February 2011
26 posts
1 tag
Each culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay, and never return.
There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline.
...
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A dead lemon like a cowled old woman crouching in...
A white pylon of salt and the flies taxiing on the orange table, rain, rain, a scraping peon and a scraping pen writing bowed words. War. And the broken necked streetcars outside and a sudden broken thought of a girl’s face in Hoboken a tilted turtle dying slowly on the stoop of the sea-food restaurant, blood lacing its mouth and the white floor— ready for the ternedos tomorrow. There will...
January 2011
21 posts
1 tag
Success is like some horrible disaster Worse than your house burning, the sounds of ruination As the roof tree falls following each other faster While you stand, the helpless witness of your damnation
Fame like a drunkard consumes the house of the soul Exposing that you have worked for only this— Ah, that I had never suffered this treacherous kiss And had been left in darkness forever to founder...
1 tag
“From the mirror within the window an ocean creature so drenched and coppered by...”
2 tags
Divergent English town pronunciations
Featherstonehaugh - Fanshaw
Cholmondeley - Chumly
Berkeley - Barkly
Mainwaring - Mannering
Belvoir - Beaver
Trottiscliffe - Trozli
ἀτύφος
1 tag
A Defense of Books
by William H. Gass
One
When Ben Jonson was a small boy, his tutor, William Camden, persuaded him of the virtue of keeping a commonplace book: pages where an ardent reader might copy down passages that especially pleased him, preserving sentences that seemed particularly apt or wise or rightly formed and that would, because they were written afresh in a new place, and in a context of...
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“The detection of small errors has always been the property of minds elevated...”
3 tags
In the beginning, people remembered things.
The world saturated the life that lived in it to such an extent that a kind of consubstantiation took place. The world and its sequences became beached inside the life that experienced them, long after the sensations that represented those sequences had drained back into nothingness.
Memory.
Can you think of a pure memory? Do the common features of...
1 tag
Listen