The light from outside
The kaleidoscopic light promises us things, that we will be better engaged at some point. Our time is oft useless, but inside the shimmering fragments we find hospice and tentative repose. Yes, that was somewhat manipulative; I was obviously trying to tie biblical stained glass and iPhone apps together, their rows of minutiae narratives. Ever walk into a dark bar and see someone looking down at their dumbphone with a halo of light on their face? The text that never comes is not a writer’s plight, but we who wait at bars. “Be there in 5,” they all say. To the rows of people in cathedrals, praying, praying — they have their share of waiting too. I say no to these broken rainbows, no to these cruel seductive colors. A fly can only see a million shards of the same scene; its world is broken and short lived. I want to have a heart whole enough to stare at a wall for hours, on which a fly rests as some annoying period for a never written sentence.
Second Sex and Death
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Magnum Photos
Simone de Beauvoir, Paris, 1945
A good article titled “The Second ‘Second Sex'” about translation, specifically of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, in The Chronicle of Higher Ed. Have you translated? What are your problems/concerns with translating?
Another interesting one in The Chronicle about vampires and dead people in general: “All the Dead Are Vampires.”
A + B = C. de Beauvoir plus dead people = A Very Easy Death. I haven’t read this memoir of de Beauvoir’s mother’s death in a long time, but I remember it being a powerful meditation on death. Describing her mother’s fears after a fall in the bathroom that breaks her femur, de Beauvoir writes, READ MORE >
The rise of pants
Circa 1800 Goya painted “La Maja Desnuda”; three years later, in 1803, perhaps feeling a little guilty, he does another, this time with clothes on her. This was before feminism, so let’s just say ol’ Goya was a little pensive about the Inquisition. (The paintings were owned by Spanish prime minister Manuel de Godoy, who preferred to go by “Manual” while gazing at the former painting.) Maja’s fate is ours as well — to start off naked, then end up clothed as some apology. Don’t blame eve, but Ross dress for less.
Tomorrow you’re homeless, tonight it’s a blast.
Someone should write a cultural history of the celebratory sports riot.
Scratch that. Someone should give me a large enough grant or advance so I can quit my job and spend the next year or so researching and writing a cultural history of the celebratory sports riot.
(File this under a brand new category of HTML Giant post: Pitchin’ Shit to the Aether.)
Drunk On That Vintage Kick
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCKtEvjoGOs
Some things are inept in their own time. And like a fine wine, they have to age.
God damn it
Hindu god Vishnu got eight limbs, and so does this toddler who they say is a reincarnated god, though science will tell you the extra four limbs are from a ‘parasitic twin’ (sounds like a relationship). Hindus don’t eat cow cos cows are holy, which is where “holy cow” comes from — Protestants wanting to curse, but not at their own god. Hindus won’t eat beef, Jews won’t eat pork, and I won’t eat pussy; yes, we are all self-absorbed. Christians see Jesus everywhere, mostly on toast. Toast is an example of its verb manifesting its noun. Let me help: bread → toaster → toast. The other kind of toast involves champagne and having to lie about liking someone.
Reading Notes
1. In grad school I took a wonderful course on the poetry (and lives) of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell taught by the poet Gail Mazur. I was fascinated, in particular, with Robert Lowell’s mental illness and how it affected his artistic life. Lowell’s poem “Eye and Tooth” is ostensibly about a cut cornea (“My whole eye was sunset red,” it begins), but in the end it’s about manic depression and how, duh, it tinges the way he sees the world:
Donora Hillard’s Theology of the Body
From its first page, Donora Hillard’s Theology of the Body presents itself a mesmerizing object of equal command and restraint. It defines, in the remove-voice of not a narrator, not a guide, but some black sound, the birthplace of the title, via 3 thin lines which crown a long white blank: “Theology of the Body is defined as the study of how God is revealed through the human body; this is also part of Pope John Paul II’s title for his collected lectures on the subject. It is being promoted throughout Catholic institutions as a sexual counter-revolution.” The remaining white that fills the page floods on, as does, often, the battered brain of the encroached.
Most of the body of the book itself continues on in this thick statement/relief shriek arrangement: as if someone has eaten through the mantle of the paper, leaving selected words and languages as would the aggressor leave the remains. Hillard does not require a lot of language to implant the tone of stroke. Many poems are a few calmly stated lines.
Winter, Michigan
you pinned me up against an oak in a park near where you were young and your hand
sang inside and you were the resurrection you were violent light behind the mountain
Go Right Ahead: It is Friday
A mind too active is no mind at all.
Drink at any dance.
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
A glass of beer first thing in the morning.
Grew wild, broke furniture, beat out windows.
His favorite bar: The Corner Unusual.
I may look like a beer salesman but I am a poet.
The garden is a river flowing south.
Racing the devil for Rainbow, a beer joint.
You smell like television.