Archive for 2020
pseudaphoristica (21)
4 January 2020, around 5.17.
dogged.
lying-before-us
10 January 2020, around 8.57.
William Orpen, ‘Group associated with the New English Art Club’ What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. —Francis Bacon, ‘Of Truth’ There was an odd passage in a woodworking memoir I read because I was taking the long way ’round in trying to think about craftsmanship. The woodworker had […]
A view (48)
15 January 2020, around 15.27.
trees and snow.
fugit
16 January 2020, around 5.04.
There is a feeling of relief, drawing near the front of the line at the movie theatre and seeing the clerk post a small notice that the next showing is sold out. It is the same thrill one gets when, after planning a meeting or outing, the other person calls or texts or writes and […]
habitus
20 January 2020, around 9.19.
It is pleasant to return to familiar walks, a matter of habitus.
punctum
25 January 2020, around 8.50.
Best way to start the day.
amused
13 February 2020, around 5.42.
An arbitrary detail from ‘Portrait of the Comte De M.’ by Jérôme-Martin Langlois (1831). Just last Tuesday, I ended up at the art museum, although I hadn’t intended to go. It was after going to the dentist, you see, and my jaw was sore from a filling and the right side of my face was […]
Citation (63)
25 February 2020, around 17.12.
from the lumber room.
exaltée
29 February 2020, around 5.02.
A view of a bridge, in watercolor, ca. 1820. All recollections are like shadows, & all shadows are dark, be the objects that cause them ever so bright. —Emily Foster (Journals, p. 64, ca. May 1822) It is always a little strange to read published journals or diaries. The ones that I’ve encountered – Virginia […]
A view (49)
31 March 2020, around 18.51.
ennui and falling.
ignes fatui
4 April 2020, around 5.34.
Part of an engraving from 1820. Making the daily circuit around the house, I listen to books on tape (because trying to read while walking on ground uneven from frost heaves is imprudent) and become annoyed at the lengthy chatter of background material provided. These are generalist books and start from first principles. After the […]
Small pome
5 April 2020, around 4.23.
appetite alters everything restive beneath words containing all meaning —less you have been used to your beauty
consolations
6 April 2020, around 14.27.
Reading odd bits of books in the evening as consolation for not being able to manage a satisfactory photo of any of the nurse stumps on the short walk through the woods I love the wind even if, exactly, my imagination tends to give it ferocious shapes and colors. Battered by the wind, I go […]
alpine violets
17 April 2020, around 5.34.
Every time I see these flowers, either in their purple freshness or in rain-bleached white, I think of the story ‘Ալպիական Մանուշակ’ by Aksel Bakunts;1 it is a false association, sadly, because the ‘alpine violet’ of the story is a cyclamen, as the red stems would indicate, but I think the mistake is a common […]
A view (50)
20 April 2020, around 8.32.
poems, trees, mornings.
pedestrian
29 April 2020, around 15.23.
It is the small extraordinary things – the excitement of a new pair of pantaloons, the tragedy of a lost pair of gloves, the satisfaction of completing a fair copy to go to the publisher, the suggested tedium of training the maid to mark patterns – that stand out in reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals. Although […]
dramatis personae
14 May 2020, around 5.20.
I dip into the well of words and find myself in an ocean and the conversation has swept away and it is time to pay the bill and leave the restaurant. I sit on the sofa and I feel my expressions my gestures my mannerisms are no longer mine they belong to the past the […]
channel
20 May 2020, around 8.30.
These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones in the day when I am entirely myself, and for myself, without diversion, or obstacle; and when I can truly say, I am what nature designed me. —J.-J. Rousseau (Reveries of the Solitary Walker) It is over a year later and it is the same […]
de finibus
31 May 2020, around 15.23.
There is the sense that the book has an argument, that it wants some sort of artist’s statement to illumine its depths. I complained of this, and PF observed that experimental authors tend to fall into two camps – the Nabokovian and the Joycean. The Nabokovian camp will tell you in great detail all the […]
interlocutrix
18 June 2020, around 5.08.
Cropped and edited version of Djuna Barnes’s caricature of Helen Westley. It was happenstance, the purchasing of a copy of Interviews by Djuna Barnes. I was looking for a book about Pushkin and somehow found the Interviews at a local bookstore that happens to be in the same building as my dentist, although I didn’t […]
queenly
10 July 2020, around 10.42.
From the frontispiece of Hannah Wolley’s The Queen-Like Closet, or Rich Cabinet Now that we are traveling less, I have been seeing less need to maintain an ebook library – which I was keeping more from laziness than because I prefer the format. So I am trying to decide which books to let go because […]
politesse
1 August 2020, around 10.11.
Despite a subscription to one of the noteworthy review periodicals, I have mostly given up reading book reviews. They never really manage to tell me what I want to know, the information that a blind, intuitive reaching for the shelves will provide – what do I want to read next? Indeed, looking at book reviews […]
to fabulize
7 August 2020, around 5.53.
Illustration to ‘The Rose-bush’ from Fairy Tales for Workers Children The rose bush did not know where it had been born and where it had passed its early days: it is well known that flowers have a bad memory. —Hermynia zur Mühlen (‘The Rose Bush’ in The Castle of Truths and Other Revolutionary Tales) The […]
so to speak
12 August 2020, around 6.43.
A scene from Rousseau’s Confessions1 We were walking away from the bookstore, where we had just purchased a second copy (with a nicer cover) of Nabokov’s translation of and commentary on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and to pass the time before dinner we talked about Pushkin’s short stories. PF mentioned that Pushkin was noted for his […]
imperfective
28 August 2020, around 5.06.
In the mending basket were three pairs of trousers waiting in diverse states of wear and disarray. They had been waiting there for some months, and weighing on my mind for longer – indeed, since I gathered them together with patch and thread and needle to undertake the task of repair, before setting them aside […]
Citation (64)
7 September 2020, around 12.22.
memory, the field of vision, consciousness, a spark.
26.ix.2020
26 September 2020, around 10.12.
A class of small children were being asked if they liked to watch programmes which had lots of violent action in them. One small boy’s eyes lit up as he told the reporter how exciting he found it, how it made him feel that he wanted to be strong like that, to run in and […]
28.ix.2020
28 September 2020, around 19.44.
Life is always in excess of the stories we tell about it – to others, to ourselves. Always the awkward relation is a sign of more to come; the stories which don’t fit; the lives lived in parallel universes, intersecting, overlapping, together and apart. A real life includes conflict, anger, mistakes; it spills over into […]
at hasard
29 September 2020, around 5.00.
on dogs, walking, running, Mongolia and nature.
13.x.2020
13 October 2020, around 14.11.
Uncanny walk through the woods, jumpy at the metallic rattle of leaves, the tinny sound of rain, the echo of my own footsteps, the distant yip of a dog. At each step the sensation of being watched, perhaps only by a wren, but watched – and warily.
iterate
30 October 2020, around 10.18.
To begin with how it is. Sun fallen behind the ridge to the south, the light fading in the valley, though still bright on the northern hills. Raking up after a frost, hoping to clear the drive and the edges of the road before the rain. For I can push a barrow as well as […]
a singular philosophy
13 November 2020, around 7.00.
The view from the ridge, circa late summer 2017. The path that I like to walk (and have for some years) is the beginning of a nine-mile trail that goes up to a Forest Service lookout (which I have not yet reached, and probably never will, by that route). The trail climbs a series of […]
on being seen
19 November 2020, around 5.31.
Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima. Rien. // J’ai tout vu. Tout. Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed. —Arthur Conan Doyle (‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, section 1) Had Marguerite Duras […]
new frontiers
23 November 2020, around 11.06.
It was around the time I was reading the first or second of a series of translations of Beowulf and I mentioned it in passing in an email. My correspondent replied that they thought they should probably read more fiction, but it was hard to find the time. This response surprised, not because I thought […]
A view (51)
26 November 2020, around 9.46.
Autumn afternoon, Zigzag.
diabolo, l’emigrette & la dame de pique
1 December 2020, around 6.14.
On toys, literature, gaming, and the perils of history.
velleity
11 December 2020, around 5.41.
Nothing is quite what I’m expecting at the moment. If November was a month in which I could read fluently and easily and joyfully and curiously, December is, or currently seems to be, a month in which nothing makes sense, and every word on a page makes me peevish. I am tempted to retreat into […]
15.xii.2020
15 December 2020, around 17.56.
‘In the art of not living one is not ephemerally permanent but permanently ephemeral.’ —Laura (Riding) Jackson (Anarchism Is Not Enough)
16.xii.2020
16 December 2020, around 12.05.
‘The conversion of nothing into something is the task of criticism. Literature is the storehouse of these rescued somethings.’ —Laura (Riding) Jackson (Anarchism Is Not Enough)
flurried
17 December 2020, around 6.23.
A glimpse of the season’s first snowfall, through the window, at night. The first snow of the season (or the first snow I was awake to see falling) reminded me of something that I’ve been meaning to do. I am trying to read more patiently – not necessarily more attentively or carefully, but more patiently, or […]
19.xii.2020
19 December 2020, around 14.24.
‘I read all the time: newspapers, magazines, fiction, nonfiction, but it’s important for me to feel interpolated; to feel like the thing I am reading will lead to another and another…’ —Moyra Davey (‘Opposite of Low Hanging Fruit’, in Index Cards)
21 December 2020 – Portland
21 December 2020, around 10.41.
Tumbled out of the apartment building, only to find myself in the neighborhood where I have lived, on and off, for perhaps ten years.1 The neighbors pass, masked, some with their dogs and others circumspect, head bowed against the mizzle. It is the solstice, and there’s little I’d like more than to hibernate a while, […]
playing favorites
29 December 2020, around 5.01.
The other evening I was annoying myself by trying to think up answers to the question ‘what is your favorite book?’ It’s a silly question, because books are good for so many different things – one (generally) wants different things from a cookbook and a poetry chapbook; and it’s a different question from ‘what do you […]
A view (52)
30 December 2020, around 8.49.