Prynne.
Moxley, The Middle Room.
also Giscombe, Prairie Style.
and (by ?) pamela. ....km's class: poetries of dislocation.
coyne class: Heidegger's Turn. IM Intro to Metaphysics. Pathmarks. so, appealling. also: Basic Problems in Philosophy. not seen before? *not* BP in Phenomenology, own in german & english. and the wooded whatever ~ another set of essays ~ os. we still have 2 on the shelf.
+ Zeitoun. would like to see what I think of Eggers's writing, and am interested in this account, of man Zeitoun and wife ~ experience during & after Hurricane Katrina.
--maybe also City of Refuge, by Tom Piazza. fiction re same, experience of two families in New Orleans at time of Katrina. almost won the Morning News book tournament.
+ The Unit. swedish author. Other press. into scandinavian writing lately? knausgaard norway. whatshisname iceland who I've tht for some time shld try Halldor Laxness that blue bk whatitstitle, that I like. now I have archipelago cloth edtn of his first novel.
The Unit appeals because about closed space, finite life.
like Saramago, The Cave. which I am trying to remember. the clay figurines they take to sell. and they move there, why do they have to move there? a closed inside world. entertainment. amenities. then what happens?
+ Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go. "final donation." same phrase right?
purchased Prynne, Zeitoun. also Inside Picture Books and also The Brightening Glance, by Ellen H~ Spitz. seems very good. so that's another direction of current interest, those bks and also Daniel N Stern: Diary of a Baby.
poetry. ~writing, story. childhood. play.
on tv, starting up. January: Big Love. February (early Feb. *not* March.): Lost.
...then in March? Breaking Bad. In Treatment. maybe usofTara.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Persephone the Wanderer - Poets.org
by Louise Glück from Averno
In the first version, Persephone is taken from her mother and the goddess of the earth
punishes the earth—this is consistent with what we know of human behavior,
that human beings take profound satisfaction in doing harm, particularly
unconscious harm: we may call this negative creation.
As is well known, the return of the beloved does not correct the loss of the beloved: Persephone returns home stained with red juice like a character in Hawthorne—
I am not certain I will keep this word: is earth "home" to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably, in the bed of the god? Is she at home nowhere? ..
..You are allowed to like no one, you know. The characters
are not people. They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.
..
You must ask yourself:
where is it snowing?
White of forgetfulness,
of desecration—
It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says
Persephone is having sex in hell.
Unlike the rest of us, she doesn't know
what winter is, only that
she is what causes it.
..
The terrible reunions in store for her will take up the rest of her life.
When the passion for expiation expiate DHL snake 'sth to expiate' ~ to atone for is chronic, fierce, you do not choose the way you live. You do not live; you are not allowed to die.
..
White of forgetfulness,
white of safety—
They say there is a rift in the human soul which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life. Earth asks us to deny this rift, a threat disguised as suggestion— all that mattered was sth I cldn't remember
as we have seen in the tale of Persephone which should could be read as an argument between the mother and the lover—
the daughter is just meat. and the rift is in her? wh you see if you read this as a tug btw mother-god and lover-god? creator and demon?
When death confronts her, she has never seen the meadow without the daisies.
Suddenly she is no longer singing her maidenly songs about her mother's beauty and fecundity. Where the rift is, the break is.
My soul shattered no not shattered ~ tired, wearied with the strain of trying to belong to earth—
What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the god?
______________________________
ok. when it is my turn. what will I
would I rather hear about Ariadne? closes her eyes so as not to see the men who could only appear and disappear. I close my eyes and all the world drops dead, I open them up and all is born again, I think I made you up inside my hear.
or maybe Kore, can we call Persephone Kore? disappearance. she is who's not there.
so, this is not esp appealing. I dislike some of the words ~ cliched?, though maybe she is just unafraid to use the obvious words. and obvious line breaks? do the line breaks add anything? seems not, I like better deleting them. I do think this might benefit from being read within the book, I do like her work as book length sequences, the accruing of theme.
by Louise Glück from Averno
In the first version, Persephone is taken from her mother and the goddess of the earth
punishes the earth—this is consistent with what we know of human behavior,
that human beings take profound satisfaction in doing harm, particularly
unconscious harm: we may call this negative creation.
As is well known, the return of the beloved does not correct the loss of the beloved: Persephone returns home stained with red juice like a character in Hawthorne—
I am not certain I will keep this word: is earth "home" to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably, in the bed of the god? Is she at home nowhere? ..
..You are allowed to like no one, you know. The characters
are not people. They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.
..
You must ask yourself:
where is it snowing?
White of forgetfulness,
of desecration—
It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says
Persephone is having sex in hell.
Unlike the rest of us, she doesn't know
what winter is, only that
she is what causes it.
..
The terrible reunions in store for her will take up the rest of her life.
When the passion for expiation expiate DHL snake 'sth to expiate' ~ to atone for is chronic, fierce, you do not choose the way you live. You do not live; you are not allowed to die.
..
White of forgetfulness,
white of safety—
They say there is a rift in the human soul which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life. Earth asks us to deny this rift, a threat disguised as suggestion— all that mattered was sth I cldn't remember
as we have seen in the tale of Persephone which should could be read as an argument between the mother and the lover—
the daughter is just meat. and the rift is in her? wh you see if you read this as a tug btw mother-god and lover-god? creator and demon?
When death confronts her, she has never seen the meadow without the daisies.
Suddenly she is no longer singing her maidenly songs about her mother's beauty and fecundity. Where the rift is, the break is.
My soul shattered no not shattered ~ tired, wearied with the strain of trying to belong to earth—
What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the god?
______________________________
ok. when it is my turn. what will I
would I rather hear about Ariadne? closes her eyes so as not to see the men who could only appear and disappear. I close my eyes and all the world drops dead, I open them up and all is born again, I think I made you up inside my hear.
or maybe Kore, can we call Persephone Kore? disappearance. she is who's not there.
so, this is not esp appealing. I dislike some of the words ~ cliched?, though maybe she is just unafraid to use the obvious words. and obvious line breaks? do the line breaks add anything? seems not, I like better deleting them. I do think this might benefit from being read within the book, I do like her work as book length sequences, the accruing of theme.
prism
| | Louise Gluck, “Prism”, Averno. |
1.
Who can say what the world is? The world
is in flux, therefore
unreadable, the winds shifting,
the great plates invisibly shifting and changing-
2.
Dirt. Fragments
of blistered rock. On which
the exposed heart constructs
a house, memory: the gardens
manageable, small in scale, the beds
damp at the sea’s edge-
3.
As one takes in
an enemy, through these windows
one takes in
the world:
here is the kitchen, here the darkened study.
Meaning: I am master here.
4.
When you fall in love, my sister said,
it’s like being struck by lightning.
She was speaking hopefully,
to draw the attention of the lightning.
I reminded her that she was repeating exactly
our mother’s formula, which she and I
had discussed in childhood, because we both felt
that what we were looking at in the adults
were the effects not of lightning
but of the electric chair.
5.
Riddle:
Why was my mother happy?
Answer:
She married my father
6.
“You girls,” My mother said, “should marry
someone like your father”
That was one remark. Another was,
“There is no one like your father.”
7.
From the pierced clouds, steady lines of silver.
Unlikely
yellow of the witch hazel, veins
of mercury that were the paths of the rivers-
Then the rain again, erasing
footprints in the damp earth.
An implied path, like
a map without a crossroads.
8.
The implication was, it was necessary to abandon
childhood. The word “marry” was a signal.
You could also treat it as aesthetic advice;
the voice of the child was tiresome,
it had no lower register.
The word was a code, mysterious, like the Rosetta stone.
It was also a roadsign, a warning.
You could take a few things with you like a dowry.
You could take the part of you that thought.
“Marry” meant you should keep that part quiet.
9.
A night in summer. Outside,
sounds of a summer storm. Then the sky clearing.
In the window, constellations of summer.
I’m in a bed. This man and I,
we are suspended in the strange calm
sex often induces. Most sex induces.
Longing, what is that? Desire, what is that?
In the window, constellations of summer.
Once, I could name them.
10.
Abstracted
shapes, patterns.
The light of the mind. The cold, exacting
fires of disinterestedness, curiously
blocked by earth, coherent, glittering
in air and water,
the elaborate
signs that said now plant, now, harvest-
I could name them, I had names for them:
two different things.
11.
Fabulous things, stars.
When I was a child, I suffered from insomnia.
Summer nights, my parents permitted me to sit by the lake;
I took the dog for company.
Did I say “suffered”? That was my parents’ way of explaining
tastes that seemed to them
inexplicable: better “suffered” than “preferred to live with the dog.”
Darkness. Silence that annulled mortality.
The tethered boats rising and falling.
When the moon was full, I could sometimes read the girls’ names
painted to the sides of the boats:
Ruth Ann, Sweet Izzy, Peggy My Darling-
They were going nowhere, those girls.
There was nothing to be learned from them.
I spread my jacket in the damp sand,
the dog curled up beside me.
My parents couldn’t see the lift: in my head;
when I wrote it down, they fixed the spelling.
Sounds of the lake. The soothing, inhuman
sounds of water lapping the dock, the dog scuffling somewhere
in the weeds-
12.
The assignment was to fall in love.
The details were up to you.
The second part was
to include in the poem certain words,
words drawn from a specific text
on another subject altogether.
13.
Spring rain, then a night in summer.
A man’s voice, then a woman’s voice.
You grew up, you were struck by lightning.
When you opened your eyes, you were wired forever to your true love.
It only happened once. Then you were taken care of,
your story was finished.
It happened once. Being struck was like being vaccinated;
the rest of your life you were immune,
you were warm and dry.
Unless the shock wasn’t deep enough.
Then you weren’t vaccinated, you were addicted.
14.
The assignment was to fall in love.
The author was female.
The ego had to be called the soul.
The action took place in the body.
Stars represented everything else: dreams, the mind, etc.
The beloved was identified
with the self in a narcissistic projection.
The mind was a subplot. It went nattering on.
Time was experienced
less as narrative than ritual.
What was repeated had weight.
Certain endings were tragic, thus acceptable.
Everything else was failure.
15.
Deceit. Lies. Embellishments we call
hypotheses-
There were too many roads, too many versions.
There were too many roads, no one path-
And at the end?
16.
List the implications of “crossroads.”
Answer: a story that will have a moral.
Give a counter-example:
17.
The self ended and the world began.
They were of equal size,
commensurate,
one mirrored the other.
18.
The riddle was: why couldn’t we live in the mind.
The answer was: the barrier of the earth intervened.
19.
The room was quiet.
That is, the room was quiet, but the lovers were breathing.
In the same way, the night was dark.
It was dark, but the stars shone.
The man in bed was one of several men
to whom I gave my heart. The gift of the self,
that is without limit.
Without limit, though it recurs.
The room was quiet. It was an absolute,
like the black night.
20.
A night in summer. Sounds of a summer storm.
The great plates invisibly shifting and changing-
And in the dark room, the lovers sleeping in each other’s arms.
We are, each of us, the one who wakens first,
who stirs first and sees, there in the first dawn,
the stranger.
narratives | Tumblr (cache)
Friday, December 4, 2009
previously:
Small Works - Pam Rehm [Flood editions; 'an ever more spare clarity .. sustenance from the natural world, children's games, and familiar valedictions: "The world of consequence be with you - always." 'There is neither an I nor a Thou within range, but both of these seem to be balancing Rehm's thoughts from end to end.' -Fanny Howe hmm? no I or thou in range. but thoughts balanced by I here, thou there. ?
Catch Light - Sarah O'Brien [National Poetry Series 2009; Coffee House Press. “The whole - world is synonyms”.. a debut collection that contemplates the art of photography and the many essences of light.
The Journey - H.G.Adler
Collections of Nothing - William Davies King
recently:
Animals in Film - Jonathan Burt [little green reaction bks (uk) monograph
Black Sun - Kristeva
Goest - Cole Swensen ['Goest, sonorous with a hovering “ghost” mm which shimmers at the root of all things, is a meditation—even initiation—on the act of seeing, proprioception, and the alchemical properties of light as it exists naturally and inside the human realm of history, lore, invention and the “whites” of painting. .. “intellectus”—light of the mind..' ' ..light, glass, mirrors, flame, ice, mercury..' ~put near Catch Light
Body - Jenny Boully [had so'd yrs ago after shipping one; pos; now in new edtn. footnotes to unseen text = blank pages above the notes
Coll Stories of Lydia Davis [fsg hardcover
& km:
Middle Room - Jennifer Moxley
['A love song to friendship, the Middle Room is a valuable and delicious literary history of recent community formations on the west coast.' ~I am wary of community formations on the west coast -'what happens when you find the avant-garde of your dreams in San Diego, California' -'this true-life sex and love and car-culture confession .. the cars are open-top, the poets seethe, love and undermine each other..'
y pretty sure J Moxley is who justin talked about: assoc w the Baffler in Chgo, is at Univ of Maine now Jennifer Moxley. Associate Professor of English. 5752 Neville Hall Room 213. Orono, ME 04469. EMAIL: jennifer.moxley@umit.maine.edu ...
www.umaine.edu/english/faculty/jennifer-moxley
Poems - J.H.Prynne
[wkp: Jeremy Halvard Prynne (born 1936 ) is a British poet.
Prynne's early influences include Charles Olson and Donald Davie. His firt book was published in 1962; Prynne has excluded it from his canon. His Poems (1982) collected all the work he wanted to keep in print. An expanded and updated version appeared in 1999, with another, further updated, published in 2005. but did semcoop just get it (for first time?) fr uk?
pw: Many readers of so-called innovative or experimental verse regard Prynne as Britain's most important living poet. Until now, most of his work has been available only in small editions and chapbooks. Prynne, who teaches at Cambridge University, is the center of a group known as the Cambridge poets. His peculiarly local influence is no accident, since he has stayed away from large-scale publishing; he made this decision partly to honor the poems' quiet, hermetic quality, and partly as a response to the absorption of experimental poetics into academic parlance-a parallel, for Prynne, to capitalism's absorption of opposition. Prynne's difficulties demand, and reward, close attention. His early work shows what he learned from Charles Olson, switching from personal to political to geological frames of reference in a single phrase. Enjoyable for their complex logic and concealed wit, these early poems often alternate incompatible metres, creating a distinctive discursive cascade. Next to these recalcitrant works Prynne has placed sequences like "Day Light Songs," more lyrical, less dense and equally accomplished. .. While never a rabble-rousing avant-gardist, Prynne continues to make startling discoveries. Not-You (1993) introduces staggered lines that fall together like tone clusters.. ~innovator in the way of gerard manley hopkins sprung rhythm? (di piero: succession of poets from Thms Hardy. but Hopkins no successors. ~too ~idiosyncr) no I suppose v different ~
kirkus: ..an omnibus gathering from one of Great Britains most highly acclaimed contemporary poets. Still largely unfamiliar to American readers, Prynne has authored more than 20 volumes in England over the past 30 years. A stylist in the high modernist tradition, Prynnes lapidary phraseology and interior rhetoric..
..his voice is strong enough to carry into laterand, one hopes, healthierages to find the audience he deserves. laterand mm. (later and, one hopes, healthier ages.) carried healthierages into laterand. laterand laterland.
-Prynne has been for several decades now the most important "unknown" poet in the English language, his work earning a reputation for its sybilline authority & beauty. A nutshell description would be: imagine a collision between Charles Olson, William Wordsworth & Paul Celan--& if you don't have quite Prynne's work, you'd have a rough idea of its excitement & its extraordinary summing-up of an entire poetic tradition. which tradition? lyric?
-Prynne is the most illustrious of a fairly small number of English-language poets (others include Barry MacSweeney and Iain Sinclair) who still cleave to a sort-of modernist idea that poems ought not to say things that can be said any other way, but instead are verbal artifacts unto themselves. His early work is in a shabby, low-rent Four-Quartetsy sort of mode, but during the late Seventies he really hit his stride. His best works are glossy, sexy, sardonic, thoroughly worked-over verbal machines that do what few other poets have dared to do since the death of Pound. Prynne is not _primarily_ interested in communicating some amazingly primal or psycho-sexual-cultural-political-transcendental experience, he's interested in the glint and spark of words put together in a certain way is that enough? ~ it is if sth happens 'is going on' in the poem: mind's mountains cliffs of fall, and this saves him from being either kitschy (as the worst work of Ted Hughes can be) or trivial (as, well, pretty much most poets usually are.) This is definitely a desert island book, if only for the sheer amount of allusion and density Prynne is able to pack into a short poem - even at his most recondite, he's pushing you towards the world you've vainly tried to leave behind.
- Britain's leading late Modernist poet J.H. Prynne..
'An introduction to the poetry of J.H.Prynne', by Rod Mengham and John Kinsella (Jacket # 7, April 1999) by Rod Mengham and John Kinsella.
This piece first appeared in the Bloodaxe Books [ www.bloodaxebooks.demon.co.uk ] catalogue advertising the Collected Poems of J.H.Prynne (1999).
J.H. Prynne is possibly the most significant English poet of the late twentieth century.
He is a lyrical experimentalist..
Rightly particular about the presentation of poetry --the integrity of text, the frame and field of the page, the context in which presentation and consequently reception take place-- Prynne has been patient in collating another "collected" volume. This collection of poems (the Collected Poems)has been a long time in coming. At its core is the Poems volume published in 1982 by Agneau 2, long since out of print. But there have been over half-a-dozen other works since then published by small presses in small print runs.
..The ghettoizing of Prynne's reputation has resulted from his decision to publish only with small presses and to engage in public debate almost entirely through the pages of little magazines. huh.
As Prynne has avoided mainstream publishing it has been assumed that he rejects the 'general' readership, that his is a language of an informed & 'alternative' clique. But it is the indifference of the mainstream publisher to "the work" itself how is this indifference manifested by the mainstr publisher? that has been a problem for Prynne, and not the idea of availability. The affordable volume that can be read by anyone with an interest in what is going on in the poem would appeal to Prynne.
..the fluency and balance of the philosophical monologist are belied by crowding intimations of a whole series of relativising contexts.. The English landscape is seen in relation to the withdrawal of the glaciers, its patterns of settlement judged in relation to the customs of nomadic tribes.
..thresholds are located around the body, at the various points of entry and exit where the processes of absorbing information from the world or of sending it out into the world, must start and finish. The crucial question, of where & when personal agency can truly be said to come to life, is posed most revealingly in situations where the body is in trouble, in circumstances of estrangement or pain, and consequently much of the research encoded in the poems focuses on the extremities of what one text refers to as 'wound response'. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The making & unmaking of the world.
N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, in their lively study of the poetry of J.H. Prynne, Nearly Too Much nice title well bcs for me so m is nearly too m; what is to Prynne, according to Reeve & Kerridge? (Liverpool University Press, 1995), write of the 'indeterminacy' and the 'avoidance of totality and closure.'
..some of Prynne's most signif affiliations are w American and continental writers and thinkers; Charles Olson, Frank O'Hara, Martin Heidegger, Paul Celan make their presence felt at different stages of his work.
Small Works - Pam Rehm [Flood editions; 'an ever more spare clarity .. sustenance from the natural world, children's games, and familiar valedictions: "The world of consequence be with you - always." 'There is neither an I nor a Thou within range, but both of these seem to be balancing Rehm's thoughts from end to end.' -Fanny Howe hmm? no I or thou in range. but thoughts balanced by I here, thou there. ?
Catch Light - Sarah O'Brien [National Poetry Series 2009; Coffee House Press. “The whole - world is synonyms”.. a debut collection that contemplates the art of photography and the many essences of light.
The Journey - H.G.Adler
Collections of Nothing - William Davies King
recently:
Animals in Film - Jonathan Burt [little green reaction bks (uk) monograph
Black Sun - Kristeva
Goest - Cole Swensen ['Goest, sonorous with a hovering “ghost” mm which shimmers at the root of all things, is a meditation—even initiation—on the act of seeing, proprioception, and the alchemical properties of light as it exists naturally and inside the human realm of history, lore, invention and the “whites” of painting. .. “intellectus”—light of the mind..' ' ..light, glass, mirrors, flame, ice, mercury..' ~put near Catch Light
Body - Jenny Boully [had so'd yrs ago after shipping one; pos; now in new edtn. footnotes to unseen text = blank pages above the notes
Coll Stories of Lydia Davis [fsg hardcover
& km:
Middle Room - Jennifer Moxley
['A love song to friendship, the Middle Room is a valuable and delicious literary history of recent community formations on the west coast.' ~I am wary of community formations on the west coast -'what happens when you find the avant-garde of your dreams in San Diego, California' -'this true-life sex and love and car-culture confession .. the cars are open-top, the poets seethe, love and undermine each other..'
y pretty sure J Moxley is who justin talked about: assoc w the Baffler in Chgo, is at Univ of Maine now Jennifer Moxley. Associate Professor of English. 5752 Neville Hall Room 213. Orono, ME 04469. EMAIL: jennifer.moxley@umit.maine.edu ...
www.umaine.edu/english/faculty/jennifer-moxley
Poems - J.H.Prynne
[wkp: Jeremy Halvard Prynne (born 1936 ) is a British poet.
Prynne's early influences include Charles Olson and Donald Davie. His firt book was published in 1962; Prynne has excluded it from his canon. His Poems (1982) collected all the work he wanted to keep in print. An expanded and updated version appeared in 1999, with another, further updated, published in 2005. but did semcoop just get it (for first time?) fr uk?
pw: Many readers of so-called innovative or experimental verse regard Prynne as Britain's most important living poet. Until now, most of his work has been available only in small editions and chapbooks. Prynne, who teaches at Cambridge University, is the center of a group known as the Cambridge poets. His peculiarly local influence is no accident, since he has stayed away from large-scale publishing; he made this decision partly to honor the poems' quiet, hermetic quality, and partly as a response to the absorption of experimental poetics into academic parlance-a parallel, for Prynne, to capitalism's absorption of opposition. Prynne's difficulties demand, and reward, close attention. His early work shows what he learned from Charles Olson, switching from personal to political to geological frames of reference in a single phrase. Enjoyable for their complex logic and concealed wit, these early poems often alternate incompatible metres, creating a distinctive discursive cascade. Next to these recalcitrant works Prynne has placed sequences like "Day Light Songs," more lyrical, less dense and equally accomplished. .. While never a rabble-rousing avant-gardist, Prynne continues to make startling discoveries. Not-You (1993) introduces staggered lines that fall together like tone clusters.. ~innovator in the way of gerard manley hopkins sprung rhythm? (di piero: succession of poets from Thms Hardy. but Hopkins no successors. ~too ~idiosyncr) no I suppose v different ~
kirkus: ..an omnibus gathering from one of Great Britains most highly acclaimed contemporary poets. Still largely unfamiliar to American readers, Prynne has authored more than 20 volumes in England over the past 30 years. A stylist in the high modernist tradition, Prynnes lapidary phraseology and interior rhetoric..
..his voice is strong enough to carry into laterand, one hopes, healthierages to find the audience he deserves. laterand mm. (later and, one hopes, healthier ages.) carried healthierages into laterand. laterand laterland.
-Prynne has been for several decades now the most important "unknown" poet in the English language, his work earning a reputation for its sybilline authority & beauty. A nutshell description would be: imagine a collision between Charles Olson, William Wordsworth & Paul Celan--& if you don't have quite Prynne's work, you'd have a rough idea of its excitement & its extraordinary summing-up of an entire poetic tradition. which tradition? lyric?
-Prynne is the most illustrious of a fairly small number of English-language poets (others include Barry MacSweeney and Iain Sinclair) who still cleave to a sort-of modernist idea that poems ought not to say things that can be said any other way, but instead are verbal artifacts unto themselves. His early work is in a shabby, low-rent Four-Quartetsy sort of mode, but during the late Seventies he really hit his stride. His best works are glossy, sexy, sardonic, thoroughly worked-over verbal machines that do what few other poets have dared to do since the death of Pound. Prynne is not _primarily_ interested in communicating some amazingly primal or psycho-sexual-cultural-political-transcendental experience, he's interested in the glint and spark of words put together in a certain way is that enough? ~ it is if sth happens 'is going on' in the poem: mind's mountains cliffs of fall, and this saves him from being either kitschy (as the worst work of Ted Hughes can be) or trivial (as, well, pretty much most poets usually are.) This is definitely a desert island book, if only for the sheer amount of allusion and density Prynne is able to pack into a short poem - even at his most recondite, he's pushing you towards the world you've vainly tried to leave behind.
- Britain's leading late Modernist poet J.H. Prynne..
'An introduction to the poetry of J.H.Prynne', by Rod Mengham and John Kinsella (Jacket # 7, April 1999) by Rod Mengham and John Kinsella.
This piece first appeared in the Bloodaxe Books [ www.bloodaxebooks.demon.co.uk ] catalogue advertising the Collected Poems of J.H.Prynne (1999).
J.H. Prynne is possibly the most significant English poet of the late twentieth century.
He is a lyrical experimentalist..
Rightly particular about the presentation of poetry --the integrity of text, the frame and field of the page, the context in which presentation and consequently reception take place-- Prynne has been patient in collating another "collected" volume. This collection of poems (the Collected Poems)has been a long time in coming. At its core is the Poems volume published in 1982 by Agneau 2, long since out of print. But there have been over half-a-dozen other works since then published by small presses in small print runs.
..The ghettoizing of Prynne's reputation has resulted from his decision to publish only with small presses and to engage in public debate almost entirely through the pages of little magazines. huh.
As Prynne has avoided mainstream publishing it has been assumed that he rejects the 'general' readership, that his is a language of an informed & 'alternative' clique. But it is the indifference of the mainstream publisher to "the work" itself how is this indifference manifested by the mainstr publisher? that has been a problem for Prynne, and not the idea of availability. The affordable volume that can be read by anyone with an interest in what is going on in the poem would appeal to Prynne.
..the fluency and balance of the philosophical monologist are belied by crowding intimations of a whole series of relativising contexts.. The English landscape is seen in relation to the withdrawal of the glaciers, its patterns of settlement judged in relation to the customs of nomadic tribes.
..thresholds are located around the body, at the various points of entry and exit where the processes of absorbing information from the world or of sending it out into the world, must start and finish. The crucial question, of where & when personal agency can truly be said to come to life, is posed most revealingly in situations where the body is in trouble, in circumstances of estrangement or pain, and consequently much of the research encoded in the poems focuses on the extremities of what one text refers to as 'wound response'. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The making & unmaking of the world.
N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, in their lively study of the poetry of J.H. Prynne, Nearly Too Much nice title well bcs for me so m is nearly too m; what is to Prynne, according to Reeve & Kerridge? (Liverpool University Press, 1995), write of the 'indeterminacy' and the 'avoidance of totality and closure.'
..some of Prynne's most signif affiliations are w American and continental writers and thinkers; Charles Olson, Frank O'Hara, Martin Heidegger, Paul Celan make their presence felt at different stages of his work.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Breaking Bad. * amc.
Big Love. * hbo.
True Blood. hbo, summer.
Dexter. showtime, now (fall).
Weeds. showtime, summer.
US of Tara. showtime.
Jan ~ March 2010 returning, I think: Breaking Bad S3, Big LoveS4, USofTara S2. and! Lost S6, the final one.
oh: March mostly. Breaking Bad in March. Lost in March. and Tara "early in 2010." but Big Love, wkp:: According to imdb the fourth season will premiere on January 10, 2010.[15]
so, January: Big Love. March: Breaking Bad. Lost. it's mainly Lost that I will want to follow as it airs, reading responses. partake in it as a social Event.
just heard, also in March, a third season of In Treatment. had tht S2 was it. S3 will be fully original, BeTipul only had two seasons. In Treatment top notch, but in own category, more different from the others on this list than the rest from each other. therapy, one on one, the drama of the dyad -vs- suspenseful situation around one or more main character.
*Breaking Bad & Big Love the best, to me. wld watch again.
could watch those w mom, also maybe US of Tara which is lighter ~ fun.
True Blood, Dexter, Weeds. very entertaining, but after knowing wh happens, not that engaging to watch a second time. the minutiae, the direction & filming not as intriguing.
24 is the same, further down list in quality, wld be even more unpleasant to watch a second time. but did work for me for a while, 'the tick tick will get you long before the bomb.'
Dexter was totally compelling when had a lot of episodes to watch at once, bcs Michael C Hall mesmerizing to me, I like being in Dexter's head.
the best, to me?
Breaking Bad S1. I really like how little time it covers, how they only cook once. (much slower pace than Weeds, but with both I am on edge bcs looking for it to settle, at lst for a bit, into an organized set-up. but never does. no sooner get a plan in place for business, a deal that could possibly be repeated, sustained, than it blows up. also with The Riches, I kept wanting it to settle into a groove, have a while where the family lives as the Riches, goes to work, goes to school. never did ~ but there I think they could have, might have made it better. with that show only the pilot episode was great. but it was, that first episode was really good.)
Big Love S3. esp epsd 8 the road trip "Come all ye, Saints."
In Treatment S2. esp the Thursday sessions with Walter, fantastic.
write-ups of each episode of all three of those shows by Alan Sepinwall, with lots of blog commenters. and also nuanced writeups of Big Love and of Breaking Bad by Todd VanDerWerff at the House Next Door.
not as high quality but also favorites, first seasons of Lost, Life, Veronica Mars. and a bit below those, Nip/Tuck which did have that compellingly angsty first season.
Lost no longer as totally compelling viewing, but the discussion around it is exciting. occasions so much conversation, imagination. and S1 was really moving, I love the scenario of ppl together after a disaster, and I found every character's story involving.
Life: I really like Damian Lewis and his character Charlie Crews, how he approaches every encounter with that calm, watchful consideration. life after the end, again the hook for me.
Veronica Mars, also. life after all falls apart. and I like Veronica with her dad, and I really enjoy Jason Dohring as Logan.
been thinking of what if Dohring as Jesse in Breaking Bad, and Terry O'Quinn (Locke in Lost) as Walt. not that they could be better than Cranston & Aaron Paul, but they are similarly suited to the roles.
not esp my cup of tea? Mad Men. eh. depressing formal lives.
The Sopranos, just haven't cottoned to Tony & family.
The Wire, though I get it that is very good, still only just barely got to point of finding S1 compelling. not as psychologically intimate as I like? a wide view, the city, the institutions.
Carnivale seems haunting, but d n hook me in.
Deadwood seems haunting, grand, dark. have to get past all the dust, everything shades of brown, then, still expect it to be my favorite ever?
that's amc then hbo hbo hbo hbo.
The Shield (fx) maybe will get into this if start at the beginning. now, having liked Dean Norris as DEA agent Hank in Breaking Bad, somehow seems a way in.
so those two, The Shield and Deadwood, are my future immersion possibilities list.
Bad Guys on TV | Newsweek Entertainment | Newsweek.com :
Vic on The Shield. Jack Bauer, Dexter, Don Draper. 'These kinds of fully rendered characters—dark streaked with some light—have changed the television landscape to the point where what we see on the small screen is, pound for pound, superior to what we see at the movies.'
and over in another room, Always Sunny in Philadelphia makes me laugh with mean spirited bleak playful comedy.
and now, Modern Family, happy and funny.
Big Love. * hbo.
True Blood. hbo, summer.
Dexter. showtime, now (fall).
Weeds. showtime, summer.
US of Tara. showtime.
Jan ~ March 2010 returning, I think: Breaking Bad S3, Big LoveS4, USofTara S2. and! Lost S6, the final one.
oh: March mostly. Breaking Bad in March. Lost in March. and Tara "early in 2010." but Big Love, wkp:: According to imdb the fourth season will premiere on January 10, 2010.[15]
so, January: Big Love. March: Breaking Bad. Lost. it's mainly Lost that I will want to follow as it airs, reading responses. partake in it as a social Event.
just heard, also in March, a third season of In Treatment. had tht S2 was it. S3 will be fully original, BeTipul only had two seasons. In Treatment top notch, but in own category, more different from the others on this list than the rest from each other. therapy, one on one, the drama of the dyad -vs- suspenseful situation around one or more main character.
*Breaking Bad & Big Love the best, to me. wld watch again.
could watch those w mom, also maybe US of Tara which is lighter ~ fun.
True Blood, Dexter, Weeds. very entertaining, but after knowing wh happens, not that engaging to watch a second time. the minutiae, the direction & filming not as intriguing.
24 is the same, further down list in quality, wld be even more unpleasant to watch a second time. but did work for me for a while, 'the tick tick will get you long before the bomb.'
Dexter was totally compelling when had a lot of episodes to watch at once, bcs Michael C Hall mesmerizing to me, I like being in Dexter's head.
the best, to me?
Breaking Bad S1. I really like how little time it covers, how they only cook once. (much slower pace than Weeds, but with both I am on edge bcs looking for it to settle, at lst for a bit, into an organized set-up. but never does. no sooner get a plan in place for business, a deal that could possibly be repeated, sustained, than it blows up. also with The Riches, I kept wanting it to settle into a groove, have a while where the family lives as the Riches, goes to work, goes to school. never did ~ but there I think they could have, might have made it better. with that show only the pilot episode was great. but it was, that first episode was really good.)
Big Love S3. esp epsd 8 the road trip "Come all ye, Saints."
In Treatment S2. esp the Thursday sessions with Walter, fantastic.
write-ups of each episode of all three of those shows by Alan Sepinwall, with lots of blog commenters. and also nuanced writeups of Big Love and of Breaking Bad by Todd VanDerWerff at the House Next Door.
not as high quality but also favorites, first seasons of Lost, Life, Veronica Mars. and a bit below those, Nip/Tuck which did have that compellingly angsty first season.
Lost no longer as totally compelling viewing, but the discussion around it is exciting. occasions so much conversation, imagination. and S1 was really moving, I love the scenario of ppl together after a disaster, and I found every character's story involving.
Life: I really like Damian Lewis and his character Charlie Crews, how he approaches every encounter with that calm, watchful consideration. life after the end, again the hook for me.
Veronica Mars, also. life after all falls apart. and I like Veronica with her dad, and I really enjoy Jason Dohring as Logan.
been thinking of what if Dohring as Jesse in Breaking Bad, and Terry O'Quinn (Locke in Lost) as Walt. not that they could be better than Cranston & Aaron Paul, but they are similarly suited to the roles.
not esp my cup of tea? Mad Men. eh. depressing formal lives.
The Sopranos, just haven't cottoned to Tony & family.
The Wire, though I get it that is very good, still only just barely got to point of finding S1 compelling. not as psychologically intimate as I like? a wide view, the city, the institutions.
Carnivale seems haunting, but d n hook me in.
Deadwood seems haunting, grand, dark. have to get past all the dust, everything shades of brown, then, still expect it to be my favorite ever?
that's amc then hbo hbo hbo hbo.
The Shield (fx) maybe will get into this if start at the beginning. now, having liked Dean Norris as DEA agent Hank in Breaking Bad, somehow seems a way in.
so those two, The Shield and Deadwood, are my future immersion possibilities list.
Bad Guys on TV | Newsweek Entertainment | Newsweek.com :
Vic on The Shield. Jack Bauer, Dexter, Don Draper. 'These kinds of fully rendered characters—dark streaked with some light—have changed the television landscape to the point where what we see on the small screen is, pound for pound, superior to what we see at the movies.'
and over in another room, Always Sunny in Philadelphia makes me laugh with mean spirited bleak playful comedy.
and now, Modern Family, happy and funny.
What's Alan Watching?: Breaking Bad: Vince Gilligan post-mortems season two:
The character continues to surprise us, the writers, in the writer's room. 'What would he do now?' 'I think he would do this.' 'Maybe he should do this instead.' It's a little hard to believe for folks who don't spend every waking moment in the writer's room plotting out a fictional character's life mm that sounds like a fun job, but they do kind of come to life for us. They become, in a sense, separate from us. They demand certain moments and bits of behavior that we, in a sense, don't want to give them. It sounds a little precious to put it that way, but they do. If we're going to be honest about a guy who sets out to be a criminal, we have to see where it takes itself.
he conceit that he's doing this all for his family, has gone by the wayside quite a long time ago. To me, that's what's interesting about the show, and makes me get out of bed every morning, enthused to be a part of it, is we're not leaving this character static. We're changing him in increments, sometimes small, sometimes large, and we don't know exactly where he's going to end up.
"Go big or go home." That was our ethos for last season: go big or go home. We figured in for a penny, in for a pound. We've come this far, let's be honest about it.
--In the finale, Skyler finally puts enough of what Walt is doing together to want him out of her life. But what's she telling Flynn about why his dad can't live at home anymore? yeah Flynn who's just made his "Save Walt White" website & been profiled in the newspaper talking about how his dad is so decent, always does the right thing, is his hero.
Good question, and that's been a big focus of conversation in the writers room here in season three. I can't tell you too much. It's stuff you'll see in the first episode, but I can give you this: I don't think she's telling folks too much. You're asking the right question, let me put it that way. When a woman is going to leave her husband, everybody needs to hear a reason. What reason do you give if the reason you're leaving is that you don't know what he's involved in, and you don't want to know.
-An absolutely riveting and visually stunning final episode that rivaled the best that TV has ever offered.
The character continues to surprise us, the writers, in the writer's room. 'What would he do now?' 'I think he would do this.' 'Maybe he should do this instead.' It's a little hard to believe for folks who don't spend every waking moment in the writer's room plotting out a fictional character's life mm that sounds like a fun job, but they do kind of come to life for us. They become, in a sense, separate from us. They demand certain moments and bits of behavior that we, in a sense, don't want to give them. It sounds a little precious to put it that way, but they do. If we're going to be honest about a guy who sets out to be a criminal, we have to see where it takes itself.
he conceit that he's doing this all for his family, has gone by the wayside quite a long time ago. To me, that's what's interesting about the show, and makes me get out of bed every morning, enthused to be a part of it, is we're not leaving this character static. We're changing him in increments, sometimes small, sometimes large, and we don't know exactly where he's going to end up.
"Go big or go home." That was our ethos for last season: go big or go home. We figured in for a penny, in for a pound. We've come this far, let's be honest about it.
--In the finale, Skyler finally puts enough of what Walt is doing together to want him out of her life. But what's she telling Flynn about why his dad can't live at home anymore? yeah Flynn who's just made his "Save Walt White" website & been profiled in the newspaper talking about how his dad is so decent, always does the right thing, is his hero.
Good question, and that's been a big focus of conversation in the writers room here in season three. I can't tell you too much. It's stuff you'll see in the first episode, but I can give you this: I don't think she's telling folks too much. You're asking the right question, let me put it that way. When a woman is going to leave her husband, everybody needs to hear a reason. What reason do you give if the reason you're leaving is that you don't know what he's involved in, and you don't want to know.
-An absolutely riveting and visually stunning final episode that rivaled the best that TV has ever offered.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
The publisher's description of this book, and most of the reviews and readers' reactions I've read (many of them regarding the UK publication this past summer of this same translation, under the title A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven), mostly prepare you for the opening pages: a story of a boy lost in the woods at night, who comes upon two men with wings. It is a lovely story, but only takes you a little ways into A Time For Everything. The story is told to us by a narrator who occasionally announces himself as an "I" or a "me" as he tells us of Antinous Bellori, the lost boy who in 1584 witnesses two angels and who then devotes his life to researching and writing a book called On the Nature of Angels.
The dominant storyline ofA Time For Everything is our narrator's consideration of Bellori's work on angels, including their appearances in the book of Genesis. But barely forty pages in, the narrator disappears for two long stretches (with just a few pages' reappearance in the transition between the two). For a hundred pages, we are immersed in the story of Cain and his complicated but fond love for his younger quicker brother Abel. Then for two hundred pages, we read a moving story of people at the time of the flood. We meet Noah's sister Anna and her family in the days when the rain keeps falling and falling and they eventually take to the mountains to try to keep above the rising sea. We only briefly read of Noah's instruction from God to build an Ark, and how he and his sons set to work building a huge boat in a field up in the mountains. The narrative spends more time falling back to tell us of Noah and Anna's childhood, their relationship with their father Lamech, the joy that their kid brother Barak brings, and a family tragedy. When we circle back around to the days of rain, it is again to tragedy, heightened when Anna's daughter Rachel gives birth to a baby boy, only to carry him up and up until they can go no further, and must huddle on the peak of a mountain that is now an island, looking out at the other mountain peaks turned islands, other people visible on the nearest one, also looking out across the vast waterscape. And the water is still rising.
Then, three hundred and some pages into the book, we are back with our narrator and Bellori. We stay with them, more or less, for the next one hundred and fifty pages (so, overall, the story of Anna and her family gets a little bit more page weight than Bellori and On the Nature of Angels). I'm talking about page counts because I think it is easy to be vague and even inaccurate in saying what this strange book contains, and I want to try to articulate what is actually found in these five hundred pages. This is hardest to do with regard to this main storyline, concerning Bellori's life and work. Other descriptions of A Time For Everything say, to my mind too vaguely, carelessly, that it tells us all about angels. But there are many stories, myths, ideas about angels that could figure in a catalog or investigation into the nature of angels, yet do not come into play here; we hear only in passing, for example, about the image of angels as guardians. Our narrator is concerned with angels as on a fault line between the human and the divine, and with fault lines generally: at the level of intellectual history, as changes between worldviews; and within that history, as momentous shifts from one situation to another. With regard to intellectual history, our narrator is able to use Bellori to muse on the shift to a modern worldview, since Knausgaard has positioned Bellori as one of those "obsessed young men who, in the first decades of the modern age, ensconced themselves in rooms in great cities all round Europe to think." At Bellori's time, angelology could still go hand in hand with geography, or numerology and alchemy be pursued alongside studies of motion and matter -- as they were, our narrator reminds us, by Newton -- but reason and observation were becoming ascendant over scriptural or traditional authority, and divisions being made: material vs immaterial, concrete vs abstract, physical vs spiritual, scientific vs historical, natural vs divine. "In reality it was just a matter of time before the situation would become what it's turned into today, where everything connected with the holy is regarded as abstract, so that we literally do not see the materiality of what is holy, whereas everything that concerns physical nature is exclusively seen as concrete, and we lose sight of physical nature's immaterial aspects, too." Along with such assessing of Bellori's own moment in history, our narrator follows Bellori's work in assessing major shifts in the relations between humanity and divinity, the fault lines appearing as the great flood, the incarnation, and the crucifixion. Bellori posits that the real reason for the flood was that angels had overstepped their proper bounds, as referenced by one line in Genesis, by taking up with human women who then bore their children, the giant Nephilim. How shocked, Bellori realizes, must the angels have been, when their Lord, after flooding and killing everything in reaction to their transgression, then himself so much more completely crossed that same boundary by becoming man? And how fallen must the angels be now, after watching their Lord die?
Thinking over this book, I find that I try to make it come together. I try to see how its concern over shifts in human worldview lines up with its concern over divine-human relations. The interrelation of concerns is obvious but unneat. Knausgaard puts a lot out there, but it does not seem finally to have been carefully designed. Is there a parallel between the human-divine relations, the proximity of God to his people, as Bellori finds manifested by the angels, and the changing proximity of our narrator to us? Until the final fifty page "coda", we might think the narrator is simply the author Karl Klausgaard; but in those final pages the "I" tells us a story of his own life, in our time, and we learn that he is a Norwegian man named Henrik Vankel, protagonist of Klausgaard's first book, Out of This World. Vankel's father tells him when he is young that seagulls used to be angels; this is the one link back to the previous four hundred and fifty pages. The coda does not mention Bellori, does not have Vankel reference all that thinking that I guess he's been doing about angels, the flood, the life of Christ. Vankel does give us in these final pages the reflection that provides the book title, thinking about how "not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven." I had thought perhaps the title was in keeping with how much this book contains, resonant but not specifically tied together: a time for everything, and here is some of that everything. Vankel's emphasis is on the "a" - one single time for everything, all at once. What to make of it?
The dominant storyline ofA Time For Everything is our narrator's consideration of Bellori's work on angels, including their appearances in the book of Genesis. But barely forty pages in, the narrator disappears for two long stretches (with just a few pages' reappearance in the transition between the two). For a hundred pages, we are immersed in the story of Cain and his complicated but fond love for his younger quicker brother Abel. Then for two hundred pages, we read a moving story of people at the time of the flood. We meet Noah's sister Anna and her family in the days when the rain keeps falling and falling and they eventually take to the mountains to try to keep above the rising sea. We only briefly read of Noah's instruction from God to build an Ark, and how he and his sons set to work building a huge boat in a field up in the mountains. The narrative spends more time falling back to tell us of Noah and Anna's childhood, their relationship with their father Lamech, the joy that their kid brother Barak brings, and a family tragedy. When we circle back around to the days of rain, it is again to tragedy, heightened when Anna's daughter Rachel gives birth to a baby boy, only to carry him up and up until they can go no further, and must huddle on the peak of a mountain that is now an island, looking out at the other mountain peaks turned islands, other people visible on the nearest one, also looking out across the vast waterscape. And the water is still rising.
Then, three hundred and some pages into the book, we are back with our narrator and Bellori. We stay with them, more or less, for the next one hundred and fifty pages (so, overall, the story of Anna and her family gets a little bit more page weight than Bellori and On the Nature of Angels). I'm talking about page counts because I think it is easy to be vague and even inaccurate in saying what this strange book contains, and I want to try to articulate what is actually found in these five hundred pages. This is hardest to do with regard to this main storyline, concerning Bellori's life and work. Other descriptions of A Time For Everything say, to my mind too vaguely, carelessly, that it tells us all about angels. But there are many stories, myths, ideas about angels that could figure in a catalog or investigation into the nature of angels, yet do not come into play here; we hear only in passing, for example, about the image of angels as guardians. Our narrator is concerned with angels as on a fault line between the human and the divine, and with fault lines generally: at the level of intellectual history, as changes between worldviews; and within that history, as momentous shifts from one situation to another. With regard to intellectual history, our narrator is able to use Bellori to muse on the shift to a modern worldview, since Knausgaard has positioned Bellori as one of those "obsessed young men who, in the first decades of the modern age, ensconced themselves in rooms in great cities all round Europe to think." At Bellori's time, angelology could still go hand in hand with geography, or numerology and alchemy be pursued alongside studies of motion and matter -- as they were, our narrator reminds us, by Newton -- but reason and observation were becoming ascendant over scriptural or traditional authority, and divisions being made: material vs immaterial, concrete vs abstract, physical vs spiritual, scientific vs historical, natural vs divine. "In reality it was just a matter of time before the situation would become what it's turned into today, where everything connected with the holy is regarded as abstract, so that we literally do not see the materiality of what is holy, whereas everything that concerns physical nature is exclusively seen as concrete, and we lose sight of physical nature's immaterial aspects, too." Along with such assessing of Bellori's own moment in history, our narrator follows Bellori's work in assessing major shifts in the relations between humanity and divinity, the fault lines appearing as the great flood, the incarnation, and the crucifixion. Bellori posits that the real reason for the flood was that angels had overstepped their proper bounds, as referenced by one line in Genesis, by taking up with human women who then bore their children, the giant Nephilim. How shocked, Bellori realizes, must the angels have been, when their Lord, after flooding and killing everything in reaction to their transgression, then himself so much more completely crossed that same boundary by becoming man? And how fallen must the angels be now, after watching their Lord die?
Thinking over this book, I find that I try to make it come together. I try to see how its concern over shifts in human worldview lines up with its concern over divine-human relations. The interrelation of concerns is obvious but unneat. Knausgaard puts a lot out there, but it does not seem finally to have been carefully designed. Is there a parallel between the human-divine relations, the proximity of God to his people, as Bellori finds manifested by the angels, and the changing proximity of our narrator to us? Until the final fifty page "coda", we might think the narrator is simply the author Karl Klausgaard; but in those final pages the "I" tells us a story of his own life, in our time, and we learn that he is a Norwegian man named Henrik Vankel, protagonist of Klausgaard's first book, Out of This World. Vankel's father tells him when he is young that seagulls used to be angels; this is the one link back to the previous four hundred and fifty pages. The coda does not mention Bellori, does not have Vankel reference all that thinking that I guess he's been doing about angels, the flood, the life of Christ. Vankel does give us in these final pages the reflection that provides the book title, thinking about how "not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven." I had thought perhaps the title was in keeping with how much this book contains, resonant but not specifically tied together: a time for everything, and here is some of that everything. Vankel's emphasis is on the "a" - one single time for everything, all at once. What to make of it?
The publisher's description of this book, and most of the reviews and readers' reactions I've read (many of them regarding UK publication this past summer of this same translation, under the title A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven), mostly prepare you for the opening pages: a story of a boy lost in the woods at night, who comes upon two men with wings. It is a lovely story, but only takes you a little ways into A Time For Everything. The story is told to us by a narrator who occasionally announces himself as an "I" or a "me" as he tells us of Antinous Bellori, the lost boy who in 1584 witnesses two angels and who then devotes his life to researching and writing a book called On the Nature of Angels.
The dominant storyline of A Time For Everything is our narrator's consideration of Bellori's work on angels, including their appearances in the book of Genesis. But barely forty pages in, the narrator disappears for two long streches (with just a few pages' reappearance in the transition between the two). For a hundred pages, we are immersed in the story of Cain and his complicated but fond love for his younger quicker brother Abel. Then for two hundred pages, we read a moving story of people at the time of the flood. We meet Noah's sister Anna and her family in the days when the rain keeps falling and falling and they eventually take to the mountains to try to keep above the rising sea. We only briefly read of Noah's instruction from God to build an Ark, and how he and his sons set to work building a huge boat in a field up in the mountains. The narrative spends more time falling back to tell us of Noah and Anna's childhood, their relationship with their father Lamech, the joy that their kid brother Barak brings, and a family tragedy. When we circle back around to the days of rain, it is again to tragedy, heightened when Anna's daughter Rachel gives birth to a baby boy, only to carry him up and up until they can go no further, and must huddle on the peak of a mountain that is now an island, looking out at the other mountain peaks turned islands, other people visible on the nearest one, also looking out across the vast waterscape. And the water is still rising.
Then, three hundred and some pages into the book, we are back with our narrator and Bellori. Other descriptions of A Time For Everything say, to my mind too vaguely, carelessly, that it tells us all about angels. But there are many stories, myths, ideas about angels that would figure in a catalog yet do not come into play here; we hear only in passing, for example, about the image of angels as guardians.
especially in the relations between humans and the divine, and he sees angels as inhabiting the intermediary between the two, and therefore as informants about the weather there.
What our narrator is interested in is fault lines in human history -- both at the level of intellectual history, fault lines between worldviews, and also within that history, changes from what situation to another.
At the meta-level in the history of ideas -- how we think about our world -- and Knausgaard has situated Bellori as one of those "obsessed young men who, in the first decades of the modern age, ensconced themselves in rooms in great cities all round Europe to think." And while at this time angelology could still go hand in hand with geography, or numerology and alchemy be pursued alongside studies of motion and matter -- as they were, we are reminded, by Newton -- a worldview was coming into being in which reason and observation were ascendant over scriptural or traditional authority, and strict divisions made: material vs immaterial, concrete vs abstract, physical vs spiritual, scientific vs historical, natural vs divine. "In reality it was just a matter of time before the situation would beome what it's turned into today, where everything connected with the holy is regarded as abstract, so that we literally do not see the materiality of what is holy, whereas everything that concerns physical nature is exclusively seen as concrete, and we lose sight of physical nature's immaterial aspects, too."
"Always ask yourself, what if it's the complete opposite?" Lamech
Our narrator is intrigued with this moment, where he sees alchemy and physics, numerology and logic, superstition and reason, scriptural authority and observation, still intermixed but beginning to be segregated. Newton, he reminds us, developed his scientific theories in trying to understand the divine presence in creation, but kept his less verifiable suppositions mostly concealed from the public.
Newton in Cambridge, Leibniz in Nuremberg, Descartes in Utrecht.
These two levels are not separate, not really, and maybe that is why Knausgaard has put the story of Anna et al (within history) in the same book as the story of Bellori (ideas about history).
And just as this book has both sections where we are immersed in a story and sections where we are regarding the story,
~ looking at fault lines within history and also regarding it.
I. At the level of experience, within the story, Within: the Flood: what was it like before. narrator ~ we can't know. it was different.
Before the flood, our narrator calculates, there must have been sixteen hundred years of human history.
human-divine relations as manifest by angels, in three periods:
1. before the Flood up until angels intercourse with humanity too far out of bounds out of balance the Nephilim.
-----this is the location of the story of Cain & Abel, near beginning, early, just a bit after the Garden.
----AND the story of Anna et al, marking the time just before the end of this period.
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. here, our narrator is at a distance. just as the Lord ~ well, as narator discusses, actually quite close, walking in the cool of the evening in the Garden. calling out to Adam. making clothes for his people, after he tells them they are banished. and again, appears to Cain. and later to Noah.
but the boundary maintained? what does narrator conclude about this?
because through those stories, the boundary between author~Creator and Creation is maintained. we are simply in the story. the narrator does not announce himself.
2. from Flood until the Incarnation, when the Lord himself crosses bound ~ which means, annihilates? the boundary.
(in relation to hmmmmmmm above. here the narrator never fully disappears. continues to comment as relays story of Lot, and of Ezekiel. he is with us in the story, as we approach and then consider moment when the Lord joins His story, enters his creation. .....I don't know, I don't think Knausgaard thought this through, don't think he designed with care the interactions of the sections of his book, the levels of story, the levels of fault lines. Levels of story: narrator present. narrator gone, immersed in story. Levels of fault lines. Bellori & Newton & Descartes, modernity, science reason. dichotomies. Bellori sees through them. and sees the fault lines, the changes, in relation btw divine and humanity. )
-----story of Lot. Soddom & Gomorrah. that's after the Flood right?! not sure! (consult Genesis: the Garden, Adam & Eve, expelled, Cain & Abel, Seth, descendants thr generations .. begot who begot .. quick to Noah right?)
----story of Ezekiel, who eats God's scroll. Ezekiel becomes one with God's Word. *but also*: God's Word becomes one with flesh & blood man. first this, God's Word incarnated. then God himself.
[btw 2 & 3, period not covered: the life of Christ. angels not present. there at birth and at death but not imbetween. not during his life. narrator ~ Bellori imagines~understands that this is beause they are ~reeling. horrified, aghast, bewildered. the Lord himself has crossed the boundary that, when they approached it, prompted him to Flood everything.
3. after the Death of Christ, which the angels know is really the death of God. so from then on, this after, the third period, is Godlessness.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Until the final 50 page coda, we might think the narrator is simply the author Karl Klausgaard speaking as himself; but in those final pages the "I" tells us a story of his own life, in our time, and we learn -- assuming that this "I" is the same as the one speaking throughout the book -- that he is a Norwegian man named Henrik Vankel.
Henrik Vankel is the protagonist of Klausgaard's first book, Out of This World.
A Time For Everything is the second book in a trilogy about Venkel. no. that LHild rvw seems to have been wrong about it being a trilogy. since now publishing 2500 page autobiogr novel ~Proustian~ in six installmnts. calling it Min Kamp = My Struggle = Mein Kampf (!). Bold.
So, this book is perhaps enigmatic because it is an installment in a very long work, an installment n which we mostly follow Venkel's study of On the Nature of Angels. The Genesis stories are beautiful portraits of characters and relationships, but what resonance do these stories have in this context? What meaning do they have for Venkel? What does the final coda have to do with anything that came before? ~ fathers, siblings ~. We could discuss possibilities -- and by asking these questions about how the parts of this book relate, we might go a ways toward understanding how this strange book is a 'novel' -- but I came away unsure that Klausgaard has intended a coherence. Maybe he spends two hundred pages on the story of Anna and her people, , because there *is* a time for everything. I kind of like that idea, but I also kind of find it too cutely clever, and anyway it seems unlikely that Klausgaard intended that by his title.
no it's not. just read in the coda where he considers how the past continues to be with you, and to change, and muses on this as *one* time for everything. 'one time to every purpose under heaven.'
emphasis on one. all at once. everything at once.
also, connectn btw coda & rest of book: dead seagull. father tells young Henrik "Did you know that seagulls were angels once?" shows him, under wing, a tiny little arm, pine-needle-thin fingers. vestigal.
so Henrik's father re seagulls were angels, Henrik narrates 200ish pages re Bellori on nature of angels.
~ what happens at end to Bellori? and to the angel he has captured, who we are given to understand did not die a final death but has been dying over and over and over, with Raphael tending to him, leaving him against the tree after he dies, returning to him .
a note about Klausgaard: the Guardian published a column in which he listed his 'ten favorite books about angels' and among these he includes Bellori's On the Nature of Angels. From all other indications, Bellori and his book are fictional. Klausgaard made up Bellori's book, and here he includes it on a list of favorite books. So maybe he is more consciously playful then was apparent to me in A Time For Everything?
I do not like that article, other comments found by Knausgaard in interviews (reading ggl transl after search 'Knausgard intervju'), too glib. I want author to speak re his book, closer to it. seriously, somewhat from within it.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
beautiful writing, moving, rich, imaginative, thoughtful. provocative: get lost in it, associations, reminded of so much. reminding.
in general reminded me of Calasso - not a novel, but a ruminative retelling. immersion in a subject (in Cadmus & Harmony, the subject is Greek mythology > the Greek mind. here, the subject is ~ the Bible~Genesis > the relations between humanity and the divine. and how humanity views their world.)
but here, two long stories separated out from the ruminations
Anna & Lamach & Noah & Barak I found moving, and reminded me of Per Peterson Out Stealing Horses. there the tragedy-memory was in the context of man reflecting on his early life and his father. which ~ the coda ~ maybe this is, also. but book here d n come tgthr as a whole like that.
re Anna et al, rather tightly structured within itself, sets up a frame:
the days of rain, the cherubs leaving.
moves back to Lamech at his brother's funeral, then back to the childhood of Anna and Noah, forward to Barak, then his death, then long part re Anna's meeting then life with Javan. finally return to Lamech at the funeral where he first cracks - reexperiencing the day of Barak's death "who was that man on the roof?" who he saw when arriving back in the morning from market. gets a ladder later, goes up there. then goes & rounds up the cows "Come along, girls!" he sang "Come along, girls!". Anna & Javan realize what is happening, Lamech's mental life deteriorates, now he is lying as an invalid when the rain is falling, the water rising.
back to narrator. Noah in the stark sandy world after the flood. everything is different.
~ complaints re Knausgaard setting his pre-flood human life in a Norwegian style landscape. fjords. farmhouse. advanced: guns. clothes: made professionally? some are 'homespun' but this is a distinguishing description of Abel's clothes, so generally their clothes are obtained through barter ~ ).
but to the complaints, I say Knausgard set up as ~ what if. (Lameh: Always ask yourself, What if it's the opposite?). we know little of those 1600 years of human history, human way of life must have advanced good bit, and the landscape would have been totally different than after the flood, the weight of water that so changed, demolished it. so imagine it this way.
stories with commentary, esp Ezekiel, and maybe all of the narrator's overt presence reminds of Saramago. which I like very much. irony ~ cool, dry, factual accounting.
book as a whole, left with sense that it does not add up.
writing a review not easy, because my impulse is to make it fit together. int in fault lines. antiquity /medieval/ modernity. ascendance of science. view: materiality vs divine. divine as immaterial and (so) as unchanging. Bellori saw angels, knew they were corporeal - they were eating, and knew they were a state different from how they were in the Bible. so, they had changed. so he, situated at this moment when division between material and immaterial was being reified, was specially suited to resist that view. ~ . how does that line up with his work, his finding? = the three periods of human-divine relations.
I don't know. maybe should back off the statement that int in fault lines. which seems to have gotten me all involved in trying to assess the various levels, how at work in the book. how the attention to worldview change, and human-dvine change, and narrator present or absent are parallel or meaningfully related in some way.
just review: not really a catalog of angels. ok if want can say these two: world view fault line, human-divine fault lines. seem might add up, but do not. final coda.
hard to write, because infinity of directions could go ~ is this my trouble with getting anything down, in general? not perfectionism in sense of wanting it to be perfect to be well received, but yestrying twoard some kind of perfection, saying what is the case, and with this book, so long, so much in it (and seems does not add up), could get head into it in any number of ways.
..I'm leaving out some that d n at lst yet attend to closely: anna w javan, that's what 70 pages? and the coda.
The dominant storyline of A Time For Everything is our narrator's consideration of Bellori's work on angels, including their appearances in the book of Genesis. But barely forty pages in, the narrator disappears for two long streches (with just a few pages' reappearance in the transition between the two). For a hundred pages, we are immersed in the story of Cain and his complicated but fond love for his younger quicker brother Abel. Then for two hundred pages, we read a moving story of people at the time of the flood. We meet Noah's sister Anna and her family in the days when the rain keeps falling and falling and they eventually take to the mountains to try to keep above the rising sea. We only briefly read of Noah's instruction from God to build an Ark, and how he and his sons set to work building a huge boat in a field up in the mountains. The narrative spends more time falling back to tell us of Noah and Anna's childhood, their relationship with their father Lamech, the joy that their kid brother Barak brings, and a family tragedy. When we circle back around to the days of rain, it is again to tragedy, heightened when Anna's daughter Rachel gives birth to a baby boy, only to carry him up and up until they can go no further, and must huddle on the peak of a mountain that is now an island, looking out at the other mountain peaks turned islands, other people visible on the nearest one, also looking out across the vast waterscape. And the water is still rising.
Then, three hundred and some pages into the book, we are back with our narrator and Bellori. Other descriptions of A Time For Everything say, to my mind too vaguely, carelessly, that it tells us all about angels. But there are many stories, myths, ideas about angels that would figure in a catalog yet do not come into play here; we hear only in passing, for example, about the image of angels as guardians.
especially in the relations between humans and the divine, and he sees angels as inhabiting the intermediary between the two, and therefore as informants about the weather there.
What our narrator is interested in is fault lines in human history -- both at the level of intellectual history, fault lines between worldviews, and also within that history, changes from what situation to another.
At the meta-level in the history of ideas -- how we think about our world -- and Knausgaard has situated Bellori as one of those "obsessed young men who, in the first decades of the modern age, ensconced themselves in rooms in great cities all round Europe to think." And while at this time angelology could still go hand in hand with geography, or numerology and alchemy be pursued alongside studies of motion and matter -- as they were, we are reminded, by Newton -- a worldview was coming into being in which reason and observation were ascendant over scriptural or traditional authority, and strict divisions made: material vs immaterial, concrete vs abstract, physical vs spiritual, scientific vs historical, natural vs divine. "In reality it was just a matter of time before the situation would beome what it's turned into today, where everything connected with the holy is regarded as abstract, so that we literally do not see the materiality of what is holy, whereas everything that concerns physical nature is exclusively seen as concrete, and we lose sight of physical nature's immaterial aspects, too."
"Always ask yourself, what if it's the complete opposite?" Lamech
Our narrator is intrigued with this moment, where he sees alchemy and physics, numerology and logic, superstition and reason, scriptural authority and observation, still intermixed but beginning to be segregated. Newton, he reminds us, developed his scientific theories in trying to understand the divine presence in creation, but kept his less verifiable suppositions mostly concealed from the public.
Newton in Cambridge, Leibniz in Nuremberg, Descartes in Utrecht.
These two levels are not separate, not really, and maybe that is why Knausgaard has put the story of Anna et al (within history) in the same book as the story of Bellori (ideas about history).
And just as this book has both sections where we are immersed in a story and sections where we are regarding the story,
~ looking at fault lines within history and also regarding it.
I. At the level of experience, within the story, Within: the Flood: what was it like before. narrator ~ we can't know. it was different.
Before the flood, our narrator calculates, there must have been sixteen hundred years of human history.
human-divine relations as manifest by angels, in three periods:
1. before the Flood up until angels intercourse with humanity too far out of bounds out of balance the Nephilim.
-----this is the location of the story of Cain & Abel, near beginning, early, just a bit after the Garden.
----AND the story of Anna et al, marking the time just before the end of this period.
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. here, our narrator is at a distance. just as the Lord ~ well, as narator discusses, actually quite close, walking in the cool of the evening in the Garden. calling out to Adam. making clothes for his people, after he tells them they are banished. and again, appears to Cain. and later to Noah.
but the boundary maintained? what does narrator conclude about this?
because through those stories, the boundary between author~Creator and Creation is maintained. we are simply in the story. the narrator does not announce himself.
2. from Flood until the Incarnation, when the Lord himself crosses bound ~ which means, annihilates? the boundary.
(in relation to hmmmmmmm above. here the narrator never fully disappears. continues to comment as relays story of Lot, and of Ezekiel. he is with us in the story, as we approach and then consider moment when the Lord joins His story, enters his creation. .....I don't know, I don't think Knausgaard thought this through, don't think he designed with care the interactions of the sections of his book, the levels of story, the levels of fault lines. Levels of story: narrator present. narrator gone, immersed in story. Levels of fault lines. Bellori & Newton & Descartes, modernity, science reason. dichotomies. Bellori sees through them. and sees the fault lines, the changes, in relation btw divine and humanity. )
-----story of Lot. Soddom & Gomorrah. that's after the Flood right?! not sure! (consult Genesis: the Garden, Adam & Eve, expelled, Cain & Abel, Seth, descendants thr generations .. begot who begot .. quick to Noah right?)
----story of Ezekiel, who eats God's scroll. Ezekiel becomes one with God's Word. *but also*: God's Word becomes one with flesh & blood man. first this, God's Word incarnated. then God himself.
[btw 2 & 3, period not covered: the life of Christ. angels not present. there at birth and at death but not imbetween. not during his life. narrator ~ Bellori imagines~understands that this is beause they are ~reeling. horrified, aghast, bewildered. the Lord himself has crossed the boundary that, when they approached it, prompted him to Flood everything.
3. after the Death of Christ, which the angels know is really the death of God. so from then on, this after, the third period, is Godlessness.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Until the final 50 page coda, we might think the narrator is simply the author Karl Klausgaard speaking as himself; but in those final pages the "I" tells us a story of his own life, in our time, and we learn -- assuming that this "I" is the same as the one speaking throughout the book -- that he is a Norwegian man named Henrik Vankel.
Henrik Vankel is the protagonist of Klausgaard's first book, Out of This World.
A Time For Everything is the second book in a trilogy about Venkel. no. that LHild rvw seems to have been wrong about it being a trilogy. since now publishing 2500 page autobiogr novel ~Proustian~ in six installmnts. calling it Min Kamp = My Struggle = Mein Kampf (!). Bold.
So, this book is perhaps enigmatic because it is an installment in a very long work, an installment n which we mostly follow Venkel's study of On the Nature of Angels. The Genesis stories are beautiful portraits of characters and relationships, but what resonance do these stories have in this context? What meaning do they have for Venkel? What does the final coda have to do with anything that came before? ~ fathers, siblings ~. We could discuss possibilities -- and by asking these questions about how the parts of this book relate, we might go a ways toward understanding how this strange book is a 'novel' -- but I came away unsure that Klausgaard has intended a coherence. Maybe he spends two hundred pages on the story of Anna and her people, , because there *is* a time for everything. I kind of like that idea, but I also kind of find it too cutely clever, and anyway it seems unlikely that Klausgaard intended that by his title.
no it's not. just read in the coda where he considers how the past continues to be with you, and to change, and muses on this as *one* time for everything. 'one time to every purpose under heaven.'
emphasis on one. all at once. everything at once.
also, connectn btw coda & rest of book: dead seagull. father tells young Henrik "Did you know that seagulls were angels once?" shows him, under wing, a tiny little arm, pine-needle-thin fingers. vestigal.
so Henrik's father re seagulls were angels, Henrik narrates 200ish pages re Bellori on nature of angels.
~ what happens at end to Bellori? and to the angel he has captured, who we are given to understand did not die a final death but has been dying over and over and over, with Raphael tending to him, leaving him against the tree after he dies, returning to him .
a note about Klausgaard: the Guardian published a column in which he listed his 'ten favorite books about angels' and among these he includes Bellori's On the Nature of Angels. From all other indications, Bellori and his book are fictional. Klausgaard made up Bellori's book, and here he includes it on a list of favorite books. So maybe he is more consciously playful then was apparent to me in A Time For Everything?
I do not like that article, other comments found by Knausgaard in interviews (reading ggl transl after search 'Knausgard intervju'), too glib. I want author to speak re his book, closer to it. seriously, somewhat from within it.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
beautiful writing, moving, rich, imaginative, thoughtful. provocative: get lost in it, associations, reminded of so much. reminding.
in general reminded me of Calasso - not a novel, but a ruminative retelling. immersion in a subject (in Cadmus & Harmony, the subject is Greek mythology > the Greek mind. here, the subject is ~ the Bible~Genesis > the relations between humanity and the divine. and how humanity views their world.)
but here, two long stories separated out from the ruminations
Anna & Lamach & Noah & Barak I found moving, and reminded me of Per Peterson Out Stealing Horses. there the tragedy-memory was in the context of man reflecting on his early life and his father. which ~ the coda ~ maybe this is, also. but book here d n come tgthr as a whole like that.
re Anna et al, rather tightly structured within itself, sets up a frame:
the days of rain, the cherubs leaving.
moves back to Lamech at his brother's funeral, then back to the childhood of Anna and Noah, forward to Barak, then his death, then long part re Anna's meeting then life with Javan. finally return to Lamech at the funeral where he first cracks - reexperiencing the day of Barak's death "who was that man on the roof?" who he saw when arriving back in the morning from market. gets a ladder later, goes up there. then goes & rounds up the cows "Come along, girls!" he sang "Come along, girls!". Anna & Javan realize what is happening, Lamech's mental life deteriorates, now he is lying as an invalid when the rain is falling, the water rising.
back to narrator. Noah in the stark sandy world after the flood. everything is different.
~ complaints re Knausgaard setting his pre-flood human life in a Norwegian style landscape. fjords. farmhouse. advanced: guns. clothes: made professionally? some are 'homespun' but this is a distinguishing description of Abel's clothes, so generally their clothes are obtained through barter ~ ).
but to the complaints, I say Knausgard set up as ~ what if. (Lameh: Always ask yourself, What if it's the opposite?). we know little of those 1600 years of human history, human way of life must have advanced good bit, and the landscape would have been totally different than after the flood, the weight of water that so changed, demolished it. so imagine it this way.
stories with commentary, esp Ezekiel, and maybe all of the narrator's overt presence reminds of Saramago. which I like very much. irony ~ cool, dry, factual accounting.
book as a whole, left with sense that it does not add up.
writing a review not easy, because my impulse is to make it fit together. int in fault lines. antiquity /medieval/ modernity. ascendance of science. view: materiality vs divine. divine as immaterial and (so) as unchanging. Bellori saw angels, knew they were corporeal - they were eating, and knew they were a state different from how they were in the Bible. so, they had changed. so he, situated at this moment when division between material and immaterial was being reified, was specially suited to resist that view. ~ . how does that line up with his work, his finding? = the three periods of human-divine relations.
I don't know. maybe should back off the statement that int in fault lines. which seems to have gotten me all involved in trying to assess the various levels, how at work in the book. how the attention to worldview change, and human-dvine change, and narrator present or absent are parallel or meaningfully related in some way.
just review: not really a catalog of angels. ok if want can say these two: world view fault line, human-divine fault lines. seem might add up, but do not. final coda.
hard to write, because infinity of directions could go ~ is this my trouble with getting anything down, in general? not perfectionism in sense of wanting it to be perfect to be well received, but yestrying twoard some kind of perfection, saying what is the case, and with this book, so long, so much in it (and seems does not add up), could get head into it in any number of ways.
..I'm leaving out some that d n at lst yet attend to closely: anna w javan, that's what 70 pages? and the coda.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
az- A Time for Everything -by Karl Knausgaard
He had redeeming features, of course he had. Ezekiel could be tender and considerate; Ezekiel could suddenly realize that he'd done something unjust and hurry back to make amends or ask forgiveness, Ezekiel could also melt entirely and stare at someone with a look of innocence, open and vulnerable like a child's. Everyone could do that. (p349)
can they? can everyone do that? stare, open and vulnerable?
I like this passage very much. redeeming ~ endearing: the openness, thereness (dasein is a clearing, like a clearing in the woods, a space -- there), realness of someone who realizes. ~ who can change. come to understand. and, as here, esp shows when: come to understand that he was in the wrong, that the other was right -- and hurry back. "I'm so sorry." - "Look at me. This is what I look like when I believe in you."
He had redeeming features, of course he had. Ezekiel could be tender and considerate; Ezekiel could suddenly realize that he'd done something unjust and hurry back to make amends or ask forgiveness, Ezekiel could also melt entirely and stare at someone with a look of innocence, open and vulnerable like a child's. Everyone could do that. (p349)
can they? can everyone do that? stare, open and vulnerable?
I like this passage very much. redeeming ~ endearing: the openness, thereness (dasein is a clearing, like a clearing in the woods, a space -- there), realness of someone who realizes. ~ who can change. come to understand. and, as here, esp shows when: come to understand that he was in the wrong, that the other was right -- and hurry back. "I'm so sorry." - "Look at me. This is what I look like when I believe in you."
az- A Time for Everything -by Karl Knausgaard, trans James Anderson|Archipelago Books (November 1, 2009)
In reality, it was just a matter of time before the situation would become what it's turned into today, where everything connected with the holy is regarded as abstract, so that we literally do not see the materiality of what is holy; whereas everything that concerns physical nature is exclusively seen as concrete, and we lose sight of physical nature's immaterial aspects, too. (p346)
material / immaterial.
concrete / abstract. ~d n like usage of 'concrete' ~ too specifically connotes concrete. better? 'tangible'
physical / spiritual.
science / history (including revelation; all knowledge by authority).
nature / divinity.
matter / force.
my old argument: the divide is unreal. these are not even separate aspects.
defined in contrast to one another: the meaning is imaginary, it does not hold.
In reality, it was just a matter of time before the situation would become what it's turned into today, where everything connected with the holy is regarded as abstract, so that we literally do not see the materiality of what is holy; whereas everything that concerns physical nature is exclusively seen as concrete, and we lose sight of physical nature's immaterial aspects, too. (p346)
material / immaterial.
concrete / abstract. ~d n like usage of 'concrete' ~ too specifically connotes concrete. better? 'tangible'
physical / spiritual.
science / history (including revelation; all knowledge by authority).
nature / divinity.
matter / force.
my old argument: the divide is unreal. these are not even separate aspects.
defined in contrast to one another: the meaning is imaginary, it does not hold.
az- To Each His Own -by Leonardo Sciascia, trans Adrienne Foulke, intro W.S. Di Piero | New York Review Books Classics, (Oct 2000)
The first step -- since rain always falls on wet ground -- was to round up everyone with a prison record.
The dead are dead; help the living.
a mafia story.
mafia ~ an ethos of silence, reserve, deception.
The first step -- since rain always falls on wet ground -- was to round up everyone with a prison record.
The dead are dead; help the living.
a mafia story.
mafia ~ an ethos of silence, reserve, deception.
az-The House of Life (Common Reader Edition) - by Mario Praz, trans. Angus Davidson | David R Godine (October 15, 2009)
on display, bkcase w literary bio & cirticism & art, low shelves. attractive large paperbk, muted colors, little to tell wh it is: single quotatn ctr bkcvr.
confused ~ had just read that Common Reader closed: bankrupt 2006. maybe Godine bought some of their inventory? or no, listed here as the publisher & w a date = bought rights this one title? or to 'Cmmn Rdr Edtn' name?
concept of bk on first look reminds of another noticed recent yrs: Voyage Around My Room by Xavier De Maistre. writ during six week home arrest (for dueling!). appealing: someone's small world ~ "and over here we have my desk" ~ w all their personal associatns
"To your right is a young woman pretending to be a tour guide" (Nyr cartoon)
M Praz (1896 tse, H - 1982) among great scholar-critics .. studies of iconography, 17thC art. The House of Life as close to his autobiogr as anyth .. a quirky & magical book. A house tour, but Praz's Roman apt was a wunderkammer ..objets d'art, overflowing ephemera.. his erudition, curiosity, enthusiasm, amiability. .. disquistn on art & how objects we choose to surround us tell..
...km says reminds of book I gave her (& now ask to have again) SUNY press: Everyday Spirits 1993 cannot get it to come up on az by inputting title, even as advanced srch specifically for title (!); have to put author.
-Short essays dense with image and ideas explore such things as keys, ladders, hospitalilty, lullabies..
- Within two minutes of beginning the book, I knew I had acquired a jewel of literature.If this book were a typical example of the fruits of contemporary academic philosophy, I would hold great hope and respect for the field.
looking at now, this is very appealing:
are we most ourselves in sleep? not dream sleep. dreams tell us about waking life. y.
infant gaze takes in everything sees no thing. yes. infants "do not blink" ?!
Blink - wkp: Infants do not blink at the same rate of adults; in fact infants only blink at an average rate of one or two times in a minute.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
az- Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector - by Benjamin Moser: Oxford Press, August 2009Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela (The Hour of the Star) opening paragraph:
Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule & life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never & there was the yes. It was ever so. /These things are always./ I do not know why, but I do know that the universe never began.
Wallace Stevens:
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun. this present sun this coming into. EW re Here Comes the Sun as #48 their list top Beatles songs: 'three blissful minutes of pure sonic warmth'
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one, the cataract? the rejected things ~become opaque~?
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket's horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech, yes: even. even that.
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body mmm, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps hmm - andrew - of wh reminds? not this, another poem, 'the form on the pillow' ~ ? ... here last page blue bound an email "read this poem and I certainly thought of you" The Task by Ashbery 'promise of the pillow and so much in the night to come". conflated w a memory of this line itself. and this line means? the form on the pillow is the affirming, maybe. believe the one thing, it will be affirmed. (y. if it is sunny for you, you will find it sunny. ~maybe. belief finds its affirmation.)
The aureole above the humming house...
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never. ..how did we get here? or is it ~ discontinuous. it's what the poet thinks, regardless. no . . . stevens is not ...
The Well Dressed Man With A Beard - A poem by Wallace Stevens - American Poems | After the final no there comes a yes | ... it can never be satisfied, the mind, never. | [..GMH the mind has mountains] Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed O my dear
After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends. No was the night. Yes is this present sun. If the rejected things, the things denied ..One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough. ..Green in the body, out of a petty phrase, Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed: .. It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
Sep09: how get fr? one infallible thing, one thing affirmed, after the no the yes >to> It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
~~GMHopkins: O the mind, the mind has mountains. hold them cheap may they who never clung there. =
'O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall. Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap. May who ne'er hung there.' /so it is 'cheap'. and 'hung'. but I leave out: 'cliffs of fall. Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.' like my, that hyphenate 'no-man-fathomed.' mm. and repeated: ' ..O my dear.' nice. like my. my own. mine own. //no. no that repeat is of the musical adaptation I'm looking at, not in the Hopkins sonnet. >>>
~~ "A poet's subject is his sense of the world," he noted in an essay. =Parini article re Stevens, pgmrk z0607 poem. y my subject. my sense of th.
The war between mind and sky - Jay Parini re Wallace Stevens
"A poet's subject is his sense of the world," he
NO worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing -
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked `No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
Gerard Manley Hopkins Poems In Musical Adaptations - Mind Has Mountains
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep. *oh. that *is* the comfort.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed O my dear
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, pitched past pitch. no worst, there is none. 'you don't know how far down it goes.'
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing —
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed O my dear
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer
O the mind, mind has mountains;
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. oh. fathomed. no man's been to the bottom, sourced the bottom, mapped it. grund. 'you don't know how far down it goes.' ('oh my dear, it's turtles all the way down.')
Nor mouth had, no nor mind expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed: It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.
~I'm not as convinced at this moment, of my reading: [*that* mind does not hold & cannot articulate what the heart hears, spirit senses.] = It = the blight = you mourn that you cannot know what you ~know. cannot hold, say (logos: gather, make a ratio) what you feel, are (nous).
ie ~ common reading: sorrow's springs = mortality. all grief re one's self, own losses, own death. and this is what heart hearts, ghost guesses. you intuit that you are grieving for yourself. eh.
vs ~ I'm saying: sorrow's springs = sensing sth you cannot say or think. trying to think it and you cannot. so yes, all the new thinking is about loss. and-or, all the loss is about not being able to think. knowing and not knowing. ghost, heartheard, phantom (Moby), *poof*.
here, more clear equation. the comfort = death, sleep. that life ends, the day ends. y.
Can somebody explain Gerald Manley Hopkins poem? - Yahoo! Answers: "the comforting notion that death is the end of life, and each day ends in sleep." for all that it is a yahoo answer, this seems like a competent, helpful gloss:
Here goes, line by line:::
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
No WORST, not no worse. Pitched, sounds like Satan hurled from heaven. He keeps falling this way, hurled down, it the grief always increasing; all he knows is there is no worst. That is, the grief increases eternally. Overtones of a crescendo of rising notes (pitch) and even the blackness of pitch (as tar)
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
And this is why he knows there is 'no worst'; because the pain he has already felt 'teaches' the present and future pain so that like a good student getting wiser and wiser, this pain will continue to get worse.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
The Catholic cries out to the Holy Spirit (known as 'the comforter') and the virgin Mary, who is the intercessor; they aren't apparently helping at all.
...'herds-long'. introduces sheep imagery..... Jesus is the shepherd. (Sheep herd)...
on an age-old anvil wince and sing —
Here's God, the blacksmith; ouch. like hot metal hissing on the anvil as it cools, he in this pain; so here is a hint that he is though struggling seeing this terrible distress as part of a process familiar in a general sense (an age-old anvil) of making something useful. (out of his soul.)
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'.
'fell' here means terrible, as in 'the fell fiend' wow huh is that not 'the fallen fiend'? Lucifer; and is associated in usage with the devil; so again stressing the horror of the experience.
[okay: Merriam Webster - fell (adj) * Function: adjective * Etymology: Middle English fel, from Anglo-French — more at felon * Date: 14th century 1 a : fierce, cruel, terrible b : sinister, malevolent c : very destructive : deadly]
But of course it has other overtones, of falling, so echoing 'pitched'; and also of the fells mm, part of the wild scenery of the land he loved. Sheep get lost on fells; they are not kindly landscapes, though beautiful; you have to be tough to wander the fells.
As for Fury; the Furies were the executors of divine justice in ancient Greece; if you committed a terrible sin you were pursued by these shrieking terrors. He hints that he has sinned.. but does not specifically gloss, why does Fury say (shriek) "No lingering! Let me be fell; force I must be brief." ? perforce. I do not understand this, not exactly, who what must be be brief?
Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind:
So this is the only shred of comfort I can find, it's not much but anything is better than this whirlwind; .. intensifies the image of adverse weather .... miserable creature that I am, I huddle under it. ...
No worst, there is none@Everything2.com:
Line 8 requires explanation: fell meaning cruel, savage (but also prefiguring the extended image of falling down from great height), force is used as an adverb, as perforce - I am forced to be brief. Hopkins marked a pause on 'fell' to prevent the reader interpreting it as 'fell force'.
'World-sorrow', 'herds-long' and 'no-man-fathomed' are typical examples of his compound adjectives formed somewhat as in German; a poetically useful way to compress meaning into few words. Hopkins achieves an unusual fusion between the intellectual curiousness and emotional content of such constructions.
...........................................................................................................................................................
...........................................................................................................................................................
...........................................................................................................................................................
.........................................................................................poetry is reminding.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson . good books on the give away shelf this sunday morning . denmark to me it . niedecker flood small works . Winesburg OH little sentence shaped bits of paper . because human understanding, whenever and wherever it is active, always and everywhere keeps on the lookout for: the reason why whatever it encounters is and is the way it is.
The True Deceiver - by Tove Jansson
NYRB Classics (December 1, 2009)
A New York Review Books Original.
Tove Jansson (1914—2001) wrote about the adventures of the Moomin family cute Moomins in a long-running comic strip and bestselling series of books for children. Jansson also wrote novels and short stories for adults, including The Summer Book (NYRB Classics). yes I saw that, a girl & her grandmother. judged it happier than I. summer.
All winter long the snow has been falling on the village.
Katri, yellow-eyed, lives in a room with her simple brother Mats and dog with no name. She hasn't any patience for politeness. Anna Aemelin lives alone in her family mansion, venturing out come springtime to paint exquisitely detailed paintings of the forest floor, to which her young fans insist she add the flower-covered rabbits she is known for.
When Katri moves with her brother into Anna's mansion with the intention of helping around the house, it's not long before she has taken charge of just about every aspect of Anna’s life and livelihood. As the season becomes increasingly oppressive, the two women find themselves engaged in a confrontation that will gradually strip away their cherished illusions. 'product description' online different from & I like it less than on my galley. I did like the book. simple. this happened, then this. Katri organizes all the papers into folders. Anna no longer feels she can trust anyone.
"I loved this book...understated yet exciting, with a tension that keeps you reading. I felt transported to that remote region of Sweden. The characters still haunt me."-Ruth Rendell
also read thr and did not care for, also a NYRB galley: No Tomorrow by Vivant Denon. NYRB Classics (October 13, 2009) Denon’s ravishing novella is a paradisal diversion. Summoned by Madame de T–– to her country house, the young hero of the novella is taken on a tour of the grounds, only the beginning of a night that not only will be full of unanticipated delights. Lydia Davis’s definitive translation of Denon’s slim masterpiece is accompanied by the French text.
"A tale of adulterous love told with impeccable discretion." --The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. manners. discretion. do not care for.
also recently: A Fair Maiden by Joyce Carol Oates. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (January 6, 2010)
Sixteen-year-old Katya is spending the summer working as a nanny in a wealthy Jersey Shore community when she meets Marcus Kidder, an elderly yet dashing artist to whom libraries and pavilions are dedicated all over town. ..Despite each rebuff, she keeps returning to Kidder and soon is posing for his paintings. What sounds like a story of older-man-seduces-young-girl becomes a treatise on female aspiration. There is a subtle mystery at the center of this unsettling short novel: Kidder insists that he has a “mission” for Katya that will be revealed in time. The mission, when it comes, is a dark one, involving not just transactions of subservience and control but of life and death, and readers’ takes on character motivations will govern their reactions. I am curious to see reactions. ends in the mode of ~ a fairy tale, immersed in what Kidder wanted, how he saw it. ~ugly to me, ~accurate, ugly.
put books on give away shelf this Sunday morning. galleys: A Fair Maiden. Remainder. A Country Called Home by Kim Barnes. what else. The Search. The Singularity is Near. book re McCain. Wittgenstein ~ basic works, damaged copy. Lipstick Jihad. book re Sassy, tall & thin like magazine, bright colors. craft magazine bought w bonnie. yale press ~ World Apart Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America
and the rest I do not readily remember. so there.
today the feeling is I do not care, and I am calm. I'm glad to be in a position to be nice to people, to help them find a book, be supportive. ('Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone's Annie.') I think most if not all of it ~ pentecostalism, Edith Wharton re the French & their ways, Power by Lukes, the stupid girl with a dragon tattoo or flaming hair or whatever ~ is not worth caring about, but if you do, you do. I don't. (Denmark's a prison. - A goodly one; in which there are many confines.. - We think not so, my lord. - Why, then, 'tis none to you.)
I do not think there is anyone to tell, and so what is there worth telling.
I mean, if I *really* don't see anyone to tell.
so, tell myself.
no sense of any possible accomplishment, progress. only: you like it or you do not.
type it on dlww. though there is no idea to make anything out of it, no idea of a making that is distinct in completion from in progress, or anything better made than not made. no sense of form, study, learning, realizing, none of that. none of that describes any real experience I've had. only: you like it or you do not.
write it down, throw the paper away.
words written on bits of paper ~ Winesburg, OH. little sentence shaped bits of paper.
Niedecker:
Paean to Place by Lorine Niedecker. encountered that bit recently as epigraph to Small Works by Pam Rehm
also in my mind ~ 'going out in the street and fainting is like putting the gun back in the drawer.'
I was thinking maybe this was Didion On self-respect but it's not, it's Susanna Kaysen, Girl Interrupted:
Why did she do it? Nobody dared to ask. Because - what courage! Who had the courage to burn herself? Twenty aspirin, a little slit alongside the veins of the arm, maybe even a bad half hour standing on a roof: We've all had those. And somewhat more dangerous things, like putting a gun in your mouth. But you put it there, you taste it, it's cold and greasy, your finger is on the trigger, and you find that a whole world lies between this moment and the moment you've been planning, when you'll pull the trigger. That world defeats you. You put the gun back in the drawer. You'll have to find another way.
What was that moment like for her? The moment she lit the match. Had she already tried roofs and guns and aspirins? Or was it just an inspiration?
I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that today I had to swallow fifty aspirin. It was my task: my job for the day. I lined them up on my desk and took them one by one, counting. But it's not the same as what she did. I could have stopped, at ten, or at thirty. And I could have done what I did do, which was go onto the street and faint. Fifty aspirin is a lot of aspirin, but going onto the street and fainting is like putting the gun back in the drawer.
so what I've got, what I recognize is: despair, end, beginning, alone, tabula rasa, why this, what does it matter. I opened Heidegger 'Principle of Reason' ~ everything for a reason; understanding looks for the reason in any thing it encounters.
'nothing is without a reason.'
It is because human understanding, whenever and wherever it is active, always and everywhere keeps on the lookout for: the reason why whatever it encounters is and is the way it is.
NYRB Classics (December 1, 2009)
A New York Review Books Original.
Tove Jansson (1914—2001) wrote about the adventures of the Moomin family cute Moomins in a long-running comic strip and bestselling series of books for children. Jansson also wrote novels and short stories for adults, including The Summer Book (NYRB Classics). yes I saw that, a girl & her grandmother. judged it happier than I. summer.
All winter long the snow has been falling on the village.Katri, yellow-eyed, lives in a room with her simple brother Mats and dog with no name. She hasn't any patience for politeness. Anna Aemelin lives alone in her family mansion, venturing out come springtime to paint exquisitely detailed paintings of the forest floor, to which her young fans insist she add the flower-covered rabbits she is known for.
When Katri moves with her brother into Anna's mansion with the intention of helping around the house, it's not long before she has taken charge of just about every aspect of Anna’s life and livelihood. As the season becomes increasingly oppressive, the two women find themselves engaged in a confrontation that will gradually strip away their cherished illusions. 'product description' online different from & I like it less than on my galley. I did like the book. simple. this happened, then this. Katri organizes all the papers into folders. Anna no longer feels she can trust anyone.
"I loved this book...understated yet exciting, with a tension that keeps you reading. I felt transported to that remote region of Sweden. The characters still haunt me."-Ruth Rendell
also read thr and did not care for, also a NYRB galley: No Tomorrow by Vivant Denon. NYRB Classics (October 13, 2009) Denon’s ravishing novella is a paradisal diversion. Summoned by Madame de T–– to her country house, the young hero of the novella is taken on a tour of the grounds, only the beginning of a night that not only will be full of unanticipated delights. Lydia Davis’s definitive translation of Denon’s slim masterpiece is accompanied by the French text.
"A tale of adulterous love told with impeccable discretion." --The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. manners. discretion. do not care for.
also recently: A Fair Maiden by Joyce Carol Oates. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (January 6, 2010)
Sixteen-year-old Katya is spending the summer working as a nanny in a wealthy Jersey Shore community when she meets Marcus Kidder, an elderly yet dashing artist to whom libraries and pavilions are dedicated all over town. ..Despite each rebuff, she keeps returning to Kidder and soon is posing for his paintings. What sounds like a story of older-man-seduces-young-girl becomes a treatise on female aspiration. There is a subtle mystery at the center of this unsettling short novel: Kidder insists that he has a “mission” for Katya that will be revealed in time. The mission, when it comes, is a dark one, involving not just transactions of subservience and control but of life and death, and readers’ takes on character motivations will govern their reactions. I am curious to see reactions. ends in the mode of ~ a fairy tale, immersed in what Kidder wanted, how he saw it. ~ugly to me, ~accurate, ugly.
put books on give away shelf this Sunday morning. galleys: A Fair Maiden. Remainder. A Country Called Home by Kim Barnes. what else. The Search. The Singularity is Near. book re McCain. Wittgenstein ~ basic works, damaged copy. Lipstick Jihad. book re Sassy, tall & thin like magazine, bright colors. craft magazine bought w bonnie. yale press ~ World Apart Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America
and the rest I do not readily remember. so there.
today the feeling is I do not care, and I am calm. I'm glad to be in a position to be nice to people, to help them find a book, be supportive. ('Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone's Annie.') I think most if not all of it ~ pentecostalism, Edith Wharton re the French & their ways, Power by Lukes, the stupid girl with a dragon tattoo or flaming hair or whatever ~ is not worth caring about, but if you do, you do. I don't. (Denmark's a prison. - A goodly one; in which there are many confines.. - We think not so, my lord. - Why, then, 'tis none to you.)
I do not think there is anyone to tell, and so what is there worth telling.
I mean, if I *really* don't see anyone to tell.
so, tell myself.
no sense of any possible accomplishment, progress. only: you like it or you do not.
type it on dlww. though there is no idea to make anything out of it, no idea of a making that is distinct in completion from in progress, or anything better made than not made. no sense of form, study, learning, realizing, none of that. none of that describes any real experience I've had. only: you like it or you do not.
write it down, throw the paper away.
words written on bits of paper ~ Winesburg, OH. little sentence shaped bits of paper.
Niedecker:
Do not save love
for things
Throw things
to the flood
Paean to Place by Lorine Niedecker. encountered that bit recently as epigraph to Small Works by Pam Rehm
also in my mind ~ 'going out in the street and fainting is like putting the gun back in the drawer.'
I was thinking maybe this was Didion On self-respect but it's not, it's Susanna Kaysen, Girl Interrupted:
Why did she do it? Nobody dared to ask. Because - what courage! Who had the courage to burn herself? Twenty aspirin, a little slit alongside the veins of the arm, maybe even a bad half hour standing on a roof: We've all had those. And somewhat more dangerous things, like putting a gun in your mouth. But you put it there, you taste it, it's cold and greasy, your finger is on the trigger, and you find that a whole world lies between this moment and the moment you've been planning, when you'll pull the trigger. That world defeats you. You put the gun back in the drawer. You'll have to find another way.
What was that moment like for her? The moment she lit the match. Had she already tried roofs and guns and aspirins? Or was it just an inspiration?
I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that today I had to swallow fifty aspirin. It was my task: my job for the day. I lined them up on my desk and took them one by one, counting. But it's not the same as what she did. I could have stopped, at ten, or at thirty. And I could have done what I did do, which was go onto the street and faint. Fifty aspirin is a lot of aspirin, but going onto the street and fainting is like putting the gun back in the drawer.
so what I've got, what I recognize is: despair, end, beginning, alone, tabula rasa, why this, what does it matter. I opened Heidegger 'Principle of Reason' ~ everything for a reason; understanding looks for the reason in any thing it encounters.
'nothing is without a reason.'
It is because human understanding, whenever and wherever it is active, always and everywhere keeps on the lookout for: the reason why whatever it encounters is and is the way it is.
Friday, September 4, 2009
now, what makes you feel better?
play. wryness. sharp minds. immersion.
what does not make you feel better? poetry. it seems overly available, like there's nothing to it. you can say anything you want, you're saying this. and I do not feel less alone. you seem to think there's something happening here, and I do not.
[there's just so many ways this could go. I could write it every which way. recombinations, various; as fish in the sea. collage. recall. cadence. again, again. as before. repetition, this time with feeling. and recognition of the other times. before, now. every time with feeling. all the times, all the ways. "you can get it as many ways as you want, sweetheart, 'specially from me." so: it's too easy and there's too much of it.]
Mr. Van Zandt are you interested in botany? No.
Mr. Van Zandt are you interested in aviation? No.
I feel better imagining I get to be not interested, always sunny in philadelphia. and rescue me: I like the not pretending.
play. wryness. sharp minds. immersion.
what does not make you feel better? poetry. it seems overly available, like there's nothing to it. you can say anything you want, you're saying this. and I do not feel less alone. you seem to think there's something happening here, and I do not.
[there's just so many ways this could go. I could write it every which way. recombinations, various; as fish in the sea. collage. recall. cadence. again, again. as before. repetition, this time with feeling. and recognition of the other times. before, now. every time with feeling. all the times, all the ways. "you can get it as many ways as you want, sweetheart, 'specially from me." so: it's too easy and there's too much of it.]
Mr. Van Zandt are you interested in botany? No.
Mr. Van Zandt are you interested in aviation? No.
I feel better imagining I get to be not interested, always sunny in philadelphia. and rescue me: I like the not pretending.
Attachment, Separation, Loss.
Inconsolable.
concerned with: attachment. Erikson stage one. trust or mistrust. hope or not. consolable or not.
Wait without hope, for hope would be for the wrong thing.
I've lost hope. It's easier to live without it. First you abandon someone and then someone abandons you.
no. no no no no, how could you abandon someone first? it may it only feels like that. you were just a baby.
the babies in the study who were handled minimally lying on their beds in the same position not moving left indentations.
the baby's hand on mother's face, through the night, that she's there.
if she's there with you, is there anything wrong?
nothing wrong in this whole world.
a plea so desperate it reads Come get me yesterday.
Open your eyes. This is what I look like when I believe in you.
do you have belief in? experience of. achievement. learning-realizing. coming to understand.
do you think someone knows-understands things sachen matters that you do not.
what is there to accomplish?
you will die. if you expect to die tomorrow, what do you do today. I think this, that I would lie down still and think. feel a tension. body. be in it.
no you can't sleep when you are dead. you can't sleep then.
mornings evenings afternoons. I like mornings. have dreaded. 'Nothing here to be afraid of. It's just the morning.' but also have enjoyed. I like evenings. so right now it seems to me that it is afternoons that are uncomfortable. laundry time. full daylight. 3pm. 1pm to 6pm to be sure.
write down everything you remember. would that be worthwhile? interesting, enjoyable. tell me something.
no important secrets. no one is trying to find out. sitting on the floor with the notebook of yours pulled from under the bed, behind the bookcase, feeling surreptitious and reading what you wrote. oh.
what could they read that would matter?
who could read you that would matter?
there is always something between people. or not.
here are notebooks full of meanings, things I wrote.
'I accept you as you are.' - you are not curious?
someone could want to find out about you, every day. did you like this? why? what did you think? why do you say that?
for fun. for the fun of: a whole other person.
the baby's hand on mother's face.
the mother, as baby rolls over: Yay! that's wonderful. you are wonderful.
this is not nothing.
there is nothing here to be afraid of.
I want wholesome now. I'd like feeling and an interesting role to play and something between people and I don't want it to be ugly or impossible or terrifying.
I don't know what to tell you.
why would I write a book, who would I want to tell?
Inconsolable.
concerned with: attachment. Erikson stage one. trust or mistrust. hope or not. consolable or not.
Wait without hope, for hope would be for the wrong thing.
I've lost hope. It's easier to live without it. First you abandon someone and then someone abandons you.
no. no no no no, how could you abandon someone first? it may it only feels like that. you were just a baby.
the babies in the study who were handled minimally lying on their beds in the same position not moving left indentations.
the baby's hand on mother's face, through the night, that she's there.
if she's there with you, is there anything wrong?
nothing wrong in this whole world.
a plea so desperate it reads Come get me yesterday.
Open your eyes. This is what I look like when I believe in you.
do you have belief in? experience of. achievement. learning-realizing. coming to understand.
do you think someone knows-understands things sachen matters that you do not.
what is there to accomplish?
you will die. if you expect to die tomorrow, what do you do today. I think this, that I would lie down still and think. feel a tension. body. be in it.
no you can't sleep when you are dead. you can't sleep then.
mornings evenings afternoons. I like mornings. have dreaded. 'Nothing here to be afraid of. It's just the morning.' but also have enjoyed. I like evenings. so right now it seems to me that it is afternoons that are uncomfortable. laundry time. full daylight. 3pm. 1pm to 6pm to be sure.
write down everything you remember. would that be worthwhile? interesting, enjoyable. tell me something.
no important secrets. no one is trying to find out. sitting on the floor with the notebook of yours pulled from under the bed, behind the bookcase, feeling surreptitious and reading what you wrote. oh.
what could they read that would matter?
who could read you that would matter?
there is always something between people. or not.
here are notebooks full of meanings, things I wrote.
'I accept you as you are.' - you are not curious?
someone could want to find out about you, every day. did you like this? why? what did you think? why do you say that?
for fun. for the fun of: a whole other person.
the baby's hand on mother's face.
the mother, as baby rolls over: Yay! that's wonderful. you are wonderful.
this is not nothing.
there is nothing here to be afraid of.
I want wholesome now. I'd like feeling and an interesting role to play and something between people and I don't want it to be ugly or impossible or terrifying.
I don't know what to tell you.
why would I write a book, who would I want to tell?
Pilar: So, Guillermo. Interesting choice. I admire the cojones. Next time you might want to hire someone -- who doesn’t work for me--and who isn’t still mad at you for ratting him out.
mm I really enjoy her delivery there. watched it more than once.
:50 sec mark:
mmm I love it. her facial expression: 'interesting choice.'
the breathy 'hire someone' and very quiet, quick 'who doesn't work for me' straight into & with classic bitchy chin jut so-there: 'and who isn't still mad at you for ratting him out.'
scene transcript (or? dialogue text. what they said, written out.) found at
nowmyhousehastwotoasters.tumblr -
Fuck me? Fuck you.
Pilar: You look nice.
Nancy: Well, thank you. You look nice too.
Pilar: So, Guillermo. Interesting choice.
Nancy: Guillermo?
Pilar: I admire the cojones. Next time you might want to hire someone who doesn’t work for me, and isn’t still mad at you for ratting him out.
Nancy: I’ll keep that in mind. Next time. Now, if you’ll excuse me, some bitch told me I had to leave early. Oh, your press-on nails are digging into my arm.
Pilar: You think this is a joke?
Nancy: You took a fucking shot at me, and you hit my kid. And you cut my husband’s balls off. That’s three you owe me, four if we count the balls separately.
Pilar: Let’s make it six.
Nancy: We’re counting yours, too?
Pilar: Esteban needs you and the baby for photos, but Silas and Shane are… what’s the word? Extraneous. We don’t need them to complete our pretty pictures.
Nancy: You come anywhere near my children, I’ll kill you myself.
Pilar: You look stunning in black. The people will be very sympathetic to the grieving mother who has just lost her beautiful children in a tragic… car accident? Or perhaps a plane crash? Or perhaps…
The Deep End of the Ocean - TWoP recap of Weeds 5.13 All About My Mom - by Jacob | p15 of 15:
Out of the mise-en-scène comes a croquet mallet, into Pilar's head and thence to the water, hefted by the increasingly bad-ass terrifying Strange Botwin, terror of the soccer field, biter of karate feet, ghost whisperer, apprentice thug, drug dealer, bird-shooter, fruit punch-mouthed, threesome-haver, junior alcoholic, celebrity disease enthusiast, profane rap artist, valedictory detournist, budding masochist, beheading video terrorist. "I couldn't find a golf club," he explains to his mystified mother, and they watch Pilar's blood fill the water from the shallows all the way to the deep end.
Jacob begins the recap p1
("As I stand before you today on the brink of junior high, here is what I have to say.")
= Shane's graduation speech, season 2:
fuckyeahweeds.tumblr - Shane: As I stand before you today on the brink of...
Shane: As I stand before you today on the brink of junior high, here is what I have to say. You have failed us all! Everything is not okay! We have become alienated, desensitized, angry, and frightened. If we picture Agrestic as an airplane, a grand soaring jet carrying us through the sky, I think you all need to understand - there are mother fucking snakes on this mother fucking plane.
(Season 2, Episode 12: Pittsburgh)
nice choice, Jacob, interspersing Shane's words of warning through this episode's recap.
Pilar explains: "Esteban needs you and the baby for photos. But Silas and Shane? They are... what's the word... Extraneous. We don't need them to complete our pretty pictures."
("You're not safe. You moved here so that you'd feel safe, but your children are not safe.")
..Strange Botwin, terror of the soccer field, fruit punch-mouth, biter of karate feet, junior alcoholic, apprentice thug.
when Shane ask Silas why he stayed
Silas: "Because it looked like you were going to go off the deep end, and I wanted to be around to jump in."
mm I really enjoy her delivery there. watched it more than once.
:50 sec mark:
mmm I love it. her facial expression: 'interesting choice.'
the breathy 'hire someone' and very quiet, quick 'who doesn't work for me' straight into & with classic bitchy chin jut so-there: 'and who isn't still mad at you for ratting him out.'
scene transcript (or? dialogue text. what they said, written out.) found at
nowmyhousehastwotoasters.tumblr -
Fuck me? Fuck you.
Pilar: You look nice.
Nancy: Well, thank you. You look nice too.
Pilar: So, Guillermo. Interesting choice.
Nancy: Guillermo?
Pilar: I admire the cojones. Next time you might want to hire someone who doesn’t work for me, and isn’t still mad at you for ratting him out.
Nancy: I’ll keep that in mind. Next time. Now, if you’ll excuse me, some bitch told me I had to leave early. Oh, your press-on nails are digging into my arm.
Pilar: You think this is a joke?
Nancy: You took a fucking shot at me, and you hit my kid. And you cut my husband’s balls off. That’s three you owe me, four if we count the balls separately.
Pilar: Let’s make it six.
Nancy: We’re counting yours, too?
Pilar: Esteban needs you and the baby for photos, but Silas and Shane are… what’s the word? Extraneous. We don’t need them to complete our pretty pictures.
Nancy: You come anywhere near my children, I’ll kill you myself.
Pilar: You look stunning in black. The people will be very sympathetic to the grieving mother who has just lost her beautiful children in a tragic… car accident? Or perhaps a plane crash? Or perhaps…
The Deep End of the Ocean - TWoP recap of Weeds 5.13 All About My Mom - by Jacob | p15 of 15:
Out of the mise-en-scène comes a croquet mallet, into Pilar's head and thence to the water, hefted by the increasingly bad-ass terrifying Strange Botwin, terror of the soccer field, biter of karate feet, ghost whisperer, apprentice thug, drug dealer, bird-shooter, fruit punch-mouthed, threesome-haver, junior alcoholic, celebrity disease enthusiast, profane rap artist, valedictory detournist, budding masochist, beheading video terrorist. "I couldn't find a golf club," he explains to his mystified mother, and they watch Pilar's blood fill the water from the shallows all the way to the deep end.
Jacob begins the recap p1
("As I stand before you today on the brink of junior high, here is what I have to say.")
= Shane's graduation speech, season 2:
fuckyeahweeds.tumblr - Shane: As I stand before you today on the brink of...
Shane: As I stand before you today on the brink of junior high, here is what I have to say. You have failed us all! Everything is not okay! We have become alienated, desensitized, angry, and frightened. If we picture Agrestic as an airplane, a grand soaring jet carrying us through the sky, I think you all need to understand - there are mother fucking snakes on this mother fucking plane.(Season 2, Episode 12: Pittsburgh)
nice choice, Jacob, interspersing Shane's words of warning through this episode's recap.
Pilar explains: "Esteban needs you and the baby for photos. But Silas and Shane? They are... what's the word... Extraneous. We don't need them to complete our pretty pictures."
("You're not safe. You moved here so that you'd feel safe, but your children are not safe.")
..Strange Botwin, terror of the soccer field, fruit punch-mouth, biter of karate feet, junior alcoholic, apprentice thug.
when Shane ask Silas why he stayed
Silas: "Because it looked like you were going to go off the deep end, and I wanted to be around to jump in."
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