To Do List

• Chapter 4,5 revision

The High Window - pg. 55

He had sharp black eyes with a pair of pouches under each eye, brownish purple in color and traced with a network of wrinkles and veins. His cheeks were shiny and his short sharp nose looked as f it had hung over a lot of quick ones in its time. A Hoover collar which no decent laundry would have allowed on the premises nudged his Adam's apple and a black string tie poked a small hard knot out at the bottom of the collar, like a mouse getting ready to come our of a mousehole.

The High Window - pg. 42

From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away. Her mouth was too wide, her eyes were too blue, her makeup was too vivid, the thin spread, and the mascara was so thick on her eyelashes that they looked like miniature iron railings.

The High Window - pg. 38

"For five I could start thinking."
"I wouldn't want to make it that tough for you."
"For ten I could sing like four canaries and a steel guitar."

The High Window - pg. 26

"I'm screaming," I said. "With rage and pain."

Divisadero - Closing

Lucien pushes the boat free of the mud shelf and strides beside it through the cloudy water and climbs in. He turns his back to the far shore and rows towards it. He can in this way travel away from, yet still see, his house. Water laps up between the boards, and he feels he is riding a floating skeleton. He is able to distinguish the shape of his small home in the quickening dusk. He wants to stand, to see everything clearly, and at the very moment of his thinking this, a board cracks below him, like the one crucial bone in the body that holds sanity, that protects the road out to the future. His gaze holds on tho this last, porous light. Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible.

To Do List

• Chapter 3 revision
• Ficciones
  

Divisadero - pg. 231

But for Lucien, writing was a place of emergency. He wanted what he had done those first few times, without awareness, when the page was a pigeonnier flown into from all the realms one had travelled through. There had been the gathering then, the thrill of diversity. There was no judgment. He had not sought judgment when he began to write, but it had somehow become crucial to hislife. When all he had wanted was to dance with no purpose, with a cat.

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

To Do List

• Chapter 3 revision
• Columbus project

To Do List

• Chapter 3
• physical layer diagram, plots
• cover letter
• states databases update
  

Ficciones - Opening

TLON, UQBAR,
ORBIS TERTIUS

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The unnerving mirror hung at the end of a corridor in a villa on Calle Goana, in Ramos Mejia; the misleading encyclopedia goes by the name of The AngloAmerican Cyclopedia (New York, 1917), and is a literal if inadequate reprint of the 1902 Encyclopaedia Britannica.


Copyright 1962 by Grove Press, Inc.
All Rights Reserved

Translated from the Spanish
1956 by Emcee Editores, S.A., Buenos Aires
First Printing
Manufactured in the United States of America.

To

Esther Zemborain de Torres

Divisadero - pg. 141

We have become unintelligible in our secrets, governed by our previous selves.

Divisadero - pg. 122

When she began to sing, what was surprising was not the power of her voice, or its range from rough to tender, but the confidence she had built up there, as if a great actress were sculpting the air with her arms while drawling like Chryssie Hynde. It was a persona Cooper had not met in all the time he had spent with Bridget. Her subliminal dancing, her yelling back to the crowd, her translation of 'Season of the Witch' into a rough, dangerous blues, left him unmoored from everything he knew about her. He'd never met this woman before.

Divisadero - pg. 76

She and Rafael keep between them a formality that makes them careful with each other. They have stepped into this friendship the way solitaries in medieval times might have bundled together for the night before journeying on towards a destination of marriage or war. So that Anna is not aware that the casualness in Rafael she witnesses is inconsistent with his nature (save for the territorial precision with which he flicked that bee off his guitar in her presence a few days earlier), while he knows scarcely a thing about her. Who is she? This woman who has led him into this medicine cabinet of a room where most of her possessions exist -- books, journals, passport, a carefully folded map, archival tapes, even the soap she has brought with her from her other world. As if this orderly collection of things is what she is. So we fall in love with ghosts.

Divisadero - pg. 75

I'm embarrassed by the size of the other rooms.
Rafael sat on the bed, watching the strip of her energy, tall, erect. Dark jeans, blue shirt, a rolled-up sleeve on her brown arm. He noticed a mirror positioned low on the wall, a low sink.
This room belongs to a child.

Divisadero - pg. 60

They stop for a drink in a roadside bar. Once back in the car, Cooper separates money equally, into four piles, and puts his in an old Northwest Airlines bag. Then they drive again, the last leg, with the windows down, the highway breeze sideswiping him. At one point he slows the car to a halt and she says, 'What is it?' There is an owl on the road, apparently unwilling to leave the heat of the highway, and Coop drives around it and continues. When they reach the bus depot at Tonapah, he sits a moment longer, his hands on the wheel, as if there were still miles to go. They get out and Ruth comes around to the driver's door and they embrace. Coop is going to disappear. He will never these friends again. He pulls out the Northwest Airlines bag and walks away from the car. Ruth starts it and a moment later drives past him -- a tap on the horn, her hand out the window -- but he doesn't acknowledge the second farewell. He has already become a stranger.

Destroyer: To the Heart of the Sun on the Back of the Vulture, I'll Go

I memorized the moves of a great culture.
It gave way to the vulture and me.
So, I decided to be through with the assassins and the kids,
and kill for the thrill of silencing.

Yes, throw yourselves away,
don't save yourselves.
Throw yourselves away,
don't save yourselves.

Father tried to find her,
but she's not there.
Guess I lost those tracks in the City of Despair.
And, winding round the fact that things fall apart,
have a heart sister!
Don't you know you started to?

Yes, throw yourselves away,
don't save yourselves.
Throw yourselves away,
don't save yourselves.

In a theater of impatience,
records cause culture
as records break records.
On the back of the vulture,
I'll go to the heart of the sun.
We have set the controls for one

Shhh...

Just like days of old,
bad horses still get sold.
Mistakes get made, I mean we blaspheme.
Like mad eagles who think they've made the same one's extinct,
girl, you've got another thing
coming.

So, throw yourselves away,
don't save yourselves.
Throw yourselves away,
don't save yourselves.

In a theater of impatience,
records cause culture
as records break records.
On the back of the vulture,
I'll go to the heart of the sun.
We have set the controls for one.
I'll go to the heart of the sun.
We have set the controls for one.

Divisadero - pg. 13

Steamboats travelled inland to the furthest point of navigation - as far as the Feather River. And a many-headed civilization arrived. Gamblers, water entrepreneurs, professional shootists, prostitutes, diarists, coffee drinkers, whisky merchants, poets, heroic dogs, mail-order brides, women falling in love with boys who walked within the realm of luck, old men swallowing gold to conceal it on their return journeys to the coast, balloonists, mystics, Lola Montez, opera singers -- good ones, bad ones, those who fornicated their way across the territory. Dynamiters blasted steep grades and the land under your feet. There were seventeen miles of tunnels beneath the town of Iowa Hill. Sonora burned. Weaverville burned. Shasta and Columbia burned. Were rebuilt and burned again and rebuilt again and rebuilt again. Sacramento flooded.

Divisadero - Opening

By our grandfather's cabin, on the high ridge, opposite a slope of buckeye trees, Claire sits on her horse, wrapped in a thick blanket. She has camped all night and lit a fire in the hearth of that small structure our ancestor built more than a generation ago, and which he lived in like a hermit or some creature, when he first came to this country.

First published in Great Britain 2007
Copyright 2007 by Michael Ondaatje

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
36 Soho Square
London W1D 3QY

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library


Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

The paper this book is printed on is certified by the 1996 Forest
Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient forest friendly.
The printer holds FSC chain of custody SGS-COC-2061

For John and Beverly

and in loving memory of Creon Corea

--remembered by us as 'Egilly'

Concrete - Closing

I ran over to the lunatic asylum to order a taxi, since this could not be done from the cemetery, and drove straight back to the hotel. I drew the curtains in my room, writes Rudolf, took several sleeping tablets, and woke up twenty-six hours later in a state of extreme anxiety.

Concrete - pg. 151

When we have sentences in our heads we still can't be certain of being able to get them down on paper, I thought. The sentences frighten us; first the idea frightens us, then the sentence, then the thought that we may no longer have the idea in our heads when we want to write it down. Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is to write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.

Concrete - pg. 83

To have to give myself up to all these people, yet at the same time to be all alone in Peiskam, where suddenly treachery lurked once more in every corner. Making my own breakfast and my own supper and having to endure constant nausea from one breakfast to the next, from one supper to the next, from one disappointment in the weather to the next. Having to read the newspapers everyday with their diet of local political dirt and all the garbage they carried on their political, economic and cultural pages. Yet not being able to escape from the newspapers because, despite everything, I have a compulsion to devour this journalistic dirt everyday, as if I were afflicted by a perverse and gluttonous appetite for the newspapers. Not being able to escape from all this public and published dirt, in spite of having the will to do so, the will to survive in fact, because I can't escape from this gluttonous appetite of mine - for all the horror stories emanating from the Ballhausplatz, where a half-crazed Chancellor is at large, issuing half-crazed orders to his idiotic ministers, for all the horrendous parliamentary news which daily jangles in my ears and polluted my brains and which all comes packaged in Christian hypocrisy.

To Do List

• Chapter 1 Revision
• Chapter 3 Revision
  

Men God Forgot - pg. 25

Near by, in the Cul-de-sac of the Cripples, a woman scolded her husband in pictured terms: 'You washingline, you colourless rag!' The voice died away, stifled by the heat. Somewhere in Mohamed Aly street a tram ran on its rails with its lugubrious whistle, announcing the distress of a far-off world. On the shop wall, whitened with chalk, a popular painting represented a bank of the Nile with a sailingboat upright on the river, immobile as if it did not wish to move any more, but to stay like that forever, afraid of the wide and vast unknown. And it seemed as if everything, quarter, people and things, were fixed like this sailing-boat painted on the wall, no longer wishing to know that one can move; to hope for other ends than those already attained ; to go further and further on the road. And that it was folly.

Men God Forgot - pg. 24

The postman moved off, taking his grotesque shadow with him down the street.

Men God Forgot - pg. 17

He stood on tiptoe, and it seemed to him that he was like a high minaret, dominating all by its height, the people of this quarter and of others too, all of them crushed by the wisdom emanating from his word, from him, the prophet, the illuminated prophet recognised at last.

Men God Forgot - pg. 16

Sound of dry leaves and buzzing insects. The least vibration of matter is perceptible, to the ears? Men are asleep. Time takes on a new dignity, relieved of men and their eternal wrangles.

Men God Forgot - pg. 15

High up in the sky, the sun is wedding the earth in mad embraces. The air is heavy with complaint, like the stifled cries of a virgin you are ravishing. A hot substance penetrates, flows through life, burning its creatures, waking monsters in the bodies of defenceless children, looting everything in its infernal rage and bringing thirst, thirst to everything : lips, the soul, the eyes, the flesh. Ah, who will deliver men from this hell? clouds of blinding dust, dust that one breathes, that one swallows always and everywhere; sweat that drowns you in its tepid water, trickles down your skin and makes your lightest clothes unbearable, sticky, to the point of making you long for death. Excrement must be drying somewhere at the foot of a wall. Not to mention the flies, the horrible nation of flies, settling as conquerors on wounds, seeking nourishment in the corners of hollowed and bleeding eye-sockets, near the noses of children where the gleaming snot draws their frightful swarm; poisoning the crude nourishment destined for the poor, the poor who worry no longer, stir no longer, because they are disgusted with the world and with everything.

Men God Forgot

The Postman Gets His Own Back
IT WAS frightfully hot.
In the Street of the Pregnant Woman the postman stopped, as he did every morning, before the shop of Hanafi, the laundryman.

To Do List

• Complete Chapter 1,2,3,4 Revision
• application process
• 
  

Concrete - pg. 35

But before I can publish it I have to write it, I thought, and at this thought I burst into a fit of laughter, of what I call self-laughter, to which I have become prone over the years through being constantly alone. Yes, you've first got to write the work in order to be able to publish it! I exclaimed to my own amusement.

Concrete - pg. 33

But I've always had a sound instinct about what should be published and what should not, having always believed that publishing is senseless, if not an intellectual crime, or rather a capital offence against the intellect. We publish only to satisfy our craving for fame; there's no other motive except the even baser one of making money, which in my case, thank God, is ruled out by the circumstances of my birth. Had I published my essay on Schoenberg I shouldn't dare to be seen in the street any longer; the same would be true if I'd published my work on Nietzsche, although that was not a complete failure.

Concrete - pg. 30

And above all we always overrate whatever we plan to do, for, if the truth were known, every intellectual work, like every other work, is grossly overrated, and there is no intellectual work in this generally overrated world which could not be dispensed with, just as there is no person, and hence no intellect, which cannot be dispensed with in this world: everything could be dispensed with if only we had the strength and the courage.

Concrete - Opening

From March to December, writes Rudolf, while I was having to take large quantities of prednisolone, a fact which I am bound to record here, against the third acute onset of my sarcoidosis, I assembled every possible book and article written by or about Mendelssohn Bartholdy and visited every possible and impoossible library iin order to acquaint myself thoroughly with my favourite ocmposer and his work, preparing myself with the most passionate seriousness for the task, which I had been dreading throughout the preceding winter, of writing - such was my pretension - a major work of impeccable scholarship.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Translation Copyright 1984 by David McLintock
All rights reserved under
International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York.

Originally published in Germany as Beton by
Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.
Copyright 1982 by Suhrkamp Verlag
This translation originally published
in Great Britain in 1984 by
J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.

Composed in Great Britain in VIP Sabon by
Biddles Ltd., Guildford
Printed and bound by
The Haddon Craftsmen, Scranton, Pennsylvania

Display typography and binding design by
David Connolly

Manufactured in the United States of America
First American Edition

Reading Priorities

In descending order of priority

• Concrete - Thomas Bernhard
• The High Window - Raymond Chandler
• Plats - JH Trefry
• Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri
• The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
  
• 2666 - Roberto Bolano
• Upanishads
  
• History of Lucknow
• The Recognition of Shakuntala - Kalidasa
  

Terra Nostra - Closing

Twelve o' clock did not toll in the church towers of Paris; but the snow ceased, and the following day a cold sun shone.

Terra Nostra - pg. 770

... Erasmus wrested from the Middle Ages the certainty of immutable truths and imposed dogmas; for modernity he reduces the absolute of reason and the empire of the self to ironic proportions. Erasmian madness is the checkmate of man by man himself, of reason by reason itself, not by sin or the Devil. But it is also the critical consciousness of a reason and an ego that do not wish to be deceived by anyone, not even by themselves.

Terra Nostra - pg. 761

Only Cuban Venegas, that flabby, garish old rumba queen with the swelling heart-shaped buttocks, maintained her strange Antillean optimism to the end, singing melancholy boleros in her sung-out voice in the lowest dives in Pigalle. She said, unaware of the paraphrase: "All good Latin Americans come to Paris to die."
Perhaps, she was right. Perhaps Paris was the exact moral, sexual, and intellectual point of balance between the two worlds that tear us apart: the Germanic and the Mediterranean, the North and the South, the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin.

Terra Nostra - pg. 761

-- at what moment Spanish America had fucked everything up. You haven't seen them lately. If they are still alive, even thoday they are surely declaring, along with you, fucked-up Peru, and who had come to Paris a refugee like all the others, wondering, like all the others -- with the exception of the Cuban rumba-rhythm queen -- at what moment Spanish America had fucked everything up. You haven't seen them lately. If they are still alive, even today they are surely declaring, along with you, fucked-up Peru, fucked-up Chile, fucked-up Argentina, fucked-up Mexico, the hwole fucked-up world.

Terra Nostra - pg. 756

Slowly Felipe climbed, holding the feverish hand of Mihail-ben-Sama.
This time he closed his eyes to avoid seeing, as he had before, himself; rather, the world; and on each step the world offered the temptation to choose anew, choices dating from the dawn of time, but always in the same, if transfigured, place: this land, land of Vespers, Spain, Terra Nostra.

To Do List

• apps. city-wide
  
• Chapter 4 Revision
• The High Window
  

Terra Nostra - pg. 752

"Close your mouth, Your Mercy, for the flies of Spain are very insolent"

Terra Nostra - pg. 739

"It is called Baroque, and it is an instantaneous flowering: its bloom so full that its youth is its maturity, and its magnificence its cancer. An art, Felipe, which, like nature itself, abhors a vacuum: it fills all voids offered by reality. Its prolongation is its negation. Birth and death are the only acts of this art: as it appears, it is fixed, and since it totally embraces the reality it selects, totally fills it, it is incapable of extension or development. We still do not know whether from this combined death and birth further dead things or further living things can be born."

To Do List

• Chapter 5 Revision
• The high window
  

To Do List

• Chapter 4 Revision
• Chapter 1 Revision
• Terra Nostra - Conclusion
• Vicente Huidobro from library