Book reviews/Notes/Quotations
[most emphases marked are by Erna]
Marie-Claire Blais 1939 — 2021
Mad Shadows
Mother, beautiful son, ugly daughter — in train. Later mother’s 2. husband Lanz.
Daughters — that is sisters terrible jealousy on brothers beauty who is an idiot.
Mother — a stupid doll, to her 2. husband.
First attack on brother the sister does when he is 15 (she is older). Mother is away for a week or so — sister let the brother starve. He is ill.
Then the brother kills his stepfather riding a horse on him (kind of unconsciously done killing). Sister marries a blind young man to whom she plays being beautiful. She gets an ugly child (daughter) from him. Regains his sight — sees her ugly — beats her. She flees back to mother.
Later pushes her brother’s face in boiling water, so destroying his beauty.
Mother (later) discovering it, sends her away with her child.
The ugly son she does not love anymore. So — puts him in madhouse.
She, the mother gets a cancer on her face. Is near dying, when the daughter with her child comes fortunately back to the house — puts fire on it.
Returning back where she came from with the child — she leaves the child and runs under the train.
The brother escapes from madhouse, comes home to see mother. Finds ashes. Goes to the lake, as formerly, to look at his face — if it might not be beautiful again. Drowns.
Forceful — but fantastically childish story. Short, dictatanic descriptions. Sure it does not matter for a book, if the story is believable all through its structure. But still — the childish fairytail quality in it, spoils the quite mature conclusions, observations etc. Still — for 20 years. O.K. What impresses me — the force, abruptness, sureness.
What I do not like — the told, always the told things, not living, developing by themselves — but made by author. Still — psychological road — is right.
—————
Quentin Bell
Virginia Woolf. Biography
Jealous, almost nasty woman. Much of her class.
—————
Virginia Woolf
Between the acts.
Summer in a “well off class” people’s house. The “villagers” are performing a play (an “every years happening”)
————–
Simone de Beauvoir
Les belles images
— boring!
————–
Robertson Davies
The Manticore
Fifth business turpinājums [continued]
Mostly rubbish.
Good knowledge of this and that (judges career, fate)
Psychotherapist — in action — finishes or, just does not finish, but talk and talk and talk, and at last — the stupid scene to crawl with Lisle in the cave, that is — crawl out and put in pants…
Make ups. No art.
—————-
Salinger
To Esme with love
Warm, as usually, Salinger.
—————-
Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Family Moskat
novel: Jews in Poland before world war 1. — Interesting.
Shortstories: gets a little boring his stile, when you read much of him.
Shortstories about Poland — Good!
—————
Thomas Mann + Herman Hesse
Letters
Interesting their genuine? hate for Hitler’s Germany — otherwise — not very interesting letters.
——————-
Anaïs Nin
In favor of the secretive man and Diary
Poor stuff. All hidden behind big words. Words, words, words, That woman has taken the wrong way how to write. Maybe also — how to live and judge life and art. (See what she says of “Milkwood“!!!)
Maybe her “for money written” erotic stories are better. Have to look at them.
These are only interesting to read and see her misleadings.
———————-
E.L. Doctorov
Ragtime
Not too bad, some — history at least.
The book of Daniel
Mixed up — not — really worth reading.
————-
Susan Sontag
Against interpretation
Long, too long talk.
Sharp. But much good opinions. Only — contradicts herself.
——————–
Oates
The poisonous kiss
Not worth reading.
Not genuine, not profound. One cannot speak for somebody else when writing so much, than even not having seen his country one could speak about it and its product, its man.
——————–
Kobo Abe:
The Woman in the Dunes.
About man trapped in a sand hole where there is a little house with a woman.
To live there – you have to dig the sand every night and put it in buckets, then the men from the village come and ‘fish’ it out. There has been a string ladder when the man came – to have a ‘hotel’ for a night. But he is trapped, the stairs taken away, no escape. Struggling, desperateness awful – sand everywhere… Once he escapes but is caught and put back.
Awful simple sex with the woman – however they are too hostile to each other. If they do not shovel the sand away every day (night actually) the all village will disappear under the sand.
At last the man discover water at the holes bottom – under a bucket he has placed there to catch crows (actually he is a teacher – insect gatherer, looking for new specimen beetles. He never there (for years) does anything – just suffers and works at the sand a bit.)
Yes – under in the bucket – he finds water, that by capillary momentum gather in the bucket – So that is his way for escaping, but it does not describe how. Only you read announcement of him – missing, escaped.
So he is somewhere in freedom.
But the years there – the life??
Awful books write is Japanese author Kobo Abe, the language pretty rude too and the reader – gets impatient to know the ending?
It was said (once) in a school or in literary critics that that is a bad style to write like that – that the reader gets impatient for the ending. But may be it depends also of the reader. Still I do not get impatient usually with good books – I got in both of Kobo Abe books impatient to know the ending. I read also – too long without a rest.
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Reading American Voices – short stories. Up to now, the best are J. Updike – ‘Separation’ and Dennis McFarland – ‘Nothing to Ask For’.
Also Amy Amy Tan – ‘Rules of the Game’ O.K. Two other women authors I’ve forgotten and Carol Oates – somehow heavy and… yes and – what? Not compact, not strongly artistic. ‘Artistic’ in quotes.
—————–
Books read:
About By
1. Van Gogh (1853-1890) Frank Elgar
2. Van Gogh Pierre Cabanne
3. Van Gogh Andre Leclerc
4. The passion of a pilgrim –
The life of Van Gogh Lorence & Elizabeth Hanson
5. Cezanne (1839-1906) Jean de Beucken
6. Cezanne Henry Perruchot
7. P. Cezane Theodore Rousseau
8. Cezanne – Letters
9. The Valadon story –
The life of S. Valadon John Storm
10. Paul Klee (1899-1940) G. Dison Lazzaro
11. The World of
Maurice Utrillo (1883-1955) Peter de Polnay
12. De Staël
13. Picasso (1881 – ) Andre Leclerc
14. Cezanne Meyer Shapiro
15. Utrillo Alfred Werner
Quotations
In Greek art (and other good modern art) the complex whole is evoked by means of a few perfectly chosen details.
—-
Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment… (Since it consists not in the pleasure of making love, as is generally supposed, but in that suffering from love…)
So — it’s not too short…
—-
The spirit knows that its growth is the real aim of existence.
—-
Who makes stupid jokes? I am serious. I am really happy? Are you?
—-
There is always a way.
—-
Those who can – do.
Those who can’t – teach.
—-
[Add for good books]: …The greatness of a man is measured by the amount of power he has been able to acquire and use in his life time – and the consequences of his exercise of that power…” Yes. Power and power... [still forever, but used in some hellish way.]
—-
Happiness is the state of mind, not
State of your life real conditions.
—-
But an affair only in thought, still is a great thing.
—-
The force, that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age…
—-
The life, the existence. The hardships, the beauty, the eternal, the heavy, beautiful rule and desire – to live.
—-
(a woman):
You would trade your gray days
for the dark night of the soul,
but a child has drawn your golden face
Inside the centre of a daffodil.
————-
The Great Books Club books for 1982 [83?]:
The River – O’Connor
Stress Without Distress – Selye
Letters From The Earth – M. Twain
Love in the Ruins – Percy
Jean Anouilh
Dieu ne donne pas la passion à tout le monde.
Willem de Kooning
(Interview):
Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny — very tiny, content.
Andre Maurois
“The act of writing” (about Turgenev):
Poetry is the art of remaking, of recreating the world for man, of imposing upon it a form, and above all — a rhythm.
To reconstruct this mysterious unity, to establish a relationship between nature and human emotions, to set the individual within the vast, rhythmic movement of clouds and sunlight, spring and winter, youth and age, that is what being a poet (at the same time a novelist) means.
Strindberg 1888:
You are right to require a conscious attitude from the artist toward his work, but you mix up two ideas: the solution of the problem and the correct presentation of the problem. Only the latter is obligatory for the artist.
Denise Levertova
(A poem from Galway Kinnell):
I know, there is so much of me wasted
so much we could have been or done
that we held ourselves back from
out of fear,
or out of the dream we had one thing to be or to do,
or out of the faith a life is richer lived among the paths not taken.
—-
Yet now it seems nothing
nothing, that once touched the web of possible
could keep itself
right down to the last, beyond knowing.
And how clear the air becomes, before dark.
—-
So? What? How?
Dag Hammerskjold:
The light died in the low clouds. Falling snow drank in the dusk. Shrouded in silence, the branches wrapped in their peace. When the boundaries were erased, once again the wonder: that I exist.
Where is the fire that has burned out,
Where goes the wind that has died?
We carry the miracles within us that we seek outside ourselves.
Without being aware of it, our fingers are so guided, that a pattern is created when the thread gets caught in the web.
—-
The road, Vagen,
you shall follow it. du skall folja den.
The funa [fun?], Luckan,
you shall forget it. du skall glomma den.
The cup, Kalken,
you shall empty it. du skall tomma den.
The pain, Smartan,
You shall conceal it. du skall dolja den.
The truth, Svaret,
you shall be told it. du skall lara det.
The end, Slutet,
you shall endure it. du skall vara det.
Catullus‘ translation of Sapho — (which is said to be “the best clinical description of love in European medicine’):
When I see you
Sound fails, my tongue falters,
Thin fire steals through my limbs,
An inner roar and darkness
Shrouds my ears and eyes.
John Berger
The Ways of Seeing:
When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match; a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate.
Do not waste your life in fear.
—-
What makes a work (like this) almost pornographic is its destruction of all intimacy and its lack of all passion. (Suzanna and the Elders, in which the Elders are all fashion magazine photographers and Suzanna knows it only too well).
Success and Failure of Picasso:
Success is simultaneously desired and feared. On one hand it promises the means to survive, and go on working, on the other it threatens corruption.
Tacher (painters): [?]
A Tacher painting looks like one square centimetre of an Impressionist painting blown up to fill twelve square feet.
What makes a work like this almost pornographic is: its destruction of all intimacy and its lack of all passion.
Not Susanna and the Elders, but Susanna and the fashion magazine photographers.
Dylan Thomas:
Oh, as I was young and easy
in the mercy of His means
time held me green and dying
though I sang in my chains
like the sea.
—-
Do not go gentle in that dark night…
—-
about Wilfred Owen (war poet):
…he would always be experimenting technically, deeper and deeper driving towards the final intensity of language: the words behind the words.
—-
All I can say that might be interpreted as even remotely constructive is that you must endeavour to feel and weight the shape, sound, content of each word in relation to the shape, sound, content etc. of the words surrounding it.
It isn’t only the meaning of the words that must develop harmonically, each syllable adding to the single existence of the next, but it is that, which also informs the words with their own particular life: the noise, that is, that they make in the air and the ear, the contours in which they lie on the page and the mind, their colours and density!
—-
I can never make anything much of a phrase as – the measureless depth of fears – (!!)
I like in poems to be told why or how this ‘depth’ is full of fears, and even exactly what the ‘depth’ is?
Such a line as ‘the untellable deep squid-crowded sea’ would, in spite of its impromptu silliness, mean more to me.”
It is, of course, far easier to point out, what one disagrees with, than it is to comment sensibly upon what one finds good. (about criticism)
—-
…the words to be exact, to be just.
…the juxtaposition of a vague word and a particular word is, to me nearly always satisfactory.
—-
(But pieces VI + VII) because the words are objects, make an immediate impact, ‘yes’ one says ‘this is what it is about; he is looking through windows at the rooms, I can understand I think his grief’ etc.
And I think the rhythms of all the pieces could be tautened; but that tautening will emerge itself as each word is valued according to its individual life.
—-
The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem, so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.
—-
The joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man which is also the celebration of God.
—-
Its generally accepted that language not only expresses thought but also affects it!
Example the Welsh did not, in large measure, still do not think exactly like the English.
—-
Dylan Thomas in a letter to Charles Fry:
I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway development or the modern Turkish essay; and gradually I began to feel nervous about the job in front of me, the job of writing, making things in words, by myself again.
The more I used words, the more frightened I became using them in my own work once more.
Endless booming of poems didn’t sour or stale words for me, but made me more conscious of my obsessive interest in them, and my horror that I would never again be innocent enough to touch and use them.
—-
…A live body is a building around the soul, and the dead body is without it. Without the soul a body breaks, but broken pieces are beautiful and meaningful because the soul has made them so and has left its marks. … just as, on looking on an empty house, we should say, there stands strength, strength (or anything else) for it housed strength, strength being beautiful…
…Art is praise and it is sane to praise, for praising, we praise the godliness that gives us sanity…
—-
D.S. Savage, The Poetry of Dylan Thomas:
What Thomas, – what any poet – says is precisely what is contained in the exact number and
arrangement of words by which he says it.
A clear understanding of this obvious truth will prevent a lot of idle talk about ‘obscurity’.
—-
A fine clear definition what must be set before the ‘idiots’…
—-
Brinnin’s report of a discussion with Thomas on the subject of composition (of poetry):
We began to speak of working methods. I noticed that on many of his manuscripts Dylan would add a single word or a phrase, or a new punctuation, then recopy the whole poem in longhand. When another addition or revision was made, no matter how minor or major, he would then copy the whole poem again. When I asked him, about this laborious repetition, he showed me his drafts of “Fern Hill.” There were more than two hundred separate and distinct versions of the poem. It was, he explained, his way of “keeping the poem together,” so that its process of growth was like an organism. He began almost every poem merely with some phrase he had carried about in his head. If this phrase was right, which is to say, if it were resonant or pregnant, it would suggest another phrase. In this way a poem would “accumulate.”
Once given a word (sometimes the prime movers of poems, were the words of an other poem or mere words of the dictionary that called out to be “set”) or a phrase or a line (or whatever it is that is “given”, when there is yet a poem to “prove”) he could often envision or “locate” it within a pattern of other words or phrases or lines, that not given, were yet to be discovered; so that sometimes it would be possible to surmise accurately that the “given” unit would occur near the end of the poem, or near the beginning or near the middle or somewhere in between.
M. Proust:
One of the tasks of the talented is to restore the tints of life and of nature to those sentiments that literature has surrounded with conventional splendors !–
—-
Nothing is more different from love than the idea we have of it.
(Me: Still, the development and continuity of that Idea, depends on the person with which we are supposed to be in love, and on ourselves.)
Margaret Atwood:
For the members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their “here”, is not a luxury but a necessity.
Without that knowledge (they) we will not survive.
—-
A person who is “here” but would rather be somewhere else, is an exile or a prisoner.
A person who is “here” but THINKS he is somewhere else is insane.
—-
In societies where everyone and everything has its place a person may have to struggle to separate himself from his social background, in order to keep from being just a function of the structure.
Camus
La Shute:
Des lors, puisque nous sommes tous juges, nous sommes coupables les uns devant les autres, tous Christs à notre vilaine manière, un à un crucifiés, et toujours sans savoir.
—-
…Mais j’ai bu l’eau (d’un camarade agonisant), cela est sûr, en me persuadant que les autres avaient besoin de moi, plus que celui qui allait mourir de toutes façons, et je devais me conserver à ceux.
C’est ainsi, cher, que naissent les empires et les églises, sous le soleil de la mort.
—-
Tous le fleurs resteront…
William Faulkner:
If he is a first-rate poet, he tries to do it in a quatrain.
If he is not first-rate poet, then he tries to do it in few pages — he is a short-story writer.
If he can’t be a short-story writer, then he resorts to eighty thousand words and becomes a third-stage novelist.
If a spirit of nationalism gets into literature, it stops being literature.
—-
Sex to an Italian is something like a firecracker in a children’s party, to a Frenchman – a business the relaxation from which is making money, to an Englishman it is a nuisance, to an American a horse race.
—-
Silence is good for the wise and even better for the stupid.
Flannery O’Connor:
Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology and of course and particularly drawing.
John Hersey:
And so we come to the crux of the craft: What is it that gives some writings their power? I have hypothesized that this power where it shows itself is the product of a certain unique combination of temperament and intellect.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
But will we comprehend all that light?
Who will dare say that he has defined art?
That he has tabulated all its facets?
Paul Verlaine: [Erna’s emphases]
ART POÉTIQUE
De la musique avant toute chose,
Et pour cela préfère l’Impair
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air,
Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.
Il faut aussi que tu n’ailles point
Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise :
Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise
Où l’Indécis au Précis se joint.
C’est des beaux yeux derrière des voiles,
C’est le grand jour tremblant de midi,
C’est, par un ciel d’automne attiédi,
Le bleu fouillis des claires étoiles !
Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,
Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance !
Oh ! la nuance seule fiance
Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor !
Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine,
L’Esprit cruel et le Rire impur,
Qui font pleurer les yeux de l’Azur,
Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine !
Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui son cou !
Tu feras bien, en train d’énergie,
De rendre un peu la Rime assagie.
Si l’on n’y veille, elle ira jusqu’où ?
Ô qui dira les torts de la Rime ?
Quel enfant sourd ou quel nègre fou
Nous a forgé ce bijou d’un sou
Qui sonne creux et faux sous la lime ?
De la musique encore et toujours !
Que ton vers soit la chose envolée
Qu’on sent qui fuit d’une âme en allée
Vers d’autres cieux à d’autres amours.
Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure
Éparse au vent crispé du matin
Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym…
Et tout le reste est littérature.
Clive James:
As I see you
crystals grow
leaves chime
roses flow.
As I touch you
tables turn
towers lean
witches burn.
As I leave you
lenses shiver
flags fall
show’s over.
Apollinaire:
Rencotre
Passante mêle à ta vie l’orgueil et la bonté
Surmonte l’ennemi et boit à sa santé
Honore ton outil sans le laisser inerte
Brise-le par amour au moment de la perte
Et méprise ceci juoir sans en pleurer
La vigne sans ivresse et le champ sans ivrer.
Hector Bianciotti:
Car le jardin est l’une des formes du rêve — comme la musique, l’algèbre, le poème.
Saul Bellow
From Humboldt’s Gift:
… In the Twenties kids in Chicago hunted for treasure in the March thaw. Dirty snow hillocks formed along the curbs and when they melted, water ran braided and brilliant in the gutters and you could find marvellous loot — bottle tops, machine gears, Indian-head pennies. And last spring, almost an elderly fellow now, I found that I had left the sidewalk and that I was following the curb and looking for what? What was I doing? Suppose I found a dime? Suppose I found a fifty-cent piece? What then? I don’t know how the child’s soul had gotten back, but it was back. Everything was melting. Ice, discretion, maturity. (What would Humboldt have said to this?)…
— It is the most excellent page I have read in a long time… I almost hate Saul Bellow’s work — “The Adventures of Augie March”. I said — what the hell I have to read so much pages for that watery stuff? — Did not found a single paragraph like this. Or — didn’t see?
—-
Characteristics of this time observed by Saul Bellow:
Pride
Anger
Excessive rationality
Homosexual inclinations
Inability to bear criticism
Hostile projections
Competitiveness
Mistrust of emotions
Delusion etc.
Sam. Johnson:
Keep your friendship in constant repair.
(Like Sydney Harbour bridge…)
Herman:
Dignity is to resist all the bad habits, desires, etc.
Dumas (from notes, an inscription in a monk’s cell in Chartreuse):
Un heure sonne; elle est déjà passée.
Antoine François Prévost:
Love, love! Will you and wisdom never be reconciled?
—-
Songs, that are for the most part local and private, are capable of losing almost all their substance in translation.
And again:
The private experience, if articulated with skill, may communicate an appeal that is universal beyond the limitations of time and landscape.
G. Garcia Marquez
The General in his labyrinth:
There is no greater victory than being alive.
Bertrand Russell:
After all, people can tell (one) nothing more interesting than their own feeling towards life.
—–
(After the war)…when we shall get back to poetry and summer woods!
—-
About atomic war:
There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal as a human being to human beings: Remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do that, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, nothing lies before you but universal death.
Carlos Castaneda
the words of don Juan, in A Yaqui Way of Knowledge:
A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war wide awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge, or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it, will live to regret his steps.
Gerard Manley Hopkins:
Thoughts about poetry.
Expressed in a letter.
… the language of verse may be divided into three kinds.
1. The first and highest is poetry proper, the language of inspiration.
The word inspiration need cause no difficulty. I mean by it a mood of great, abnormal in fact, mental acuteness, either energetic or receptive according as the thoughts which arise in it seem generated by stress and action in the brain, or to strike into it unasked
The mood arises from various causes, physical generally (??? is) as good health or state of air or, prosaic as it is, length of time after meal. (By me it’s almost only by state of mind — as hopes, love, joy, grief, etc.) But I need not go into this; all that is needful to mark is, that poetry of inspiration can only be written in this mood of mind even if it last only a minute, by poets themselves. Everybody of course has like moods, but not being poets what they then produce is not poetry.
The second kind (of language) I call
2. Parnassian. It can only be spoken by poets, but is not in the highest sense poetry.
It does not require the mood of mind in which the poetry of inspiration is written. It is spoken on and from the level of a poet’s mind, not as in the other case, when the inspiration, which is the gift of genius, raises him above himself. For I think it is the case with genius that it is not when the quiescent so very much above mediocrity as difference between the two might lead us to think, but that it has the power and privilege of rising from that level to a height utterly far from mediocrity in other words that its greatness is — that it can be so great.
Parnassian then is that language which genius speaks as fitted to its exaltation, and slave (?) among other genius, but does not sing in its flights.
Great men, poets I mean, have each their own their own dialect as it were of Parnassian, formed generally as they go on writing, and at last — that is the point to be marked, — they can see things in this Parnassian way and describe them in this Parnassian tongue, without further effort of inspiration. In a poet’s particular kind of Parnassian lies most of his style, of his manner, of his mannerism if you like… I believe that when a poet palls on us it is because of his Parnassian. We seem to have found out his secret. Now in fact we have found out not more than this, that when he is not inspired and in his flights, is poetry does run in an intelligibly laid down path… Shakespeare does not pall, because he uses so little Parnassian.
2a. There is a higher sort of Parnassian which I call Castalian, or it may be thought the lowest kind of inspiration,
Beautiful poems may be written wholly in it.
3. The third kind is merely the language of verse as distinct from that of prose, DELPHIC, the tongue of the Sacred Plain I may call it, used in common by poet and poetaster. Poetry when spoken is spoken in it but to speak it is not necessarily to speak poetry.
I may add — there is also Olympian. This is the language of strange masculine genius which suddenly forces its way into the domain of poetry, without naturally having a right there.
Spender:
Yet those we lose, we learn
With singleness to love;
Regret stronger than passion holds
Her the times remove:
All those past doubts of life, her death
One happiness does prove
Better in death to know
The happiness we lose
Than die in life in meaningless
Misery of those
Who lie beside chosen
Companions they never chose.
Tennyson:
Break, break, break
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
—-
The tender grace of a day…
But the tender grace of the day is dead. Will never come back to us, to me…
De Caussade:
God instructs the heart not by ideas but by pains and contradictions!
Exupery:
A bitch in the heat is nothing.
18-19th c. Voltaire, Rousseau, Vigny, Victor Hugo, Anatole France:
French artists always – great thinkers.
Analytical, critical mind – French spirit at its best.
Francois Villon
Ballad of Ladies of the Past:
Nay, never ask this week, fair lord,
Where they are gone, nor yet this year,
Save with thus much for an overword
But where are the snows of yester-year?
Balzac:
Madame de Berny: „…it follows that we die entirely, that there is neither vice nor virtue, nor Hell, nor Paradise, and that our lives should be guided solely by this axiom ‘Take all the pleasure you can’…”
Goethe:
Last and highest effect of art is charm
No scowling sublimity – even in its best, and most brilliant.
Leonard Cohen:
As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill
So my body leaves no scar
On you, nor ever will.
When wind and hawk encounter
What remains to keep?
So you and I encounter
Then turn, then fall to sleep.
As many nights endure
Without a moon or star,
So will we endure
When one is gone far. .
(Also other verse is very lyrical):
Oh, green hills,
Dark, green hills…
Gunter Grass:
(as a joke) People don’t want to be made to think. They want to be accurately informed.
Carol Oates:
The Hungry Ghosts
Good information about ‘unhumanity’ of ‘high standard’ humans.
Bashevis Singer:
Shadow of a Crib
Heaven and Earth conspire that everything which has been, be rooted out and reduced to dust.
Only the dreamers who dream while awake, call back the shadows of the past and braid from unspun threads – un woven nets.
James Joyce:
When you wet the bed
First it is warm
Then it gets cold.
About the blackbirds whistle: “…Or maybe no one can understand anyone: each blackbird believes that he has put into his whistle a meaning fundamental for him, but only he understands it; the other gives him a reply that has no connection with what he said; It is a dialogue between the deaf, a conversation without head or tail.
Chingiz Aitmatov:
The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years.
Everyone has his own understanding about things, and this understanding dies with him.
John di Stefano:
The history of a man is his solitude. ( in last ‘Parachute’)
—————————————–
Cupboards
Milosz:
“amoureuse ini[t]iation”
“L’armoir, tante pleine du tumulte muet des souvenirs.”
André Breton:
“L’armoir a pleine de ligne,
Il y a même des rayons de lune que
je peux déplier.”
“Le reflet de l’armoire ancien sous la braise du crépuscule d’octobre.”
“Disonance, harmonie
piles de draps de l’armoire
lavande dans le linge.”
—————————————
Rod Steiger:
Don’t dig me with your
downbeat conversations.
Don’t dig me –
Ding –
Dong –
––––
And gong –
––––
Don’t dig me with
your downbeat
conversations.
About technique: “I worked hard, if you are as industrious as I was, you will be no less successful!”
Antoine Francois Prevost (abbé Prevost):
Manon Lescaut:
Love, love! Will you and wisdom never be reconciled?
My Secret Diary:
You must separate yourself from masses.
If You Meet the Buddha… Kill Him.
Milan Kundera
Farewell Party:
Life is to be accepted totally and completely. (to the dregs…)
(A female author):
Distance is the soul of beauty.
On a horse
there is rhythm.
Everything we say
is careless wind.
*
Canada Jay
grey bird
for tallow
for grain.
Winter hot inside your breast.
*
Chinook
in waves
down the mountains
to lift the white skirts
of old mother prairie.
Brings visions of summer
on the wind
My old cat is dead
Who would butt me with his head.
He had the sleekest fur,
He had the blackest purr.
Always gentle with us
Was this black puss,
But when I found him today
Stiff and cold where he lay,
His look was a lion’s
Full of rage, defiance:
O! He would not pretend
That what came was a friend
But met it in pure hate.
Well died, my old cat!