The way they look and see and go. Unable to slip a word in edgewise. Everything all at once but different times; missed tones in the afternoon. Expecting all receiving naught. Or aught. But chancing not to see.
Finding out after the fact. A decade or so. Time not wasted, trim-waisted, but lost. Everywhere a door [...]
Started reading The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić. The novel proper begins as follows:
1. ‘Ich bin müde,’ I say to Fred. His sorrowful, pale face stretches into a grin. Ich bin müde is the only German sentence I know at the moment (3).*
I note this only because ‘Ich bin müde’ was also the [...]
Books to be packed.
She sat rather glumly looking at her own hands, her chin drawn in as though suffering from indigestion, or a surfeit of English.
– Patrick White
The Vivisector, p. 317.
I am, as it were, at sea. The most difficult part of packing books is deciding which ones I am most likely to want to [...]
Three chairs on the deck of the house opposite rock of their own volition, looking at the sea and seven sail-less sailboats.
The bright pink flowers of potted geranium plants refuse to lose their petals.
And I, sadly, am reading William Hazlitt.
Postcard (from the editor of the text to his godmother)
found in a copy of ‘Urne Buriall’
and ‘The Garden of Cyrus’
… according to the notion I have of reason, neither the written treatises of the learned nor the set discourses of the eloquent are able of themselves to teach the use of it. It is the [...]
meme (ex machina):*
Intrigue me?1 The impression is that the lay-out of the whole area resembled that of the Seraglio in Constantinople, with palaces, barracks, and other royal buildings set in an area of parkland.2 A house of sin you may call it, but not a house of darkness, for the candles are never out; and [...]
I cannot think of a writer I dislike more than William Butler Yeats; mind you, I’m sure such an author exists – the literary world would be a sad place indeed if the most unlikeable creature it could offer was WBY – but I can’t think of one right now. Aside from being a pompous [...]
Artemis.
I was quite pleased with myself: I managed to trim a ten-paragraph letter down to nine words, excluding salutation. Sadly, neither the grammar nor spelling were all that they should be, and I am pleased no more.
To my great embarrassment, I mistook this overview of William Blades’s Enemies of Books (via) for a poem1; e.g.:
Bagford the biblioclast.
Illustrations torn from MSS.
Title-pages torn from books.
Rubens, his engraved titles.
Colophons torn out of books.
Lincoln Cathedral
Dr. Dibdin’s Nosegay.
Theurdanck.
Fragments of MSS.
Some libraries almost useless.
[...]
The care that should be taken of books.
Enjoyment derived from them.
Incidentally, I am still [...]
K.
fragment of a dialogue
Is there a reason you haven’t bathed in almost a week?
Is there a reason you consider my personal hygiene to be of general interest?
Answer the question.
Yes. There is a reason.
Would you care to elaborate?
When have I ever cared to elaborate?
Let me rephrase: please share your reasons…
…for not bathing?
Quite.
I’m not sure I can [...]
hopefully, time won’t tell.
Historical inevitability.
After reading Donna Wilson’s Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the ‘Iliad’ (based on the dissertation she prepared for the University of Texas, Austin) the largest question I have for the author concerns her relationship with her father. Her discussion of the character of reparation in the Iliad emphasizes the role of the father in [...]
These characters, which now are wet and glossy, will become invisible when they are dried, being of the same colour as the substance on which We write. Such is the nature of this magic, that neither sweat nor water will affect it.
– Don Tarquinio
(xiii)
on the origins of regret.
Mine heart began to weep within my breast, silently, very bitterly: but the crowds which came in and the crowds which went out were ignorant of my grief. To the genuinely aggrieved, there is nothing more distracting (and consoling) than the knowledge that he is keeping his grievance to himself.
– Don Tarquinio, chapter iii, p. [...]
Reflections on orientalism.
And, unrelated:
‘They’re hopelessly vulgar,’ said Mrs. Costello. ‘Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being ‘bad’ is a question for the metaphysicians. They’re bad enough to blush for, at any rate; and for this short life that’s quite enough.’
– Henry James,
Daisy Miller
Goethe, ‘Am Flusse’ –
Ihr wart ins Wasser eingeschrieben;
So fließt denn auch mit ihm davon.
You were engraved upon the water;
and flow, too, with the water away.
Keats’s epitaph, in the Protestant cemetery, at Rome:1
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
Keats died 23 February 1821. Goethe’s son, Julius, who died in 1830, is also buried in [...]
Ciceronis Epistulae ad Atticum,
edidit D.R. Shackleton Bailey,
Cambridge University Press.
Olympia.
Dusk, rain.
I don’t know. Maybe I was expecting something different. It’s possible. Something other than the nights of fog and afternoons of rain, rudely punctuated by dawns and dusks and gloamings serene and unencumbered. Come to think of it, though, no one uses the word ‘gloaming’ anymore; nobody sane, anyway. Certainly not the young woman [...]
For the words and facts of the ancients are as bricks, from which we build the fortresses of our arguments, ever quarreling over the lines of the walls. These walls are torn down and rebuilt with such haste and such fury, that it does not seem strange when they are torn down again, or prove [...]
December
Leon Edel. Henry James. The Conquest of London: 1870–1881. New York: Avon Books, 1962. [109]
James Agee & Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1988 (1939). [108]
Dave Eggers. You Shall Know Our Velocity. San Francisco:
McSweeney’s, 2002. [107]
J. M. Coetzee. Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. A Memoir.
New York: Penguin, 1997. [106]
Giovanni Boccaccio. The [...]
7.06.02
In a case like this, it would have been a godsend, I thought, had either of the three gentlemen, Captains Burton, Speke, or Grant, given some information on these points; had they devoted a chapter upon, ‘How to get ready an Expedition for Central Africa.’ The purpose of this chapter, then, is to relate how [...]
December
Karen Wilkin, ed. Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey
on Edward Gorey. Harcourt, 2001. [104]
Yi Mun-Yol. The Poet. trans. C. Chung et al. Harvill,
1995 (1992). [103]
Henry James. Washington Square. ed. B. Lee. Penguin,
1984 (1880). [102]
¤ Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil. trans.R.
J. Hollingdale. Penguin, 1990 (1886). [101]
W. G. Sebald. Vertigo. trans. M. Hulse. New Directions,
2000 (1990). [100]
C. S. [...]
::
ego hoc feci mm–mmviii
© 2000–8 M.F.C.