Archive for 2014
Citation (50)
1 January 2014, around 14.58.
the dangers of athletics…
A Publisher Speaking
3 January 2014, around 5.20.
By Geoffrey Faber, Houghton Mifflin, 1935.
in stacks
3 January 2014, around 5.21.
A few books close at hand. Her favourite reading was a mouldy old book called Urn Burial, that she read in bed; and she liked creepy, rustling things like tortoises and cacti. She had a dark, haggard face that made one think of an old graveyard, but her eyes were so dark and deep that […]
Crambe repetita (31)
4 January 2014, around 5.02.
Irmgard Keun, After Midnight.
A view (40)
8 January 2014, around 16.37.
It rained most of the day.
pleasant & agreeable
9 January 2014, around 12.00.
It’s dreary out. He is a learned man, and has a power of college-books by heart: his greatest fault is, that he incessantly quotes passages from them in conversation, which is not agreeable to everybody. —Alain-Renée Lesage (Gil Blas, vol. 1, p. 149 (II.ix))1 Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, […]
undetectable
12 January 2014, around 15.11.
A down-graded storm. There are of course other things I should be doing, even other things I should be reading, but just at the moment detective stories seem to be what I want. They are amusing and plotty and charmingly shamefaced. There’s not a one that takes itself too seriously, not one that claims it […]
from that other place
17 January 2014, around 20.58.
If one grows up in Oregon, one hears a lot about William Stafford. Always being the sort of person to avoid what other people are talking about (with no regard for its merit or interest), I never read any of his work until just a few months ago – and I expected to sneer even […]
detected
20 January 2014, around 15.10.
(8) Finger-prints of any value to the police are seldom found on anybody’s skin. (9) The pupils of many drug-addicts’ eyes are apparently normal. (10) It is impossible to see anything by the flash of an ordinary gun, though it is easy to imagine you have seen things. (11) Not nearly so much can be […]
immeasurably
30 January 2014, around 7.00.
J. Drayton, ‘Pine Forest, Ore.’1 Just something I found one day – a pebble as it were, to generate ripples of thought. Later (March 2022): After checking the original of Wilkes’s Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (vol. 5), it appears the original sketch was by Drayton; the caption has been updated accordingly. [↩]
Crambe repetita (32)
4 February 2014, around 5.05.
Monica Dickens, Mariana.
A view (41)
8 February 2014, around 10.53.
still snowing.
daily
14 February 2014, around 22.11.
Taking pictures around the house. It’s the repeated, regular acts – the habits – that are, oddly, the most interesting thing. I wouldn’t have thought it. For his own part, Adams inclined to think that neither chaos nor death was an object to him as a searcher of knowledge – neither would have vogue in […]
under the look of fatigue
21 February 2014, around 5.00.
Auden at home.1 Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye. —Auden, from ‘At Last the […]
Citation (51)
4 March 2014, around 8.28.
fury and despair…
to sliver
26 March 2014, around 10.42.
I can’t remember if that was the actual color of the sky or if that was just what my camera saw.
wayside
11 April 2014, around 20.43.
in a style to endure
1 June 2014, around 11.42.
In the world of literature and art, Goldsmith and Johnson had gone; Cowper was not yet much known; the most prominent poets were Hayley and Darwin; the most distinguished prose-writer, Gibbon. […] Miss Burney, afterwards Madame D’Arblay, surprised the reading world with her entertaining, but somewhat vulgar novels; and Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Charlotte Smith, and […]
added too freely
8 June 2014, around 11.41.
In his ‘History of Ancient Art,’ of which the first edition appeared in 1764, Winckelmann gave to the study of the antique an impulse along a line which it has never wholly deserted; his theory of the ‘beautiful’ as manifested even in these Græco-Roman copies to which his imagination often added too freely the missing […]
A view (42)
27 June 2014, around 18.35.
loose ends
11 July 2014, around 16.10.
Out and about. It’s been warm and that brings with it vexation. I’ve been filling out paperwork for other people and then carrying it hither and thither because it can’t be emailed, but only faxed; fax machines and I have a long-standing disagreement, so walking it is.1 I could use the exercise, anyway. I sometimes […]
Print is Dead
13 July 2014, around 14.19.
By Jeff Gomez, Macmillan, 2008.
cornered
6 August 2014, around 13.56.
momentum
26 August 2014, around 0.04.
Scent through the open window – party-goer’s perfume or an evening bath, mothballed sociability. Dull beats from the club, from the event space fluorescent light, and the shouting or murmurs of the smokers. Another scent. Ready for winter – ready to close the windows.
barrier to entry
31 August 2014, around 14.48.
Reading at the window, December 2013. There were too many things to do this summer, each day crowded with too of the little nothings that are so necessary if anything is going to happen. Now, though, projects are winding down, and there’s nothing to do but bustle about and procrastinate on those last few things […]
Crambe repetita (33)
4 September 2014, around 5.42.
Mollie Panter-Downs, One Fine Day.
punchbowl
20 September 2014, around 9.35.
Oh well!
30 October 2014, around 5.00.
The thought of what America would be like If the Classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep, The thought of what America, The thought of what America, The thought of what America would be like If the Classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep. Nunc dimittis, now lettest thou thy servant, Now […]
mise en scène
23 November 2014, around 7.31.
The other day I noticed that the old apartment was empty – the one we had lived in before. It faces west with a view of the city, and has certain conveniences (a trundle bed, a refrigerator that doesn’t block a window) that the current apartment lacks. I emailed the property manager about it, to […]
minatory
24 November 2014, around 12.00.
Neither this nor any of the mines we own in Yugoslavia is being worked for the first time. First the Greeks worked them, and then the Romans; then in the Middle Ages the Serbs brought in the Saxons to work them. Then under the Turks the work stopped, stopped dead, for five centuries, until we […]
grates
27 November 2014, around 15.30.
Evidence of a brief excursion outdoors. There’s a fire in the fireplace. There are books on the table. It’s misting outside in the true Oregon manner.
off-color
11 December 2014, around 8.32.
Notes on Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour: Wittgenstein muddles his thinking about color – visualizing rather than looking: the dullness of phenomenology. The removal of colors from context, which changes the ‘meaning’ – what is at once ‘reddish green’ might, in other settings, be called ‘brown’. ‘I took a green painted lead cupola to be translucent greenish […]
accordance
15 December 2014, around 9.25.
Although he never lose his heart exclusively to one philosophical sect and was also an eclectic, Horace’s sharply critical mind, with a subtle sense of humor on the surface and a tempered pessimism deeper down, was far more inclined towards the doctrines of Aristippus, Epicurus and Lucretius than towards the Stoa which he often mentions […]
pseudaphoristica (18)
21 December 2014, around 9.26.
axes.
a mere habit
24 December 2014, around 11.56.
It is snowing outside and there is nothing to do save sit in front of the fire and read. Indeed, there is nothing one would rather be doing. Did she distrust all figurative language because she was sharply aware of the aptitude of the most languid figurative expressions for persisting as a mere habit of […]
wide of the mark
31 December 2014, around 5.29.
I suppose after all that no one whose mind was not, to put it mildly, abnormal, ever yet aimed very high out of pure malice aforethought. I once saw a fly alight on a cup of hot coffee on which the milk had formed a thin skin; he perceived his extreme danger, and I noted […]