actual blood, actual love

more.

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 23:34:17 GMT

I don't want to die, me! I want to stop alive forever, if only to see the ships pass.
(GB Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer LePage)

...who spent his life dreaming of ships while none of the ships he owned ever lived up to his dreams
(Alvaro Mutis, "The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll")

Clea once asked him: "Do you not miss the sea, Scobie?" and the old man replied simply, without hesitation, "Every night I put to sea in my dreams."
(Lawrence Durrell, "Justine")

resonance #n

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 21:39:12 GMT

love is another thing altogether. it is nothing whatever like generosity and nothing whatever like compassion. on the contrary. love is a curious mixture of opposites, a blend of extreme selfishness and total devotion. a paradox! besides which, love, everybody is always talking about love, love, but love isn't something you choose, you catch it, like a disease, you get trapped in it, like a disaster.
(amos oz, "a tale of love and darkness")

i realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all. the other feelings, compassion, tenderness and so on, exist only on the periphery and belong to the constructions of society and habit.
(lawrence durrell, "justine")

possibly one of my favorite book openings ever?

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:20:16 GMT

"
Aquarius is poor. Sagittarius is poor. Virgo is a barren sign, it will produce no growth. The first day the Moon is in a Sign is better than the second and the second better than the third. Seed planted when the Earth is in Leo, which is a Barren, Fiery Sign, will die, as it is favorable only to the destruction of noxious growth. Trim no trees or vines when the Moon or Earth is in Leo. For they will surely die.

He stopped reading, marked his place, and began to talk.

It is a lawless country.

"

(John Hawkes, The Beetle Leg)

a new pairing

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:39:43 GMT

Things she had never noticed much before began to hurt her: home lights watched from the evening sidewalks, an unknown voice from an alley. She would stare at the lights and listen to the voice, and something inside her stiffened and waited. But the lights would darken, the voice fall silent, and though she waited, that was all. She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone. She was afraid, and there was a queer tightness in her chest.

(Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding)

+

...he would drop the rock back in place and stand, hands on hips, looking off to sea, where the round clouds piled up white with pink and black edges. And he would be thinking, What am I thinking? What do I want? Where do I want to go? There would be wonder in him, and a little impatience, as though he stood outside and looked in on himself through a glass shell. And he would be conscious of a tone within himself, or several tones, as though he heard music distantly.

(John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday)

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:30:26 GMT

"These were days when my heart was volcanic."

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 21:41:39 GMT

gram parsons, "in my hour of darkness"
big star, "kangaroo"
the ladybug transistor, "rushes of pure spring"
the mountain goats, "dirty old town"

just because.

a very random question

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 03:39:41 GMT

does anyone have a copy of rex's waltz ep, from which they could send me an MP3 of willow garden? i would be eternally grateful...

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 21:57:08 GMT

some one had seven devils in him.

Wed, 23 May 2007 16:53:02 GMT

that love which gives up what it never had -- that penny's modicum which is the donor's all yet whose infintesimal weight adds nothing to the substance of the loved -- and yet i gave it. and not to him, to her; it was as though i said to her, 'here, take this too. you cannot love him as he should be loved, and though he will no more feel this giving's weight than he would ever know its lack, yet there may come some moment in your married lives when he will find this atom's particle as you might find a cramped small pallid hidden shoot in a familiar flower bed and pause and say, "where did this come from?"; you need only answer, "i dont know." '

absalom, absalom!

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 00:01:51 GMT

let us agree on one point: the lid of a can -- or let us say, of a can that is in good condition, whose edge curves in the same way as its own -- a lid like this should have no other wish than to find itself on top of its can; this would be the utmost that it could imagine for itself; an unsurpassable satisfaction, the fulfillment of all its desires. indeed, there is something almost ideal about being patiently and gently turned and coming to rest evenly on the small projecting rim, and feeling its interlocking edge inside you, elastic and just as sharp as your own edge is when you are lying alone. ah, but there are hardly an lids now that can still appreciate this. here it is very evident how much confusion has been caused among Things by their association with humans. for humans -- if it is permissible to compare them, just in passing, with tin lids -- humans sit upon their occupations ungracefully and with extreme unwillingness. some because in their haste they haven't found the right one; some because they have been put on in anger, crooked; some because the corresponding rims have been dented, each in a different way. let us admit in all sincerity that basically they have just one thought: as soon as they get a chance, to jump down and roll around and clatter. otherwise, where do all these so-called amusements come from, and the noise they make?

(rainer maria rilke, "the notebooks of malte laurids brigge")

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 01:00:04 GMT

this is perhaps an image of how we live. for reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.

anthony powell, a dance to the music of time, first movement, book 2.

rereading

Sat, 05 Aug 2006 12:39:36 GMT

it is delicious, like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of winesburg. in the fall one walks in the orchards and the ground is hard with frost underfoot. the apples have been taken from the trees by the pickers. they have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities where they will be eaten in apartments that are filled with books, magazines, furniture, and people. on the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. they look like the knuckles on doctor reefy's hands. one nibbles at them and they are delicious. into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. one runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.

(sherwood anderson, "winesburg, ohio")

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 23:03:23 GMT

my mother always insisted that it was not enough to know the various names of objects but you should get to know them by sniffing them, touching them with the tip of your tongue, feeling them with your fingertips, to know their warmth and smoothness, their smell, their roughness and hardness, the sound they made when you tapped them, all those things that she called their "response" or "resistance." every material, she said, every piece of clothing or furniture, every utensil, every object had different characteristics of response and resistance, which were not fixed but could change according to season or the time of day or night, the person who was touching or smelling, the light and shade, and even vague propensities that we have no means of understanding. it was no accident, she said, that hebrew uses the same word for an inanimate object and a desire. it was not only we who had or did not have a desire for one thing or another, inanimate objects and plants also had an inner desire of their own, and only someone who knew how to feel, listen, taste, and smell in an ungreedy way could sometimes discern it.

(ibid.)

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 00:04:58 GMT

some kind of magnetic

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:56:44 GMT

i just found a turquoise smith-corona ghia by the curb in someone's trash. nothing wrong with it except that the ribbon was torn, but that was easy enough to fix. it has its case too, boxy & stylish with a black racing stripe.

what kind of luck is this. there are now 4 green (or blue-green) typewriters in my apartment. ridiculous. if that boy, and he knows who he is, ever comes back to this coast, maybe there's already a typewriter waiting for him. unless someone more local grabs it first.

now i've got ribbon ink on my fingers.
and a stack of lousy polaroids on my desk.
sometimes things are ok.

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 23:02:51 GMT

I sat leaning against a mailbox
Where years earlier I dropped a love letter.
It was still there whispering to me,
And then it wasn't.

("meditation in the gutter," charles simic)

He remembered not the Baths, the Damps, poor wretched Cowles, nor the rooms in Dreary Station, but a love note he had written at the age of twelve when the city was on fire. And remembering it he looked at Sybilline and saw in her eyes the eyes of an animal that has seen a lantern swinging on a blackened hill.

("the lime twig," john hawkes)

We were young and in love
In a burning town
But the fire went out
I'm alone again now

("the dreaming moon," the magnetic fields)

Sat, 15 Apr 2006 01:26:23 GMT

It seems to me that what we carry inside us, what seems so familiar and ordinary, presents enough problems, enough vast, indecipherable spaces, without inventing others.

(Alvaro Mutis)

We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.

(Robert Walser)

sound & fury

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 21:50:16 GMT

damn that honeysuckle i wish it would stop

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 03:04:49 GMT

at best a picture, a book are only open doors inviting you into an empty house, & once inside you just have to make the rest up as well as you can.

(richard flanagan, gould's book of fish)

Sun, 27 Nov 2005 23:57:28 GMT

but bespectacled man, on the contrary, invents devices outside of his body, and if health and nobility existed in the inventor, they are almost always lacking in the user. devices are bought, sold, and stolen, and man becomes increasingly shrewd and weaker. his first devices seemed extensions of his arm and couldn't be effective without its strength; but, by now, the device no longer has any relation to the limb. and it is the device that creates sickness, abandoning the law that was, on all earth, the creator. the law of the strongest vanished, and we lost healthful selection. we need much more than psychoanalysis. under the law established by the posessor of the greatest number of devices, sickeness and the sick will flourish.

perhaps, through an unheard-of catastrophe produced by devices, we will return to health. when poison gases no longer suffice, an ordinary man, in the secrecy of a room in this world, will invent an incomparable explosive compared to which the explosives currently in existence will be considered harmless toys. and another man, also ordinary, but a bit sicker than others, will steal this explosive and will climb up at the center of the earth, to set it on the spot where it can have the maximum effect. there will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, once again a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed of parasites and sickness.

italo svevo, zeno's conscience, 1923.

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 17:46:12 GMT

so, i finally watched herzog's stroszek last night, and it was really amazing, really bizarre and beautiful and dark. and it's gotten me thinking about other movies i could put into roughly the same category, and craving more of the same. i don't know how to define this classification exactly, although i'm sure other people have thought & written about this many times before. but i guess what i'm thinking of are films by european directors, by which maybe i mean in particular non-western european, that involve characters from those countries relocating to america, often to random towns in the middle of nowhere. i think the result i'm thinking of has to do with a kind of obsessive americana, mixed in with this peculiar outsider perspective, often stark and with a lot of dark humor. this is all pretty obvious, i think. the few examples i managed to come up with are:

stroszek
alice in the cities
baghdad cafe
leningrad cowboys go america

one tangential category might include things like paris, texas and arizona dream, which don't involve german or yugoslavian characters, but which seem kind of informed by the respective nationalities of their directors. another might be drawn around various other kaurismaki or wenders films (kings of the road, the man without a past) that don't take place in america, but are saturated with american music and references. does this make sense?

what i need is ideas for more films/directors like this, because i've got a craving now.
anyone?

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 21:17:29 GMT

this morning singing joanna newsom on my bike, and as i coast around the corner of a large intersection, i look up to see no less than 6 airplanes flying in a line with red & white banners sailing out behind them. i don't know what they were advertising, i saw only pictures and one word which was backward and, hence, unreadable. much better that way, of course.

earlier, in between premature waking and the first sound of the alarm, i had such intense dreams. as usual involving people i generally try not to think about, but often do anyway, and who subsequently arrive in my dreams with the greatest frequency. as a result, have spent this day in a state of vague unease, which i can't exactly identify or solve. something in the ground or the air has shifted. it may have started last night. it's difficult to say.

and now it's raining and my stomach has the same kind of ache it gets from sitting too long on buses or trains.

at least the dark don't hide it

Wed, 07 Sep 2005 01:47:12 GMT

the weekend was kind of a bust, lightning bolt's performance in an almonte field notwithstanding. it's sad when three days which seem so wide open, so possible, end up so abortive. wind out of sails and all that. largely it has to do with love.

every few months i wind up in the park a block from my house, where i sit for an hour or so in the sun, drink coffee and read a little, write a little. watch the dogs play on the grass, watch the leaves move, and the light. and each time i'm there, i seem to remember each previous time too, and there is a certain weight to this small string of hours. i can remember so exactly what i have read on those benches, what i have written, who i have wondered about and missed. a striking assembly, this clear delineation over the course of three years.

and so i can chart my progress in this city, or sometimes my lack thereof.
i remember this season from the year i moved here, because there are black figs for sale again in all the markets.

quiz

Mon, 05 Sep 2005 18:16:26 GMT

1. washer, slint
2. conception bay south, sea snakes
3. two feet in front, lync
4. naomi, neutral milk hotel
5. the everyday world of bodies, rodan
6.

Sat, 02 Apr 2005 12:28:31 GMT

i suppose this won't be relevant to most people reading, but in case anyone is planning a surprise visit to montreal in the next week? or could be persuaded to? just this:

my MFA thesis show, in other words.
it's running april 4-9th.
short, silent videos of coney island in october, and, god willing, a working camera obscura on the walls of the room.

if anyone actually does want more detailed information, please ask.