"without a word without a breath"

All

All the beautiful women in my life

were called Sadie or Sadist I forget

the color of that flower also its name

now that you ask

where I have been these past few months

between the solstice and the total eclipse

of all that we once had known

or thought mistakenly to know.

Perhaps the snow blinded us

or we gazed too long at the startled sun

forgetting our strict instructions

like so many others

who had assembled there for the event

that came and went

without a word without a breath

while the dancers so young filled the streets

and the fields with a sort of silent song

thinking they could go on and on.

-- Michael Palmer, Little Elegies for Sister Satan

"Human as meat, human as object, human as tool."

"They were nowhere to be found, leading me to believe they were long dead. I would never find the bodies, because if their organs hadn't already been carved out and sold off, the corpses would have been disguised for insurance fraud. I'm not exactly sure when it started, this habit of always assuming the worst-case scenario. My parents, the moneylenders, everyone said the words. All you've got is your body. A body. . . not a person, not a human. Human as meat, human as object, human as tool. A person's value is proportional to their bank balance. Our society seems to think it's okay to look down on the poor. And when you're constantly broke and beaten down, you start to think money's the only thing that matters. The more you're knocked down, the more you cling to money, hoping it can put you back together. It's messed up, yeah, but that's how it is."

-- Jin-Young Choi, Hunger

The Living Is Easy

I'd say for the last ten years my primary reading has been fiction, with some forays into history.  I'm trying to read more poetry these days though, like when I was a much younger man.  In the past year I've re-read Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin, both very much worth my time.  (I'd forgotten how damn funny Plath is, biography be damned.)  I came upon this poem -- "Places with Terrible Wi-Fi" -- and had to buy the book by J. Estanislao Lopez.  Along with new stuff, I've got plans to reconnect with T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson before the summer ends.

And things are good.  I'm going down to North Carolina in August to check out houses.  I'm thinking the US men make it out of the group stage then get crushed (typical, really, and not all that bad for a Football / Basketball county).  It's hot and humid.  Ultimately, I'm just excited to be leaving Frederick.  Some charms, but mostly boring and filled with rednecks.  And while I realize I'm moving to the South, at least I'll have good beaches down there to visit.

"more troublesome than the act itself"

"The aftermath is often more troublesome than the act itself. As soon as the head has been exhibited to the crowd, it can be dropped back into the basket. But the headless body (which remains capable of losing a good deal of blood for a long time after the action of the heart has ceased) must be taken away in a manner dignified yet dishonorable. Furthermore, it must be not just taken 'away,' but taken to some specific spot where it will be safe from molestation. An exultant can, by custom, be laid across the saddle of his own destrier, and his remains are surrendered to his family at once. Persons of lesser rank, however, must be provided with some resting place secure from the eaters of the dead; and at least until they are safely out of sight, they must be dragged. The executioner cannot perform this procedure because he is already burdened with the head and with his weapon, and it is rare for anyone else involved -- soldiers, officers of the course, and so on -- to be willing to do so.  (At the Citadel it was done by two journeyman and thus presented no difficulty.)"

-- Gene Wolfe, Shadow of the Torturer

"not as inevitable as we think it is"

"This is Minimalism's most powerful and frightening insight. It has nothing to do with the aesthetic cues associated with lowercase-m minimalism, the consumer products, interior decoration, the curated items of clothing. Minimalism doesn't need to look good. It tries to make us understand that the sense of artistic beauty humanity has built up over millennia -- the varieties of colors, stories recounted, and bodies represented -- is also an artificial creation, not as inevitable as we think it is.

Minimalism requires a new definition of beauty, one that centers on the fundamental miracle of our moment-to-moment encounter with reality, our sense of being itself. Any attempt at elegance is extraneous. [Donald] Judd left another note in his diary that winter: 'A definition of art finally occurred to me. Art is everything at once.'"

-- Kyle Chayka, The Longing for Less -- Living with Minimalism

"a Big Mac in a cornfield in Kansas"

"Back in the plane, alone with Quintana, I took one of the hamburgers the teenagers had brought and tore it into pieces so that she and I could share. After a few bites she shook her head. She had been allowed solid food for only a week or so and could not eat more. There was still a feeding tube in place in case she could not eat at all.

'Am I going to make it,' she asked then.

I chose to believe that she was asking if she would make it to New York.

'Definitely,' I told her.

I'm here. You're safe.

Definitely she would be okay in California, I remembered telling her five weeks before.

That night when we arrived at the Rusk Institute Gerry and Tony were waiting outside to meet the ambulance. Gerry asked how the flight had been. I said that we had shared a Big Mac in a cornfield in Kansas. 'It wasn't a Big Mac,' Quintana said. 'It was a Quarter Pounder.'"

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

RIP Len Deighton

Len Deighton, master spy novelist, visual artist. World War II vet, published cookbook author, and the first to use a computer to publish a novel, has left us at 97.

He was one of my Dad's favorite writers.  During his last few years as we lived together, I read the Game, Set, Match trilogy, among others, and got to share my interest in these books with him.  Dad wasn't capable of reading full-blown novels any more, but he definitely remembered the characters and their triumphs and shortcomings.  Our best moments together came, as always, through conversations about life or, in a pinch, about art.

"a cold touch in the midst of the familiar"

"I want to talk here about two stories dealing with the archetype of the Bad Place, one good, one great. As it happens, both deal with haunted houses. Fair enough, I think; haunted cars and railway stations are nasty, but your house is the place put your shield away. Our homes are the places where we allow ourselves the ultimate vulnerability: they are the places where we take off our clothes and go to sleep with no guard on watch (except perhaps for those ever more popular drones of modern society, the smoke-detector and the burglar alarm). Robert Frost said home is the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in. The old aphorisms say that home is where the heart is, there's no place like home, that a heap of lovin' can make a house a home. We are abjured to keep the home fires burning, and when fighter pilots finish their missions they radio that they are 'coming home.' And even if you are a stranger in a strange land, you can usually find a restaurant that will temporarily assuage your homesickness as well as your hunger with a big plate of home-cooked fries.

It doesn't hurt to emphasize again that horror fiction is a cold touch in the midst of the familiar, and good horror fiction applies this cold touch with sudden, unexpected pressure. When we go home and shoot the bolt on the door, we like to think we're locking trouble out. The good horror story about the Bad Place whispers that we are not locking the world out; we are locking ourselves in ... with them."

-- Stephen King, Danse Macabre

Wuthering Heights -- Wut I Thunk

Oh my, this is one horny movie.  Over the top?  Yes.  Trashy?  Kinda!  But there's no doubt about the commitment here to really focus on the infernal power of Heathcliff and Catherine's desire -- let's face it, lust -- for each other.  If you're looking for faithfulness to the book you won't find it here, especially in the second half.  But there's something to be said for what the film actually captures.  To put it another way, this movie being ridiculous only confirms that the novel is as well.  It worked for me, but probably won't work for a lot of purists.

Four steamy carriage windows out of five!

"shrieking in several languages"

"At one time or another, most of us have arrived at a gorgeous concert hall with whole afternoon to relax, prior to a leisurely and professional soundcheck in a spectacularly sumptuous hotel room within walking distance. You have the which everything works, everyone can hear everyone, the coffee is fresh, and you can't think of anything to complain about. Then to dinner, in agreeable company, before the short walk back to the dressing room in a gentle and balmy Mediterranean breeze. The sea shimmers in the distance, the crowd seems on fire with anticipation, and a pleasant phone-call home establishes that all is well back at Central Command. The gig is rubbish.

Conversely, the equipment arrives late in some dirty, smelly dump; the backstage sustenance you wouldn't offer a dog, and there's no coffee anyway, hot or cold. The soundcheck is a lot of shrieking in several languages to a background of a wall of electronic feedback, your head is killing you, Iberia lost your suitcase, and they are letting in the punters in seven minutes, so dinner is out of the question. What do you get? A blinding gig."

-- Bill Bruford: The Autobiography

"words that bloom forth like flowers"

"They arrive unperceived at first, and the children

 Rush toward them, but the joy is too bright, too blinding, 

And man shies away, even a demigod hardly knows

 What to call them, they who approach him with gifts.

But great is the courage they bring, their joys fill

 His heart, he hardly knows what to make of this wealth;

He fiddles around and he wastes it, almost thinking the unholy holy,

 That which he kindly and foolishly touches with his blessing hand.

The heavenly bear this as much as they can; but they

 Themselves then come in truth, and men grow accustomed to joy

And the day and beholding those manifest, the faces of those

 Who were named long ago the One and the All, and who

Filled the silent breasts deeply with contentment so free,

 And were first and alone to satisfy every desire.

Thus is man; when the wealth is there, and a god himself

 Provides him with gifts, he won't see it and remains unaware.

First he must bear it; now, though, he names what is dearest,

 Now he needs words, words that bloom forth like flowers."

Friedrich Hölderlin, Bread and Wine stanza 5, trans. Nick Hoff

"very loud music"

 "'I want a very large steak," she said to Les Goodwin in a restaurant on Melrose at eight o'clock that night. 'And before the very large steak I want three drinks. And after the steak I want to go somewhere with very loud music.'

'Like where.'

'I don't know where. You ought to know where. You know a lot of places with loud music.'

'What's the matter with you.'

'I am just very very very tired of listening to you all.'"

-- Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

"I won the good behavior prize every year I was there."

"'When I came out of the bathroom twenty-five minutes later she was sitting at the secretary, smoking a cigarette and studying a memoranda book that had been in a side pocket of my gladstone bag.

'I guess these are the expenses you've charged up on other cases,' she said without looking up. 'I'm damned if I can see why you can't be more liberal with me. Look, here's a six-hundred-dollar item marked Inf. That's information you bought from somebody, isn't it? And here's a hundred and fifty below it--Top --whatever that is. And here's another day when you spent nearly a thousand dollars.'

'They must be telephone numbers,' I said, taking the book from her. 'Where were you raised? Fanning my baggage!'

'I was raised in a convent,' she told me. 'I won the good behavior prize every year I was there. I thought little girls who put extra spoons of sugar in their chocolate went to hell for gluttony. I didn't even know there was such a thing as profanity until I was eighteen. The first time I heard any I damned near fainted.' She spit on the rug in front of her, tilted her chair back, put her crossed feet on my bed, and asked: 'What do you think of that?'

I pushed her feet off the bed and said:

'I was raised in a water-front saloon. Keep your saliva off my floor or I'll toss you out on your neck.'"

-- Dashiel Hammett, Red Harvest

"a yawning, neutral god with a relish for disinfectants"

"'It's true enough," said Crowther-Mason. 'The concept of sin seems to be dead. It's been expelled from the Garden. Freud and Marx hold up their flaming swords. But surely it's a good thing?'

'It's an atrocious thing,' said the Vicar. 'It's killed both kinds of good living. It's removed a dimension from our lives. We've all lost that incense-laden thrill we used to get from the exciting knowledge that, if you pulled up the floor-boards, you would find a deliciously bottomless pit. What have we instead? Right and wrong, with their interchangeable wardrobes, and the police-courts, temples of a yawning, neutral god with a relish for disinfectants.' With a pleasant smile he raised his brandy to his lips, as with a relish for it, as in a silent toast to sin. But he spluttered with shock, and all gasped with surprise, as the French-windows were shiveringly pushed open and Ambrose entered, nearly dead on his feet, paper-faced, trembling with terror, saying:

'Give me a drink, for God's sake.'"

-- Anthony Burgess, The Eve of Saint Venus

"time rushes by drying up or rotting"

"These memories made me think how the words 'That person has changed' are completely useless in some cases; it finally occurred to me that to expect someone to always be a certain way or consistently do a certain thing can be a huge burden on them.

When life becomes something one just lives through, when the demands of survival take up all of our time and effort, leaving no strength for any other demands, and when time rushes by drying up or rotting whatever we have had to neglect, expecting someone to carry on being the same is truly too much of a burden."

-- Baek Sae-hee, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Deokbokki

"It's biological."

"'I have an idea,' I say. 'Since you're attracted to me and I'm attracted to you, why don't we go to my house and have sex and see what happens next, no strings attached?'

'That would be a betrayal of Marc.'

'You could call it that, or you could call it adding another gradation into the field of your trustworthiness.'

'Having sex with you would turn me from being trustworthy into being untrustworthy.'

'Not necessarily' I say. 'If we sleep together once and it's not incredible, you'll be more trustworthy and committed to Marc from that point on, because when you see my muscles through my T-shirt and feel attracted to me, you'll think, I've already had sex with Lincoln and it wasn't that great, so who cares about those muscles?'

'You're cloaking your lust in logic.'

'My lust is logical.'

'Lust is never logical," she says. "It's biological.'"

-- Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

Meh, I Say

I finished Jennifer Egan's The Candy House, a sequel to one of my favorite books A Visit from the Goon Squad, and I was disappointed.  It felt like short stories, which is fine except the main idea of the book is never fully explored.  There are some great moments of course (she knows how to end a novel, that's for sure) but overall I can't recommend it.

"On any given afternoon, they all converged on the nearby playhouses"

"Norton Folgate was a decidedly mixed neighborhood, though by no means as mixed as the adjacent parish of St. Botolph, Bishopsgate, with its high crime rate and heightened susceptibility to plague. Still, it was insalubrious and crowded enough, and it undoubtedly saw its share of the dubious characters who trolled many of the streets of London. These characters in Marlowe's time had an array of colorful names:  'Anglers,' thieves who carried hooked staffs with which they could snare linen hanging from upstairs windows; 'Abraham Men,' beggars who pretended to be mad, along with 'Counterfeit Cranks,' who feigned falling sickness; 'Cony-Catchers,' con men on the lookout for easy marks; 'Priggers of Prancers,' horse thieves; 'Rufflers,' former soldiers who showed their real or pretended wounds in order to compel charity; 'Bawdy Baskets,' 'Walking Morts,' 'Kichin Morts,' and other names for women who worked the sex trade. The likes of these, together with cutpurses, pickpockets, and all the rest of London's lower depths, rubbed elbows with the street hawkers, fortune tellers, tinkers, tradesmen, maids, apprentices, porters, bailiffs, sailors, perfumed courtiers, idle gentlemen, fashionable ladies, and on occasion, as in the case of Marlowe, poets and playwrights. On any given afternoon, they all converged on the nearby playhouses, those large wooden O's that had room for all of them."

-- Stephen Greenblatt, Dark Renaissance

"necessary and accidental"

"Taking possession of this new abode, I put on my thinking cap.  I reasoned more or less as follows: Civilization is a thing both necessary and accidental; like the lining of a nest, it is a shelter from the world, a tiny counterworld that the large world silently tolerates, with the toleration of indifference, because in it there is no answer to the questions of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, laws and customs. Language, the creation of civilization, is like the framework of the nest; it binds all the bits of lining and units them into the shape that is deemed necessary by the occupants of the nest. Language is an appeal to the joint identity of the nesting beings, their common denominator, their constant of similarity and therefore its influence must end immediately beyond the edge of that subtle structure."

-- Stanislaw Lem, His Master's Voice

"I know that office, they issue passports to anybody."

"The cat then stirred, jumped off the chair, stood on his hind legs, front legs akimbo, opened his maw and said:

'Well, so I sent the telegram. What of it?'

Maximilian Andreevich's head at once began to spin, his arms and legs went numb, he dropped the suitcase and sat down on a chair facing the cat.

'I believe I asked in good Russian?' the cat said sternly. 'What of it?'

But Poplavsky made no reply.

'Passport!' barked the cat, holding out a plump paw.

Understanding nothing and seeing nothing except the two sparks burning in the cat's eyes, Poplavsky snatched the passport from his pocket like a dagger. The cat picked up a pair of glasses in thick black frames from the pier-glass table, put them on his muzzle, thus acquiring a still more imposing air, and took the passport from Poplavsky's twitching hand.

'I wonder, am I going to faint or not?...' thought Poplavsky.

From far away came Koroviev's snivelling, the whole front hall filled with the smell of ether, valerian and some other nauseating vileness.

'What office issued this document?' the cat asked, peering at the page. No answer came.

'The 412th,' the cat said to himself, tracing with his paw on the passport, which he was holding upside down. 'Ah, yes, of course! I know that office, they issue passports to anybody. Whereas I, for instance, wouldn't issue one to the likes of you! Not on your life I wouldn't! I'd just take one look at your face and instantly refuse!' The cat got so angry that he flung the passport on the floor. 'Your presence at the funeral is cancelled, the cat continued in an official voice. 'Kindly return to your place of residence.' And he barked through the door: 'Azazello!'

At his call a small man ran out to the front hall, limping, sheathed in black tights, with a knife tucked into his leather belt, red-haired, with a yellow fang and with albugo in his left eye.

Poplavsky felt he could not get enough air, rose from his seat and backed away, clutching his heart.

'See him off, Azazello!' the cat ordered and left the hall.

'Poplavsky,' the other twanged softly, 'I hope everything's understood now?'

Poplavsky nodded."

-- Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita