who listened to him lecture on the subject; or rather watched him talk, fascinated by his strangeness and not paying inordinately close attention to the words.

Little, Big - pg. 292

The only one asleep in the house then in the house was Daily Alice, who lay on her stomach with her head deep in two feather pillows, dreaming of a hill where there stood an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace.

Little, Big - pg. 274

"Stuffing a dozen marshmallows into your face on the way to school? I don't know. The ills that flesh is heir to. Mortality. I look very grave and say, 'I guess we can go on now.'"

-- Smoky

Marcel Proust quote from restisnoise.com

Because [Mme de Cambremer] considered herself "advanced," because (in matters of art only) "one could never be far enough to the Left," she maintained not merely that music progressed, but that it progressed along a single straight line, and that Debussy was in a sense a super-Wagner, slightly more advanced again than Wagner. She did not realize that if Debussy was not as independent of Wagner as she herself was to suppose in a few years' time, because an artist will after all make use of the weapons he has captured to free himself finally from one whom he has momentarily defeated, he nevertheless sought, when people were beginning to feel surfeited with works that were too complete, in which everything was expressed, to satisfy an opposite need. There were theories, of course, to bolster this reaction temporarily, like those theories which, in politics, come to the support of the laws against the religious orders, or of wars in the East (unnatural teaching, the Yellow Peril, etc., etc.). People said that an age of speed required rapidity in art, precisely as they might have said that the next war could not last longer than a fortnight, or that the coming of railways would kill the little places beloved of the coaches, which the motor-car was none the less to restore to favor. Composers were warned not to strain the attention of their audience, as though we had not at our disposal different degrees of attention, among which it rests precisely with the artist himself to arouse the highest. For those who yawn with boredom after ten lines of a mediocre article have journeyed year after year to Bayreuth to listen to the Ring. In any case, the day was to come when, for a time, Debussy would be pronounced as flimsy as Massenet, and the agitations of Mélisande degraded to the level of Manon's. For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life. But that time was still to come.

Little, Big - pg. 257

Perhaps, like Daily Alice, they thought it had all Somehow slipped out of their reach, each generation slipping further from it as the inexorable slow fall of time was consumed to embers, the embers to ashes, the ashes to cold clinkers, each generation losing something of the last's close connection, or easy access, or quick understanding, the times when Auberon could photograph them or Violet wander in their realms and return with news now the dim fabulous past: and yet (Cloud knew it to be so) each generation in fact grew closer to it, and only ceased to search or bother themselves about it because they felt fewer and fewer distinctions between themselves and it. And, upon a time, there would be no searching at all for a way in. Because there they would be.

Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear

Song #149

This world is gradually becoming a place
where I do not care to be any more. Can Delmore die?
I don't suppose
in all them years a day went ever by
without a loving thought for him. Welladay.
In the brightness of his promise,

unstained, I saw him thro' the mist of the actual
blazing with insight, warm with gossip
thro' all our Harvard years
when both of us were just becoming known
I got him out of a police-station once, in Washington, the world is tref
and grief too astray for tears.

I imagine you have heard the terrible news,
that Delmore Schwartz is dead, miserably & alone,
in New York: he sang me a song
'I am the Brooklyn poet Delmore Schwartz
Harms & the child I sing, two parents' torts'
when he was young & gift-strong.

Little, Big - pg. 228

"Lilac made the fireflies dance," he told his mother when at length he came in from the garden. He circled his finger in the air as Lilac had and made a hum.

Calexico - Hard Hat

There was a day in mid-August 2006 when I had a chance to venture out on I-8 opposite El-Centro into the desert. On my way to Tempe, AZ, I ran into an ecotone, a geographical anomaly where two different landscapes collide, right outside San Diego. Within five minutes of drive time into the twisting, turning mountains, the road entered into a vast expanse of yellow sand floor. That's where I saw the unsuspicious traffic-sign pointing at Calexico on the right of I-8. To drive in that desert among rocky hills looking at you sideways is to disturb the stasis, the radio dial whispering long faded out signals hovering above the summits and the sandstorms. The intrusion, the spirits dwelling in the air, silent evenings descending, shadows of crumbling walls, forgotten alleys exposing everything exposing you, that queasy feeling one associate with travel exhaustion.

Little, Big - pg. 146

And there was no way anyway for her to tell him that what made her weep was a picture in her mind of the black pool in the forest, starred with golden leaves falling continuously, each hovering momentarily above the surface of the water before it alighted, as though choosing carefully its drowning place, and the great damned fish within too cold to speak or think: that fish seized by the Tale, even as she was herself.

Little, Big - pg. 106

There were no answers, none. All that was within the power of mind and speech has to become more precise in how the questions were put. John had asked her: Do fairies really exist? And there wasn't any answer to that. So he tried harder, and the question got more circumstantial and tentative, and at the same time more precise and exact; and still there were no answers, only the fuller and fuller form of the question, evolving as Auberon had described to her all life evolving, reaching out limbs and inventing organs, reticulating joints, doing and being in more and more complex yet more and more compact and individuated ways, until the question, perfectly asked, understood its own answerlessness. And then there was an end to that. The last edition, and John died still waiting for his answer.

Don Quixote - Opening

Prologue:
IDLE READER: Without my swearing to it, you can believe that I would like this book, the child of my understanding, to be the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most discreet that anyone could imagine.

Translation copyright 2003 by Edith Grossman; introduction copyright 2003 by Harold Bloom. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

First Ecco paperback edition 2005

Designed by Cassandra J. Pappas

Little, Big - pg. 76

"Did you ever think," Alice said, "that maybe trees are alive like we are, only just more slowly? That what a day is to us, maybe a whole summer is to them -- between sleep and sleep, you know. That they have long, long thoughts and conversations that are just too slow for us to hear."

Little, Big - pg. 67

He looked up into Daily Alice's placid and certain face, wondering why every deepening of these daily mysteries left him less inclined to probe them. "The things that make us happy," he said, "make us wise."
And she smiled, and nodded, as who should say: yes, those old truths are really true.

Little, Big - pg. 51

It was grand, still garden. The sphinxes watched her pass, their identical faces mobile in the aqueous moonlight. A frog spoke from the fishpond's edge, but not her name. She went on, across the spectral bridge and through a screen of poplars like frightened heads of hair on end. Beyond was a field, crossed by a kind of hedge, not a proper hedge, a line of bushes and small sighing trees, and the piled stones of a crude wall. She followed this, not knowing where she was going, feeling (as Smoky Barnable would years hence) that she may not have left Edgewood at all, only turned down some new illusory outdoor corridor of it.

Little, Big - pg. 44

And so on further within: the vast, inner circles where they grow to full size are so tiny that we step completely over them, constantly, in our daily lives, without knowing we do so, and never enter there at all -- though it may be that in the old heroic age, access there was easier, and so we have the many tales of deeds done there. And lastly, the vastest circle, the infinity, the center pint - Faery, ladies and gentlemen, where the heroes ride across endless landscapes and sail sea beyond sea and there is no end to possibility -- why that cirle is so tiny it has no door at all."

Crystal Country

So This is Crystal Country,
where refugees flee like I fly...
into forests of your eyes...
Hey, I saw full-on Night there...
She said - "You'll always be alone,"
and she was right, there...
She said you'll always be alone,
and she was right there rummaging through the eastern townships...
Just wait, here comes the comeback you've always hated...

Somewhere an olive branch is being planted
in honor of a dancers body and, granted,
you could take This as a sign that there is life outside the mine,
and maybe things are looking up but, Buttercup,
the form insists on rupture and therefore we break...
Ok?

So This is Crystal Country,
and, like refugees flee I fly...
into the forests of your eyes...
Hey, I saw full-on Night there...
She said - "You'll always be alone,"
and she was right, there...
She said you'll always be alone,
and she was right there rummaging through the western townships...
where they're staging a play called Comeback...
The only line is - "Don't go..."

Somewhere an olive branch is being planted
in honor of a dancers body and, granted,
I know things have never looked This good but -
somehow - indulge your life at sea for now...

Cause when a breeze is blowing,
it's just Crystal Country showing us
that everything must break to be beautiful
and, honey, that's what I meant when I called and said -
"This is fucked"...

To Do List

• Presentation part 1 and 2
• Resume updating for Boston
• Paper
• Little, Big (oh, oh)
  

Little, Big - pg. 30

She straddled the bench, and picked up a twig, at the same time drawing out with her pinkie a glittering hair that had blown between her lips. She scratched a quick five-pointed star in the dirt. Smoky looked at it and at the tautness of her jeans. "That's not really it," she said, looking birdwise at her star, 'but sort of. See it's a house all fronts..."

To Do List

• Presentation
• Chapter 3
• Little, Big
  

...gonna make...

Mine've been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud.

Reading Targets '08

1. History of Karachi
2. Upanishads, Bhagavat Gita, Vedas, Ramayana
   
3. Lost in the Funhouse, The Sot-Weed Factor - John Barth
4. Don Quixote - Cerevantes
5. Pale Fire, Ada/Ardor - Viladimir Nabokov
6. Little, Big - John Crowley
7. 2666, Nazi Literature in Americas, Last Nights on Earth - Roberto Bolano
8. The Tunnel - William Gass
9. Collected Works of Lord Byron
10. Explorations of New York School Poets
11. Ali Poor ka Aeli - Mumtaz Mufti
12. Beckett Trilogy - Samuel Beckett
13. Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
14. Earthly Powers - Anthony Burgess
15. Cantos - Ezra Pound
16. Hamlet, King Lear - William Shakespeare
17. Berlin Alexanderplatz - Alexander Doblin
18. Nadja - Andre Breton
19. Humbold's Gift - Saul Bellow
20. Hiroshima Mon Amour - Marguerite Duras