truth of reality

THE TELLING OF STORIES CREATES THE REAL WORLD.

-Alberto Manguel

one bright golden wing

 

"To Walden the saxophone was, at once, his key to the world in which he found himself, and the way by which that world was rendered impotent to brand him either failure or madman or Negro or saint. But then sometimes on the smoky stand, between solos, he hung it from his swinging shoulder like one bright, golden wing, and waited for his time."

-The Horn, by John Clellon Holmes

9/21: happy birthday, bill murray.

today is the first day of fall and the birthday of bill. i love you, bill. thank you for everything.

the good fight

"It's terrible sometimes, inside," he said, "that's what's the trouble. You walk these streets, black and funky and cold, and there's not really a living ass to talk to, and there's nothing shaking, and there's no way of getting it out- that storm inside. You can't talk it and you can't make love with it, and when you finally try to get with it and play it, you realize nobody's listening. So you've got to listen. You got to find a way to listen."

 

-from "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin

we move among meanings

"In Ballymenone, at home, in place, they move among meanings, using details of the landscape to locate themselves in time. That grassy bump, the site of a kiln, rouses memories of wet clay slapped into a wooden mold, of the sound of a fiddle on the night air. Then past and present lock into contrastive relation- today there is no work so festive, no labor so cruel- and memories become general, cultural, when they register in an account that balances loss against gain. Deftly meshing knowledge of the place where they live with knowledge of the work they must do, people come to understanding. They understand the drift of history, the surge and seethe of time- the ebb of sociability and the flow of ease- and aware of their course, protected from the delusions of nostalgia or progress, they are thrust into life, knowing, as Hugh Nolan put it, that the two things happen at the one time:

"Things get better.

"and they get worse.""

-from The Stars of Ballymenone by Henry Glassie

library life

The Librarian by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1566

"Ranganathan expected librarians to have a spiritual bent, using their intuition to categorize books. With intuition, he wrote, a person 'sees beyond the phenomenal occurrences. He transcends space and time. He sees from the seminal level, the perfect harmony of everything."


"In the third order of order, knowledge doesn't have a shape. There are just too many useful, powerful, and beautiful ways to make sense of the world."

-from Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, David Weinberger 

dearly departed

payin' respects to the second of july as it's the date of death for two seriously great souls.

"The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is."

   -nabokov

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

- ernest

he must know something, but he don't say nothing.

southern gothic

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

- William Faulkner

waking up and the thaw

the seasons are mixing and moving, but it's mostly spring now. we went to the woods last weekend for the vernal equinox and it was beautiful to sleep in a circle on the ground with lights in the trees and pancakes and tea over the fire and the voices of my friends all around me. i am awake after months of hibernation and it's startling and good.

but every night my dreams pull me around and i wake up exhausted. last night i dreamt about a camping trip in the woods with long lost st. christine's classmates and their babies and husbands and mini vans. but first ferdinand and tony and i took a strange detour to a sleazy kentucky motel where the staff and customers were all slimy KKK members who were there for sex and gambling. we holed up in a musty dark room where i watched the lobby warily from the window while ferdinand took photos. then suddenly i fell to the ground and reality split into layers and layers parallel to the sleazy motel, and in one of them i was working for tony soprano and there were motorcycles and hit men and ominous plans. we drove into the woods and found an elaborate system of tunnels and domiciles made from sticks and stones scattered with relics from some long-gone residents. there was some feeling of doom or dread hanging over every adventure as reality continued to couple and split. i flickered in and out of someone else's large family gathering with plates and plates of delicious food. my father was there and we feasted on pasta and salad and fried chicken and took naps on the couches. then everything was reduced to virtual reality again and i watched it on the windshield screen of a motorcycle parked in the motel's lot. i drove it down the block and found tony soprano installing a taco truck in another empty lot, so i advised him in its placement. then i woke up, in real life this time, and there was snow on the ground.


time is flying by and life is a countdown again.