“A Mercedes Benz is class because it represents money. However, chili dogs have absolutely no class but a great deal of style.” – David Lee Roth
from The Magnetic Fields (1920)
Philippe Soupault & Andre Breton
The corridors of the big hotels are empty and the cigar smoke is hiding. A man comes down the stairway and notices that it’s raining; the windows are white. We sense the presence of a dog lying near him. All possible obstacles are present. There is a pink cup; an order is given and without haste the servants respond. The great curtains of the sky draw open. A buzzing protests this hasty departure. Who can run so softly? The names lose their faces. The street becomes a deserted track.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLH2k_qlxE8
“Literature is language charged with meaning.”
From ABC of Reading
by Ezra Pound
Chapter Four
1
‘Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.’
Dichten = condensare.
I begin with poetry because it is the most concentrated form of verbal expression. Basil Bunting, fumbling about with a German-Italian dictionary, found that this idea of poetry as concentration is as old almost as the German language. ‘Dichten’ is the German verb corresponding to the noun ‘Dichtung’ meaning poetry, and the lexicographer has rendered it by the Italian verb meaning ‘to condense’. READ MORE >
Men’s Truation
From Thou Art That by Joseph Campbell:
Picture a little Bushman boy being nursed by his mother, weaned very late, a little boy already, but still nursing on his mother. That little boy, unlike the little girl, will never become the life-body himself. He must learn to relate to that. The woman need not learn to relate to the man because that is not the problem. The problem concerns how the man relates to the woman. She is Life. He is a way of relating to Life.
So what happens with the boy? Nothing ever happens. READ MORE >
15 random sentences from Raúl Zurita’s Song for his Disappeared Love
15. Now Zurita – he said – now that you got in here into our nightmares, through pure verse and guts: can you tell me where my son is?
14. It’s not tough not the solitude, nothing has happened and my sleep rises and falls as usual.
13. Now everyone is fallen except for us the fallen.
12. From there the wind blew across the inexistent pampas and as it settled the massacred faces became visible, Amen.
11. For his disappeared love he went form hole to hole, grave to grave, searching for the eyes that don’t find.
10. Everything dies sucking itself.
Speaking of Anne Carson,
which we were doing at some point in the last 10 or so posts, there’s a prose poem of hers from Plainwater that makes me want to die.
On Waterproofing
Franz Kafka was Jewish. He had a sister, Ottla, Jewish. Ottla married a jurist, Josef David, not Jewish. When the Nuremburg Laws were introduced to Bohemia-Moravia in 1942, quiet Ottla suggested to Josef David that they divorce. He at first refused. She spoke about sleep shapes and property and their two daughters and a rational approach. She did not mention, because she did not yet know the word, Auschwitz, where she would die in October 1943. After putting the apartment in order she packed a rucksack and was given a good shoeshine by Josef David. He applied a coat of grease. Now they are waterproof, he said.
Hill of Beans, Can of Words
These are some books I bought or otherwise acquired recently. A hill of words.
& that is a can of beans.
Ben Mirov
Ghost Machine
(not pictured)
Caketrain
Pittsburgh, PA — 2010
I read most of this book at the park that is in the book on a pretty much perfect day and it was a hell of a pairing I have to say. It has the kind of restraint my own work lacks a lot. Makes me jells but not bad way. Read the rest at my ex’s apartment who is no longer my ex while she made me dinner, which I could not believe was happening and yet there it was happening. I often felt breathless and thought maybe that’s not such a dumb name for a movie after all. READ MORE >
A.R. Ammons on Masculinity, Sex pt. 2
from Sphere: The Form of a Motion
5
this works in the bedrock, too, or undifferentiated gas:
one feels up the two legs of the possibility and, ever
tightening and steered, rises to the crux, to find
there the whole mystery, the lush squeeze, the centering
and prolongation: so much so that the final stone
never locks the peak but inlet: outlet opens unfolding
into nothingness’s complete possibility, the strangling
through into the darkness of futurity: it is hard at this
point to avoid some feeling, however abstract the circumstance:
if one can get far enough this way where imagination
and flesh strive together in shocking splendors, one can
forget that sensibility is sometimes dissociated and come:
…
A.R. Ammons on Masculinity, Sex
from Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974)
1
The sexual basis of all things rare is really apparent
and fools crop up where angels are mere disguises:
a penetrating eye (insight), a penetrating tongue (ah),
a penetrating penis and withal a penetrating mind,
integration’s consummation: a com- or intermingling of parts,
heterocosm joyous, opposite motions away and toward
along a common line, the in-depth knowledge (a dilly),
the concentration and projection (firmly energized) and
the ecstasy, the pay off, the play out, the expended
nexus nodding, the flurry, cell spray, finish, the
haploid hungering after the diploid condition: the reconciler
of opposites, commencement, proliferation, ontogeny:
…
“Nothing ever happens.”
This is the first installment of what I might call Litblogging Wis Frvr or something like that. Sort of an anthology-in-progress.
The Book: A Spiritual Instrument
by Stéphane Mallarmé
I am the author of a statement to which there have been varying reactions, including praise and blame, and which I shall make again in the present article. Briefly, it is this: all earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book. READ MORE >