mp3: Aloha - Light Works

I am synched up to my friend on the other coast as we coast through this paper and I just finished The Square and I just read the first of John Berryman's Dream Songs cycle and here right now I want to kill pitchfork for not covering Aloha's new EP "Light Works". Aloha destroyed me in June with Brace Your Face, it was brutal on the mad-crazy alternating your life away to a free-deathbound-way. Things changed. But here they are trying to sell themselves out straight on the indie rockdom with very acoustic, very jammy ta-da ta-da ta-da overload. But it's good because it's bracing me away from the face that had the empty box of wine on it turned upside down. I love the earnestness in their sound.

Aloha -

The Square - Closing

"I must say good-bye. Perhaps then we shall meet again this coming Saturday?"
"Perhaps, yes, perhaps. Good-bye."
The girl turned and went off rapidly with the child. The man watched her going, watched her as hard as he could. She did not turn back. And he took this as a sign of encouragement to go to that Dance Hall.

The Square - pg. 15

A wind had risen, so light it seemed to carry the summer with it. For a moment it chased the clouds away, leaving a new warmth hanging over the city.

The Square - Opening

The child came over quietly from the far side of the Square and stood beside the girl.
"I'm hungry,' he announced.
The man took this as an opportunity to start a conversation.

COPYRIGHT 1959 BY JOHN CALDER (PUNBLISHERS) LTD.

Originally published in France by Librairie Gallimars as Le Square

First Grove Press Edition 1959

CAUTION: All rights, including professional, amateur, motion-picture, recitation, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved. Permission for any use of this novel as a play must be obtained in writing from the author's agent, Georges Borchardt, 100 West 55th Street, New York 19, New York.

Grove Press Books and Evergreen Books
are published by Barney Rosset at Grove Press, Inc.
64 University Place, New York 3, N. Y.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

THE SQUARE
Marguerite Duras
Translated by
Sonia Pitt-Rivers
and Irina Morduch

Hiroshima Mon Amour

The Lover - pg. 117 - Closing

Years after the war, after marriages, children divorces, books, he came to Paris with his wife. He phoned her. It's me. She recognized him at once from the voice. He said, I just wanted to hear your voice. She said, It's me, hello. He was nervous, afraid, as before. His voice suddenly trembled. And with the trembling, suddenly, she heard again the voice of China. He knew she'd begun writing books, he'd heard about it through her mother whom he'd met again in Saigon. And about her younger brother, and he'd been grieved for her. Then he didn't know what to say. And then he told her. Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he'd love her until death.

Neauphle-le-Château-Paris
February-May 1984

The Lover - pg. 107

The wind has ceased, and under the trees there's the supernatural light that follows rain. Some birds are shrieking at the tops of their voices, crazy birds. As they sharpen their beaks on it, the cold air rings with an almost deafening clamor.

The Lover - pg. 104

It was a mistake, and that momentary error filled the universe. The outrage was on the scale of God. My younger brother was immortal and they hadn't noticed. Immortality had been concealed in my brother's body while he was alive, and we hadn't noticed that it dwelt there. Now my brother's body was dead, and immortality with it. And the world went on without that visited body, and without its visitation. It was a complete mistake. And the error, the outrage, filled the whole universe.

The Lover - pg. 99

He looks at her. Goes on looking at her, his eyes shut. He inhales her face, breathes in her breath, the warm air coming out of her. Less and less clearly can he make out the limits of this body, it's not like other bodies, it's not finished, in the room it keeps growing, it's still without set form, continually coming into being, not only there where it's visible but elsewhere too, stretching beyond sight, toward risk, toward death, it's nimble, it launches itself wholly into pleasure as if it were grown up, adult, it's without guile, and it's frighteningly intelligent.

The Lover - pg. 67

She's slim, tall drawn in India ink, an engraving. People stop and look in amazement at the elegance of this foreigner who walks along unseeing. Like a queen. People never know at first where she's from. And then they think she can only be from somewhere else, from there. Because of this she's beautiful. She's dressed in old European clothes, scraps of brocade, out-of-date old suits, old curtains, old oddments, old models, moth-eaten old fox furs, old otterskins, that's her kind of beauty, tattered, chilly, plaintive and in exile, nothing suits her, everything's too big, and yet it looks marvelous. She's made in such a way, face and body, that anything that touches her shares immediately and infallibly in her beauty.

The Lover - pg. 44

Now evening comes. He tells me I'll remember this afternoon all my life, even when I've forgotten his face and name. I wonder if I'll remember the house. He says, Take a good look at it. I do. I say it's like everywhere else. He says yes, yes, it's always the same.

The Lover - pg. 25

In the books I've written about my childhood I can't remember, suddenly, what I left out, what I said. I think I wrote about our love for our mother, but I don't know if I wrote about how we hated her too, or about our love for one another, and our terrible hatred too, in that common family history of ruin and death which was ours whatever happened, in love or in hate, and which I still can't understand however hard I try, which is still beyond my reach, hidden in the very depths of my flesh, blind as a newborn child. It's the area on whose brink silence begins. What happens there is silence, the slow travail of my whole life. I'm still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.

The Lover - pg. 4

Very early in my life it was too late. It was already too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteen and twenty-five my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eighteen. I don't know if it's the same for everyone, I've never asked. But I believe I've heard of the way time can suddenly accelerate on people when they're going through even the most youthful and highly esteemed stages of life. My ageing was very sudden. I saw it spread over my features one by one, changing the relationship between them, making the eyes larger, the expression sadder, the mouth more final, leaving great creases in the forehead. But instead of being dismayed I watched this process with the same sort of interest I might have taken in the reading of a book. And I knew I was right, that one day it would slow down and take its normal course. The people who knew me at seventeen, when I went to France, were surprised when they saw me again two years later, at nineteen. And I've kept it ever since, the new face I had then. It has been my face. It's got older still, of course, but less, comparatively, then it would otherwise have done. It's scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed, as some with fine features have done. It's kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste.

The Lover - Opening

One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, "I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged."

Translation Copyright 1985 by Random House, Inc., and William Colins Sons & Co. Ltd.

not a New Author

Amzon Link: The Lover by Marguerite Duras

Only 128 pages!