ontext

*Grande Sertão: Veredas, or, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands

2007-03-14T16:15:00.002-07:00

Grande Sertão: Veredas, or, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands -João Guimarães Rosa
I think the novel itself is a form of bravery. Any novel. The poem may be truth, but the novel is good. There is so much badness in this book that I can’t explain exactly how soft it is. The place itself, the sertão, the text, is as dense as a heart. And though a heart is fragile, it is never short-lived.
A beautiful book.
“Don’t you know that one who is wholly brave, in his heart, cannot help being good, too?”
“Is God a trigger?”

*Beloved

2007-03-14T16:15:00.001-07:00

Beloved -Toni Morrison
One of the most pure and powerful uses of language I’ve ever encountered. I don’t know in what possible way we, as humankind, are not like the love that terrorizes the characters of this novel. And yet. And yet. Sethe ends up dribbling in a rocking chair and yet she wins. She wins. She wins grace that her world isn’t ready for. Listen to her voice:
“And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew.”
“Now I can. I can sleep like the drowned, have mercy.”

*Our Lady of the Flowers

2007-03-14T16:14:00.001-07:00

Our Lady of the Flowers -Jean Genet
In the long-evening half-light of mid-American dusk, the smell of barbecue and panting dogs and summer children, sun tea cooling on the gravel driveway and mosquitoes in helices around the porchlight in the deep green unmown lawns to the slow romance of the crickets, the dandelion is sexing itself. The starfish breaks an arm to fragment a new organism. The coffee tree is autogamous. Most amazing is the aphid, which is usually parthenogenic, generationally telescoping, born with a baby in the belly, sometimes born with a baby and a grand-baby in the belly. But the aphid will still have sex, Genet is idiodioecious, and under his covers he is only a man, hard-on, mind womb wound around a semi-gendered Darling who gains the male pronoun like the blooming phallic raceme of the foxglove but sometimes slips into the deep curtsy of a little girl.
This book inspired me to research the hymen, which is only present in the following animals: llamas, guinea pigs, manatees, moles, toothed whales, chimpanzees, elephants, rats, lemurs, seals, and horses.
Besides the hot sex, it was hard for me to pay attention to this book. I let the words, though, the slick hard style of it, gloss over me. Coat me. And I marveled at a phrase, a situation, but, especially towards the end, completely lost myself to its pages.
“The swan, borne up by its mass of white feathers, cannot go to the bottom of the water to find mud, nor can Jesus sin.”
“It was a smile that was enough to damn his judges, a smile so azure that the guards themselves had an intuition of the existence of God and of the great principles of geometery.”
“He was good-looking—as are all the males in this book, powerful and lithe, and unaware of their grace.”
“like violins being skinned alive.”

*The Duino Elegies

2007-03-14T16:11:00.000-07:00

The Duino Elegies -Rainer Maria Rilke
For Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror is to say that Birth is nothing but the beginning of Death. Then, ask me, ask, to what is the beginning of Death? The only medicament is Night. Oh and night: there is night... Because Light and Lovers are only masks—inadequately covering the terror. Masquerades of levity we are. And wasn’t it Goethe who said that if the world wasn’t inherently dark then we wouldn’t need light. And didn’t he also say that architecture is frozen music. What then is poetry, but unfettered dirt. Angels, chronologically, are pre-dirt. Man is post-rock. Poetry is un-rock. Music is etymologically earth-angel. Architecture, then, is to Poetry what an edifice is to marble slab. What then, Rilke, has mustered under his open window with the violin pealing along the breeze, is an unwieldy temple for metaphors (instead of vice-versa). On its altar shines a Mask to end all Masks. In which we disguise our dark souls with darkness and disappear into immortality. No, not even Women in Love can penetrate this totality, not even the Hero or Rome or Gaspara Stampa or Nietzsche or the Army of Children Crusaders can fade into the unremitting tides of eternity like Goethe’s Homunculus martyring himself to the lowest of forms, knowing in complete faith that over the millennia he will fall into the cycle of evolution and attain its highest state: a worthy lover. He died for worth. For boys drink wine, men drink port, but heroes drink brandy. Quaff, then, Ahab! Consecrate and Consanguinate! And then abandon. Complete, inexhaustible idealism. The poet is a Young Man—the only soul with the tension to withstand the bowstring, to fire the quiver into the unknown. For still stillness is worse than death. We must be, as Miller says, still as the hummingbird. For there is no place where we can remain.
You can remain in the beloved.
Restrain him.
Oh gently, gently, wash the atavistic graveyards with your soft steps, flicker away the battling phalluses like a fly on a hot day, landing to rub his feet in the sweet sweat-manna of your arms, a hot day, the glaze down your neck, flood the dried-up riverbeds with your tears of joy, with your birth-giving tears. For even lovemaking is a birth. And drown the rivers. But don’t be his mother. But don’t be his lover. And don’t hide his face.
Let it encounter all the world and be stunned forever.

…And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

*The Ladder of Divine Ascent

2007-03-14T16:08:00.000-07:00

The Ladder of Divine Ascent -St. John Climacus (intro by Kallistos Ware)
from Ware: “the progress of eternity,” that is, “The essence of perfection consists paradoxically in the fact that we never become perfect, but advance unceasingly ‘from glory to glory’.”
and from St. John Climacus: “War against us is proof we are making war.”
“So then, keep running, brother athletes, and again I say to you, keep running… Keep running, athlete, and do not be afraid.”
“It is one and the same fire that is called that which consumes and that which illuminates.”
“By dispassion I mean a heaven of the mind within the heart.”

*The Symposium

2007-03-14T16:07:00.000-07:00

The Symposium -Plato (translated by Christopher Gill and Desmond Lee)
2 books in a row on Love, whose parents, according to Plato, are Poverty, a drunk beggar woman, and Resource, the wily son of Invention, who conceived a child to put the Gods in order and make poets of men. I wasn’t expecting such a tipsy, homoerotic text. Nor, a sarcastic eulogy of Socrates.
“All human beings are pregnant in body and mind.”
“Yes, sexual intercourse between men and women is a kind of birth.”

*The Song of Songs

2007-03-14T16:06:00.002-07:00

The Song of Songs -translated by Chana Bloch and Ariel Bloch

How wonderful you are, O Love,
how much sweeter
than all other pleasures!

But to try to quote from the Song is like hunting for a rabbit’s foot. Or trying to cook only a spoonful of soup. The lovers are stoked with the such desperate passion, that no matter the circumstance, the politic, or the law, they bestow on themselves and, now, thanks to the translation, on us, a profound innocence. In that split moment before tears begin to well. Before pain is translated into reaction. Or desire hits the brain. No wonder the Song flaunts such a pure animal presence. The lovers living between the heartbeats. I can see the Shulamite stealthing around the city at night. Silent, almost rolling, footsteps. The lovers collision always in the softlight of dawn. The air cold.

Hurry, my love! Run away,
my gazelle, my wild stag
on the hills of cinnamon.

*Cat Attacks

2007-03-14T16:06:00.001-07:00

Cat Attacks -Jo Deurbrouck and Dean Miller
I can see them. Feel the unprecedented silence of the pounce. We are at complete oblivion to their eyes. And before I hear a sound the back of my neck is in the hot mouth of a lion.
The way they run, while stalking, so close to the ground, so graceful, almost rolling, and silent. I’ve never before seen an animal become a complete blur. We lock eyes. Or maybe it locks on my eyes and I paralyze. Or maybe I rip off my sunglasses to compensate for the depth of its stare, which takes in most of the canyon’s light. Don’t look away, I say to myself. Don’t look away. I start backing up and run into a bush. For one split moment I glance down, and then back up and the lion has halved the distance between us and is still as if it never moved. I unbutton my shirt with my left hand. Don’t look down. I pull it away from my body, assuming more girth. I snarl. Scream. Hoist my crosier in the air like some hellish cataclysm and the lion doesn’t even flinch. When my echo dies, the lion, without sound, takes about six lightning steps forward and stops again, now less than fifteen yards from me. Don’t look away. With my left hand I reach across my body and unbuckle the sheath to my knife. The lion takes two more steps. It’s still enough to be dead. My eyes water and the lion blurs into the camouflage of the sand. As if it could sense my slightly obscured vision, it creeps closer. Now I know it’s a male. Too big to be a female. But still, probably weighing less than my one forty-five. I unsheath my knife and again raise my crosier in the air. Without reason, during the scream, I feint forward and I see the lion tense. I feint again. Snarling and brandishing my crosier like some lunatic samurai. The lion doesn’t move. I feint and stamp the ground and slash the air with my knife and feint. The lion doesn’t move. Then it charges.
v

*The Black Book

2007-03-14T16:03:00.000-07:00

The Black Book -Orhan Pamuk
The first hundred pages and the last forty were stellar. But the middle few hundred were very static. Lots and lots of “becoming” going on. Lots of very subtle “revelations.” Lots of time spent watching characters read and write. The last line even named writing as “the only consolation,” which is fine. I do look forward to reading one of his later books, after Pamuk himself comes to and gets over coming to writing. And great to glimpse Turkey in the ‘70s and ‘80s. So many nouns in this book. I liked too, the notion of finding Latin letters in the lines of faces.
“and that the universe is he who is seeking the mystery.”
He like Tolstoy’s lips as well: “I loved seeing how you pushed out your upper lip when you were reading, just like a character in a Tolstoy novel.”

*The Ramayana

2007-03-14T16:02:00.000-07:00

The Ramayana (retold by Ramesh Menon)
this was a sea of love they plowed through, their chariot a ship of sorrow

“It is you who seem to have lost your reason, and tread a path of madness called Rama.”
list of animals appearing in Ramayana:
nilgai, chital, sambur, bison, leapard, tiger, krauncha bird, langur, filigree keepers, swans, tame deer, peacock, elephant, wolves, black bees, sarasa, chakravaka, geese, migrant teal, scarlet ibis, pelican, wild pig, crane, painted stork, koyal, owls, gigantic eagles, rabbits, vulture, kite, horse, squirrel, vanjaluka bird, honey bees, bear, ghandarva, kinnara, panther, monitor lizard, butterfly, firefly, scarlet-footed pigeons, mynahs, moths, boar, chameleon, duck, crocodile, cur, dolphin, whale-eating giant squid, jackal, deer called srimara and chamara, hyena, whale, sea serpent, shark, timming ala, vidyadhara, kokilas, bhringarajas, hamadryad, kitten, cobras, ants, worms, horse, and cows.
list of trees and plants appearing in Ramayana:
pipal, nyagrodha (pipal sap), kadamba, mango, aswattha, valkala (tree bark clothing), palasa, badri, yamala, bamboo, eucalyptus, early pine, sala, asvarkana, madhuka, apple, peach, pear, darbha grass, scented pala trees, karnikara, asoka, lodra flower, tilaka, sara reeds, kritamala, kumsuka flowers, patala, priyangu, punnaga, arjuna, chandana, mandara, bakula, ketaka, kusa grass, sandalwood, japaa flowers, gajapushpi vine, aguru, desdar, shimshupa, champaka, punnaga, parijata, deodar, asana, nipa, saptaparna, atimuktaka, mandara bakula, jambu, and kovidara.

“And in the heart of the forest, his spirit was opened to him: a secret, mystic bloom, thousand-petaled.”

*The Pilgrim’s Progress

2007-03-14T16:01:00.000-07:00

The Pilgrim’s Progress -John Bunyan
I am not very well acquainted with physical violence. Sad and desperate for the arduous tasking of Christianity, of religion. Death is a presence that lives in healthy, beaming children. This life however is more than thorn. Moses scourged the pilgrim, clobbered him over and again on the head until he was pulled to safety (further thorn-tripping) by a Jesus angel. I know that I’m not a “good” writer. I know I owe penance and honor and every ounce of me to my creator, but I know too that dues have been paid, and if I, and Bunyan, and the weak and the strong and the eloquent can swallow this freedom than the terror of thorns is painless, soft-petaled. I don’t want a walk in the park. I couldn’t. Nor would I turn away a man who came into the path of righteousness but “not at the wicket gate,” who “camest hither through that same crooked lane,” and not through the path of travail, through the Slough of Despond or through the trial at Vanity Fair, or after fighting the terrible Apollyon. Is there not a path through pure beauty. If I wasn’t so measly, write it, to write it. My roommate and his girlfriend storm drunken into his room. The wall is thin and she complains, “I’m so cold.” I revile the sound of my typing that I know they can hear. These words. They’re so drunk.

The Rings of Saturn -W.G. Sebald

2007-03-14T16:00:00.001-07:00

The Rings of Saturn -W.G. Sebald
A beautiful way of thinking. Robert Silman, in a blurb on the front cover, says, “Stunning and strange… like a dream you want to last forever.”
I fell asleep reading this book two days ago and dreamt of strange Chinese mass suicides and woke up with a leg and an eye twitching.
Sebald transitions, often within a paragraph, from glowing herring to the history of citylights to a forgotten maritime battle to an English hurricane to a biography of Joseph Conrad. And all done seamlessly, in the logic of interest and exploration and awe, which is closer to reality (the logic, the “storyline”) than any book I have ever read.
If I were the surgeon general of the west, I would readily prescribe afternoon constitutionals with W.G. Sebald.
“It is not for nothing that Brazil owes its name to the French word for charcoal.”
“…but would still be concerned about the wellbeing of her goldfish, which she washed under the kitchen tap every day and placed on the window ledge when the weather was fine, for a little fresh air.”
“An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herring is that, when dead, it begins to glow.”

*The Botany of Desire -Michael Pollan

2007-03-14T15:58:00.000-07:00

The Botany of Desire -Michael Pollan
I was introduced to this text as a letdown. I scanned briefly the section on the tulip, which seemed immediately paltry and dry compared to Anna Pavor’s The Tulip. I went to a Pollan reading at Black Oak’s with the Berkeley crowd wearing sandals, hemming, healthy, and terrifically pleased with themselves to confront their two favorite topics in one setting: advocacy and organics. So I was doubtful of the seriousness of the writing, and expecting mere fasciculation of the old, pro-, hippyish themes. The book is divided into four sections, or, as Pollan puts them, Desires. He explores the idea that plants have adapted themselves to meet our desires for reasons of self-propagation, or, another way of looking at it, is that certain plants have taken advantage of our desires, have, in the same way we use plants to gratify ourselves, used us to “gratify” their own unyielding desire for life. So Johnny Appleseed wasn’t delivering healthy teeth and Red Delicious to the Midwest, it was instead eccentric evangelism and applejack that came from his makeshift canoe of seeds. Basically, bringing liquor to the thirsty. Similarly, Pollan combines anecdote and the unmystification of botany and history concerning the Tulip, Marijuana, and the Potato. He shines most clearly, or, perhaps the potato does, in the last section, explaining away the human desire for control.
“Banality depends on memory…”
“Memory is the enemy of wonder.”

*Faust

2006-11-14T16:55:00.000-08:00

Faust, I & II -Goethe
Strange.
Part I, which I’d read before, was legible, full of action, tragic, and, indeed, dramatic. Part II was hifalutin, abstruse, very sexual, discombobulating, and wonderful. My favorite storyline (there were many) was that of Homunculus, the sarcastic incorporeal man-spirit, who accompanied Faust and Mephisto on their journey to Ancient Greece (in search of Helen of Troy), to find himself a form to inhabit. Quickly, (as went most of Part II, either quick or at an enormously poetic standstill), and with hardly any background or buildup, the little mansprit spots his ideal form in the passing sea goddess Galatea (a non-sequitur cameo), falls in love, and in a semi-onanistic climax, sacrifices himself before her to be deposited as the lowest form in the sea, where he will eventually, over millennia, evolve up the ontogenic ladder to become, or reincarnate, Galatea herself (which all takes place in about three pages). But Homunculus is only one of many sidebars. In fact, the entire “drama” of part II seems constructed exclusively of sidebars. Even Faust himself doesn’t seem to find much page space, and when he does, he usually poeticizes obscure references to ancient forms of magic or deities. But, somehow, despite, and also because of, a few hundred pages of nearly pure orgasm (greeting, courting, foreplay, even bodies barely exist in part II), it is a wonderful read. Not to mention the two philosophers, a Vulcanist and a Neptunist, arguing about the origin of a recently appeared mountain.
Concerning Part I: the story of Gretchen is one of the most gruesome and ruthless I’ve ever encountered. Yet Goethe still tells it playfully. And a misconception (my own) that has been righted: Faust initially “sold his soul” to Mephisto, not for knowledge, but for the experience of all human experience. Which, omniempiricus, is much more interesting than omniscience or omnipotence. Faust longs for the whole gambit of human experience, all the way to even the sadness of loss, and the ultimate loss: “Heap all their joys and troubles on my breast, / And thus my self to their selves’ limits to extend, / And like them perish foundering at the end.”
Faust retranslates the first line of John’s Gospel:“In the beginning was the Deed!”
Faust’s first words when he wakes up after time-traveling to ancient Greece (concerning Helen): “Where is she?”
Learned something about Goethe in the footnotes, that he supposedly hated bells.
“Freedom and life belong to that man solely / Who must reconquer them each day.”
And the last words of the play, “The Eternal-Feminine / Draws us onward.”

*Antony and Cleopatra

2006-10-21T14:31:00.000-07:00

Antony and Cleopatra -William Shakespeare
The seminal difference between Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth lies not in their action, nor in their intention, but in their conclusions. The last we see of Lady Macbeth is when she is frantically trying to rue away her bloodstained hands,“Out, damned spot,” she begs. But, she realizes, “What’s done cannot be undone.”
Whereas Cleopatra is left, indeed, with the ultimate cleansing, self-martyrdom. Having done no irreparable wrong, she kills herself to both avoid becking to Caesar and to join her deceased lover. Both Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth are, in terms, in the end, “unsexed.” Lady Macbeth bats away her sex so that she can find the fortitude to murder. Cleopatra, on the other hand, achieves the consummation of her sex through the love and anger shared between her and Antony. The diabolical difference between LadyBeth and Cleopatra, is that Cleopatra ends life unsexed and Lady Macbeth is, in the end, resexed. When Cleopatra dies, she uses as weapon an asp. Obviously symbolic of what it took women to become women, or to become at least ashamed of being so, instead of beggaring to the temptation of the snake, this time, she (woman/Cleopatra) delivers her own coup de (grace)innocence, and seals herself forever with the mark of conscience, the, in fact, ultimate mark of purpose, suicide.
“My resolution’s placed, and I have nothing
Of woman in me. Now from head to foot
I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon
No planet is of mine.”
and,
“I am fire and air; my other elements
I give to baser life.”
She walks away from life Cained. She leaves tattooed by the beast (purpose/potential/possibility), but, she walks upright.

Lady Macbeth, however, attempting to trump her womanity, succumbs to the beast (p/p/p, or, conscience), and is left imprisoned. Both her man, and the man in her, fail her: Macbeth cowers to a ghost and is then killed by Macduff, while she herself concedes her masculinity to tears.

Two more from Antony and Cleopatra:
“There’s beggary in love that can be reckoned.”
“The breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack.”

*The Road

2006-10-21T14:30:00.001-07:00

The Road -Cormac McCarthy
The Road is not a transcendent novel. It is not philosophy, fact, nor harbinger. It is not a moral or a prophesy. It is an artifact.
Could you say that a recovered amphora is transcendent?
But what relic has function?
If an amphora could tell a story then why would men tell stories?
Then what does the amphora do?
It promises.
And so does this book.
It promises of civilization. Of life. And of God.
“Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who’s not honored here today. [to his son] Whatever form you spoke of you were right.”

Again, read an entire McCarthy novel in less than 24 hours. Again, sick. Again, what is the opposite of devastation?
The book started with the typical Cormac off-colored descriptions…“like some… [simile of something godly, ghastly or obscure].” And the dialogue was spitting off the skillet.
But a few times Cormac was off target with sentences like, “A blackness to hurt your ears,” which is, itself, painful, beautiful, but McCarthy stresses the prose a little too much, and adds, “with listening,” [A blackness to hurt your ears with listening] which is obvious, redundant, and, in the author’s own standards, long-winded.
“Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.”
The truncated, perhaps often truncheoned, diction of The Road was less abrasive and simpler, almost sweet, inquisitive, than what is found in even the most recent of his novels.
“On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?”

And as the reviewer in The Economist pointed out, we are not short of the Cormacian stylism, “The snow fell nor did it cease to fall.” But sometimes he broke out of his fashion and was dead on good, “The nights were blinding cold and casket black…” and, this cold, miniature, Melvillian chapter, addressing the reader, pointblank, “Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.”
This sentiment is perhaps the completion of an oeuvre. But despite the blood splattered, the insanity, and the fear of ten novels, a play and a screenplay, in both of his septuagenarian works we are left with a modicum of hope. Of promise. The finish of No Country was the story of a man who built a stone water trough that would last ten thousand years. Did it last the cataclysm that forced father and son to take to The Road? Probably. Just like the promise of the amphora will last.

And in The Road the author’s voice never felt as obvious as in moments when the writing itself was choked:
“When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.”
and
“He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

*The History of Love

2006-10-21T14:30:00.000-07:00

The History of Love -Nicole Krauss
As long as the lightness keeps itself light… But how does it do that? What is the pretence is to shining? Why would a dark soul even try to write a book?
By the end of the novel I was impressed. The plot complicated delightfully and resolved like the crack of a blossoming sweet pea.
What was so perplexing was the ever-present question: Can I take this book seriously?
Very far from meta-fiction, removed from slapstick, off-track of drama, oft-too-puerile for a love story, full of tricks and quips, The History of Love, unbelievably, came to itself, and what I finally gleaned from Krauss was the simple joy of writing.
It won’t keep you up nights, but, quick and charming in a great way.
“her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
“When a Jew prays, he is asking God a question that has no end.”

*Monkey

2006-10-21T14:29:00.000-07:00

Monkey –Wu Ch’Eng-En – translated by Arthur Waley
A blurb from The Nation describes the book as a “combination of picaresque novel, fairly tale, fabliau, Mickey Mouse, Davy Crocket, and Pilgrim’s Progress.” I would add to that list The Divine Comedy, The Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn, 1001 Arabian Nights and modern political satire. But despite the seemingly esoteric description, it is a light, breezy novel. The reader doesn’t need to know who Lao Tzu is to laugh when he pinches Monkey and tells him “Be off with you, be off with you, and don’t let me find you hanging round here [heaven] anymore.” The reader doesn’t need to have a few University years of Chinese fiction or philosophy under the belt before laughing at Monkey stuffing himself with the Jade Emperor’s peaches. Nor, even, does the reader need to be steeped in morality, for, though having early attained immortality and, we all know, on fast track for Buddhahood, Monkey still likes to crack a dragon joke before clobbering one over the head with his cudgel in “a real garlic-pounding blow that will finish him off for good and all.”
Waley’s translation flows lightly, using a vernacular that is simple, easy and inviting, and, at the same time, reminiscent of the sagacity of the veteran Boddhisatvas, many of whom make guest appearances. It is a beautiful, wild, fun story centered around a stone-born ape, aka Monkey, aka “Aware of Vacuity,” who tromps the world over in search of mischief, power, peaches, sacred texts and enlightenment. Strikingly similar to 1001 Arabian Nights in both form, wisdom, and content.
“I wonder whether a knowledge of the True Scriptures would not cause some improvement in them? Do you yourself possess those scriptures?’” asked the Bodhisattvas! ‘Yes, three baskets of them,’ said Buddha,” and the journey began…
“Tripitaka said nothing, but only pointed again and again at his own heart.”
“He who does not believe that straight is straight must guard against the wickedness of good.”
“’I will rise on my cloud-trapeze,’ said Monkey, ‘and force my way into the southern gate of Heaven. I shall not go to the Palace of the Pole and Ox, nor to the Hall of Holy Mists, but go straight up to the thirty-third heaven, and in the Trayasimstra Courtyard of the heavenly palace of Quit Grief I shall visit Lao Tzu and ask for a grain of his Nine Times Sublimated Life Restoring Elixir, and with it I shall bring the king back to life.’”
“A team of horses cannot overtake a word that has left the mouth.”

*The Satanic Verses

2006-10-21T14:27:00.000-07:00

The Satanic Verses -Salman Rushdie
The short opening chapter was so elegantly written, so coherently conscious, and fresh, that I was verily disappointed that the novel extended into cutesy, half-forged post-modernism. I see how he is Pynchonesque. I see how he adopts a cultural headline, a modern trend or a big name and transplants it in a seemingly timeless style of writing. I see how people like to read “serious” fiction that mentions Goldie Hawn. What I don’t see is how Ayatollah Khomeini denounced and threatened to execute a man for such an ephemeral book. Topically, it may be profound. But even children play with big words and we don’t condemn them for their constructions, or mistakes. I can see how easily this pertinent novel could be so swept into the realm of important literature… it’s because we want it to be good, we want it to matter, we want to understand the human condition, and so when any skate comes mountebanking, we’re quick to throw down our cash. No, I didn’t finish it. Pertinence and quality are very different animals.
“How does newness come into the world? How is it born?”

*New Arabian Nights

2006-10-21T14:25:00.001-07:00

New Arabian Nights -Robert Louis Stevenson
Wholly without the charm, wisdom, ancestry, longevity, vibrancy or wit of the “old” Arabian Nights. The pleasure mostly came from imagining Borges so enjoying them as a boy. I suppose there may be a place for these tales, resting in historical literary scholarship, obscure theses, or middle childhood.

*Arabian Nights

2006-10-21T14:25:00.000-07:00

The Arabian Nights: Tales from A Thousand and One Nights -translated by Sir Richard F. Burton
Though the collection is incomplete (this edition contains only the “most famous and representative” tales from the entirety), the compendium outshines any expectation or foreknowledge of the stories and is choc with the marvelous wit of ancient Arabian storytelling. The stories have an underbidding theme all alike, good is good and evil is evil, Allah is all and always and man and manhood will be sundered, for without fail comes with the tail of every tale “the Destroyer of delights and Severer of societies, the Plunderer of palaces, and the Garnerer of graves.” Reminding sundry-reader that, despite diamond caches and throes of love, all is vanity of vanity, and only the story will exist for aught. The structure of each of these stories is thematically similar: a poor man happens on a souterrain of riches, he is espied by someone of evil, foul play ensues, a moon of moons of a beauty entrances one and all, a jinn sneaks out of a signet ring, the enemy is bewitched, and the hero is consummated with love and gold. Or, the reverse. Or, the inverse. But what is unique to each of these stories is the complete freedom of happenstance. A man fishing in a pond nets a monkey. A marooned sailor flies with a giant bird to freedom. A man blind in one eye runs into another blind in one eye and they run into another blind in one eye. Ali-Babba overhears an eponymous password to a storehouse of plunder. Everything and anything goes. As well with the language, in “fairest favour and formous form,” Sir Burton spares no joyance of neologism coined, alliteration aligned or rhyme rhymed. The text is bedight with proper consciousness of Shaharazad, “for interest fails in twice told tales,” and “Words cannot undo the done,” as we are gently and thematically reminded of the bookends: the murderous king and the maiden, Shaharazad’s “fictitious” fight for survival. The stories that have so obviously leaked into our culture, Aladdin, Ali-Babba and the Forty Thieves, are so much richer, more profound, and less coddling than our cartooned interpretations (as is also the case with the Grimm and Andersen tales). In the end, it is obvious that nor King nor author nor Queen is the hero. None save the stories themselves and the love of the telling will live on.

*Iphigenia among the Taurians

2006-10-21T14:24:00.000-07:00

Iphigenia among the Taurians -Euripides
Good to be reminded of the genre. The Deus-ex-Macchina. A tale much reminiscent of Arabian Nights. Short, sweet, full of trickery, chicanery, the fear of God, brotherly love and a happy ending.

*The Orchard Keeper

2006-10-21T14:22:00.000-07:00

The Orchard Keeper -Cormac McCarthy
Finished with his public works and ready for the upcoming novel, “The Road,” this fall. The Orchard Keeper was published in 1965 when McCarthy was only 32. Wonderful to see the lessons that he learned, not only about writing, but about life. Mostly it was unfocused, characters more ideas than characters. Wit precedenting depth. The writing was similarly esoteric, sesquipedalian, but without the punch of his later work. It is like a sword-swallower hesitating mid-throat. Which smarts, but is the only way to establish scar that will afford a lifetime in the trade. He took, in this novel, entire paragraphs to glean the beauty of the sunset when in his later works he does so in a few words and moves back to the character. Nonetheless, striking.

*At the Mountains of Madness

2006-08-13T14:23:00.000-07:00

At the Mountains of Madness -H.P. Lovecraft
Never in the entire novella did H.P. Lovecraft frighten me. The build-up was incredible, almost viral, and in the end, it was all. The monsters’ origins, their habitat, their sculpture, their history, their diet, economic glitches, decline and wars and they turn out not to even be the monsters, or at least can’t be blamed for acting monstrous, and in the remaining ten pages we are given a glimpse of the long-built-up “unspeakable terror” and it’s a giant blob resembling a subway car… Well… the imagination was pointed. The language was steeped.
“What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response.”
Lovecraft obviously knows all the synonyms for scary.
But what I love most of him is his name. And second most, his writing. But his allegory never struck.
“Even the pictures illustrate only one or two phases of its endless variety, preternatural massiveness, and utterly alien exoticism. There were geometrical forms for which an Euclid would scarcely find a name—cones of all degrees of irregularity and truncation, terraces of every sort of provocative disproportion, shafts with odd bulbous enlargements, broken columns in curious groups, and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements of mad grotesqueness.”

*Europeana

2006-08-13T14:22:00.001-07:00

Europeana -Patrik Ourednik
At the end of Europeana Ourednik observes that, “memory is renewed wheras history removes the legitimacy of the living past by fixing it in time.” I say observes because hardly in this unique work could I say that Ourednik writes, yet, at the same time, his observations have such ringing aesthetic dignity to them that this is undoubtedly a work of art rather than a textbook or any other expository chuck at history. Ourednik has created a memorial rather than a museum, living in the flux of memory rather than the stronghold of history. His observations are so quick and poignant that they are more caustic than nauseating (MTV) and more unsettling than tedious (CNN). I compare him to television not because he resembles it, but because he comes close to what in television is possible yet rarely attained.
Ourednik attends detailed horrors and tongue-in-cheek sidebars with the same cool, glib composure, for example, “Above the entrance to the Buchenwald concentration camp was the sign EVERYONE GETS WHAT HE DESERVES.” A note that is read so quickly and so deeply ensconced in a two-page paragraph that it is almost glossed over. But it’s not. Rather than glossing over these thousand and one facts, it is the unpartisan details that gloss over the reader, showering us in horror and humor alike. The potency of the Buchenwald sign is given no precedence over, “And no one wanted to be poor anymore and everyone wanted to have a refrigerator and a cordless telephone and a dog and a cat and a tortoise and a vibrator and take part in sports and attend psychoanalysis.”
or,
“And young people looked toward the future and the wind ruffled the ears of corn and the sun rose on the horizon.”
And the book reads in about two maniacal hours.

*Gilead

2006-08-13T14:22:00.000-07:00

Gilead -Marilynne Robinson
Gilead is like a circus tent that never opens its flaps. To enjoy the show you have to join the troupe. Robinson has eased her way into a language that doesn’t succeed in any translation or abridgement. You must join her circus, you must know how to juggle, or swallow fire, or funambulate to enter into this novel. You must move to the town of Gilead to understand what she is saying. You must listen to her like a mother.
Her best passages are not quotable.
To quote from this novel is to conjure.
She has built a house without a foundation and the result is more solid and skyscraping than any series of I-beams or cement crews could muster.
The tendentious motives of many great writers is to work within a book so that they may succeed in erupting out of the book, into the “real” world. The great writers want to achieve pertinence outside of their books. They want to matter, to tell us something about us. Robinson does not do that. This novel is self-contained. It matters only to itself, yet still resonates of the most pointed parable. Only in the middle, when Robinson shifts to blatant (though sensitive) theology, are we reminded that she falters, and then, and sadly, are there a few moments of redundancy, but so simple, and dry, they remind me more of annoyingly hot summer days than bad fiction.
There is a spark in Iowa.

*Fear and Trembling

2006-08-13T14:21:00.001-07:00

Fear and Trembling -Soren Kerkegaard
It is important for Abraham to have never given up the finitude of wanting his son alive. This is the dialectical nature of faith, to not only believe in God, but to fear him, not only to believe in life after death, but to live in this life before death. It is absurd for God to have asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son, but Abraham traveled three days journey to complete the act. It is absurd for God to then allow Abraham to sacrifice a ram instead of his son, but Abraham rejoiced. If he had not faith, the Joy at gaining a son, instead of having to kill him, would have been incomplete.
Problema One: Abraham’s action, that of meaning to kill his son, was not ethical, it was beyond ethics. The ethics were “teleologically suspended.” Kierkegaard carefully makes the distinction between the pagan (faithless) tragic hero, who suspends his own will for the upholding of a greater ethic and Abraham (the knight (father) of faith), who acts by a purely personal virtue. “He does it for God’s sake… and for his own sake in order to be able to produce the proof” of his faith, because that is what God demands of him. The tragic hero upholds a virtue outside of himself, and so for him we can weep, and laud. But the knight of faith goes beyond virtue, and, his action is absurd. For God is beyond our rationale. “When a person sets out on the tragic hero’s admittedly hard path there are many who could lend him advice; but he who walks the narrow path of faith no one can advise, no one understand.”
Probelma Two: Is there an absolute duty to God? The answer is in the koan-like aphorism: “the knight of faith is kept in constant tension.” Tension? What tension is there in perfect faith? Is not faith the opposite of tension, unsurety, of quavering? Is not faith the pillar holding man to God? What then is there of tension? The common quip to “build on rock” could be extrapolated to build on the deepest, hardest rock, deeper, still, all the way digging to the center of the earth, where the rock has become so adamant that it has turned to fire, which is the essence of rock. Flame. With faith the same. The essence of faith lies in its tension. Its question.
Problema Three: The story of Abraham extends far beyond a genre. Into the absurd. Kierkegaard asks if it was ethical for Abraham not to tell his wife, his servant, or his son what he was going to Moriah to do. It was neither ethical, nor unethical, because even if Abraham tried to explain or expiate himself, he could not. He spoke a language not of men, but of Faith. He spoke in tongues. “Aesthetics can well understand that I sacrifice myself, but not that I should sacrifice another for my own sake,” which is exactly what Abraham did. Yet, to put it lightly, it perturbed him. When Isaac asked where the lamb was, Abraham broke his silence and answered, “My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.” He said this because he truly believed it. He had faith that either, as happened, a ram would replace his son, or, if he went through and killed his son God would restore him. This is not a self-sacrifice, or, in Kierkegaard’s words, “infinite resignation,” rather, it is faithfully and resolutely holding onto the self-employ, or self-will, that he doesn’t want to kill his son. The tragic hero would resign himself, sacrifice his will and murder his son for the “greater” good. Abraham, the knight of faith, does greater than “greater”, he maintains his will unto God. Proof of this is his clarity of acceptance of, first, the ram, and second and most importantly, his son. This is what hits me the most. In pure faith, he is filled with Joy not to have to sacrifice Isaac. This rejoicing is not a test of faith, it is not a result, but it is an indelible mark. If he had not perfect faith, there would be guilt, or doubt, or even, simply, hesitation. I don’t mean hesitation to lift the knife, which there obviously wasn’t… but the hesitation that there wasn’t to take back his son.
Kierkegaard maintains that “faith is the highest passion.” It is what each generation is born without and only a few of each generation achieve. Yet faith is only and the only stepping stone for something far greater. Love. Call it ascension. Christ ascended not in faith, not even because of faith, (though without it he would never even have been killed) but in love. He ascended not in passion, but only after passing all passion. Faith, simply, is not a shovel. It is not a tool at all. It is not the anvil or the hammer. It may be the blacksmith. (A blacksmith because a blacksmith is not useful, it is of no use to the gardener. You can’t dig with a blacksmith, but, nor can you dig without a blacksmith) And love, then, are the tools that the blacksmith makes. It is also every tool that he doesn’t make. And even every tool that he couldn’t make. (Imagine three-spaded shovels, hoes that do the hoing, scissors with ball and socket hinges) Love is the anvil and it is the bread that powers the blacksmith’s arm and the wine that he drinks with his wife. It is the fire and it is the bellows. It is the steel and it is the ingot and it is the mold. It is the coup de grace of the blacksmith’s sword. It is the death groan and the weeping widow and the orphaned child and the revolution and the lily in the field and this one mis-cropped wishing great things into metallurgy. Oh, Soul!

“I can swim in life, but for this mysterious floating I am too heavy.”
“and yet it is only the knight of faith who is happy, only he is heir apparent to the finite.”

*The Last Temptation of Christ

2006-08-13T14:21:00.000-07:00

The Last Temptation of Christ -Nikos Kazantzakis
This book recalls to me a word that I once loved and have since semantically abandoned. Deed. The difference between deed, endeavor, and aesthetics. The endeavor of Kazantzakis is, exemplified by his bio and this opus, large. Though I’ve never seen a picture of the author, I imagine him looking very much like his artistic Judas, gargantuan, resolute, red-bearded (at least in essence), unwavering, fat-fingered, muscle-faithed, but still with a sensitivity-- a big man who can cry. The deed, then, of this man is the novel. Deed, however, not as a stamp, but as a vector. This vectordeed then is beautiful and human. The aesthetic, though I am addressing a translation, is where the opus stumbles. In theory The Last Temptation is beautiful. Christ and the Gospels supercede theory.
The Last Temptation begins before Jesus came out of the closet. He was a young carpenter/crossmaker, still living with his parent, plagued by dreams of angels and allusions of the greatest grandeur. He had memories of childhood love for Magdalene and reluctantly, very reluctantly, heeded his own coming of age. Gathering up the sons of Zebedee and tethering ardent-hearted Judas to a life of love was the adventure. For a few-hundred pages meandering through the Gospels. Ugly, half-shunned ex-publican Matthew was the most interesting character, staying up nights to scribble his prosody, all the other disciples scorning the writer. Not until we find nailed to the cross and hailing God, “Eloi, Eloi…” are we swooped into the aesthetic of Kazantzakis. The alternative end of Jesus, if he were to submit to his powers and descend from the cross, robust and vital, to couple with Magdalene and then live a life as a father, husband, a consummate man. Hunchbacked old Paul is the new thorn in his side, proclaiming, “I don’t need you anymore, Jesus,” the idea of crucifixion and rising again and ascension is enough for Paul to construct a church and a religion. But then staple-hearted Judas maunders by Jesus’ door and reminds him of the “sacrifice of the betrayal” and, soon enough, we are transported back to the moment of the cross, “… Lama Sabachtani!” the scream is complete, “It is finished.”
Three quotes from Magdalene:
“If you’re not hanging on to your mother’s apron strings, you’re hanging onto mine, or God’s.”
and my favorite: “It’s coming down in buckets, Jesus.”
“If you are a holy saint and a woman requests a kiss of you, descend from your sanctity in order to give it to her. Otherwise you cannot be saved.”
And then another gem:
“First came the wings and then the angel.”

*Wild Child

2006-08-13T14:20:00.001-07:00

Wild Child -novella by T.C. Boyle included in McSweeney’s 19, along with “Color Plates” by Adam Golaski and “Prince of the World” by Christopher Howard
Encased in a cigarbox with mock AandH bomb tactical response pamphlets and old travel guides to Iraq, is a wonderful volume of literature. What’s unfortunate about modern popular literature is that our contemporary writers, apologies, have behaviorally evolved to, even while writing the most profound or plangent stories, can’t take their tongues out of their cheeks. And it’s so for both T.C. Boyle and Christopher Howard. Their topics are commendable, their diction honed, their metaphors whetted, but there is an inextricable element of postmodern smirk to them. Or is it ennui. For even the slightest glimmer of ennui is worse than determined depravity. The stories, along with the theme of the cigar box, are savage, frightening, and very pertinent to our post-nuclear, operation freedom world. I feel echoes of McCarthy. Echoes of Revelation. And I believe in God.
A man on the street asked me today, But have you surrendered to surrender? He was drunk, intelligent, Berkeley, talking to us about his thesis in calculus, what is the difference between an idea and a belief and he looked at me and said, John, are you racist? His name was Nick Armstong. And his mother and all of his sisters are very becoming women.
“The city awoke and arose. Fires were lit. Raw dough fell into hot oil, eggs cracked, pike lost their heads, civilization progressed.” from T.C. Boyle

*The Tempest

2006-08-13T14:18:00.000-07:00

The Tempest -William Shakespeare, with introduction by Harold Bloom
Perplexing. Little direction. Seemingly misinspired. At no point did I ever doubt Prospero’s complete control, and, as there was no suspense, the “jokes” seemed to linger after said, or, even more eerily, present themselves before their just deliverance. My favorite parts were the original bickerings of the boatswain and Gonzalo and, later, the bickerings of Sebastian, Antonio and Gonzalo. As Bloom pointed out, Shakespeare created an unique creature with Caliban, which I agree with, but it felt such a shame that he had so little stage time, or was treated with such snub-nosing, even by Shakespeare himself. He, in fact, as much as claims airiness in this tale:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and out little life
Is rounded with a sleep…
… A turn or two I’ll walk,
To still my beating mind.”

This stout abjectedness hardly holds force to Miranda’s reaction to Prospero’s life story: “Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.”
So, enjoying the glimpse of Shakespeare, but, he never struck me in the heart. The “Anti-Faust”, though, is a idea worth contemplating.

*Two Years Before the Mast

2006-08-13T14:17:00.000-07:00

Two Years Before the Mast -Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
A Harvard Classic from a Harvard graduate. Blown about by the torrential Southeaster. Lackadaisy, dropsical academia discarded for two years to become the regular “salt.” Much, as pointed out in the introduction, as Roosevelt left Yale for a few seasons to rough it as a cowhand in Wyoming. Dana’s prose is proper, yet still inspired, full of sailoreese, and an obvious precursor to Melville. I enjoyed it, a good little adventure, but didn’t finish it as it seemed not to course out of its regular, stormy direction.
The Philadelphia Catechism:
“Six days shalt thou labor and do all thou art able,
And on the seventh, holystone the decks and scrape the cable.”

*The Iliad

2006-08-13T14:16:00.000-07:00

The Iliad -Homer (Robert Fagles Translation)
I really enjoyed this great and bloody tale by Homer. The translation was seething and alive. I hope I never forget the scintillating use of epithets in The Iliad. Bernard Knox explained in the very thorough and enlightening introduction that repetition and epithet and other literary devices were tools that Homer used to help “memorize” such a long story. Something like, Variations on a Theme. Which is an inspiring and freeing concept to an artist. This book, water-crinkled and ragged, accompanied me through an afternoon of storms at ten thousand feet on the snowy climes of Mt. Shasta. It accompanied me also closer to sea-level on stormy, desolate plateau of sadness and sickness. The diversions and details have survived many thousands of years to still horrify and delight. My favorite moment was perhaps when Achilles’ mother, Thetis, wanting to properly arm him for battle, coaxes the god of fire, Hephaestus, to forge an unheralded panoply for her son and Homer expounds the details of the brilliant shield for one hundred and forty some lines, describing castle scenes, wedding feasts, wars, young men in love, exceeding in form to the point that on the golden shield, where the harvesters plowed the field, “the earth churned black behind them, like earth churning / solid gold as it was.”
My first question is, why did Achilles initially give up Briseis? There is some understanding that he is under deep, honorable obligation to obey Agamemnon at any cost, even if it means hating him through the obeisance. But, as we see that Achilles rage is unquenchable even after his revenge is completely carried out (dragging Hector’s body behind his chariot for nine whole days), there is a sentiment that Achilles longed for more battle than was posed to him by fighting the Trojans. He needed more drama, and more war. And so he submitted to giving up Briseis and spent the entire war plotting to get her back and to pay back Agamemnon and then to revenge Patroclus and still, never, will his rage be sated. I wonder, then, where such “anxiety” comes from? Why will Agamemnon not accept as amends Helen from Paris and call of the war? The characters all lacking a God of peace. Lacking a ultimate reason, even on Earth, and battling, thus, to no foreseen end.
“Beware the toils of war… / the mesh of the huge dragnet sweeping up the world.”
“fighters killing, fighters killed, and the ground streamed blood.”
“the earth that feeds us all.”
“his face dark / as the sudden rushing night but he blazed on in bronze / and terrible fire broke from the gear that wrapped his body, / two spears in his fists. No one could fight him, stop him, / none but the gods as Hector hurled through the gates / and his eyes flashed fire. And whirling round he cried to his Trojans, shouting through the ruck, / ‘The wall, storm the wall!’”

“no one can ever slake / their thirst for blood, for the great leveler, war! / One can achieve his fill of all good things, / even of sleep, even of making love… / rapturous song and the beat and sway of dancing. / A man will yearn for his fill of all these joys / before his fill of war. But not these Trojans-- / no one can glut their lust for battle.”
“both claw-mad for battle.”

And one love scene:
“With that the son of Cronus caught his wife in his arms / and under them now the holy earth burst with fresh green grass, / crocus and hyacinth, clover soaked with dew, so thick and soft / it lifted their bodies off the hard, packed ground…”

“A man’s tongue is a glib and twisty thing.”

*The Stonemason

2006-06-22T17:42:00.000-07:00

The Stonemason -Cormac McCarthy
I would like to say, “the best book I’ve read in years.” And I can say it, and mean it, in certain terms. A book that makes NYU’s rejection a must. A book that solidifies my deepest religion. A book that makes me stand up and turn around and admire what it is I’m sitting on.
“The audience may perhaps be also a jury. And now we can begin. As the mathematician Gauss said to his contemporaries: Go forward and faith will come to you.”
“And if it is true that laying stone can teach you reverence of God and tolerance of your neighbor and love for your family it is also true that this knowledge is instilled in you through the work and not through any contemplation of the work.”
“He says that to a man who’s never laid a stone there’s nothing you can tell him. Even the truth would be wrong.”
And does this echo of Marilynne Robinson… I’m sure he must have read Housekeeping. Or at least he sees something kindred in the dirt of fiction… “In what tense do you speak of those who have vanished? You don’t speak of them. You are simply enslaved to them.”
“Somewhere there is someone who wants to know. Nor will I have to seek him out. He’ll find me.”
“The work devours the man and devours his life and I thought that in the end he must be somehow justified thereby. That if enough of the world’s weight only pass through his hands he must become inaugurated into the reality of that world in a way to withstand all scrutiny.”
“Grace I know is much like love and you cannot deserve it. It is freely given, without reason or equity. What could you do to deserve it? What?”

*Housekeeping

2006-06-22T17:40:00.000-07:00

Housekeeping -Marilynne Robinson
Here then, is the female sentence. Here then, is the female story arc. Without hesitation, but with complete, creeping patience, Robinson accepts her sentence, paddles once, and spinning into the middle of a deeply cold and sad lake, the story shows us the comedy and the slow despair of both abandonment and utter, resplendent, unique love. The details that Robinson chooses. The philosophy. The Biblical cry of Ruth and the song of Miriam and the religion of Cane. She doesn’t show us, the book is not written to be read, it is merely a testament and we stumble upon it, fortunate us, and gander as if it were a mountain suddenly in view, or a stunted tree in a blooming orchard, a helicopter low in the sky, a falling leaf in late August. But there is no sadness to be had for a mountain, or for a plant, or even for a helicopter. It is only curiosity. And somehow she makes me laugh, though I promise I never broke a smile while reading her book. She is obviously coeval with McCarthy. But I would never call her a sidekick. For they are both unique. Both, thank God, I believe, writing beyond gender. Though Cormac has his moments. Though Marilynne has her moments.
This is what I would call modern American fiction:
“That is to say that she conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one’s destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting.”
This is what we might call post-luminescent:
“In the course of the days the flood had made a sort of tea of hemp and horsehair and rag paper in that room, a smell which always afterward clung to it and which I remember precisely at this minute, though I have never encountered its like.”
“What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?”
“If we imagine that Noah’s wife, when she was old, found somewhere a remnant of the Deluge, she might have walked into it till her widow’s dress floated above her head and the water loosened her plaited hair.”
“…so prophecy is only brilliant memory.”
“By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.”
She is a gem. A find. I am happy that, amazingly, again, this year, I find a find.

*A Room of One's Own

2006-06-22T17:38:00.000-07:00

A Room of One’s Own -Virginia Woolf
Perhaps now more than under other titles it is obvious that this booklog is more than a series of review but also, (see February’s review of The Prophet) obviously, a sort of self-chronicle. I flew to Philadelphia to visit with my father and visit and interview with NYU. It was a big reading weekend. I finished Remembrance of Things Past and started A Room of One’s Own on the first flight. Before even getting on the flight I remembered my knife in my pocket and bought an envelope to mail it back to myself. Not an omen, but a submission to defenselessness. I paid five dollars for a small bottle of red wine, and I blame the expenditure on Virginia Wolf. My father and I, the day after arrival, in a yuppy corner of downtown Philly, finished a bottle of Chianti and trucked page by page through my novel. New York City the next day by train and touristing with Joel and Simcha and up til four in the morning East Village in the afternoon and then NYU open house followed by informal, successful interview with assistant director. The school impressed me. Excited me. I finished Woolf’s essay on the train back to Trenton. Couldn’t sleep the night, read Marilynne Robinson by the half-light, awake before six, delayed flights, stuck in Denver, finish Housekeeping after they shuffle us back off the plane still in Denver, then open Stonemason and finish it streaming over the Rockies, Nevada, Yosemite, all in one flight. (see last August’s Child of God) When I finally, spent, walk back into my Berkeley house a letter from NYU postmarked the day I left for Philly, tells me that they don’t want me. So now I keep looking sidelong at my bookshelf. It’s me and you baby.
No! I don’t consider books sentient in that respect. But I do admit some sadness. Not sadness. Shadowboxing. Roiling. I’m not waiting for anything. Maybe there isn’t a sentence yet for a woman. But if that were true then neither is the contemporary sentence completely masculine. Now, who knows what sex we are. Then, 1929, I’m not sorry for anything. Maybe there was a dichotomy. I do believe in progress. I know that Virginia Woolf is part of our progress. I know that she’s in me whether I like it or not. I know because of her essay I excused myself and simpered to the back of the cabin and paid five dollars for a mini bottle of Chilean Cabernet. I know that my writing will never be the same. I know she promotes Proustian androgyny. I know that without it there will be no writing at all. Neither Greek nor Jew, neither male nor female, only art, not art, nothing, not nihilism, fullness, a seed, by the Grace of God.
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
“Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.”

*Time Regained

2006-06-22T17:34:00.000-07:00

Time Regained, Remembrance of Things Past -Marcel Proust
Thom Conroy recommended to me reading Proust and then added, “It will change your life.”
It did.
His notions of time and courage, of love and despondency, I feel are so near to my own that I don’t know if his many million words substituted my own understanding or if, in his eloquence, he reached a level of translatable, glossolalic, transmogrifying, universal truth that my nascent balks at the world are necessarily, not to any genius of my own, in tune to. Yet I know, I know that we are kin. In the same way that the old, forgetful, wiry, stumbling character of Marcel remembers as if Time were no chasm to be bridged, the ferruginous, clear ringing of the gate’s bell as Swann finally took leave of his parents for the evening and young Marcel had only the dreamy, swaddling glory of being embraced and kissed by his soporific mother to look forward to, I know that there is a brotherhood, a pledge and almost a religion shared between Proust and I that needs traverse no lacuna of time or dismemberment of ocean.
His androgyny is commonly accepted, but I think that Proust takes his art not only to the substratum of ambisexuality, but to a place that is truly beyond gender, beyond Greek or Jew, beyond today or tomorrow. It is a spirit that is beyond exhaustion, not triumphing over it. It is a patience that has looked into the face of beauty and found nothing left to wait for. There is nothing to wait for, the fanning of these pages like billows plushing oxygen into the burning bush. Look hard.
Perhaps I am exaggerating, for surely, the opus is flawed, but there leaves in me and in Proust and in the world not a reflection of the glory of the world, but a veritable modicum of Gloria itself.
“We think that we are in love with a girl, whereas we love in her, alas! only that dawn the glow of which is momentarily reflected on her face.”
Nice to see Apocalypse Now pilfer matching Wagner’s Valkyries to a raid of zeppelins. (p. 781)
“phrases of music half emerging like the shoulders of water-nymphs.”
“A moment of the past, did I say? Was it not perhaps very much more: something that, common both to the past and to the present, is much more essential than either of them? … a fragment of time in pure state.”
“The railway, according to this mode of thinking, was destined to kill contemplation and there was no sense in regretting the age of diligence.”
“The happy years are the lost, the wasted years, one must wait for suffering before one can work. And then the idea of the preliminary suffering becomes associated with the idea of work and one is afraid of each new literary undertaking because one thinks of the pain one will first have to endure in order to imagine it.”
“Oblivion is at work within us.”
“A feeling of vertigo seized me as I looked down beneath me, yet within me, as though from a height, which was my own height, of many leagues, at the long series of the years.”

*The Idiot

2006-06-22T17:30:00.000-07:00

The Idiot -Fyodor Dostoevski (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)
My initial impression was that Dostoevski wrote a pointless novel. Which was a good impression. Especially after the obviously tendentious Crime and Punishment, and the ponderously philosophical, though it is one of the best books I’ve ever read, Brothers Karamazov. So, at first, The Idiot felt like ahh, here is a book without a purpose, not trying to prove that God is in all of us or disprove Hell or flick Earth off our shoulders like the midge that it is, but just letting Dostoevski play upon a theme, let him run with the darkness of his spine, harping over and again weakness, depravity, trembling, jealousy, epilepsy, impudent young men and murder. And I was thrilled. Distracted. Lost track of a few names. Mildly disappointed by the ending. Humdrum translation. And it seemed to me by the end, that indeed it was a pointlessly intended novel, which is beautiful, but there was an element of haste to the plot that didn’t let it soar like his other books. Which is unique, because in both Brothers K and Crime and Punishment, the climax comes early and there is a lot of repercussion that follows, but none of it ever bores. Yet in The Idiot, the text slowly churns forward and half-climaxes at the very end, which, somehow took away from all of the excitement.
Dostoevski the man, though, I love him.
“’they say something of the sort exists among the Japanese,’ Ivan Petrovich Ptitsyn was saying. ‘An offended man there supposedly goes to the offender and says to him: “You have offended me, for that I have come to rip my belly open before your eyes,” and with those words he actually rips his belly open before his offender’s eyes.’”
“Roman Catholocism is even worse than atheism itself.”
“all this Europe of yours, it’s all one big fantasy.”
The Idiot is Mother Russia in full stride.

*Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

2006-06-22T17:28:00.000-07:00

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead -Tom Stoppard
What I liked least about it was the transition between Stoppard’s writing and the extant text from Shakespeare. The old was just so obviously better than the new. The concept was nice. Some of the dialogue wit and snappy, it’s just that, no offense, Shakespeare is the superior writer. And I mean, by superior, actually, genuine. And I mean by genuine mindfulness of death. And I don’t mean mindfulness of death as tragedy, but the essence of comedy, where Shakespeare wrote humorously because of his imminent darkness whereas Stoppard, so it seemed, wrote humorously out of humor, or hyper-self-consciousness, or, gad, boredom (po-mo-ism). Well, it went fast.
In his own words (he did hit the mark a few times):
“We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the words for it… out we come, bloodied and squalling with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure (he reflects, getting more desperate and rapid.) A Hindu, a Buddhist and a lion-tamer chanced to meet, in a circus on the Indo-Chinese border. (He breaks out.) They’re taking us for granted! …”
“…truth is only that which is taken to be true. It’s the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn’t make any difference so long as it is honoured.”
and I can’t help repeating, of course, Shakespeare, not Stoppard, “You cannot take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal—except my life, except my life, escept my life…”

*Hamlet

2006-06-22T17:26:00.000-07:00

Hamlet -William Shakespeare
It is oft argued that Shakespeare is a master of craft. Rereading Hamlet, though rich in wit and poetry, I am convinced not of his mastery of form, but that his plays are undying because of their topic. What, then, is the topic of Hamlet? (There certainly has been much concoction to the answer of this question. Nonetheless,) Passion. Love. Madness. Syncretism. Art. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. It drives a spike through my heart though.
I had the inkling that Dostoevsky attempted to write Hamlet’s reciprocal and came up with Crime and Punishment. I have many inklings. So have we all.
“Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’”
“brevity is the soul of wit.”
“You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal—except my life, except my life, except my life.”
“I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”
“equivocation will undo us.”
“there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.”

*Narcissus and Goldmund

2006-06-22T17:25:00.000-07:00

Narcissus and Goldmund -Hermann Hesse
Grandiose and dry. Compared to Steppenwolf, Glass Bead Game, and Siddhartha, this book was overly conceptual and weak in character. A light philosophical read, in which the strict duality of human nature was thornily jammed into a merely scholastic oneness of nature. There were gems, of course. There was an overall, arching grace emanating from Hesse’s intellect. I thought very much of Heather and I, as Narcissus and Goldmund, respectively. But gladly we don’t fit into those scientific ingots.
“He thought that perhaps fear of death was the root of all art.”
“Ach, life made sense only if one achieved both, only if it was not split by this brittle alternative! To create, without sacrificing one’s senses for it. To live, without renouncing the nobility of creating. Was that impossible? Perhaps there were people for whom this was possible. Perhaps there were husbands and heads of families who did not lose their sensuality by being faithful. Perhaps there were people who, though settled, did not have hearts dried up by lack of freedom and lack of risk. Perhaps. He had never met one.”
and my favorite, a sentence that reminds me of Cormac,
“You are not to think about whether God hears your prayers or whether there is a God such as you imagine.”

*Robinson Crusoe

2006-06-22T17:23:00.000-07:00

Robinson Crusoe -Daniel Defoe
Battling between the strictures. What I liked best. What an enjoyable read. How pleased I am to have read this book. I can clearly see how Melville must have enjoyed this as well, not only because he and Defoe haunted the same obsessive sea drama, but in their freedom of story-telling. Lists, repetition, continually reminding the reader of what has happened, and then, of course, the singularity, or linearity of the telling. Though Melville was able to shift perspectives, and Defoe was not, they both kept the reader so focused on one action at a time, to the “minutest detail”, as if we were pancaked against a door watching the novel through our peepholes, and what falls down our hallway, pirates, parrots, misadventure, cannibals, whales, shipwrecks, et cetera, that we never tire of our singular view. I still am a little baffled that the book didn’t end when Robinson got off the island, and continued on for a fifteen page adventure in the snowy mountains of France fighting giant packs of wolves. But, so I read it. As I resolve myself to read this year the best books in the world, I’m happy and fortunate to have commenced with such a classic.
“… that whenever they come to a true sense of things, they will find deliverance from sin a much greater blessing than deliverance from affliction.”
We cannot forget the line drawing of Defoe that is on the first page of the Signet Classic, a snub-nose wicker face man with a voluptuous, curly wig… “and the desires were so moved by it that when I spoke the words my hands would clinch together and my fingers press the palms of my hands, that if I had had any soft thing in my hand, it would have crushed it involuntarily…”
and the conclusion of the novel,
“I might well say now, indeed, that the latter end of Job was better than the beginning.”

easy poem(kinda review:100 mtns)(or, a portrait of the artist)

2006-05-16T12:38:00.000-07:00

re: 100 Euphemisms for Mountain,
by John Washington

A story of inadequate love. Impossible death. Embibiquy. Confrontery? Joust. Impressed innards, unravel, that is—Cinematic, for one. For two, sealed with a kiss.

Hand-slung, body-wrought, primordial soup-juice, bun-in-the-oven, youth and vigor gone sweet with--Romantic. Masculine. Endeavor.

Yolk-bourne.
Even, jest.
Too limb for ‘his britches.

(m’ love)

Neither is it fitting.

In a way that way his way(the way the knee-knob won’t stop knocking),
That intuition, leg-flung, clambers even reaching, Ho!, the nape.

Of giants.
Looking up, not over (in the meantime, on the way)

Euphemistic for his own gad love, above all, nonetheless, and/but,
It’s called for. Listen quick.

*Pygmalion

2006-04-08T13:51:00.001-07:00

Pygmalion -Bernard Shaw
Conceited. Witty in concept and tepid in text. Decent to have have read for its slight social significance, but a passing of time in all other aspects. When he about-faced in the last scene to his half-hearted dithyramb on love, the spine went droopy. He wrote an epilogue in short story form for the public who he supposed to not “get” his message. The epilogue opens with this sentence:
“The rest of the story need not be shewn in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-mades and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of ‘happy endings’ to misfit all stories.”

…yet, again, if I only had the eye… if I only was able to recognize the beauty in front of me, then I wouldn’t start my review with one word judgmentals like, “Conceited.” Ghastly of me.

*The Fugitive

2006-04-08T13:51:00.000-07:00

The Fugitive -Marcel Proust
Parallel, in the soft beauty of its impossible concept, strikes me as a fit arithmetical description of the maundering, sinuous, laughable perusings of Proust. Never faltering. Ever equidistant. Strange. Perhaps another apt macaronic would be recherché. Not that she were to be expiated by philology, or, rather, shackled hand and foot, like the purposeful victimization of a housepet, by said, candlelit, effeminate author’s brutish ukase.
What?
Well, suddenly Remembrance of Things Past jumped into a new realm, or shall I say, returned to an old one, of sheer, happening, spirited, gut-twisting, gorgeous and unparalleled philosophic narrative. Absolutely book throwing. He made me want to hug myself. Which I did. And I felt almost as silly and self-moralizing, as lonely and dear, as sweet, wet, whimpering Marcel.
“I knew that one can never read a novel without giving its heroine the form and features of the woman one loves.”
“for the force that circles the earth most times in a second is not electricity but pain.”
“…there is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.”
“The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.”

*Thoughts on the East

2006-04-08T13:50:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on the East -Thomas Merton
Perfunctory and uninspired. The only insight came from his quotations.

…But if I only had the faith and the perceptiveness then Merton and Shaw would no longer, if I only had the love, would no longer be passed off, would be treasured, if I only had the patience… it is not Merton nor me that is boring, but my hackneyed, spiritless way of reading that turns out pathetic reviews like, “Perfunctory and uninspired.”

*The Captive

2006-04-08T13:49:00.001-07:00

The Captive -Marcel Proust
There is breadth, care, and beauty to every word of this book. Though atimes rather a sob-sister, Proust nevertheless has me drooling over Fortuny gowns, the fluency of M. de Charlus, dreams of Venice, the neckline of Albertine, and the ubiquitous “little phrase” of Vinteiul’s sonata. His best work comes in flashes of complete, airy plotlessness. When he ramps onto the he-said-she-said circuit, I only long for the return to the prismatic, oleaginous, philosophizing eyes of our dear Marcel, the protagonist. The end of this novel brought back a simplicity that I haven’t seen since Marcel was a little boy, yawning and fretting for his mother to come kiss him goodnight.

*Yaqui Way of Knowledge

2006-04-08T13:49:00.000-07:00

The Teachings of Don Juan, a Yaqui Way of Knowledge. –Carlos Casteneda
Incredible that such a treasure of wisdom is officially brought to the world by such a dunce. Never have I believed so adamantly that man doesn’t luster herself, but only acts the conduit to a glow that cannot be suppressed even by our ponderous, thickheaded dross. Reading of Casteneda pester and pester to set a method to Don Juan’s spirit is both enervating and a little sad. Even Don Juan relapses now and again into ennui and ego. However, the moments when Casteneda wrestles with a dog, claps his shin and stomps his foot in war dance, unleashes a war cry and throws a rock at Don Juan’s impersonator, rubs lizards on his temples, or spends days curled on the sand as a violent, peyote button victim in the striking, boulder, rainbow desert of the southwest, all of these graces of altermind unlock the gates to an ancient truth and a momentous beauty that we are all thankful to witness.
Don Juan’s four enemies are, in order, Fear, Clarity, Power, and Old Age.
“… and we ran together toward a sort of yellow warmth that came from some indefinite place. And there we played. We played and wrestled until I knew his wishes and he knew mine. We took turns manipulating each other in the fashion of a puppet show. I could make him move his legs by twisting my toes, and every time he nodded his head I felt an irresistible impulse to jump.”
“I was everywhere.”

gift from the sea

2006-03-10T15:07:00.000-08:00

the novel got gilled. action-packed. hat damn. it's a mess. lovely to read all your posts vinod. this is berkeley. signing out.

*Flowering Earth

2006-03-10T14:49:00.000-08:00

Flowering Earth -Donald Culross Peattie
One of the many wisdoms is that there is everything botanically effusive about Flowering Earth. Peattie’s poetry is simple, scientific, culling, fulsome and flattering. He tosses around epochs like peatmoss. And he tosses around peatmoss with passionate, patient, love and curiosity. The book has a tremendous arcing plot, disregarding chronology or suspense, and simply, heliotropically, moves where it will, where it sees fit, just like a plant.
“True a plant may not think; neither will the profoundest of men ever put forth a flower.”
I recognize the beauty in Peattie’s thought, yet I believe with my whole soul in the literal possibility of a man flowering.
There is nothing but truth, however, in the following quote: “The further men get, I think, from pines, the worse for them.”
“The grand, hard truth of it is that nothing in Nature happens in order that something else shall happen, but only as it must.”
“Why is it sad to be so happy?”

*The Prophet

2006-03-10T14:48:00.000-08:00

The Prophet -Kahlil Gibran
One of the many wisdoms is that there is nothing prophetic about The Prophet. The rest of it stands for itself. Searching, loving, curious, watchful, strong, these words. I would like to forcefully butt heads with Gibran, maybe push him, hard, slap-push him, in the chest, see what he does. Maybe it’s my mood. Maybe I’m angry that I believe, even know, even first-hand, that there is an underlying peace in the world and yet can still have this steaming vehemence clamping down my last four molars. It’s a pressure that really does build in the ears. I would surely lose to Gibran in arm-wrestling. I can feel it now, the cramp popping my bicep like a popsicle stick. My sclera spilling with blood. My heart slinging around my chest cavity like an animate, vengeful pinball. Like a loose fist trying to dig its fingernails out of my elastic sternum. The fleshlayers holding tight though. Until a pithy, hot, rancid spraying of my heart blood… staining my pants, and a nice carpet… not even very much blood, but blood with debris, stinking. Coagulating even outside of me into a fecal black and magenta syrup. Maybe it’s my mood. Or the crystal wine glass shattering in my palm. Or maybe I really do feel it, the prophecy of war. The longing for war. Crimes against humanity. Sickness and dying. Maybe I want to hear the feeling of crushing a skull, of listening to my jaw torn out of place. Maybe the drugs should be stuck into the neck. Right at the trachea, listening to your own wet wind of who knows what sickness. Maybe there is something in the sky that I can bang my head on. The stomachless sensation of being flat-hit in the head with a billet. Then vomit. Bile squeegeeing through your tear-ducts. There is more to life than violence. There is the following death.
“And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.”
“That whenever I come to the fountain to drink I find the living water itself thirsty; And it drinks me while I drink it.”

*The Chandler Apartments

2006-03-10T14:47:00.000-08:00

The Chandler Apartments -Owen Hill
In the downstairs of Moe’s books I showed Owen that I was buying his book and he told me that he hoped it would be a quick fun read and it was. It wasn’t “just pulp” that Raymond Chandler wrote and here the crown prince of chiaroscuro verse’s artistic bent is more expressly, obviously espoused in a poet/bookmonger’s book about poetry and books. Twas a joy to read about the un-lionized, moonlight poetry world of Berkeley, whose landmarks I am vaguely familiar with.
“The human voice can be soothing, regardless of content.”

*The Subterraneans

2006-03-10T14:39:00.000-08:00

The Subterraneans -Jack Kerouac
Yes, yes we all need some Jack Kerouac every for and again to bring some levity into our lives, no not levity, some jazzbo onto our palates, that’s right, something turbine into our writing. But here is sad old Buddha-bellied Jack, mingling with the new crowd, tizzying over lovehaps and drunk all the time, stale beer, wants his mamma he admits it, WHA WHA WHA. Which of course is to say that where I find stuttering Jack I recognize myself. Wanting to build steam into the conversation instead of patience. It’s his speed that saves him. His art-on-the-fly that (does it?) makes up for the rabblepaging antics of a probably balding semi-celeb writer who wants to pass as any old Tolstoy on the corner but can’t shake the limelight, and who’s to blame you, Jack, what a sweet, sad, sweet run you had.
and how’s this as essence of Jack for you: “Okay, I said, I believe in you believing in freedom and maybe you’re right, have another wine.”
or the nostalgia his brighter days: “with stars above and the smashby Zipper and the fragrance of locomotive coalsmoke as I sit there and let them pass and far down the line in the night around that South San Francisco airport you can see that sonofabitch red light waving Mars signal light swimming in the dark big red markers blowing up and down and sending fires in the keenpure lostpurity lovelyskies of old California in the late sad night of autumn spring comefall winter’s summertime tall, like trees—“
What I learned most, because there’s a lot to learn from his keenpure energetics, is that to love a woman it isn’t necessarily to squawk and pull your beard about it. And other things.

Movie Blog

2006-03-04T13:54:00.000-08:00

Hey guys,

A buddy of mine asked me to write a movie blog for a website he's running, check it out and give me comments, I want to get better at writing these reviews cause it would be a pretty cool job in the future. I stole your newsie moniker for it John, sorry...I'm adding a link to it in the links on the side.

later skaters

P.S. Look at the rest of this website at your own risk, it's pretty lame...

*The Empty Space

2006-03-03T02:59:00.000-08:00

The Empty Space: A Book About the Theater: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate - Peter Brook

"The exchange of impressions through images is our basic language: at the moment when one man expresses an image at that same instant the other man meets him in belief."

"Chekhov never just made a slice of life, he was a doctor who with infinite gentleness and care took thousands and thousands of fine layer off life. These he cultured and then arranged them in an exquisitely cunning, completely artificial and meaningful order in which part of the cunning lay in so disguising the artifice that the result looked like the keyhole view it never had been."

I was wondering if there is any benefit in disguising the artifice of art, it seems another unworthy goal. Hiding the process seems an attempt to trick an audience, why not invite them in by showing the inner workings? What is there that is useful in a secret?

"I stopped, and walked away from my book, in amongst the actors, and I have never looked at a written plan since. I recognized once and for all the presumption and the folly of thinking that an inanimate model can stand for a man."

"He is searching inside himself for an alphabet that is also fossilized, for the language of signs from life that he knows is the language not of invention but of his conditioning. His observations of behavior are often observations of projections of himself...Clearly the true and instantaneous inner reaction was checked and like lighting the memory substituted some imitation of a form once seen. Dabbing the paint was even more revealing: the hair's breadth of terror before the blackness, and then the reassuring ready-made idea coming to the rescue. This Deadly Theater lurks inside all of us."

"A creative actor will be most ready to discard the hardened shells of his work at the last rehearsal because here, with the first night approaching, a brilliant searchlight is cast on his creation, and he sees its pitiful inadequacy. The creative actor also longs to cling on to all he's found, he too wants at all costs to avoid the trauma of appearing in front of an audience, naked and unprepared - still this is exactly what he must do. He must destroy and abandon his results even if what he picks up seems almost the same...And this is the only way that a part, instead of being built, can be born."

"In everyday life, 'if' is a fiction, in the theater 'if' is an experiment.
In everyday life, 'if; is an evasion, in the theater 'if' is the truth.
When we are persuaded to believe in this truth, then the theater and life are one.
This is a high aim. It sounds like hard work.
To play needs much work. But when we experience the work as play, then it is not work anymore."
A play is play."

The Holy Theater is the one chapter in this book I would definitely want you guys to read. In it they talk about theater as a ritual. I seem to knock up against the idea of art as ritual quite a bit in my reading, Joseph Campbell or those European Marxist literary critics with their penchant for romanticizing Oriental art, or Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, but I have yet to be convinced of the necessity of ritual. what purpose does it really serve? It seems to create a separation, a privileged portion (and perhaps players) in life, which I think is dangerous. who gets to pick what constitutes a ritual? Anything that connects us to something bigger? I dunno, lets talk about this one...

*The Big Con

2006-03-03T02:57:00.000-08:00

The Big Con - David W. Maurer

I read this book because it's the text that they based The Sting off of, and it was great, full of that talkie newsie humor I love so much, in the same realm as You Can't Win by Jack Black, but with grifters instead of hobos riding the rails. Even as academic as the book strives to be, it's hard to be anything but engaging and colorful with this subject matter.

"The grift has a gentle touch. It takes its toll from the verdant sucker by means of the skilled hand or the sharp wit. In this, it differs from all other forms of crime, and especially from the heavy rackets. It never employs violence to separate the mark from his money. Of all the grifters the confidence man is the aristocrat."

Though much of the book is a history it also intends to be a record of the language of the con-man.

"It is a peculiar fact that every professional criminal group has its own language...It is a mark of professional affiliation, a union card, so to speak, which requires several years to acquire and which is difficult to counterfeit."

"But con men, as contrasted to other professional criminals, have creative imagination. Their proclivity for coining and using argot extends much beyond the technical vocabulary. They like to express all life-situations in argot, to give their sense of humor free play, to result against conventional language."

It anything this is a book that shows language stretching to communicate new actions, clear evidence of the malleability of English.

This got me thinking a little about how strongly representational a new invented word can be. For the most part the con man lingo in this book had been confined in its use to a relatively narrow historical period, and if not that, then fairly specific technical actions and players. In creating language they could divorce the words from their historical weight. Maybe a new word is a counterpoint to the ambiguous word ("love" as in the Thomas Mann quote from The Magic Mountain in my earlier post), no better or worse, but another tool maybe. and perhaps to create that sort of precision the word must be connected to a concrete reality, an action for example, or maybe any precision is fleeting as any action shifts in time from reality to perception and memory. I guess all this is obvious though...

A good book though, cleanse your palate of Proust, or maybe read this and cleanse your palate with Proust, it's fun stuff, a really good glossary to boot.

The cackle-bladder - A method of blowing off recalcitrant or dangerous marks after they have been fleeced. The inside-man shoots the roper with blank cartridges on the pretense that the roper has ruined both the mark and the inside-man. He then hands the mark the gun, while the roper spurts blood on the mark from a rubber bladder he holds in his mouth. The mark flees, thinking he is an accessory to murder. The inside-man keeps in touch with him for some time and sends him to various cities on the pretext of avoiding arrest. (Big Con.) Cf. to cool a mark out.

*The Real Thing

2006-03-03T02:56:00.000-08:00

The Real Thing - Tom Stoppard

This play felt like stuff I have written, at least I wrote that stuff before I read this and at least Tom Stoppard gets a lot or work...it also had a writer character which I always cringe at. I'm not sure what to say about this play, it was pretty good, but to continue what I was talking about with All in the Timing, it spends a lot of time creating a reality, connecting the characters with the present of the play's writing and initial performance, which I'm not sure is beneficial or perhaps just not what I want to do. It seems a fairly useless goal to me, it will never be real simply because it is being acted. It does exploit the stage's unreality with some well played time jumps, repetitions in scenery that point out the contradictions between shifting time and place and unchanged characters. I'm sure some sort of middle ground is an answer, but it seems if one is trying to make a point through verisimilitude then one should just make a documentary or live your life to make that point. (That sounds like too much even as I am writing it...wait a minute, words are a fiction too...phew).

*All in the Timing

2006-03-03T02:52:00.000-08:00

All in the Timing - David Ives

I read this one to get back on a play-writing kick. Mr Foster put this on (or parts of it at least) at Lake Ridge our freshman or sophomore year...The only cast I can remember are Dimitri as Trotsky and Alex Venizalos as the guy trying to pick up a girl (what fictions the stage can bring). Upon reading this whole book it strikes me just how hard it is to write a short form play, I mean this guy is good and even a couple of these are duds. Maybe its because I have a lot of theater memories of watching people I know but, this is something so acted about watching someone tell a joke on stage, not that it has to be less funny for it, but it seems hard to imagine being lost in a joke. I almost prefer the skit stuff we did with honor patrol where character takes a back-seat to punch-line. It seems easier to suspend disbelief when watching a movie instead of real people actually talking in the same room at that instant. It seems more prudent to me to embrace that unreality, I mean the audience can give you such leeway with it. Two chairs side by side can easily be a car, you could jump across the planet with a change in backdrop, or even just a few explanatory lines.

more thoughts on theater to come (I know you can't wait...)

*Cities of the Plain

2006-02-17T09:16:00.001-08:00

Cities of the Plain -Cormac McCarthy
An oeuvre that changed my life, no doubt. No doubt. John Grady, Billy Parham, Suttree, wayfarers, the most honest reaches in the world, laboring over the trails of pre-history. The stories they tell are the stories that have always been told. The only story that there is to tell. I stood up and had to pace a few times in the middle of this one. Slug some port. Look away. The problem is that you can’t look away. Closing your eyes isn’t good enough.
“Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.”
“He walked up Juárez Avenue through the hucksters and pimps. He saw a boy selling stuffed armadillos. He saw a tourist drunk laboring up the sidewalk carrying a full suit of armor. He saw a beautiful young woman vomit in the street. Dogs turned at the sound and ran toward her.”

*Cities of the Plain

2006-02-17T09:16:00.000-08:00

Cities of the Plain -Marcel Proust
Of course sexuality, nostalgia, literature, androgyny, musicology, deontology, rhetoric, francophilia, poetry, post-modernism and all the brave or craven want to take a slice of the diluvium that is Proust… let ‘em all gobble… close a lovely book… swell with a deeply-inspired subtlety… and continue through this gracious tortured world.
“It’s far more difficult to disfigure a great work or art than to create one.”
“For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart.”
“…and I longed for the nails that riveted her to my consciousness to be driven deeper.”

the next page in Suttree

2006-02-01T05:57:00.001-08:00

"A curtain is rising on the western world. A fine rain of soot, dead beetles, anonymous small bones. The audience sits webbed in dust. Within the gutted sockets of the interlocutor's skull a spider sleeps and the jointed ruins of the hanged fool dangle from the flies, bone pendulum in motley. Fourfooted shapes go to and fro over the boards. Ruder forms survive."

thats on page three.

good lord.

from Suttree

2006-02-01T05:48:00.000-08:00

"There is a moonshaped rictus in the streetlamp's globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless."

and that's on the second page.

of this four hundred eighty page book.

uh oh.

*Treasure Island - R.L. Stevenson

2006-01-23T22:59:00.000-08:00

Treasure Island -Robert Louis Stevenson
Finally. A decade or more past due.
Long John Silver as redeemable nemesis. It is the characters most blighted that are most lovable. And hence, now the namesake fast-food fishery boasts literature in ticky-tacky America. What drove the voyage to begin with but greed? A six-piece of fish’n’chips for the Jolly Roger raising miscreants of the Hispaniola. Good, hearty, pirate laughter… And a bottle of rum.

*Guermante's Way - Proust

2006-01-23T22:58:00.000-08:00

The Guermantes Way -Marcel Proust
Despite all the tittle-tattle throat coat name-dropping of these pages there is a lucidity that is beyond the proper noun, a wisdom that is pervasive, subtle, couchant in the almost two thousand pages of fetes, salons, cordials and constitutionals. But, why so many words? And when is the poor boy going to come of age, nubile, effeminate, wrath-leashing whimpering nameless Marcel with the syntax of a thousand hungry puppies and the vocabulary of a sesquipedalian, who, as yet, has yet to make up his mind about the direction of a single sentence not to mention, effusively, a resolution of his own. My faith in Proust remains, I admit, due partly to the fact that there is so much still to read of this story. Can I call it a story, or is it a florid, gilt-cornered punctilious address book. Surely, I will read on.
“And for this reason it is the really beautiful works [of art] that, if we listen to them with sincerity, must disappoint us most keenly, because in the storehouse of our ideas there is none that responds to an individual impression.”
“’The Duchesse de Guermantes,’ as though it were a name that was just like other names.”
“Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art.”
“I believed that there was such a thing as knowledge acquired by the lips.”
“It has even been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.” Which reminds one of Jeremiah 3:16, “’Then it shall come to pass, when you are multiplied and increased in the land in those days,’ says the Lord, ‘that they will say no more, ‘The ark of the covenant of the Lord.’ It shall not come to mind, nor shall they remember it, nor shall they visit it, nor shall it be made anymore. At that time Jerusalem shall be called The Throne of the Lord.”
and then back to Proust,
“This remark of Bloch’s was of no great interest, but I remembered it as proof that sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.”
“In these early poems, Victor Hugo is still a thinker, instead of contenting himself, like Nature, with providing food for thought.”
I guess all of these examples are counter to my claiming Proust as an embellishing cataloguer, which, of course, he’s not, but my sentiment still holds.

*Woolf again, and the viper(Clarice)

2006-01-16T13:44:00.000-08:00

A Room of One’s Own (Virginia Woolf)…
Near to the Wild Heart (Clarice Lispector)…

And the discourse tends to precede the reality—the word… with God… was God…
If there is some sequence within the instant, it could be this.

So, the distinction here, is man/woman. In terms of creation. Our empathy is greater than our means. And even surpasses the boundary of compassion. Bodies branded with sin—that is, in opposition.
And then, to bear witness to creation. The inherent prostration—
as words and laws and mapping mouths, it's a masculine mind we've got on our hands. And considering the incubation, there is time, in which to see the creation as, in word and deed, in fact, separate from ourselves.
I am a woman. There is man in me. We clearly need some new twist or tweak of language to make the sound of what we know. Or ears to hear.
Metaphor.
Can it be taken too far?
Considering the motion of a metaphor is in the return to its source, it goes only as far as we, ourselves, do.

These books could perhaps be compared according to the parts of the body with which they were written… Loosely, arguably, the mind, and the heart. One’s an essay, one’s a novel. Loosely, arguably. Considering the groin, though, I may have to switch that: the mind, and the body (they are truly pieces of philo-poetics, propprio cotto di Sophie).
How can the body be divided into the “mind and the body”? That may just be the matter. Somehow, we’ve managed it, though.

That the masculine and the feminine in myself could be sealed up, physically, and divided, mentally/linguistically, by our own metaphor. Suppose that the entire structure of our societies are built up according to our metaphors, our own degradation built into the patterning of our universe. Perception preceded by the definition. “Table/not table”. But then, there’s always, Wood/not wood. Dinner/not dinner. Still the thing. It’s actually an incredibly open system—potentially.
It includes inclusion. and change. We can only hope.

“Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.”

So, to a room of One’s Own. (as she says a number of times, the basis for the title, a woman needs “money and a room of one’s own” in order to write.)

“There must be freedom and there must be peace.”

There is no comparison, here, (alone, in a room of one’s own) except to reality:
This is a freedom to,
“Think of things in themselves.”
“…and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality.”

This is also social.
Supposing the artistic intuition precedes even the discourse, the intellectual discourse then paving the conceptual way for it’s realization in the social. At any rate, regardless of the artistic/intellectual freedom to consummate difference,
There are men and women, and it is one thing to be a man, and quite another to be a woman. (Though one may also consider that:
Though there is social/political evidence of collaboration, the mind/body is still at odds. In theory.
So, our metaphors are pervasive.
(Or: Truth is inevitable.))

“At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial—and any question of sex is that—one cannot hope to tell the truth.”

“One must strain off what was personal and accidental in all these impressions and so reach the pure fluid, the essential oil of truth.”

So, to be pervaded… There is a social reality that is patterned after…. (hmm?), Well, And, But, there is also, body/self. Within a body, and within a social system, there is distinction. And there is also suffering.

“The world is split up for her into two parties. Men are the “opposing faction”; men are hated and feared, because they have the power to bar her way to what she wants to do—which is to write.”

Oooh, power… would appear to turn distinction into opposition. The effect of this opposition? Suffering.

“…and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in”

Locked out, and so, driven (and locked) in?
Alone, am I still a woman?

“Perhaps to think, as I had been thinking these two days, of one sex as distinct from the other is an effort. It interferes with the unity of the mind.”

What does suffering (hatred/fear/interference) do to the writing? To the creation? (Eventually, vice-versa: What does(can/could) the creation (writing) do to/with suffering??)

“…if one reads them over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire… She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?”

Shifting, to Lispector, John was saying the other day, that he wasn’t interested in reading her because he felt like she was making a point of herself. Makes me wonder what the act of writing has become, for a woman. And where it has come from. What it means for her to make a point of herself.

Consider that one is taught, by comparison, what one is: namely, a woman. Alone? How deep does the metaphor go…

I could be getting at this:
“for Mary Carmichael will still be encumbered with that self-consciousness in the presence of “sin” which is the legacy of our sexual barbarity.”
(Woolf)

Socially? Woman. Spiritually? Self. That is, in lieu of God/not God.

(Lispector)
“My God, I await you. God, come to me, God, burgeon in my breast. I am nothing and misfortune rains upon my head. I only know how to use words and words are treacherous and I continue to suffer…
God, come to me for I have no happiness and my life is as dark as a night without stars and God, why do You not exist inside me? Why did You make me separate from You…
God, give me what I need whatever that may be, my desolation is as deep as a well and I do not deceive myself before myself and others…

“Come to me in my misfortune and that misfortune is today.”

(check out Lamentations… written by a man, of course, but this is the point. What woman has learned about herself within a masculine system…
((speaking of which:
“Yet who shall say that even now “the novel”… is rightly shaped for her use? No doubt we shall find her knocking that into shape for herself when she has the free use of her limbs; and providing some new vehicle, not necessarily in verse, for the poetry in her. For it is the poetry that is denied outlet.” (Woolf)

and Lispector says something of this poetry,
“Such a beautiful woman. Her lips full but impassive, without the slightest tremor, the lips of someone who is not afraid of pleasure, who receives it without remorse. What poetry supported her existence?”

without fear (of man/power/opposition), or guilt (sin, the legacy of her sexual barbarity).

So, for a woman writing within a masculine system…
(((and the metaphor clearly, whole-heartedly pervades, back to it’s source, out of the strictly social, back to that which is within the individual, “In our time Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman.” (Woolf)

and Listpector turns to Joyce for her title,
“He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life.” (from Portrait)

)

In terms of the self-conscious Mary Carmichael, the poetess, or that which, condemned in the presence of God, seeks it’s own solitude in order to find the metaphor of salvation (“freedom and peace”) within itself, knocking elbows at the walls of reality, creating new ways to permit change, to renew the mind, to include,

“The world said with a guffaw, Write? What’s the good of your writing?” (Woolf) (Now she, within oneself, says it. Even now.)

And in Lispector, there is this abundant effect,
“It only required his presence, even its anticipation, to annihilate her completely, and reduce her to waiting… She had been born for resignation.”

And this has everything to do with distinction, (his presence) and so, opposition, when it is mixed up with power (to annihilate). There is this effect of the masculine imbalance on itself, “he detested her more and more because he could not love her.”

And then, the masculine in the presence of the feminine. Ultimately the suffering of both the one AND the other…

“She speaks in such precise terms that it is terrifying, Otavio thought uneasily, suddenly feeling himself to be useless and effeminate. And this was when he was seeing her for the first time.”
“Bitterness then possessed him because he could not perceive her as a woman and his quality as a man became futile, and he was incapable of being anything other than a man.”
“Perplexed, he was finally witnessing his own strange, intense purification, as if he were slowly penetrating an inorganic world…
Terrified of the solitude into which he had ventured, he suddenly wanted to link himself to life, to lean on Joana”

This is an ultimate degradation within the masculine structure, but, back to Woolf,
“She knew, no one better, how enormously her genius would have profited if it had not spent itself in solitary visions over distant fields”

So, she writes.
And how.

“She herself, along with the top of the staircase and all her capacity to want to feel.”

“For if we already knew that ‘everything was one’, why would be go on seeing and living?”

“There is a certain moment in the joy of being able to do something which exceeds the fear itself of death. Two persons who live together—he continued in a whisper—try perhaps to attain that moment.”

Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

*To The Lighthouse

2006-01-16T07:59:00.000-08:00

To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

It's hard to write these things once out of the habit, though you really all should read this one. I don't want to say too much because it actually has strangely brutal surprises that shouldn't be ruined.

"For it was extraordinary to think that they had been capable of going on living all these years when she had not thought of them more than once all that time."

"Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that's what you feel, was one; that's what I feel, was the other, and then they fought together in her mind, as now. It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on the beach..."

"It was necessary now to carry everything a step further. With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's and left the room it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past."

gus you were right about the yew bush

2006-01-07T17:10:00.000-08:00

absolutely right.

Uncle Fiction...?

2005-12-18T13:41:00.000-08:00

Gus. Frustration is a lot like friction. And if friction never was there would never have been motion. And if friction were to not be there would be no stillness. Thanks then to frustration we have poems, spaceships and diamonds, and you too, Gus, becuase isn't copulation just specialized friction. And words to the wind would be but deadweight without friction, which is really, a lot like fiction.
I think that my avuncular advice will always be, "do as i do, not as i say."

*Athaliah

2005-12-18T13:38:00.000-08:00

Athaliah -Jean Racine
What I love about Racine’s drama is that it is very contrived. Deus Ex Macchina all across the board, almost to the point of post-modernism, but four hundred years ago, which boils down to purposeful. Unabashed purpose drama. And very emotional.
Living unto the promise of God, these characters steadfast, purblind in their faith.
The idea of God’s chosen. Is it the choice of God or is it how we call and deal with being individuals that are not God? Is there one to admit that they are not chosen by God? It is the inculpable tragedy again. There is no perfect foe.

“What cannot panic do to mortal minds?”

*Phaedra

2005-12-15T14:02:00.000-08:00

Phaedra -Jean Racine
A true tragedy, as no character is singularly true or evil, the guilt, the opprobrium lies in the form itself, as Melville would put it, the interstices through which we communicate. The guilt lies in the emptiness between us. Rather than in the vileness of humanity, true falsity and odium is in the listlessness of humanity, the will to not do, instead of to do.
“Not only have I spoken; but my frenzy / Is noised abroad.”
“Venus implacable, am I confounded / Enough for thee?”
“My heart / Can be unbosomed only to the gods / And you.”
“Then on the liquid plain arose / A watery mountain which appeared to boil.”

*Suttree

2005-12-15T14:00:00.000-08:00

Suttree -Cormac McCarthy
Of breathing writers, Marquez, Dellilo, McCarthy, Pynchon, Cixous, Roth, Xingjian, Naipul, Salinger (?), this is the best book that I’ve read. Uplifting in only its ultimate sense. Tears of the gut. Tears of tears from the gut of the gut. I feel taught. Thank you. Thank you.

“An opaque smoketarred lightbulb that looked like an eggplant screwed into the ceiling.”
“He was struck by the fidelity of this earth he inhabited and he bore it sudden love.”
“He passed his hand through his hair and leaned forward and looked at the old man. You have no right to represent people this way, he said. A man is all men. You have no right to your wretchedness.”
“I feel like an angel, he told an old lady with a bucket whom he passed.”

On ambition/ frustration

2005-12-09T11:35:00.000-08:00

Have to read this Book of Promethea- sounds like it twists around this frustration-

Have to be more careful or I’ll stare out of this window all day. But that act of not staring, of devoting those idle moments to writing, or to the act of devotion, or hopefully a balance, does not mean I’m flourishing. Still sloshing around in that murky stew of typewriter writing (the foundation), slowly working my way out of it while I should be taking off running, throwing those pages to the wind, driving them into all of this snow to disintegrate. And I know it. And my fingers have a direct line to my soul; they know it. But I have fragments, half thoughts, some generic bad writing, some indecipherable characters, and an endless patience for them. Careful, careful, carefully I choose every syllable as wisely as I can. As i can. Does the backbone grow from there? What about the legs and feet to carry me off? Aside from the tail or good lord the head and all of its inner-workings?

Why has my soul lost that urgency to speak what it once had to? Why did it speak it like this? Maybe I didn’t write the message it had (I had, have?) fast enough. Is there a point where the heart is second to mechanics? And why, how could that ever be true? How could I build words around a half-recalled urgency? Of course, this is today.

Who has written about this?

Ambition means having to without reconsideration, disregarding stamina as not only endless but its acknowledgment a weakness, of having a stranglehold on any emotional intellectual physical creative shortcomings, and with that stranglehold one feels the pulse. But does one also eat the world in front of them? That is, is there no distraction, all material? Or, better yet, where does writing stop and the world start for a spirit of true ambition? Should one be tented completely under a creative whim, choosing to ignore worldly influence, therefore a meditation? Should I write Scott, the words becoming Scott becoming words? Or should this all be secondary, a result of meditation, which should always be clarity, correct? How does clarity travel out of words, through them? Does one even have that choice?

That is, a choice to be ambitious?

John, when you say the most difficult part of writing your novel was not writing it, that you are innately dedicated- does will transcend frustration, is the finger always on the pulse, or do you have to poke about to find it? How much time do I need in my head? How many questions could I possibly ask, in a row? I am still conditioning me.

**To the Modernists? To the Poets (Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke)

2005-12-09T10:16:00.000-08:00

Seems like this inward turning is happening, to the artist, or then another turning, toward God, and (by toward, I mean RE:, because this is around the time when God dies, and the meddling begins…
I have ziip authority, here, in terms of critical (ooh, where are my beloved italics??) authority on Modernism, etc, but as a body and as a poet, I am relying solely on the fruits of an immense love that doesn’t end (and what is love? “Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more” And who, you may ask, needs a heart when a heart can be broken? Blood, friends, nourishment. Ah, but now you’re just mixing your metaphor) No one told you? My dear, metaphors are magic!)
Furthermore, it has been written that knowing others--that is intelligence
but knowing oneself--that is wisdom. (That is, re: criticism v creation, and other things, other things)
But we don’t care “what has been written” anymore, do we? Worth, beyond critical exploits, may have died with God. (All fine, who wants the worth of the treasure anyway, when there is the treasure, itself!)
Reigning her in—
But to “join the Modernists”, somehow, putting off the treasure, for now.

(real quick: re: john’s personal statement, shoulders of giants, adopting the language, and “what has been written” about intelligence/wisdom: the shoulders of the giants, yes, that is the building up, but what you’re talking about in your statement, about that voice, that’s when you choose wisdom—from way up there, now, what do YOU see?? no?)(mmwisdom as a choice? for another day...)

Okay, okay, so to rewrite the Scriptures—
Ah, this is not about Zarathustra, this is about a Young Poet, yes, the turning in. (not that there weren’t poems about the poet before then, but there was some kind of assumption that the poet was worthy of subjecthood, while since the re-turn, it has been a (By and by, Vinod, I never meant to unleash the big G so irresponsibly like that, because, according to His Scriptures, there is not “Yes and No, but in Him was Yes. For all the promises in Him are Yes, and in Him Amen.” And this is a forum of No. God died with the shaking of the head.)
But here, we wag tails, and I can dig the No. It’s kind of alluring, that No, that pillar of “Nothing’s getting past me.” No is a stud muffin, and Yes eats men for breakfast.

So, I promised in the title, that this was going to be a “book review”, so, to quote Rilke, Is this a question of “whether you really have lost God? Is it not rather, that you have never yet possessed him?...
“if you suspect that Christ was deluded by his longing and Mohammed betrayed by his pride—and if you are terrified to feel that even now he is not, in this hour when we speak of him—what then justifies you in missing him, who never was...
“As the bees bring in the honey, so do we fetch the sweetest out of everything and build Him”

If it’s not one coming, then it’s another—
“Everything is gestation and then bringing forth” (again, there are gorgeous italics, here, that I'm not sure how to perform with this blog business)(thinking about the "second coming" thing--maybe its more like the coming then, the bringing, or even more, the birthing/bearing(witness)...

One final question: So, was Christ deluded, or perhaps, did Yes eat God for breakfast?

“Live a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all love them.”
Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

p.s.(the intelligence/wisdom stuff was Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching)

...I think Logic is coming on to me...

2005-12-08T23:10:00.000-08:00

...but logic can deflower the word, all that remains unassailable is the

Because thought can never be God and word is the child of thought and is no Christ. The deflowering roue Logic is beautiful in his lechery because he reminds us that our language is human, that it contains the methods of its own deconstruction, and that flowers and fruits are meant for scattering seeds.

"The question driving me mad is: how can one manage to be simultaneously inside and outside?

...

Yesterday I made Promethea the sincere promise that I would sincerely do my best to write what she wants.
It is a promise.
Which is an even newer, even greater difficulty than all the others.

...

It is how serous translation is that torments me. Translating oneself is already serious - I mean putting life into words - sometimes it is almost putting it to death; sometimes dragging it out, sometimes embalming it, sometimes making it vomit or lie, sometimes bringing it to climax, but one never knows before beginning whether one's luck will be good or bad, whether this is birth or suicide. But translating someone else - that requires extraordinary arrogance or extraordinary humility. Extraordinary arrogance is something I don't have. And extraordinary humility - I don't know who has that."

Helene Cixous, Book of Promethea

How strange, this word Promethea--turned into a word of my blood."

2005-12-08T10:38:00.000-08:00

(that is, Helene Cixious, Book of Promethea)

(con't from: in terms of, see: "purple-stripper", What I mean to say is more like,

joy in the creation.

(as opposed to concerted effort for (imagine robotic hinging of the arms and shoulders), in the direction .of.by means with which to)))))))(too much like constipation, see...

"

And logic (as of yet) has not succeeded in Deflowering the Fuschia, if you will,so good good,
(and we are, ourselves, the DeflowerERS and DeflowerEES (gus should like this one), Just think of criticism as the way you prepare that iris for the table-setting, and the way that that is a thing of the past--as in, has no longer todo with the birds and bees,
but colors are good, and what a celebration! to have flowers in a room!!
(so, good, there are many kinds of writing, and some have to do with creation, and some are........ accoutrement. (Again, there ar no lines, if it creates, then it's a sexy beast, and logic, when it winks, well,

and with the proof of my own body to go on,and the pull of it, I write

as with the ecstasy of the saints, the word may be God,and where there is that energy, up from the soil from its grounding there is abuzzabout it
that is just the writing-----

As for reading, well, mmmmwhat,
you're asking about responsibility, about vector, not as pointing toward/at/away from "GOD" or even the words, (once chosen, are "the chosen words") but who to point at, where to but the mangy mut once its been birthed, (or, in many/ost cases, where to direct it BEFORE it's even been birthed, as in, how much money, pre-school? montessory? ohmigod, and diapers what about a bassinet and how long will I be breastfeeding (and god oh god, do i do it in publc?!?!?! And for even more, sadly, (I am implicated, myself, here) this kind of, suburban kind of newage overclench precedes and even reigns the passion, itself, so the writing becomes a kind of a robot with a savings account (and then the kid is lame, and the sex, well, it's boring... (stick with me, here, this is writing without the JOY (or fear, or anger, or etc etc i mean,

love

Even the laziest of bees like it better when there's love...
(You mentioned faith as being "lazy", and yes, laziness is a dictionary of excuses, new words for blame, the issue here is not faith, but apathy, and that and that and that,

yes, what about that.
There is an apathy about us, and it is equal parts reaction, and salt......... (with all the robots running around, who wants it? Who? We're at a loss, here, for for for

(creation.love) among others. Do your thing, I'll do mine, let's dance

(this is dangerous thinking, though, how will we tell the robots from the real people? Who is sound, ("Wisdom will be judged by her fruits" where's the authority in that, it's not the book, it's the the, just that, that wisdom will be judged by her fruits--say it, does it make any noise? no? then, put the damn book down, write something, but make it all fruit
For my part, make it all fruit,
you do as you do, this is where We defend our bodies (to the extent that we feel protective, to the extent of our own sensitivity--some bodies want to be DeFlowered, and that is a matter of DESIRE,

and oh oh oh, no No, THIS is RED FLAGS--that is to say, HOW CAN WE CONTROL DESIRE?!?!??!!?? (are we sticking together, here, I'm saying, what if people want to be lazy, or worse, mean, and even worse, DESTRUCTIVE?!?? and then, if we just let them, and let THEM get all the credit for REAL FRUIT, then, what what what, will the world decay, then? Everyone eating up all this bad fruit, all this indigestion, and apathy and people starving themselves for want of good fruit (that is, wisdom), and robots living off of their decaying bodies, the scavengers (I just threw that one in, Suburbia isn't SO bad....... (is it?)) and then, oh god, that's not what IIIIIII want, that's not MMMYYYYYYYY desire, so what, thenn what what what... go now go, use it, this is all out war(that is, CReATION!)

okay, okay, to bring it back down, now.

As though love and joy would be deflowered at the tooth of logic--let it nibble, like I said, it's a sexy beast

help with my statement

2005-12-07T16:56:00.000-08:00

this is my "Statement of Purpose" that i want to submit for applications. I accept all comments, reactions, hate-mail, inspiration, and anything else. I have to ship it off next week. So... what do you think?

My writing speaks for itself, but I, considering both my writing and this personal statement, obviously don't.
I remember reading on the creased back of a D.H. Lawrence novel that he is considered the most passionate writer ever in the English language. That same night I set out to relinquish his title.
It was a very hormonal, Sturm und Drang stage of writing for me. I was in a blitz, writing sometimes thirty pages a night, bouncing off walls like bats with their ears plugged, imagining myself arm-wrestling Proust, beating Cormac McCarthy to the draw, out-reading Borges and all the while trying to erode my keyboard into a blank, hyperactive, perfect encryption that would spew and spawn illimitable prose. That phase, after exhausting my post-teen angst, settled into a circadian, less panting, more livable life that didn't need to prove itself to survive and whose goals were never arbitrary, but now landmarks on the way to further watchfulness and exploration.
I finished my first novel a few weeks ago. It's called 100 Euphemisms for Mountain. It's a love story.
The most difficult part of my novel was not writing it. Dedication I have innately. Even deleting chunks of text, which were at one point in my life as purposeful and dear as organs, became a painless editorial task. Measuring my novel, or reading it as a reader would, was the most challenging part. As I am enormously influenced by certain authors, I tend to bend and flux my writing at the whim of my reading. When I pick up a Virginia Wolf paperback, or a Shakespeare play, or an essay by Helene Cixous, or Moby Dick, or a dithyramb from Joyce or Nietzsche, my life changes, I watch the world differently, and as surely as gossip will follow politics, my prose, like a dingy after a yacht, tacks faithfully trailing behind me. So, in the initial draft of the novel I dallied between six or seventeen different styles, depending on my variegated, myriad moodswings that took place in the eighteen months I was writing it. After I drove in the last nail and I began the beautiful, titillating experience of reading and editing a hairless new novel, I had to begin to sieve out my own voice, had to learn how to measure the rants against their pertinence, the neologisms against their disturbance, and the quirks against their poignancy.
As there is no dogma, thank God, for what is and isn't effective, subtle, piquant or maudlin, I learned by experience, intuition, and upshot.
Though I have dappled in the world of send your story here, there, writer's market, query letter, etc, writing always got in the way of licking stamps or bustling after the perfect journal. I was sadly and typically deterred from the dominion of the New Yorker and I, simply, wrote. And I would've gone on writing, happy, farsighted, and typing myself silly if I had not learned that community catalysis is frequently stifled, or negated, by the heavy-hearted solipsism that is often bred in skuzzy, dusty studio apartments. So I longed for academia, not out of loneliness or visions of tweed blazers and ascot ties, but out of my natural ability to thrive in the midst of thinkers. Like Spanish moss alighted in a virgin pine forest, academia is my dank, shadowed tree bark.
I started a publishing company, Eight and a Half by Eleven. In the first year we wrote, illustrated, designed, printed, and sold about two hundred copies of five different books. Independent publishing and indiscriminately organized idealism is a world that I love and that I won't give up. But my drive goes beyond the inde bookstore. Not in terms of mass distribution, or recognition, but in terms of exploring the ends and the antipodes, of climbing atop the shoulders of giants, of doing all I can to press the humpaday, lusterless gaze of mankind into the throes of passion, as so many authors have done for me. I long to go beyond the metaphor, bring fiction into the stomach, and the words into the throat. It is my drive and it is what I bring to you and your institution.

It was not until I began this officious, drooling, hypnotic binge of graduate school applications that I was able to truly appreciate the dry, extended witticisms of Kafka. What rigmarole and hoops I've been assaulted through to try to get four undergraduate schools to send you transcripts, or three professional men to send you recommendations, or one befuddled internet connection to complete an online application, and so I've had plenty of tongue-clacking, thumb-twiddling hours to ruminate my true artistic purpose.
I came up with three basic ideas:
To find a mentor.
To assist in the displacement of pop culture with jazz music.
To write closer to truth.

Thank you.

on specificity

2005-12-04T23:15:00.000-08:00

dispensing with ambiguity...

"Suddenly, as if the movement of his hand had released it, the load of her accumulated impressions of him tilted up, and down poured in a ponderous avalanche all she felt about him. That was one sensation. Then up rose in a fume the essence of his being. That was another. She felt herself transfixed by the intensity of her perception; it was his severity; his goodness. I respect you (she addressed silently him in person) in every atom; you are not vain; you are entirely impersonal; you are finer than Mr. Ramsay; you are the finest human being that I know; you have neither wife nor child (without any sexual feeling, she longed to cherish that loneliness), you live for science (involuntarily, sections of potatoes rose before her eyes); praise would be an insult you; generous, pure-hearted heroic man! But simultaneously, she remembered how he had brought a valet all the way up here; objected to dogs on chairs; would prose for hours (until Mr. Ramsay slammed out of the room) about salt in vegetables and the iniquity of English cooks." - Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

she just says it, says it exactly, and it sings. To join the modernists then? Pin down ephemeral thoughts, create a simulated mind on the page, a mind stretched out, wings and legs articulated with those pins, for careful consideration? Seems rational enough...leave God for those white spaces between the words...the ground to our figures etched into the page?

*A Tale of Two Cities

2005-12-04T23:12:00.000-08:00

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

Perhaps Dickens' diction puts some distance between my mind and his world, along with the years that have passed between us, but I like it. His fictive reality is never anything but on the page, simplified, crafted, but wonderful for it.

"she looked so beautiful in the purity of her faith in this lost man, that her husband could have looked at her as she was for hours"

Also what a novel! Not a scene wasted, tied up as neat as Christmas. I agree with John in his looking forward to finding a child to read this to. I am jealous of the storybook-ness of it: men that look suspiciously like each other, siblings that appear out of the mob, secrets waiting expectantly to be resolved, and that effortless telescoping of time.

"Such a heart Madame Defarge carried under her rough robe. Carelessly worn, it was a becoming robe enough, in a certain weird way, and her hair looked rich under her coarse red cap. Lying hidden in her bosom, was a loaded pistol. Lying hidden at her waist, was a sharpened dagger. Thus accoutred, and walking with the confident tread of such a character, and with the supple freedom of a woman who had habitually walked in her girlhood, bare-foot and bare-legged, on the brown sea sand, Madame Defarge took her way along the streets."

*Steppenwolf

2005-12-04T23:10:00.000-08:00

Steppenwolf - Herman Hesse

"When I read Metamorphosis, at seventeen, I realized I could be a writer. When I saw how Gregor Samsa could wake up one morning transformed into a gigantic beetle, I said to myself, "I didn't know you could do this, but if you can, I'm certainly interested in writing." - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I am really glad I read this book. I know there's something a bit too uncomplicated about the clarity articulated, but the Magic Theater? Come on! That was perfect! The freedom of that idea is almost too much, the openness of it blurs into lack of clarity, but what freedom! For Madmen only! The gall of that. The gall of all of it, Hermine and Pablo, characters crafted in perfect compliment to a protagonist, characters that are otherwise opaque, and all this is excusable in the structure of first person, a first person that reads as unstable and brilliant and lost but so full of such wry, sarcastic hope.

"'Most men will not swim before they are able to.' Is that not witty? Naturally, they won't swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won't think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what's more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown."

"After two or three notes of the piano the door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defenses and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart. It did not last very long, a quarter of an hour perhaps' but it returned to me in a dream at night, and since, though all the barren days, I caught a glimpse of it now and then. Sometimes for a minute or two I saw it clearly, threading my life like a divine and gold track. But nearly always it was blurred in dirt and dust. Then again it gleamed out in golden sparks as though never to be lost again and yet was soon quite lost once more. Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk."

"Humor alone, that magnificent discovery of those who are cut short of in their calling to highest endeavor, those who falling short of tragedy are yet as rich in gifts as in affliction, humor alone (perhaps the most inborn and brilliant achievement of the spirit) attains to the impossible and brings every aspect of human existence within the rays of its prism."

Wanted: a purple-stripper, intellectually violate

2005-12-04T23:06:00.000-08:00

"In my opinion, in fact, the key element in answering the question 'What is consciousness?' will be the unraveling of the nature of the 'isomorphism' which underlies meaning." - Douglas R. Hofstader Godel, Escher, Bach

Something about Heather's first post put my mind in a tizzy...I printed it out carried it around with me, searching for what it was that was bothering me. I have yet to pin it down...maybe its connected with everything of hers I have read...but I think it has something to do with this: How can the word be God? Because the word is necessarily not everything (I am thinking of the word in the sense that it is a sign, and in its sign-ness an arbitrary distinction that separates it from all other words), a word depends on its opposition to others of its kind for its very existence (And I know "the" word might be a beast quite different, but then why not "the" bubble-gum, and more to the point why write and not chew). And then of course Deconstruction complicates things, each signifier pointing to anti-signified as well as signified, but even then, those negative arrows aren't pointing to everything else, but to a finite set of anti-signifieds. And none of these arrows, positive or negative, are essential, they are arbitrary, cultural, historical, political. And then, I think, there are yet more arrows that to point to the sign itself and the thoughts that form it, not a web, but a recursive self-modifying loop. Those ones shift as we use the words, arrows that should not be ignored for their lack of solidity or their for connection to the personal, for it is on these arrows that all the others rest. Perhaps the world of these words is much like the world of our physical reality? Electrons that are but probabilities, with the potential to be everywhere at once, but more likely in certain spots? That which we touch not solid but the repulsion of invisible forces? I'm a frustrating chasm away from anything resembling coherence, but I think it's worth talking about. I know its hard enough just to write but I have the compulsion to pick at it...

"And then she kissed him on the mouth. It was one of those Russian kisses, the sort that are exchanged in that vast, soulful land at high Christian feasts, as a token and seal of love. But even as we record this kiss exchanged between a notoriously "subtle" young man and a charming, slinking, and still equally young woman, we cannot help finding in it a reminder of Dr. Krokowski's elaborate, if not always unobjectionable way of speaking about love in a gently irresolute sense, so that one was never quite sure whether he meant its sanctified or more passionate and fleshly forms. Are we doing the same thing here, or were Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat doing the same thing with their Russian kiss? But what would be out readers' reaction if we simply refused to get to the bottom of that question? In out opinion, it is analytically correct, although -to use Hans Castorp's phrase- "terribly gauche" and downright life-denying, to make a "tidy" distinction between sanctity and passion in matters of love. What's this about "tidy"? What's this about gentle irresolution and ambiguity? Isn't it grand, isn't it good, that language has only one word for everything we associate with love -from utter sanctity to the most fleshly lust? The result is perfect clarity in ambiguity, for love cannot be disembodied even in its more sanctified forms, not is it without sanctity even at its most fleshly. Love is always simply itself, both as a subtle affirmation of life and as the highest passion; love is out sympathy with organic life, the touchingly lustful embrace of what is destined to decay -caritas is assuredly found in the most admirable and depraved passions. Irresolute? But in God's good name, leave the meaning of love unresolved! Unresolved -that is life and humanity, and it would betray a dreary lack of subtlety to worry about it."
- Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain

Perhaps God is the word if the word is love?

Praying for the crucible of argument,
Vinod

on connectivity

2005-12-01T20:06:00.001-08:00

BAH--
we do not understand the repercussions...

just SING, boys!

(re: vinod's comment about johns novel and do things harmonize, etc, see: VG, Hamlet... and other things...

..."fascical", eh? mmmm... i love you)

2005-12-01T20:06:00.000-08:00

*The Autumn of the Patriarch

2005-12-01T12:05:00.000-08:00

The Autumn of the Patriarch -Gabriel García Márquez
It really doesn't matter what I think, what I read, the words a-flow so, it might as well rhyme, it might as well all the world rhyme and the general sir, under the ceiba tree, swinging in his hammock and shaking the candy rattle to get a whiff of the school girls, it's sick, really sick of you general sir, to be so damn duped by the fascical lore of fiction and yet be authored by one dithyrambic, ego-bent peppermint drop spirit, but do as you will, hatch a chicken in a drawer, chase a cow down the stairs, in the linty carpet of my soul I know that in the toothache, mallow running of the tongue and disaster, that there is love in your rant, García Márquez, that there is the implacable, pane-throwing, dream-spawning, Homeric dawn freedom of love and old age and love in your mounting life by the girth and riding her through the inscrutable sea lore.
And I finish the book on a great day to finish the book, (Oh! The Symbolism!), as this morning I discover that I take over the position of President, sir, of the Union and League, and all of its tectonic repercussions, the world is blowing up, Mr. President, it is the Autumn of the old and the dawning of the hot-blooded, Down with Fascismo! the corruption collusion confusion is bygone, and what I'm trying to say, the President has eloped, but can't because I keep getting my tongue caught in the crankshaft, what would Archimedes say to internal combustion, General sir, get your head out of your throat, but let's not make a farce of this, it isn't a farce, General sir, it really isn't.

*Macbeth

2005-12-01T11:58:00.000-08:00

Macbeth -Shakespeare
The interpretation of Shakespeare is his genius. Not interpretation like the variegated performances of his work, but interpretation, as in, he leaves us to glean as we please. Macbeth as the causality of prophecy. Poor ol' Macbeth, as soon as the wicked sisters spoke, as soon as they opened their gruesome worty mouths, “fair is foul and foul is fair,” the sucker was doomed. What bathos I feel for the sap who's all outta luck. Whaddayou expect Macbeth to do, it's the witches forced him to kill Duncan and then they forced him into delusion and madness and, finally, irreparable death. It was their prophecy. They killed Duncan in their wretched cauldron. Unless, prophecy is only prophecy as it is fulfilled. Cosí, like this, no veritable prophecy ever went neglected. And hence, veracity lies as much in fulfillment as it does in prophecy. And Jesus left no bridge uncrossed. And no bridge unburned. But what “choice” did then, Macbeth have? His scoundrelism resides in, what, his hesitancy… …..? …?

I wrote this in June. My double ellipses question marks, I see now, have been answered in my heart. The answer is yes. The hesitancy of Macbeth is deserving of his death. His misuse of instinct, resistance to prophecy, and living in the means is why Shakespeare hated him.

*Macbeth

2005-12-01T02:16:00.000-08:00

"Thunder. Third Apparition: A Child Crowned, with a tree in his hand."

I find reading Shakespeare like reading an old dictionary...it makes me think of how words are changing/words have changed/we should change words actively.

For John: on those threads in your novel that don't connect to anything...do they harmonize at least? This scene from Macbeth has an "Old Man" who doesn't appear elsewhere and doesn't talk about anything directly relavent (strange for a Shakespeare side character...that's often where he puts his exposition):

Old man:...On Tuesday last/A falcon, tow'ring in her pride of place,/Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed.

Ross: And Duncan's horses- a thing most strange and certain - /Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race,/Turned wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out,/Contending 'gainst obedience, as they would make/war with mankind.

Old man: 'Tis said they eat eachother.

Ross: They did so, to th' amazement of mine eyes,/That looked upon 't.

I know that's not really a profound example, but I think it's useful. It's from a play, and a short one at that, where there isn't really room for rumination (the asides are for the most part pretty quick). But it feels right...it chimes in good time.

I also think there's something to be said about fate as regards to this play but I'm not quite sure what yet...

other good lines:

...and nothing is but what is not...There's daggers in men's smiles...There's warrant in that theft/Which steals itself when there's no mercy left...We are but young in deed...I am in blood/stepped so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o'er...Then the liars and swearers are fools; for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men and hang up them...I think our county sinks beneath the yoke;/It weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash/is added to her wounds...the queen that bore thee,/Oft'ner upon her knees than on her feet,/Died every day she lived...Blow wind, come wrack!/At least we'll die with harness on our back...

Lady Macduff: Sirrah, your father's dead:/And what will you do now? How will you live?

Son: As birds do, mother.

Lady Macduff: What, with worms and flies?

Son: With what I get, I mean; and so do they.

*The Crying of Lot 49

2005-11-30T21:07:00.000-08:00

After this one-sitting read (as rewarding as you claim, Vinod), Pynchon finally sings slightly more in tune with me- his writings a true orchistrated fiction. Any smatterings of historical facts I dismiss, adding them to the already-tipped side of his writing scale- that of a child-like creative absurdity, concrete cerebral meanderings without so much as a pluck of the heart-strings and the same time a musical. The other side reserved for soul exposure, which is weighted down just ever so slightly, as if lost and graceful hairs found their way into the bowl by way of weighty yet casual sentances rupturing with backwards angles, their blinding color cutting out of dusty corners in the heat of San Narciso -
Although I have been bowing away at the strings in my fiction as of late, I have nearly forgotten how rediclous I can find most of the planet, sitting here exhausted to the point of squeezing the bridge of my nose, letting loose a wordless, hushed and frustrated Aghhhhh, all in the name of selling flowers to the city's wealthiest...cannot remember anyone spending less than 45 dollars today- all on completely inevitable, forseeable wilt. So then should I be a Pynchon sycophant or should I prove the value of soul, the shaky pen?
But then there is this- "The words, who cares? They're rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barriers around an actor's memory, right? But the reality is in this head. Mine.I'm the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also."
Why do the descriptionson the back cover of Pynchon books always contain more questions than content?
Subtle, casual dialougue I am so grateful for.
"Did you ever see the one about Porky Pig and the Anarchist?"
Dr. Hilarius, Mike Fallopian, Ghengis Cohen- pointless inventions, faux-scientific plottings with no execution, ludicrous and very eloborate postage stamp forensics-so much of this reads like Pynchon challenged grocery-store espionage paper-back writers by doing it better, ignoring a descirnable plot and laughing his ass all the way towards credibility. And with so much life in a truly fictional place.

*Child of God

2005-11-29T13:05:00.000-08:00

Maybe it was all the onions in the salad John whipped up that made my intestines churn a bit, but more likely it was Cormac Mccarthy's Child of God. Those little chapters spotted like blood or muddy footprints on the clean white snow...beautiful draw in, you start out with hearing stories and then the third person prose vines its way wround your legs until you are complicit in Lester's crimes...I wonder if it was intended to be sympathetic..."a child of God much like yourself"...are we supposed to find Lester's fumblings just a little adorable as he blushingly buys pretty clothes for his lady, that cold corpse of a girl he hoisted up into his attic to keep in the chill? Or perhaps we shouldn't use the word sympathetic to talk about a group of words on the page, no matter how frighteningly human they are. There's also something comforting about reading a book in one sitting, knowing the whole story before you focus on another thought, putting it down closed, unmarked, at rest, to let its cover smirk at you, "I told you so." Though comforting might be the wrong word to use with this one...looks like I'm going to have to suck it up and read everything he's written.

for the reviews

2005-11-29T12:18:00.000-08:00

a thought...

how about in the title of a post that's a book review we put a "*" in front of it? I feel like we'll hopefully end up pointing a few people toward this as a place to find something to read, so that might make it easier for them and us. I went back and did that for the reviews up so far, hope no one minds.

I also made everyone an "administrator," so you can adjust anything how you see fit.

by george, i think she's got it

2005-11-29T12:03:00.000-08:00

ah, the rosy-fingered dawning of my savvy, woman, thou are loosed!

onward, to zarathustra...

*Love in the Time of Cholera

2005-11-29T10:17:00.000-08:00

love in the time of cholera

how long can it last—this insistence that there is no story, but love, there is no romance but the story, itself, how long will they confront death with this kind of assurance—

“ ‘how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?’ he asked.”

and it’s been “beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love.”
far beyond the trickery, the courting rituals of the artist, beyond the barricade of GOD, beyond the throes of the intellect, through the romantic indulgence in suffering, the catharsis of war, “…long enough to know that love was always love, anytime anyplace…”

here is the confrontation, this is the gaping divide between a plea and a prophecy—
“Forever”

love
h

heather no longer hidden

2005-11-29T10:16:00.000-08:00

i can't say i know exactly how this works. presumably, i am "leaving a comment" right now, so here it is,

as for controlled breathing, the jesus prayer, the aescetic sandwich, and mentorship,

those who bear witness to the spirit cry out, "abba, father", until they come to be LED by the spirit.

"when i was i child, i spoke as a child, i understood as a child, I thought as a child;but when i became a man, i put away childish things... and now abide in faith, hope, love, these three, but the greatest of these is love."

it has been said that "truth reveals God as He is", that which reveals, this is a peeling back, there is an ACTIVE REVELATION, here, which is to say, in peeling back the pacifiers of knowledge and judgement, so wisdom (which is to say, the teacher within) is revealed to/in the intellect, love is revealed to/in the spirit, the breath is revealed to/in the body, and truth is revealed to/in the creation--from GLORY to GLORY

for now, we understand "as children", which is to say, we must first witness God in the creation, which is how Christ has called all into the kingdom of God, "most assuredly i say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it"
once we bear that witness, thus, entering the kingdom God, it is our decision to suffer "with him", which is to say with hope, because hope "does not disappoint"
hope obliterates suffering, and is only obtained through suffering. and having first born witness, we patiently, eagerly await that which is already done, thus bringing glory to God, but there is no hope without first, witness of the spirit (faith!)--only then do we come to be LED by the spirit (the teacher within) to the reconciliation with God, which, by faith, we have already witnessed--
this is the image of God--
"for now we see as in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face"

what is left? the revelation of the likeness of God to/in the creation--
the glory of glories, from glory to glory.

in terms of specific words, techniques, mantras, vigils, "permit even this," for "happy is he who does not condemn himself in what he approves"

"therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord comes, who will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness and reveal the counsels of the hearts. then each one's praise will come from God"

that's what i've been reading,
love,
h

*Child of God

2005-11-29T10:02:00.002-08:00

Child of God -Cormac McCarthy
I wonder what Cormac is a child of. Sentences bilous, filthy sometimes, refulgent, a degree of unique that makes me hurt. One of the worst novels.
“Permit even this,” and Jesus touched the centurion’s ear.
The rainbow is not without the scorchest red, nor is it without a luminescent, underground violet. And the world is not without the most blessed and the worst. Cormac has the hateful covered. No, not hateful. The passions of these men, Ballard in this novel, of these monsters can come from naught but the Lord, the Lordself.
From Second Chronicles, “but you have killed them in a rage that reaches up to heaven.”
I almost can’t believe it. I am too soft. I don’t understand. Too feeble, nurtured, weak. Perhaps this book should be burned, or, perhaps it should be worked into elementary curriculum, I don’t know, but something should be done with it, it’s no good just layin there.

take a tutorial

2005-11-29T10:02:00.001-08:00

heather, i think it pertinent that you use this blog machine with aptitude. to post a new post click on new post. not that i understand, because i do and don't, but is your name i_mpulse, or is that a blog you're part of, but why can't you just post a post?

*Sons and Lovers

2005-11-29T10:02:00.000-08:00

Sons and Lovers -D. H. Lawrence
Some things I really like about Lawrence. This is my third novel of his, after The Rainbow, when I thought I had found my fairy godfather in the first ten pages, and Women in Love, which I found beautifully written, spicy, boring, and “surprising.” His verse, no, no, no, his prose, is pretty good. His repetitive word fixations are bold. His adverbs are unabashed. His eye inexhaustible. His plots ruthless. Yet… Joyce has more ear-drumming grammar. Proust has more endurance. And Dickens has more wit. So why do I continue to read second-rate fiction? It’s really his impudence that keeps me coming back to Lawrence. His passion is childish and chauvinistic, but it is passion. Like Henry Miller- violent, grueling, and often filibuster- Lawrence is a droll, brilliant tour guide to a freak show without any freaks. His text, in a compound word, Godless. Godless yet devout.
I will be surprised if I decide to read another of his novels.
Playing pin the tail on the donkey with Sons and Lovers, a sentence that makes me wince, especially as I know I am tempted by them: “But he felt as if his blood was melting into tears, and he cried in terror and pain.”
And some sentences that I love: “He put the flower in his mouth. Unthinking, he bared his teeth, closed them on the blossom slowly, and had a mouthful of petals. These he spat into the fire, kissed his mother, and went to bed.” and “The beauty of the night made him want to shout.” and “Once roused, he opened his eyes to see his mother standing on the hearth-rug with the hot iron near her cheek, listening, as it were, to the heat.” even “It seemed as if virginity were a positive force, which fought and won in both of them.”

from india to romania to home.

2005-11-22T10:55:00.000-08:00

VINOD:

Oct 17th 2005 (morning)

As we sit in an eight-sided monk's cell the monk and my mother discuss the merits of controlling one's breathing as it concerns quieting the mind. She makes some noises of assent though it seems they might be untruthful. I stare at the octopyramid ceiling and silently disagree with his faded 101 Dalmatian sheets.

The uncle with us begins to argue with the monk revealing his agricultural technocrat leanings. The day before we toured his fields where he preened over his vast hybridization project: genetically modified cotton from America bred with a local strain. The GM crops necessitate royalties to Monsanto, which he grudgingly pays; hopeful his crops will be bug free. The plants are sexually segregated, the females impregnated by hand held flowers plucked from the males, an arduous process performed by a small army of teenage girls that he admonishes for giggling and running about.

As we leave the meditation center he rushes us into his car, a candy green Fiat, out of whose windows he will point out cashew trees, jackfruit bushes, and the small cocoa trees carefully planted and pruned under the towering coconuts. He juggles the gearshift as we rattle along rain packed red dirt roads, the noise of the car kicking up a clean white heron that had been drinking form a puddle. He smiles as it flaps lazily, gliding just above the hood.

JOHN:

it's cold and gasoline in the streets. won't even go into the stores,
refuse to photograph or hand out medicine, maybe when we get to the
monasteries where somebody can look at me without pride or hate can i look
them back. it's the first morning, fat on bread, that patina of gasoline
and dogshit, the internet cafe smells like bacon.

VINOD:

The background open sewer miasma stink hit me smack in the face as soon as i got off the plane. How do you get a billion people to shit where they're supposed to?

I'm staying with my mother's brother in their home above the clinic they run. My grandpa's health is failing; he shuffles around unsteadily straining to hear what is being said. My grandma shuffles too, but with more purpose her mind still quick. My uncle stumps instead of shuffling into the other room where he can smoke cigarettes without my mother yelling at him.

At night I tent the blanket completely over me to hide from the bugs and the fan above presses the air down fluttering the blanket rustles against my arm and ear like a restless bedfellow.

And when the current cuts out all the conversations in the house become audible for a moment, or a few moments, then they're back, electrons marching lock-step, the fans wind up and we all become hidden again behind walls of ambient sound.

I am leaving on a trip today to the state of Kerela with my mom, sister, girl cousin, and three of my aunts on my dad's side of the family. Kerela is at the extreme southwest of the country, the train ride is going to take a solid day but when we get of I'll see a sea that I have never seen before. My geologist uncle made me promise to watch the sunrise and sunset paying attention to the shape of the earth.

Finished Ulysses once through...

VINOD (Cont.):

The road from Munnar to Thekady smells of Cardamom and the occasional exhaust of a passing truck. The tops of some of the trees are red not with leaves leeched of green but with bright blooming flowers. So far I have seen nine elephants and thirteen white people.

JOHN:

i'm thinking a lot about chastity, not that i want to attempt it, or that i
long for it, but that maybe i do a little bit, yes, chastity has its flower,
but vinod, are we judged by our fruits? are we? maybe this is the prompt
that God has given us, learn to pray, then pray, and discover the essence of
the Creator, create. this is prompt. And a prompt is very much like a
responsibility. Remember my cousin daniel, he makes me play soccer and i
have the collected blisters, cramps, sighs and hard sleeps to show, the
romanian boys play on asphalt with puddles, mounds of garbage in the
corners, dilapidated fish-net fences, and they were jeans and racing jackets
and short-short soccer shorts and one shinguard and smoke during the breaks
and smoke during the games and they kick hard hard and scream, swear, spit,
their hair is sometimes gelled, their faces are spherical, they spit seeds
that stick to their enflamed lips and they, "Ai! Ma! Hai!" slick,
hodge-podge, growing up eating cold meat and disco-dancing, strong jaws,
sloping noses, everybody wants a belly, strong fingers, broken nails,
skinned knees, kicking hard hard and blaspheming for mistakes, the ball
bounces dirty, half-inflated, around the puddle and the sharp legs skittling
after it, they belch on their haunches on the sidelines and try to keep
their shirts spotless, the kid with the ball has to leave and they switch to
a basketball, it doesn't matter, they know the moves, the names, the songs,
the teams, the cars by heart, they will play until its dark, fighting,
kicking hard, almost in tears, one day they will have women...
i dream vinodian dreams, all about blue, heather says i'm magic, i called
her, i'm in love.

JOHN (Cont.):

romanian dawned all over me, yesterday, squabbles mid-language with Daniel,
four hours back to fagaras and poof a glass of wine down my guzzle and a man
named sandu and i are throttling over potholes, quadruple passes and
high-beams picking up straggling horses, cattle, bicyclists before the
swerve,
i feel the language crawling up my back, and mornings are reserved for
prayer,

VINOD:

Yesterday I saw the Arabian sea, walked in its surf and had it pull the ground from underneath my heels as I watched it obliterate the tiny patterns that crows' feet had left in the sand.

We drive past or float past tiny villages with horrible Indian pop music playing and everyone is crowded around tvs.

VINOD (Cont.):

I light a string of fireworks with a sparkler and start as the first one puffs and pops hard in my face against my glasses and eardrums sending my little cousin Anusha shrieking and giggling to hid behind the legs of her father, my father's youngest brother who stands with his weight on one leg (the abhanga pose of classical Indian sculpture denoting a god lost deep in thought) arms crossed top lip slightly pursed to bristle moustache as his brow furrows, a pose that evokes not a sculpture but once again the striking resemblance between him and my father even though they were separated by a great multifaceted distance: temporal (the sixteen year disparity in age), geographical (my father's education took him to another city) and emotional (their propensity for silence and sarcasm).
We stand there with our fingers in our ears and our eyes winced to watch the garland of explosives reduce itself to a mass of noise, ash, and white paper. A neighborhood boy named Siva comes to my uncle's apartment bearing more fireworks, the patience to help my two young cousins use them, and his namesake's penchant for destruction. We stand on the balcony which is decorated with carefully spaced and taped orange flowers and little clay bowls filled with oil and a carefully placed wick. Traditional Diwali decorations. As the sun sets we climb the stairs to the roof and view a city that is wreathed in a thick acrid smoke that smells like burnt marshmallow and that we all helped create. Siva finds a glass Pepsi bottle to light bottle rockets out of, and he and my little cousin Pavan send missiles back into the air and towards adjoining buildings, answers to the ones that hit among our feet with the red spent spark skid of bottle rockets gone to ground. My aunt passes me sparkler after sparkler, trying to keep me entertained, as I look out over the city stone faced and thinking as usual. They substitute the planned polish of a fourth of July spectacle with duration and universal participation in the cacophony. The explosions start around five, gain momentum until eight, and then continue past ten. Even through the night and into the next day the occasional bang or boom would make you start out of bed or drop the piece of idli of dosa you held in your hand for breakfast.

…at the train station the other day I disturbed myself profoundly by not having small enough change to give a beggar…

Do the words of the Jesus prayer matter? If you could invest the same feeling into another series of sounds would they also suffice? Or is it that those words connect with the similar feelings of all the other people that are speaking those words? But that seems like a bit of a fantasy, or wishful thinking at least because by what mechanism would those words connect to each other? A collective unconscious, shared dreams? More likely that we simply invest in those words ourselves, each alone, and in that case each word is what we make of it. Which seems almost better doesn't it? At least for writers anyways, because then we can just work on investing every word we write (and speak, and think, and hear?) with the humility and devotion of that prayer. Or is that too hard? To strengthen those feelings to the point where they could support any word?

And what about the whole needing a master thing? Because the orthodox Christian and the Hindu ascetic strains seem to either recommend or insist that one find a guru. But that is an idea I can't help but resist, I'm too self-willed, and I know that's exactly the point.

chastity: I was reading a book-long interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and in it he alludes to a group of writers/readers/libertines in a certain Caribbean town of which he was a part and who influenced him. Or that whole circle Virginia Woolf ran with, they were all sleeping with each other. Or Henry Miller's open marriage. It seems that writers, at least the ones we like, are predisposed towards sexual looseness and license. What does it say about us that we are quite the opposite? That our mental track leads us towards refusal/discipline?

I had a dream the other night that you were throwing rocks at the windows of my house in Strongsville (which was on stilts) and when I came down you had turned yourself into an albino porcupine and stuck your head in the ground. You then turned yourself into a toy cement mixer truck before finally returning to your own shape at which point you me and Dimitri had a discussion about how you should stop changing your shape because you had trouble getting out of it because your mind changed too.

JOHN:

hot my gosh, Vinod!
St. Maximos, a saint, stressed the difference between loving the creator vs.
loving the creation. Sartre (so I gather) despised the dualistic, Kantian
Phenomenon, the essence behind the appearance. This leads to skin- the
greatest paradox of literature. Do I think we need mentors? No. Do I
think we need mentors? Of course we do Vinod. But only if we find them.
That's like skin. What do I think about chastity? Put it between two
slices of bread and eat it. See, that's like skin too. Chastity is like
ink. If you can write a letter with it, it's good. If you can make a
sandwich out of it, yum. It's like the new law, that's Christian, blowing
the old law out of the water, which doesn't mean it's evil, just that, and
this principle I understand but I still don't live, “Nothing is unclean of
itself.” Only we make things unclean. Doesn't that accord with Hinduism?
We are all of God, yet, Hinduism doesn't deny evil. But we are not God. We
are in the Image of God, but not (yet) in the Likeness of God.
So, what do I think of the specific words of the Jesus Prayer. Put them in
a sandwich. Swallow. Engulf. Engulfer of the engulfed. Mouth to her
mouth's kiss. Must be two of 'em. Glue 'em well. What happens at the end
of the Jesus Prayer? He achieves Jesus Prayerlessness. That is the end.
If we could live our lives in a series of ends without means we would be one
with God. And, if you could write like you write about India, about
Strongsville, then you would be living in ends, and that is Genius, that is
genesis, the ENDS.
let's rap grammar.
Heather ended an email to me when I was in Romania: “Give your mother a hug
for you.” That is an extro-objective sentence framed around an imperative.
If I could only write like that…

should we live life symbolically? yes.

VINOD:

we drove back to our home in the quiet orange glow that felt the same as the first night in Hyderabad, light that must be chemically efficient. After a hubbub of moving suitcases that leaves me bleeding I walk out to the driveway to smoke a cigarette saved in a Ziploc bag for the occasion. The air is cold and free of the sweat and life and dirt of India, the trees are bare leaving clear a sky that is night-bright with an almost full moon and Orion crisper than I remember.

are you home?

JOHN:

no. not home. you're writing again, mmm. i'm here with heather. chicago.
i'll be back thanksgiving.
write to me,

the strongest ellipses...

a start of sorts.

2005-11-22T10:51:00.000-08:00

I do declare its open season.

I guess we'll let this thing go where it goes for now.

The only duty is to review what you are reading.

"I'm afraid we're not rid of God because we still believe in grammar."
- Nietzsche (Twilight of the Idols)