descensus Averno facilis est
Thursday, September 12, 2013
'Habete fiduciam ego sum nolite timere'
I was struck by that error, nolle and noli. Our organism of language mutates. It gets things wrong, by transcription or misunderstanding. Notice even this little clump of sentences that I’ve written: I’ve tried to respect Heaney, the ambiguity of his experience, the mourning ache of his family. (Is it an ache? Is such a word accurate? I don’t know.) But I’ve written about it all the same, and in doing so I have translated it. It is the same kind of translating, on a lesser, more vulgar scale, that Heaney did when he translated the Old English Beowulf into our present-day tongue.
It is a translation that his poetry will eventually require. We die and the language gets away from us, in little ways, like a dropped vowel sound, a change in prepositions, a mistaken transcription. Errors in transfer make a literature.
Like how an infant’s cells are replaced, throughout life, by other, identical versions of themselves, digital messages do not have an “original.” Did Heaney send noli timere? We can trust that his Latin was exemplary, but we have no original because there is no original. A copy of Heaney’s last words exists on his own phone. It exists on his wife’s phone. It likely exists on a server somewhere, an archive maintained by the cell provider, a stash no one will ever read. But the wires that carried it; the air through which it shimmered; the switches that transfigured it between kinds of invisible light: They have already forgotten it, for now they glow with the words of other children and children, parents and parents, and lovers and lovers.
- Robinson Meyer
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
it was all right
I remember turning on a shitty New Mexico radio station one day when I was....thirteen? must've been, I was still stuck in junior high -- and Lou Reed and the Velvets did save my life, just like that. I remember thinking just WHAT IS THIS? and THIS IS IT in about equal measure.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
writing life
“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Monday, September 9, 2013
from "Greek Coins," by Rosemary Dobson
Sonya Taaffe put me on to these, and they're just as marvelous as she says they are.
SAPPHO
Sappho on Lesbos. An island is a ring,
a burning-glass for love and suffering.
To her a crown of violets, the moon,
Go read more. They're all amazing.
SAPPHO
Sappho on Lesbos. An island is a ring,
a burning-glass for love and suffering.
To her a crown of violets, the moon,
and a round-dance of girls as offering.
THE POET'S FISH
THE POET'S FISH
Dolphins, Euripides said, on fire!
They quench their burning in the sea.
As waves from Homer's moving lips
are syllables of the Odyssey.
THE TEMPLE OF POSEIDON AT CORINTH
Pausanias keeps a count of offerings --
horses of gold with hooves of ivory!
They leap in splendour from the printed words
which put his bridle on their memory.
EPITAPH FOR LAIS
Famed far and wide, Lais the prostitute;
her grave, but never her beauty, in dispute.
From Thessaly: "She was more glittering
than the clear water of the water-spring."
THE DARK AND THE CLEAR
Going down to Delphi, at Lebadeia
splashed my face where the two springs met,
one for Forgetfulness and one for Remembrance.
Much I remember and much forget.
Go read more. They're all amazing.
'For the Anniversary of John Keats's Death (February 23, 1821)'
At midnight when the moonlit cypress trees
Have woven round his grave a magic shade,
Still weeping the unfinished hymn he made,
There moves fresh Maia like a morning breeze
Blown over jonquil beds when warm rains cease.
And stooping where her poet's head is laid,
Selene weeps while all the tides are stayed
And swaying seas are darkened into peace.
But they who wake the meadows and the tides
Have hearts too kind to bid him wake from sleep
Who murmurs sometimes when his dreams are deep,
Startling the Quiet Land where he abides,
And charming still, sad-eyed Persephone
With visions of the sunny earth and sea.
- Sara Teasdale, Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911)
Have woven round his grave a magic shade,
Still weeping the unfinished hymn he made,
There moves fresh Maia like a morning breeze
Blown over jonquil beds when warm rains cease.
And stooping where her poet's head is laid,
Selene weeps while all the tides are stayed
And swaying seas are darkened into peace.
But they who wake the meadows and the tides
Have hearts too kind to bid him wake from sleep
Who murmurs sometimes when his dreams are deep,
Startling the Quiet Land where he abides,
And charming still, sad-eyed Persephone
With visions of the sunny earth and sea.
- Sara Teasdale, Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911)
the most wonderful time of the year
I love this so much I can even forgive them spelling Poe's name wrong.
style
NAM LE: The key word here is “style.” Today, it carries a cosmetic
residue; we associate “style” with stuff that draws attention to itself.
This, in itself, isn’t bad—we’re reading and writing at a time when for
a work of art to not draw attention to its worked aspect, its
artfulness, is blinderism at best and bad faith at worst. I don’t have a
problem with this. I personally suspect it’s been this way from
Aristotle onward but anyway, what’s material is that it’s this way now.
For me, the interesting question then becomes how to draw
attention to style without copping out, without becoming necessarily
arch or defeatist or esoteric or ironic. Without breaching the
dream-state that’s the sine qua non of fiction. Nabokov called what
you’re referring to as “necessity” the “inner force of style”: the
enlivening energy, the urge to precise articulation, the thing in the
absence of which style is arbitrary and a story nothing more than a
proof of itself.
I know I’m being nebulous. Part of this is because I resist your phrase, “besides style.” Style is everything. Style is eye, window, and view. And, of course, when it serves its purpose, style is beside the point, is rightly subsumed by subjectivity and subject. Perhaps the handiest definition of literature is language where style and subject are inseparable. Sentences have a wisdom that inheres in their structure, syntax, and constituent parts, and not merely in what they purport to signify. I get agitated when I see critics lauding writers for their “invisible prose,” as though style were only a window to be scrubbed out of sight.
CHARLES D'AMBROSIO: I agree that style is everything, so to me the surface is the hardest part of any story—but if it’s true that style is “everything,” then I think narrative or plot or character or dialogue, any of those “elements,” can’t be considered “not-style” or some other lesser category. Maybe it’s like Aquinas’s idea of divine simplicity, that the being of God is identical to the attributes of God. A story is simple, not composite, assembled from parts. I’m comfortable with the way “style is everything” sweeps up and includes the entirety of a fiction (style as well as what I called “the elements”) because I grew up entranced by the mystery of the Trinity. In fact, we were taught to distinguish ourselves from Protestants based on our capacity to accept this utterly mystical truth. I guess I think of the things of fiction, in a William Carlos Williams’s way: “No ideas but in things.”
- via
I know I’m being nebulous. Part of this is because I resist your phrase, “besides style.” Style is everything. Style is eye, window, and view. And, of course, when it serves its purpose, style is beside the point, is rightly subsumed by subjectivity and subject. Perhaps the handiest definition of literature is language where style and subject are inseparable. Sentences have a wisdom that inheres in their structure, syntax, and constituent parts, and not merely in what they purport to signify. I get agitated when I see critics lauding writers for their “invisible prose,” as though style were only a window to be scrubbed out of sight.
CHARLES D'AMBROSIO: I agree that style is everything, so to me the surface is the hardest part of any story—but if it’s true that style is “everything,” then I think narrative or plot or character or dialogue, any of those “elements,” can’t be considered “not-style” or some other lesser category. Maybe it’s like Aquinas’s idea of divine simplicity, that the being of God is identical to the attributes of God. A story is simple, not composite, assembled from parts. I’m comfortable with the way “style is everything” sweeps up and includes the entirety of a fiction (style as well as what I called “the elements”) because I grew up entranced by the mystery of the Trinity. In fact, we were taught to distinguish ourselves from Protestants based on our capacity to accept this utterly mystical truth. I guess I think of the things of fiction, in a William Carlos Williams’s way: “No ideas but in things.”
- via
Sunday, September 8, 2013
'I think the future belongs to women.'
Women
must find their own answer. That’s the important thing. I’m no longer
interested in books about women written by men. Even if I could believe
in their objectivity, I just can’t find their opinions relevant. Now I
will only believe what a woman has to say about women, because even if
it’s not entirely true, it’s her struggle and she’s on the way to the
answer.
Many of you seek masculine approval. Even though you have inside you your way of talking and writing, you have mountains of it inside you, and even though it is enough to begin expressing yourselves so long as it is with your vocabulary, your abstractions, and your own conceptualization, I think you are still afraid of the master: men. Of their judgment. As long as you have this fear, you will not progress.
- Marguerite Duras
Many of you seek masculine approval. Even though you have inside you your way of talking and writing, you have mountains of it inside you, and even though it is enough to begin expressing yourselves so long as it is with your vocabulary, your abstractions, and your own conceptualization, I think you are still afraid of the master: men. Of their judgment. As long as you have this fear, you will not progress.
- Marguerite Duras
"Song," Ted Hughes
O lady, when the tipped cup of the moon blessed you
You became soft fire with a cloud's grace;
The difficult stars swam for eyes in your face;
You stood, and your shadow was my place:
You turned, your shadow turned to ice,
O my lady.
O lady, when the sea caressed you
You were a marble of foam, but dumb.
When will the stone open its tomb?
When will the waves give over their foam?
You will not die, nor come home,
O my lady.
O lady, when the wind kissed you
You made him music, for you were a shaped shell.
I follow the waters and the wind still
Since my heart heard it and all to pieces fell
Which your lovers stole, meaning ill,
O my lady.
O lady, consider when I shall have lost you
The moon's full hands, scattering waste,
The sea's hands, dark from the world's breast,
The world's decay where the wind's hands have passed,
And my head, worn out with love, at rest
In my hands, and my hands full of dust,
O my lady.
You became soft fire with a cloud's grace;
The difficult stars swam for eyes in your face;
You stood, and your shadow was my place:
You turned, your shadow turned to ice,
O my lady.
O lady, when the sea caressed you
You were a marble of foam, but dumb.
When will the stone open its tomb?
When will the waves give over their foam?
You will not die, nor come home,
O my lady.
O lady, when the wind kissed you
You made him music, for you were a shaped shell.
I follow the waters and the wind still
Since my heart heard it and all to pieces fell
Which your lovers stole, meaning ill,
O my lady.
O lady, consider when I shall have lost you
The moon's full hands, scattering waste,
The sea's hands, dark from the world's breast,
The world's decay where the wind's hands have passed,
And my head, worn out with love, at rest
In my hands, and my hands full of dust,
O my lady.
what I'm reading
"Don't I know that feeling you describe, when one longs to go to a hospital & have something cut out, & come out minus an organ, but alive & active & like other people, instead of dragging on with this bloodless existence!" - Edith Wharton writing to Sara Norton, January 1902
Saturday, September 7, 2013
Reading....Saturday. Oh dear.
At least I didn't skip the week?
What did you just finish reading?
Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy, which was incredible -- I sped through the whole thing in about three and a half? days and afterwards felt like I'd burned out more than a few neurons. In a good way.
Anne Carson's Red Doc, which was beautiful but spiky. It was confusing but I think it's meant to confuse. Lots of allegorical figures (Ida, Foresight, Pig Doctor), not people. All of a sudden they're going to a glacier! then it's like Dante, climbing up the back way what? to the mechanic of souls, then the clinic, the laundry room, all glaring cold whiteness. These places all seem the same, mirror images of each other, rooms opening off the same long icy corridor. Not sure how Ida fits in. The mother's deathbed at the beginning, at the end. Splintered like glass, like ice. But all the shards are beautiful. (Also, I fucking loved the ice bats.)
Faithful Place, Tana French -- don't ask me why I didn't read this til now (I read the whole series out of sequence: first the second book, then the first, then tore through the fourth, &c.) Cannot WAIT for the fifth book.
What are you reading now?
Just started reading Hermione Lee's monumental Edith Wharton. Eight hundred and sixty-nine pages, whew. And only about a hundred of those are notes, index, &c. Only just started, but it's very, very good.
What do you expect to read next?
I fucking loathe this question. Will probably be busy with Hermione on Edith for a while. I think instead of trying to guess my next (very very randomly chosen) read I'll fill this space with various TBR piles instead.
On my desk: Hermione, Dopehead by Tim Elhajj, Heroin from Hazelden's Library of Addictive Drugs series, Seattle Architecture, Neil Gaiman's Make Good Art speech, Squaring the Circle, Wolf Solent, The Glass of Time, Charles Dickens in Love, and the biography of Iris Murdoch I had to buy again because I had no idea where my original copy, bought when it first came out, was. Naturellement about a week and a half after buying it, I found its twin shyly peeking out at me from a bookcase about two feet away from the bed. Sigh.
Lots of good writers are posting interesting reviews to GoodReads now but I'm really sick of the whole voting system, plus I resent now being an unpaid content generator for Amazon.com. sigh again. World of web two-dot-oh, how I really do loathe you, corrupting and buying out and killing the virtual communities I love.
What did you just finish reading?
Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy, which was incredible -- I sped through the whole thing in about three and a half? days and afterwards felt like I'd burned out more than a few neurons. In a good way.
Anne Carson's Red Doc, which was beautiful but spiky. It was confusing but I think it's meant to confuse. Lots of allegorical figures (Ida, Foresight, Pig Doctor), not people. All of a sudden they're going to a glacier! then it's like Dante, climbing up the back way what? to the mechanic of souls, then the clinic, the laundry room, all glaring cold whiteness. These places all seem the same, mirror images of each other, rooms opening off the same long icy corridor. Not sure how Ida fits in. The mother's deathbed at the beginning, at the end. Splintered like glass, like ice. But all the shards are beautiful. (Also, I fucking loved the ice bats.)
Faithful Place, Tana French -- don't ask me why I didn't read this til now (I read the whole series out of sequence: first the second book, then the first, then tore through the fourth, &c.) Cannot WAIT for the fifth book.
What are you reading now?
Just started reading Hermione Lee's monumental Edith Wharton. Eight hundred and sixty-nine pages, whew. And only about a hundred of those are notes, index, &c. Only just started, but it's very, very good.
What do you expect to read next?
I fucking loathe this question. Will probably be busy with Hermione on Edith for a while. I think instead of trying to guess my next (very very randomly chosen) read I'll fill this space with various TBR piles instead.
On my desk: Hermione, Dopehead by Tim Elhajj, Heroin from Hazelden's Library of Addictive Drugs series, Seattle Architecture, Neil Gaiman's Make Good Art speech, Squaring the Circle, Wolf Solent, The Glass of Time, Charles Dickens in Love, and the biography of Iris Murdoch I had to buy again because I had no idea where my original copy, bought when it first came out, was. Naturellement about a week and a half after buying it, I found its twin shyly peeking out at me from a bookcase about two feet away from the bed. Sigh.
Lots of good writers are posting interesting reviews to GoodReads now but I'm really sick of the whole voting system, plus I resent now being an unpaid content generator for Amazon.com. sigh again. World of web two-dot-oh, how I really do loathe you, corrupting and buying out and killing the virtual communities I love.
Friday, September 6, 2013
'out of wreckage'
Do I thank them, for their dismissals? Do I thank the silence? Do I thank the alienation?
....Do I thank the cad and coward who has of late destroyed my productivity, days, lucidity, first offering kindredness, friendship, then taking it away? He did also read the manuscript.
Paging through my inbox, thinking of those writers I have been in contact with who I don't speak to anymore. Who have disappeared, either with a harsh flourish or simply fading. How these accumulate to something like heartbreak.
....All that goes into writing a book. The silence, the silencing. And how one must write over that silence.
Out of wreckage, perhaps, comes writing.
- Kate Zambreno
Thursday, September 5, 2013
books read in September 2013
Fiction is in red.
150. Red Doc, Anne Carson
151. Forty-Five: Poems, Frieda Hughes
152. Faithful Place, Tana French
153. The Cure of Souls, Phil Rickman
154. Five Days at Memorial, Sheri Fink
155. A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit
156. W is for Wasted, Sue Grafton
157. Salinger, David Shields and Shane Salerno
158. Men We Reaped: A Memoir, Jesmyn Ward
159. Coming Clean: A Memoir, Kimberly Rae Miller
160. Coyote Still Going: Native American Legends and Contemporary Stories, Ty Nolan
161. Rose Under Fire, Elizabeth Wein
162. Edith Wharton, Hermione Lee (this was about EIGHT HUNDRED AND SEVENTY PAGES long! I feel like it should count twice!)
163. Whip Hand, Dick Francis
164. Odds Against, Dick Francis
165. Falling Angels, Tracy Chevalier
166. Come to Grief, Dick Francis
167. Doctor Sleep, Stephen King
168. City of Thieves, David Benioff
169. The Children's Book, A.S. Byatt
2013 booklist
150. Red Doc, Anne Carson
151. Forty-Five: Poems, Frieda Hughes
152. Faithful Place, Tana French
153. The Cure of Souls, Phil Rickman
154. Five Days at Memorial, Sheri Fink
155. A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit
156. W is for Wasted, Sue Grafton
157. Salinger, David Shields and Shane Salerno
158. Men We Reaped: A Memoir, Jesmyn Ward
159. Coming Clean: A Memoir, Kimberly Rae Miller
160. Coyote Still Going: Native American Legends and Contemporary Stories, Ty Nolan
161. Rose Under Fire, Elizabeth Wein
162. Edith Wharton, Hermione Lee (this was about EIGHT HUNDRED AND SEVENTY PAGES long! I feel like it should count twice!)
163. Whip Hand, Dick Francis
164. Odds Against, Dick Francis
165. Falling Angels, Tracy Chevalier
166. Come to Grief, Dick Francis
167. Doctor Sleep, Stephen King
168. City of Thieves, David Benioff
169. The Children's Book, A.S. Byatt
2013 booklist
WIFE OF BRAIN
They drank bright mead in cups of gold
They drank bright mead to catch his shrieks
They drank bright mead what kind of knife
They drank bright mead between his cheeks
They drank bright mead was the melody someone sang
You ever see a Pig
In the shape of a man
Shook over hell
And on you went
The teeth it
Shattered the tongue
It rent
You drank bright mead and After bright mead you drank
Nightfall
- Anne Carson, Red Doc
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Monday, September 2, 2013
nolle timere
During the service one of his sons, Michael Heaney,
revealed that his father’s last words, sent as a text message to his
wife Marie minutes before he died, were “nolle timere”, Latin meaning
“don’t be afraid”.
- via
- via
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