happy birthday, Lydia Davis (a day late)

spending hours

staring

out a window, observing

a neighbor’s cows

tossing french verbs

at the ceiling

seeing what sticks

even the smallest thing will be observed

how a word sounds

and

how a word sounds when

there are different words around it

as consciousness is harnessed to scat singing

Last night I watched Michael Winterbottom's The Trip, a casually unkind movie. I did not enjoy almost any of it; notable exceptions being Steve Coogan's dreams, and the scene, midway through, where he and Rob Brydon are scat singing as their massive SUV blazes through the English countryside. That was transcendent. 

Incomparably better spent is time with the second volume of Susan Sontag's journals, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh, Journals & Notebooks 1964-1980:

"Mailer says he wants his writings to change the consciousness of his time. So did DH L[awrence], obviously.

I don't want mine to–at least not in terms of any particular point of view or vision or message which I'm trying to put across.

I'm not.

The texts are objects. I want them to affect readers–but in any number of possible ways. There is no one right way to experience what I've written.

I'm not 'saying something.' I'm allowing 'something' to have a voice, an independent existence (an existence independent of me).

I think, truly think, in only two situations:

at the typewriter or when writing in these notebooks (monologues)

talking to someone else (dialogue)

I don't really think–just have sensations, or broken fragments of ideas, when I am alone without a means to write, or not writing–or not talking.

I write–and talk–in order to find out what I think.

But that doesn't mean 'I' 'really' 'think' that. It only means that is my-thought-when-writing (or when-talking). If I'd written another day, or in another conversation, 'I' might have 'thought' differently."

- 1965 

 

the epiphany itself

"This was again very dumb because Frau H. failed to perceive the true meaning of the epiphany that had come unto her, which was not, as Frau H. thought, that she had been chosen to bring the beauty of dust to the world, but rather that she, Frau H., was just as whole, as profound, and as valuable, as the epiphany itself."

– Stephan Sprenger, "Dust," trans. from German by Dustin Lovett, Best European Fiction 2011

we're all going to die

There were a lot of things I enjoyed about Caitlin Moran's How to Be a Woman. This is merely one of them:

"Personally, I like the fact that we're going to die. There's nothing more exhilarating than waking up every morning and going, "WOW! THIS IS IT! THIS IS REALLY IT!" It focuses the mind wonderfully. It makes you love vividly, work intensely, and realize that, in the scheme of things, you really don't have time to sit on the sofa in your undies watching Homes Under the Hammer.

Death is not a release, but an incentive. The more focused you are on your death, the more righteously you live your life. My traditional closing-time rant – after the one where I cry that they closed that amazing chippy on Tollington Road, the one that did the pickled eggs – is that humans still believe in an afterlife. I genuinely think it's the biggest philosophical problem the earth faces. Even avowedly nonreligious people think they'll be meeting up with nana and their dead dog, Crackers, when they finally keel over. Everyone thinks they're getting a harp.

But believing in an afterlife totally negates your current existence. It's like an insidious and destabilizing mental illness. Underneath every day – every action, every word – you think it doesn't really matter if you screw up this time around because you can sort it all out in paradise. You make it up with your parents and become a better person and lose that final 14 pounds in heaven. And learn how to speak French. You'll have time, after all! It's eternity! And you'll have wings, and it'll be sunny! So, really, who cares what you do now? This is really just some lackluster waiting room you're going to be in for only 20 minutes, during which you will have no wings at all and are forced to walk around, on your feet, like pigs do.

If we wonder why people are so apathetic and casual about every eminently avoidable horror in the world – famine, war, disease, the seas gradually turning piss-yellow and filling with ring-pulls and shattered fax machines – it's right there. Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside of jigsaws."

the rest is noise

"Probably, the young Reiter answered himself, music would just be noise, noise like crumpled pages, noise like burned books. 

 At this point the conductor raised a hand and said or rather whispered confidentially:

'Don't speak of burned books, my dear young man.'

To which Hans responded:

'Everything is a burned book, my dear maestro. Music, the tenth dimension, the fourth dimension, cradles, the production of bullets and rifles, Westerns: all burned books.'

'What are you talking about?' asked the director.

'I was just stating my opinion,' said Hans.

'An opinion like any other,' said Halder, doing his best to end the conversation on a humorous note, one that would leave them all on good terms, he and the conductor and Hans and the conductor, 'a typically adolescent pronouncement.'

'No, no, no,' said the conductor, 'what do you mean by Westerns?'

'Cowboy novels,' said Hans.

The declaration seemed to relieve the director, who, after exchanging a few friendly words with them, soon took his leave. Later, he would tell their hostess that Halder and the Japanese man seemed like decent people, but Halder's young friend was a time bomb, no question about it: an untrained, powerful mind, irrational, illogical, capable of exploding at the moment least expected. Which was untrue."

– 2666, Roberto Bolaño

rooms of their own

Wait, literacy and a focus girls' education? Be still my heart! That's exactly what's going on at Room to Read, an international nonprofit organization based (yup) in San Francisco. Their website is full of shitty-but-true statistics like this one, "In the developing world, 42% of girls are not enrolled in school," and, "Of the 793 million illiterate people in the world, two-thirds are female." On the other hand, they also have awesome-and-true statistics such as, "Providing a girl with one extra year of education beyond the average boosts her future wages by 20%," and, "More than 13,000 girls in eight countries now have access to improved educational opportunities and holistic support as part of Room to Read’s Girls’ Education program." Can we just stop and look at that for a minute? 13,000 girls. 13,000, since 2000! Room to Read's programs focus on girls transitions into and out of secondary school, the organization engages with government officials and school admin, buys uniforms and ensures safe transportation, they get parents involved – and many of the girls they work with are the first in their families to finish secondary school. Let's think about that for a moment, too. The wasted talent, intelligence, and potential around the world. They're changing that.

Room to Read also builds schools, school libraries, provides reading and writing instruction, and, in an especially cool twist, produces children's literature in local languages. Are you excited yet? This is so awesome. You should really consider giving them some of your money.

you think it's like this but really it's like this

I'm reading Self-Help by Lorrie Moore.

"Pace around in the kitchen and say that you are unhappy. 
But I love you, he will say in his soft, bewildered way, stirring the spaghetti sauce but not you, staring into the pan as if waiting for something, a magic fish, to rise from it and say: That is always enough, why is that not always enough?" 

The whole damn book is like that. Explaining it to housemate Josh, I said: It's as if in each story, she slaps you in the face and says 'Does that hurt?', slaps you again, 'Does that hurt? Here, do it to me.' 'No,' you say, 'why are we doing this?' " even as you feel you hand rise, even as the welts spread across her face. I'm taking a break.

nothing like a lack of color here

Sometimes things

resemble other things.

(I flatter myself Lydia Davis would approve.)

the meaning of life

"Have you ever been to the Cluny, the museum? There you will see Persian carpets of the most exquisite hue and of a pattern the beautiful intricacy of which delights and amazes the eye. In them you will see the mystery and the sensual beauty of the East, the roses of Hafiz and the wine-cup of Omar, but presently you will see more. You were asking just now what was the meaning of life. Go and look at those Persian carpets, and one of these days the answer will come to you."

"You are cryptic," said Phillip.

"I am drunk," answered Cronshaw.

                   – W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

wild and wilder

"The girl who came into the bedroom that night...was languid and mysterious, her hair graying at the age of twenty, and he soon detected the marks of the virtue he valued most in a woman: untamed intelligence."

                 – Gabriel Garcia Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth 

lost time

"Remember this, Lenny; develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you'll never figure out what's important."

– Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart

how we read and how we are

"You used to read dictionaries like other people read novels. Each entry is a character, you'd say, that might be encountered under another rubric . . . A dictionary resembles the world more than a novel does, because the world is not a coherent sequence of actions but a constellation of things perceived. It is looked at, unrelated things congregate, and geographic proximity gives them meaning. If events follow one another, they are believed to be a story. But in a dictionary, time doesn't exist: ABC is neither more nor less chronological than BCA."

– Suicide, by Eduoard Levé, translated from the French by Jan Steyn, excerpted in Harper's, April 2011

in other words

"Michel Butor says that to travel is to write, because to travel is to read. This can be developed further: To write is to travel, to write is to read, to read is to write and to read is to travel. But George Steiner says that to translate is also to read, and to translate is to write, as to write is to translate and to read is to translate. So that we may say: To translate is to travel and to travel is to translate. To translate a travel writing, to read a writing, to write a writing, and to travel. But if because you are translating you read, and because writing translate, because traveling write, because traveling read, and because translating travel; that is if to read is to translate, and to translate is to write, to write to travel, to read to travel, to write to read, to read to write, and to travel to translate; then to write is also to write, and to read is also to read, and even more, because when you read you read, but also travel, and because traveling read, therefore read and read; and when reading also write, therefore read; and reading also translate, therefore read; therefore read, read, read, and read. The same argument may be made for translating, traveling, and writing."

  – Lydia Davis, "To Reiterate," Almost No Memory

the purpose of literature

"The answer to the use-pleasure conundrum is not neither, but both. What is more, they are the same thing. 'Use' does not mean instruction, as it did to Horace or the Victorians, the inculcation of virtue through the presentation of moral exempla. It means awareness. Literature is 'useful' because it wakes us up from the sleepwalk of self-involvement—of plans, anxieties, resentments, habits, the fog that clings to our eyes as we stumble through the day, stumble through our lives—and shows us the world, shows us ourselves, shows us life and experience and the reality of other people, and forces us to think about them all. The pleasure of serious literature is not escape or fantasy, it is this very shiver of consciousness, this troubling exhilaration. Reading is thinking and feeling, both at once and both together, simultaneous and identical. Pleasure is use, use pleasure."

   – William Deresiewicz, slaughtering Marjorie Garber's The Use and Abuse of Literature

Can I get a hell yes?

all the dolphins say

"He goes in the living room. He lies on the sofa. Not waving but drowning. No future. The future is now. Meaningless. Wave of the future. Everything is clichéd and melodramatic. He should eat. He used to think things like, This organic soymilk will make me healthy and that'll make my brain work better and that'll improve my writing. Also things like, The less I eat and the less money I spend on publicly owned companies the less pain and suffering will exist in the world. Now he thinks things like, It is impossible to be happy. Why would anyone think that? Things like, Godsford Park is the worst movie ever. Gosford? Godsford?

'Godsford,' Andrew says out loud. 'Gosford.' "

                   – Tao Lin, Eeeee Eee Eeee

love is and love is not

"As we will show, LOVE is not a concept that has a clearly delineated structure; whatever structure it has it gets only via metaphors."

– Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

And, while we're on the topic of metaphors, allow me to offer the following:

1. I like my metaphors like I like my cocktails: well-mixed.

2. I like my metaphors like I like my cocktails: shaken, not stirred.

3. I like my metaphors like I like my cocktails: frequently.

4. I like my metaphors like I like my cocktails: gin-based.

5. I like my metaphors like I like my cocktails: nonsensical.

6. I like my cocktails like I like my metaphors: self-referential.

7. I like my cocktails like I like my metaphors: surprising to the point of alienating.

8. I like my cocktails like I like my metaphors: stronger than me.

some thoughts from Nabokov

"The magic has endured, and whenever a grammar book comes my way, I instantly turn to the last page to enjoy a forbidden glimpse of the laborious student's future, of that promised land where, at last, words are meant to mean what they mean."

"One's home is always in one's past..."

"...something, in short, that I could appreciate only after the things and beings that I had most loved in the security of my childhood had been turned to ashes or shot through the heart."

                      — Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

satisfaction

"Early on the first day of summer, I found myself sitting in the middle of an impossibly green pasture, resting. 'The longest day of the year' is what I would jot down in my notebook in bed late that night, followed by 'literally,' which was then struck out and replaced with 'figuratively.' What can I say? I was tired."

           – Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma

I'm always pleased when someone tips their hat to one of my pet hates. Thanks, Michael Pollan.

biscuits

"Overcome by these perspectives Murphy fell forward on his face on the grass, beside those biscuits of which it could be said as truly as the stars, that one differed from another, but of which he could not partake in their fullness until he had learnt not to prefer any one to any other."

                – Murphy, Samuel Beckett

sight

Last night I finished reading Jose Saramago's Seeing, the sequel to Blindness. While I loved the latter,  Seeing left me feeling like I'd been punched in the gut, then kicked in the face. Even so, there's this:

He walked through the garden and stopped for a moment to study the statue of the woman with the empty jar, They left me here, she seemed to be saying, and now all I'm good for is staring into this grubby water, there was a time when the stone I'm made from was white, when a fountain flowed day and night from this jar, they never told me where all the water came from, I was just here to tip up the jar, but now not a drop falls from it, and no one has come to tell me why it stopped.