A cold front moved in. A light rain fell. Then the sun came
back out, but it didn’t warm up. A coal train rumbled by – clickity
clack, clickity clack. My fingers are getting numb trying to write this down. Trail
Dog wants to sniff and re-scent Main Street. Yark yark. Ok boy, Ok, let me
finish what I’m doing. Ok, boy? Yark, yark.
The impression is
for the writer what experiment is to he scientist, with the difference that in
the scientist the work of the intelligence proceeds by experiment and in the
writer it comes after the impression – Marcel Proust –
Tine Regained p208
Then it began to rain
In earnest
with a
Blink blink
on
The red awning overhead
Windshield wipers swished
Vehicular lights reflected
Off of the
pavement
Big Al is careless about how
He parks
his pick-up truck.
He’s is anxious not to get
Wet
As he dashes in for
His morning
Coffee
His morning
Coffee
He [ Henry James]
is supposed to have said, at the moment of his death, “So here it is at last,
the distinguished thing.” What he actually said was, “So here at last, the
extinguishing thing.” People will embroider – William H
Gass – A Temple of Texts, 2006 p51
The economy is an open crowd. A business is a pack.
What is the use
of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is enable you to talk with
some plausibility about some obtuse questions of logic – LudwigWittgensetin
I called them ‘Skeeters’ because they scoot along the beach
on their two long legs following the surf out, stopping suddenly, dipping down,
and picking at a morsel. Their feet move
so fast that they are just a blur. Their bodies follow their legs, head long.
Their bodies are rigid except when they dip (I might also have labeled them 'dippers'), leaving a residue of crab shells behind
them. They have a proper name but I am not an ornithologist. The first surf is
cold, the second less so, and each succeeding less shocking. Soon it’s just
cool and refreshing. Where the surf hits the warm sand it forms a mist, enough
to obscure the sand dunes off in the distance from which I had walked here. The wet
sand is much more comfortable to walk on than concrete. There is the life in
the city behind these sand dunes but only the stoplights rising above the dunes is indicative of this. Watching the waves break over my feet and listening to the
surf break I'm a million miles away.
The
pathology leads to new paths and pathfinding. All the way down past the future.
The words go swimming past you as if they were blue fish – Jack Spicer – The Collected Books, 1996 p179
Clair is eating health food. I ask her, does that mean that
the more you eat of it the healthier you become? No, she replied.
You
will live longer and better by consuming deliciously chewy fats and reading Proust
than by treadmilling to a Walkman tune and claiming to be educated because you
peruse the “Wall Street Journal.” – William H Gass – A Temple of Texts, 2006 p7
Men can be such bastards with their displays testosterone
even if they don’t punch anyone out. On television, that's entertainment. There he sits his arm over the back of her
seat. She sits there and glares toward
me. Not at me. She doesn’t see me at all.
She is mad, passed off, angry, unyielding, and defiant. He with his sunglasses
raised up just enough to allow his beady eyes to burn holes in the side of her
head. If a video had been playing in there, he had a front row seat. Maybe the Rockettes were stepping. To turn
and stare back at him was to yield. This was what he wanted. The more she
resisted, looked away, the angrier he was getting. Someone would eventually
have to give in. Something would have to happen, but before it did the bus
reached its terminus. She had known that he wouldn’t dare get physical in
pubic, but now they were on foot and had disappeared around the corner. I
rounded the corner behind them. She was standing there silent and stony faced.
He was getting vocal. So long as a man can talk he won’t punch. “That’s the way
it will be,” he said and he repeated it again, “That’s the way it will be.
You’re my wife!” He calmed down as I passed them standing there. At the end
of the block I looked back over my shoulder. They were walking about six feet
apart. Silence had descended. Had she yielded? Would it continue once they got
home? I go into the Edinburgh Pub and have a Penny Black Porter. A group called
the Celtic String Band is playing.
President Kennedy
seems to stiffen / for a moment before he assumed his place in history. Eros /
Do that. // I gave you my imaginary hand and you gave me your imaginary / hand
and we walk together (in imagination) over the earthly / ground – Jack Spicer –
The Collected Books, 1996 p229
The enemies of the crowd dwell in buildings; it is the
breaching of the facades that is the true objective of a crowd. A crowd fears
being contained.
To the crowd in its nakedness everything seems a Bastille – Elias Canetti -
Crowds and Power, 1978 p20
The event itself is not the onset. The event is the
ritualistic celebration of what has already come to pass. The event is accomplishment of the fait
accompli
One
difference between history and imaginative literature… is that history neither
anticipates nor satisfies our curiosity, whereas literature does – Guy Davenport – The Hunter Graacchus, 1996 p130
It is history that provides the answers and not the answer
that drives the history. It is the problems, which drive the history; not the
history that determines the problems.
True paradises
are the paradises that we have lost – Marcel Proust –
Tine Regained p197
According to the “Global Citizens’ Report on the State of GMO” , genetically
engineering has failed to increase the yield of any food crop but has vastly
increased the usage of chemicals. The three largest GMO companies (Monsanto,
Dupont and Syngenta) now control 70% of global seed sales
We are healthily
aware that photographs lie, deceive, and misrepresent and yet we go right on
reading them as if they were expert witnesses – Guy Davenport – The Hunter
Graacchus, 1996 p44
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