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 >
Libraries are churches, style is content, ideas are around.
People say mathematicians have wild dreams.
What I want to know is do they have better sex.
Einstein on the beach. With a lady.
Buckminster Fuller pointed at this idea:
We might be beamed ideas from outer space.
And that this is where we get what we call intuition.
The other day I saw a high speed chase, in progress
loudly near a lauded liberal arts college, for women.
Ryan Call—
Umpire Jim Joyce vs. Novelist James Joyce over at Adam Peterson’s Stock Photography Museum.
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Examples which might explain James Joyce’s love-hate relationship with Dublin
Finnegans Wake is super tiring, and for some, so is James Joyce. But come on people, North Earl Street doesn’t look so bad. History is made to be forgotten, and for folks to sit on. For birds, to shit on. Short of a rhyme for immortal rigamortis, just give us reason.
Third Mess Section
1. Artists of genius, such as Goya, or those of merely remarkable talent, do their best work outside the bounds of capital, patronage, and today’s Great Strip Bar of Artistic Veneration that is New York City, and to a lesser and lesser degree, Paris. Autonomy of creation relies on autonomy of thought and production. –John Sevigny on Francisco Goya, at Guernica
2. “Wasn’t there a sentence in there somewhere that we don’t have now,” Simon asked Mills outside, “where he says — and this is a terrible sentence, but — ‘I went over to the house, and I was hoping there would be a message there or something’? I feel there’s an emotional bump between him talking about his father, which is real substantive stuff, to a moment of what sounds like, by comparison, almost petty practicality about, What I’m going to do with Dad’s house? It goes from one to the other and there’s no…” –David Simon on the set of Treme, a NYT profile
3. Ji Lee on his Bubble Project, creativity & advertising.
4. The group sits back, perplexed that they together decided to take a trip which none of them wanted. They each would have preferred to sit comfortably, but did not admit to it when they still had time to enjoy the afternoon. –the Abilene Paradox
5. “They are all there, the great talkers,” he answered, “them and the things they forgot. In Ulysses I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man sees, thinks, and what seeing, thinking, saying does, to what Freudians call the subconcious,–but as far for psychoanalysis,” he broke off, “it’s neither more or less than blackmail.” –James Joyce, A Portrait of the Man Who Is, at Present, One of the More Signifigant Figures in Literature, from Vanity Fair (1922)
6. In a series of mock gunfights with colleagues Bohr always drew second and always won. –The gunfighter’s dilemma, or, Always draw second
7. Seizing the moment I told him that I had been hustling him and had deliberately lost the first four games. His response was that I was a patzer. All during the filming of 2001we played chess whenever I was in London and every fifth game I did something unusual. –Playing Chess With Kubrick
Power Quote Quartet
You know who wears sunglasses inside? Blind people and assholes. — Larry David
It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision. — Helen Keller
I’m into the girls fancying me and stuff, mad for it. — Liam Gallagher
A man’s errors are his portals of discovery. — James Joyce
Sean Lovelace—
Technically devastating (as in perfect), “The Dead” by James Joyce is the Greatest Holiday Text Of All Time. Your choice?
Critics on Criticism: William Carlos Williams
What follows are excerpts from a kind of (scathing) review of a (scathing) review. WCW’s essay, called “A Point for American Criticism,” is directed at Rebecca West, who had published some comments on Ulysses that WCW found wanting in every respect. Sometimes he says “they,” presumably meaning West and her critical cohort. So, from his red wheelbarrow full of glorious vitriol:
Forward is the new. It will not be blamed. It will not force itself into what amounts to paralyzing restrictions. It cannot be correct. It hasn’t time. ….
Comment if you like on Joyce’s narcissism but what in the world has it to do with him as a writer? Of course it has, as far as prestige is concerned, but not as to writing….But the expedient is convenient if we want to gain a spurious (psychologic, not literary) advantage for temporal purposes.
What Joyce is saying is a literary thing. It is a literary value he is forwarding. He is a writer. Will this never be understood? ….
The thing is, they want to stay safe, they do not want to give up something, so they enlist psychology to save them. But under it they miss the clear, actually the miraculous, benefits of literature itself. A silent flower opening out of the dung they dote on. They miss Joyce blossoming pure white above their heads. ….
She speaks of transcendental tosh, of Freud, of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, of anything that comes into her head, but she has not yet learned–though she professes to know the difference between art and life–the sentimental and nonsentimental–that writing is made of words. ….
Here Joyce has so far outstripped the criticism of Rebecca West that she seems a pervert.