Friday, January 4, 2013

4 enero 2013

Please click here & then click on this image:



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. . . .


[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.

so grateful not to be noble . . . so prefer to be vain, notorious, & contemptible

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 . . .

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