ulysses

Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

— James Joyce, Ulysses

narrative is radical

Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon’s hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly—once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. … Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names.

— Toni Morrison, from the 1993 Nobel Prize lecture

 

Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.     -dfw

"there is no other life but this"

  

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

-HENRY DAVID THOREAU

library love

"So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."

-kurt vonnegut

the novel as commodity

A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin. They even need to buy a pinch of intellectual catnip now and then to liven up their thoughts. 

— John Dos Passos

for virginia.

"She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on... far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day."

 -from the great Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf- who walked into the River Ouse seventy years ago today.

this is what you shall do

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” 
-WALT WHITMAN

advice

Be happy. It's one way of being wise. 

-Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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.

cast your gaze into the moonlit clearly

 it is a beautiful, hazy & prophetic friday night in september.

and this is one of my favorite songs ever.



happy weekend.