then continue to explore the site, especially if you are a child, grown or otherwise.
from Barbara Guest’s The Türler Losses (1979):
The sun
dropped its leaf like a sun diary
turning a page
to shadow where the body lay
in the
shrubbery. The body moved, but with a stilly
motion the way
a wave curls over a birthday
where nothing
remains except the foam streamers,
like giggles
after deep laughter, like death closing in.
It should be
falling, no tears. It isn’t. Mournful?
Yes, the
sand’s ribbon overturning the shell. The mollusc
pause. Such
prettiness the shell and drip of water,
later dryness
lent to a shelf.
tomorrow
I’ll leave the house without my MacAir or my iPad, with my iPhone
my
camera, my hiking & camping equipment, a stash of energy bars
I
leave Mike & Miss Vee to drive to Tilcara to hike with Kent &
Santos
&
llamas — two apiece to carry our gear — to Abra de Punta Corral
picture
me in boots, wool socks, lightweight hiking pants, hiking T-shirt
trekking,
poles, UV sunglasses, sweat band, crushable brimmed hat
my
daypack with camera, binocs, notepad, pen, energy bars, 1.8-liter
water
bladder, first aid; my pockets with handkerchief, penknife, iPhone
Considering
how exaggerated music is
Crowds are
her. It is from them that the
corruptions
of a feeling occur in structure.
—
after lines by Robert Duncan
. . . Other
people seemed completely internal which I noticed when I’d observed
a man for some time and saw that he’d say something about himself
and I thought that he should be that entirely and that other people
don’t go into a sort of public world.
I wanted to be
wholly transparent so that I would tell people details of my
activities whether I was casual or angry.
I’d go to a
restaurant or to the beach and my behavior which seemed to reflect
only the surface of what I was thinking was reproduced externally in
the jobs other people held. . . .
from
George Henry Lewes’s The
Principles of Success in Literature (1865):
[I]n the development of the social organism, as
the life of nations becomes more complex, Thought assumes a more
imperial character; and Literature, in its widest sense, becomes a
delicate index of social evolution. . . . Literature is at once the
cause and the effect of social progress. . . . As its importance
emerges into more general recognition, it necessarily draws after it
a larger crowd of servitors, filling noble minds with a noble
ambition. . . . To play at Literature is altogether inexcusable: the
motive is vanity, the object notoriety, the end contempt.
from Louis Menand’s Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Contemporaries (1986):
The task of
the usurping practitioner is to make his discourse seem not a new,
but in face the traditional discourse, and to make the language of
the amateur he is supplanting appear to be an aberration. And this
was exactly the procedure modernism followed in distinguishing itself
from and claiming superiority to the established literary culture of
its time. In the case of Eliot’s criticism, the mode to be exposed
as specious was the mode identified with the Georgian anthologies;
the mode to be revealed as tradition was, of course, his own.
from Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle:
As time
passed, my eyes became more accustomed to the darkness. Before long,
I could just barely make out the shape of my hand if I brought it
close to my face. Other things around me began slowly to take on
their own dim shapes, like timid little animals letting down their
guard in the most gradual stages imaginable. As much as my eyes
became used to it, though, the darkness never ceased to be darkness.
Anything I tried to focus on would lose its shape and burrow its way
soundlessly into the surrounding obscurity. Perhaps this could be
called “pale darkness,” but pale as it might be, it had its own
particular kind of density, which in some cases contained a more
meaningful darkness than perfect pitch darkness. In it, you could see
something. And at the same time, you could see nothing at all.
look for me next on 9 de enero . . .
safe, safe journey, and ENJOY!
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