Monday, March 23, 2009

Eliot's Middlemarch (installment #1)

"It is a misfortune, in some senses: I feed too much on the inward sources; I live too much with the dead. My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes."

"'You are a poem--and that is to be the best part of a poet--what makes up the poet's consciousness in his best moods,' said Will, showing such originality as we all share with the morning and the spring-time and other endless renewals."

"Two people persistently flirting could by no means escape from 'the various entanglements, weights, blows, clashings, motions, by which things severally go on."

"As the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendoes."

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Your Catfish Friend

If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
of my affection
and think, "It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
somebody loved me,"
I'd love you and and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
at peace,
and ask yourself, "I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them."

-Brautigan

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Tua Fata Docebo

I recently finished All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers, by Larry McMurtry. There's pretty much no possible way I can talk about this book, no way that I can recommend it highly enough. It's nothing short of absolutely brilliant.

' "I shouldn't have given you that story," she said. "It would make a great cartoon."
"Go to San Francisco with me," I said, "We'll compete for it. If your cartoon is better than the novel I write I'll burn the novel."
"No, you should never burn things," Jill said, looking at me seriously for a second. "What you should do is give them to the sea." '
(143)

'I have no real resistance to temptation, drunk or sober. Very few attractive temptations come my way and when they do I almost always yield to them. I can't smash them away like they were badminton birdies. I just don't have any moral coordination, as Jenny Salomea well knew.'
(26)


Also, I've been reading Virgil's Aeneid:

Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbrum
On they went, darlking in solitary night, far into the gloom.

O gnate, ingentem luctum ne quaere tuorum. Ostedent terris hunc fata neque ultra esse sinent.
O my son, ask not of the heavy grief that your people must bear. Of him the Fates shall give a glimpse to earth, nor suffer him to stay.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Unrelated things

"The Tempest allows us to be washed free of images, one of the comedy's many gifts. We are Miranda, who is adjured to "Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow." If the sea values nothing, and swallows all, it also keeps nothing, and casts us back again. Ariel's best song makes our drowned bones into coral . . . It is a sea fiction, a drenching that at last leaves everyone dry. No one is harmed in the play, and forgiveness is extended to all by Prospero, in response to Ariel's most human moment. Everything dissolves in The Tempest, except the sea. From one perspective, the sea is dissolution itself, but evidently not so in this unique play."
-Harold Bloom, you're a cranky old codger, but you sure have your moments of beauty.

Meanwhile, declining from the noon of day,
The sun obliquely shoots his burning ray;
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches that hang jurymen may dine'
The merchant from the Exchange returns in peace,
And the long labors of the toilet cease.
-Pope

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Things I'm Stoked About

1.

Mervyn Peake:

"A ritual, more compelling than ever man devised, is fighting anchored darkness. A ritual of the blood; of the jumping blood. These quicks of sentience owe nothing to his forbears, but to those feckless hosts, a trillion deep, of the globe's childhood. -- The gift of the bright blood. Of blood that laughs when the tenets mutter 'Weep.' Of blood that mourns when the sere laws croak 'Rejoice!' O little revolution in great shades!"

And, also Peake:

"If ever a man was destined to fill in the gap of his own absence with his own ghost it is he. For excommunication is a kind of death."

Also Peake, but just a fragment here:

"the talons of adventure, the antlers of romance"


2.

John Berryman: "Come & diminish me, & map my way."


3.

Homer:

"There was a world . . . Or was it all a dream?"

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Poetics

"Berryman is a poet so preoccupied with poetic effects as to be totally in their thrall," James Dickey wrote. "His inversions, his personal and often irritatingly cute colloquialisms and deliberate misspellings, his odd references, his basing of lines and whole poems on private allusions, create what must surely be the densest verbal thickets since Empson's."

In his 366th "Dream Song" Berryman himself wrote, "These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort." "And understood many have not been," Phillips wrote. "Packed with private jokes, topical and literary allusions (Berryman's reading and personal library are legendary), they boggle many minds. When the first 77 Dream Songs...were published, Robert Lowell admitted, 'At first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder and oddness. After a while, the repeated situations and their racy jabber become more and more enjoyable, although even now I wouldn't trust myself to paraphrase accurately at least half the sections.'"

(Wikipedia)

Monday, January 12, 2009

Was There A Time

Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles
In children's circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books,
But time was set its maggot on their track.
Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
What's never known is safest in this life.
Under the skysigns they who have no arms
Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.
-Dylan Thomas



"Today I saw a great pavement among the clouds made of gray stones, bigger than a meadow. No one goes there. Only a heron. Today I saw a tree growing out of a high wall, and people walking on it far above the ground. Today I saw a poet look out of a narrow window. But the stone field that is lost in the clouds is what you'd like best. Nobody goes there. It's a good place to play games and to dream of things. I saw today a horse swimming in the top of a tower. I saw a million towers today. I saw clouds last night. I was cold. I was colder than ice. I have had no food. I have had no sleep."
-Mervyn Peake

Sunday, January 11, 2009

New Books and Movies

I made a list of every new book I read and every new movie I saw in 2008. Here it is:

Movies I've Seen In 2008 (first-time movies only)
1. Hitch
2. La Vie Est Belle
3. Punch-Drunk Love
4. Sweeney Todd
5. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
6. Twelve Monkeys
7. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
8. The Shining
9. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
10. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
11. Talk Radio
12. City of Lost Children
13. No Country for Old Men
14. Delicatessen
15. Be Kind Rewind
16. Little Shop of Horrors
17. A Streetcar Named Desire
18. Long Day's Journey Into Night
19. Cabaret
20. 1776
21. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
22. Dumbo
23. Atonement
24. Network
25. Machuca
26. Of Mice and Men
27. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
28. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
29. Lonesome Dove
30. Brokeback Mountain
31. Being There
32. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
33. Repo Man
34. 1/2 of Into the Wild (BUT IT SUCKED SO BAD)
35. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
36. Milo and Otis
37. Death Lends A Hand (Columbo)
38. There Will Be Blood
39. Wall-E
40. Futurama II - The Beast With A Million Backs
41. The Muppet Movie
42. I'm Not There
43. A Little Romance
44. Pee Wee's Big Adventure
45. MST3000: Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders
46. MST3000: Santa Claus
47. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
48. Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
49. Koko the Talking Gorilla
50. Tremors
51. They Live
52. Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex (1992)
53. W.
54. When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
55. Aliens
56. Aguirre The Wrath Of God
57. The Seventh Seal
58. The Future of Food
59. Synecdoche, New York
60. Hatley High
61. After Hours
62. In Bruges
63. Sunshine
64. Labyrinth
65. Bringing Up Baby
66. Holiday
67. Slumdog Millionaire
68. The Philidelphia Story
69. Vertigo
70. The Devil Wears Prada
71. Field of Dreams
72. Sullivan's Travels
73. Eight Men Out

Books I've Read In 2008 (first-time books only, and only books I fully read cover-to-cover)
1. Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen
2. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
3. The Persian Letters by Montesqueiu
4. As You Like It by William Shakespeare
5. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
6. Contact by Carl Sagan
7. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
8. Henry IV, Pt. I by William Shakespeare
9. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
10. Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
11. Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware
12. Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill
13. Henry IV, Pt. II by William Shakespeare
14. Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
15. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
16. Paradise Park by Charles Mee
17. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
18. The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno
19. Antony & Cleopatra by William Shakespeare
20. Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen
21. Master of Reality by John Darnielle
22. The Lover by Marguerite Duras
23. The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare
24. Lila the Werewolf by Peter S. Beagle
25. The Line Between by Peter S. Beagle
26. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
27. Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
28. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
29. Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich
30. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen
31. Homegrown Democrat by Garrison Keillor
32. The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber
33. The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
34. The Favorite Game by Leonard Cohen
36. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
37. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
38. The Misanthrope by Moliere
39. Tartuffe by Moliere
40. The Problem of Nature by David Arnold
41. Tastes of Paradise by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
42. Rameau's Nephew by Denis Diderot
43. The Marriage of Figaro by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
44. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
45. Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster by Michael Eric Dyson
46. Hind Swaraj by M.K. Gandhi
47. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
48. Waverley by Sir Walter Scott
49. In the Solitude of Cotton Fields by Bernard-Marie Koltes
50. Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute
51. It's Beautiful by Nathalie Sarraute
52. Liberty by Garrison Keillor
53. The Waltz of the Toreadors by Jean Anouilh
54. Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
55. Lazarillo de Tormes (Anonymous)

Friday, January 9, 2009

On Philological Scholarship

'Alas for the lost lore, the annals and old poets,' wrote Tolkien, referring indeed to Virgil but by analogy to the sources of Beowulf. Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell, editing the Corpus Poetisum Boreale, the whole poetry of the North, in the 1880s, might look back on past ages and see the 'field of Northern scholarship' as 'a vast plain, filled with dry bones,' up and down which there walked 'a company of men, doing their best to set these bones in order, skull by skull, thigh by thigh, with no hope or thought of the breath that was to shake this plain with the awakening of the immortal dead.' But though philology did come and breathe life into the dry bones of old poems, filling history with the reverberations of forgotten battles and empires, still there was a point beyond which it could not go.

-T.A. Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth

Thursday, January 1, 2009

2008 books/movies list

2008

Movies I've Seen In 2008 (first-time movies only)
1. Hitch
2. La Vie Est Belle
3. Punch-Drunk Love
4. Sweeney Todd
5. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
6. Twelve Monkeys
7. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
8. The Shining
9. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
10. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
11. Talk Radio
12. City of Lost Children
13. No Country for Old Men
14. Delicatessen
15. Be Kind Rewind
16. Little Shop of Horrors
17. A Streetcar Named Desire
18. Long Day's Journey Into Night
19. Cabaret
20. 1776
21. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
22. Dumbo
23. Atonement
24. Network
25. Machuca
26. Of Mice and Men
27. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
28. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
29. Lonesome Dove
30. Brokeback Mountain
31. Being There
32. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
33. Repo Man
34. 1/2 of Into the Wild (BUT IT SUCKED SO BAD)
35. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
36. Milo and Otis
37. Death Lends A Hand (Columbo)
38. There Will Be Blood
39. Wall-E
40. Futurama II - The Beast With A Million Backs
41. The Muppet Movie
42. I'm Not There
43. A Little Romance
44. Pee Wee's Big Adventure
45. MST3000: Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders
46. MST3000: Santa Claus
47. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
48. Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
49. Koko the Talking Gorilla
50. Tremors
51. They Live
52. Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex (1992)
53. W.
54. When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
55. Aliens
56. Aguirre The Wrath Of God
57. The Seventh Seal
58. The Future of Food
59. Synecdoche, New York
60. Hatley High
61. After Hours
62. In Bruges
63. Sunshine
64. Labyrinth
65. Bringing Up Baby
66. Holiday
67. Slumdog Millionaire
68. The Philidelphia Story
69. Vertigo
70. The Devil Wears Prada
71. Field of Dreams
72. Sullivan's Travels
73. Eight Men Out
Books I've Read In 2008 (first-time only, and only books I fully read cover-to-cover)
1. Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen
2. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
3. The Persian Letters by Montesqueiu
4. As You Like It by William Shakespeare
5. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
6. Contact by Carl Sagan
7. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
8. Henry IV, Pt. I by William Shakespeare
9. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
10. Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
11. Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware
12. Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill
13. Henry IV, Pt. II by William Shakespeare
14. Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
15. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
16. Paradise Park by Charles Mee
17. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
18. The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno
19. Antony & Cleopatra by William Shakespeare
20. Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen
21. Master of Reality by John Darnielle
22. The Lover by Marguerite Duras
23. The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare
24. Lila the Werewolf by Peter S. Beagle
25. The Line Between by Peter S. Beagle
26. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
27. Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
28. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
29. Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich
30. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen
31. Homegrown Democrat by Garrison Keillor
32. The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber
33. The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
34. The Favorite Game by Leonard Cohen
36. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
37. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
38. The Misanthrope by Moliere
39. Tartuffe by Moliere
40. The Problem of Nature by David Arnold
41. Tastes of Paradise by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
42. Rameau's Nephew by Denis Diderot
43. The Marriage of Figaro by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
44. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
45. Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster by Michael Eric Dyson
46. Hind Swaraj by M.K. Gandhi
47. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
48. Waverley by Sir Walter Scott
49. In the Solitude of Cotton Fields by Bernard-Marie Koltes
50. Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute
51. It's Beautiful by Nathalie Sarraute
52. Liberty by Garrison Keillor
53. The Waltz of the Toreadors by Jean Anouilh
54. Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
55. Lazarillo de Tormes (Anonymous)