Kyle Minor is the author of In the Devil's Territory, a collection of short fiction. Recent stories and essays were published in The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Arts & Letters, Surreal South, Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers, and Best American Mystery Stories 2008.
A letter from H.D. Thoreau to Unitarian minister H.G.O. Blake, mostly about the subject of Walt Whitman:
Dec. 7, 1856
That Walt Whitman, of whom I wrote to you, is the most interesting fact to me at the present. I have just read his 2nd edition (which he gave me) and it has done me more good than any reading for a long time. Perhaps I remember best the poem of Walt Whitman an American & the Sun Down Poem. There are 2 or 3 pieces in the book which are disagreeable to say the least, simply sensual. He does not celebrate love at all. It is as if the beasts spoke. I think that men have not been ashamed of themselves without reason. No doubt, there have always been dens where such deeds were unblushingly recited, and it is no merit to compete with their inhabitants. READ MORE >
David Bazan’s approach to lyric writing is often to appropriate attitudes, functional approaches to life, or social or interpersonal behaviors which are almost always unarticulated, unacknowledged, or in many cases wholly or partially unknown to the person in whose consciousness they take up residence, and to literalize them into a first-person dramatic monologue of counterculturally brutal honesty. Here is one example, in which a husband (or possibly a wife) admits to his or her spouse that “I never wanted you /I never wanted to / Although I told you I did / In front of witnesses,” and concludes: “I know you never suspected / Because I never said / Baby, I was faking the whole time.”
“Deleuze devoured Being and Nothingness over the course of the week, and on Sunday, he and Michel Tournier went to the Sarah Bernhardt Theater to see a production of Sartre’s The Flies. They were forced to leave the theater when a bomb alert sounded, but while the crowd rushed to the underground bomb shelter, the two friends decided to ignore the warning and enjoy the lovely sunny afternoon.
‘We strolled along the quays in a totally deserted Paris. The city was completely empty. Night in mid-day. Then the bombs began raining down. The RAF was targeting the Renault factories in Billancourt. . . . We have nothing to say about this mediocre event. We were only concerned with Orestes and Jupiter struggling with the “flies.” The sirens sounded, the bomb alert was over a half hour later, and we returned to the theater. The curtain rose. Jupiter-Dullin was there, shouting for a second time, “Young man, do not blame the gods.”‘”
– Francois Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, pp. 93-94 (Columbia U. Press, 2010)
The Rotonda West neighborhood, originally developed in the 1960s, never quite fully completed, located in Charlotte County, Florida. Map, Street View. (© Google/Data SIO, NOAA, U.S. Navy, NGA, GEBCO) c/o Boston.com
The online portion of the New York Public Library’s Three Faiths exhibition includes images of the Harkness Gospels of Landevennec, Brittany, in Latin; the Xanten Tanakh of the Lower Rhineland, scribed by Joseph ben Kalonymus; and a fourteenth century Turkish Qur’an signed by Husam al-Faqir al-Mawlavi, disciple of Jalal al-Din Rumi. (Did I mention they’re all beautiful in a way books aren’t anymore?) Check out the photographic reproductions here.
Alberto Manguel, badass
Read Alberto Manguel’s killer essay “The Muse of Impossibility” at Threepenny Review. An excerpt:
One day in December 1919, the twenty-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, during a short stay in Seville, wrote a letter, in French, to his friend Maurice Abramowicz in Geneva, in which, almost in passing, he confessed to Abramowicz contradictory feelings about his literary vocation: “Sometimes I think that it’s idiotic to have the ambition of being a more or less mediocre maker of phrases. But that is my destiny.”
As Borges was well aware even then, the history of literature is the history of this paradox. On the one hand, the deeply rooted intuition writers have that the world exists, in Mallarmé’s much-abused phrase, to result in a beautiful book (or, as Borges would have it, even a mediocre book), and, on the other hand, to know that the muse governing the enterprise is, as Mallarmé called her, the Muse of Impotence (or, to use a freer translation, the Muse of Impossibility). Mallarmé added later that all who have ever written anything, even those we call geniuses, have attempted this ultimate Book, the Book with a capital B. And all have failed. (Read more)
“What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.” – John Berger
Dislocation, Timothy Buwalda