February 2012
2 posts
“All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes, but they ‘know.’ They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish...
January 2012
11 posts
“Yes. A lot of poets don’t have any poems to write. After their first book, what are they going to do? They can’t keep saying their hearts are broken. They start to write poems about childhood. Then what do they do? Some of it is just academic poetry—they learn how to write the poem perfectly. But I don’t think anybody should be criticized because their taste is different from mine. Such...
“La muerte es una vida vivida. La vida es una muerte que viene.”
– Jorge Luis Borges
Watch“Mercurochrome” + “Maya Are People” (1951)
Watch“Bones” + “Duck and Cover” (1951)
December 2011
10 posts
“…We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to...”
– Geoffrey Hill, in conversation with Carl Phillips at The Paris Review
SISTER WINTER
Oh my friends I’ve
Begun to...
“Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their...”
– William James
“Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake —...”
– from How To Read a Book by Mortimer Adler
Enemies
for Ishion Hutchinson
The thing about entertaining them,
about keeping their company,
about fraternizing,
is you must remember
they are bloodless
and have many faces,
though it’s easy enough
to walk in sunlight,
where either you or they
become invisible,
never together seen;
easy to get in bed with them,
to bed them,
to be seduced by them—
listing in their own dominance....
November 2011
3 posts
“In a letter to a friend in 1937, Bulgakov wrote “Some well-wishers have...”
– from Mirra Ginsburg’s “Translator’s Introduction” to The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Conversation Among the Ruins
Through portico of my elegant house you stalk
With your wild furies, disturbing garlands of fruit
And the fabulous lutes and peacocks, rending the net
Of all decorum which holds the whirlwind back.
Now, rich order of walls is fallen; rooks croak
Above the appalling ruin; in bleak light
Of your stormy eye, magic takes flight
Like a daunted witch, quitting castle when real days break.
...
October 2011
6 posts
“Always a little more fun on the Devil’s side. I’ve been his...”
– “Advocacy,” from Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs by Stephen Dunn
“the children imitating the cormorants
are more wonderful
than the real...”
– Kobayashi Issa
“You adulterate the truth as you write. There isn’t any pretense that you...”
– W.G. Sebald, quoted in The Emergence of Memory, ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz
In 1830, Emerson was frustrated with sermons, with their “cold, mechanical preparations for a delivery most decorous—fine things, pretty things, wise things—but no arrows, no axes, no nectar, no growling.” He wanted to find what he called “a new literature.”
A German con artist, Johann Maelzel, visited America with a “panharmonicon,” an organ...
September 2011
8 posts
“Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of...”
– from “Good Readers And Good Writers” by Vladimir Nabokov
Watch“Two” > “Epilogue” by The Antlers, from La Blogotheque
“The paradox is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious, one...”
– from “A Talk to Teachers” by James Baldwin, originally published in The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963
“All of a sudden we see a dog, a cab, a house, for the first time….This is...”
– from Rappel à l’ordre by Jean Cocteau
Watch“No Church in the Wild” by Jay-Z and Kanye West, dir. High5Collective
“…As a consequence, interpretation is infinite. The attempt to look for a...”
– from Interpretation and Overinterpretation: World, History, Texts by Umberto Eco
“The colour of the object illuminated partakes of the colour of that which...”
– from The Note-books of Leonardo Da Vinci, transl. Edward McCurdy
August 2011
10 posts
“Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a...”
– from Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov
“Many young poets have come to me and asked, How am I gonna make it? They feel,...”
– from an interview with Philip Levine in The Paris Review, Summer 1998
“The world is not beautiful, therefore it is.”
– epigraph to Kino No Tabi by Keiichi Sigsawa
Watch“The Aokigahara Forest is the most popular site for suicides in Japan. After the novel Kuroi Jukai was published, in which a young lover commits suicide in the forest, people started taking their own lives there at a rate of 50 to 100 deaths a year. The site holds so many bodies that the Yakuza pays homeless people to sneak into the forest and rob the corpses. The authorities sweep for...
“…Also, something crumpled in me when I turned on the radio, and I heard...”
“On board the royal barges there are, or were until recently, bundles of...”
– from Siamese State Ceremonies by Quaritch Wales, quoted in Thailand’s Moment of Truth: A Secret History of 21st Century Siam by Andrew MacGregor Marshall