from "the lesson of the moth," Don Marquis

and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

'What if it were all just an overture and no one knew to what?'

Pavese’s journals: all the things that preoccupy me, crystallized in another way. What luck! What a liberation!

His death prepared for: but nothing is abused, no emotion for him aroused. It just comes as if it were natural. But no death is natural. He keeps his death to himself, private. We hear about it, but it sets no example. No one would kill himself because he did.

And yet last night, when in my deepest depression I wanted to die, I reached for his journals, and he died for me. Hard to believe: through his death, today I am reborn. This mysterious process should be looked into, but not by me. I will not touch it. I want to keep it a secret.

- from the notebooks of Elias Canetti

'It is always not yet winter'

The poem’s last stanza offers a mild gesture toward “resolution” in an ever-unfolding present tense. It is early evening, and the emptied fields look warm under a pink-tinted sky. The images and sounds are specific, but the vision is comprehensive: down by the river, we hear the “wailful choir” of the gnats, while over on the hillside the lambs bleat. In the hedges the crickets sing, the robin harmonizes in the garden, and swallows twitter overhead. Keats indulges in the pathetic fallacy to strike the melancholy note (the gnats are mourning!), but as the song progresses the poet doesn’t project any further emotions onto the choristers; they bleat, trill, whistle, and twitter, as is their nature. It is getting late, and the prospect of decay is everywhere, but its touch is light: “soft-dying day,” “bourne aloft / Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies.” It’s hard not to notice, after a few readings, that although the closing scene is imbued with a sense of mortality, autumn’s song sounds much like spring’s. After all, the birds and the lambs, although now “full-grown,” would have sung and bleated in May as well. The four distinct seasons, with all their sensuous variety, are one forward motion whose end is always death. We may rely on it, and must rely on it; the harvest is our means of surviving the cold that follows.

- Caitlin Kimball

John Keats (1795-1821), "To Autumn" (September 19, 1819)

                                           1.

    SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
        Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
    Conspiring with him how to load and bless
        With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
    To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
        And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
            To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
    With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
        And still more, later flowers for the bees,
        Until they think warm days will never cease,
            For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

                                            2.
    Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
        Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
    Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
        Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
    Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
        Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
            Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
    And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
        Steady thy laden head across a brook;
        Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
            Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

                                            3.
    Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
        Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
    While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
        And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
    Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
        Among the river sallows, borne aloft
            Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
    And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
        Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
        The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
           And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

links

Grauniad Poem of the Week: "To Autumn," John Keats
All of Keats's Odes abound in mythical beings. There are the three urn-figures of "Indolence" (Love, Ambition and Poesie), the eponymous "Psyche" and "Melancholy", the "light-winged Dryad" of "Nightingale", and the "marble men and maidens" in "Grecian Urn". Like Ambition and Poesie, the addressee of "To Autumn" may be allegorical, Keats taking his cues not only from Spenser's "Mutabilitie" cantos, but from Chatterton's "Ælla: A Tragicall Interlude", both of which feature a male Autumn.

Stephen King on alcoholism and returning to the Shining
It also captures the reality of a recovering alcoholic, a state with which King is intimately familiar. "The hungover eye," he writes, "had a weird ability to find the ugliest things in any given landscape." Danny turns his life around and starts going to AA meetings, where, King writes, he discovers that memories are the "real ghosts". It is a book as extravagantly inventive as any in King's pantheon, and a careful study of self-haunting: "You take yourself with you, wherever you go."

Kelly Clarkson gives up Jane Austen's ring
Mary Guyatt, curator of Jane Austen's House Museum, said: "We have been stunned by the generosity and light-footedness of all those who have supported our campaign to meet the costs of acquiring Jane Austen's ring for our permanent collection. Visitors come from all around the world to see the house where she once lived, and we will now take great pleasure in displaying this pretty ring for their appreciation."

badreads

....man, by this point I'm just surprised GoodReads' Quote of the Day isn't Catullus 16.

Sunday jazz

perfection

celebratory reading -- Saturday

WHOOO I FINISHED that Wharton bio! ....oh man, this readsday posting schedule is all fucked up, just like my sleep schedule. ("Delayed sleep-phase disorder," actual diagnosis, not just me "refusing" to go to bed! -- anyway....) 


What did you just finish reading?
That ENORMOUS Wharton bio. Did I mention I finally FINISHED that Wharton bio? Yeah, I might be casually dropping that into conversation all this week, maybe. "Grocery store shopping list? ....did I mention I finished that Wharton bio, so now I'll have time to make it?"

Sadly it was....just not that good. Hermione and Edith are my girls, I can't diss them, but my GOD that was a long awful slog. It wasn't just that the book was long (I love long books, especially long, long biographies), more that it was overstuffed with details about Italian gardens in the US, French gardens in the US, French country estates, giant English houses, English gardens, French gardens in France, on and on....and, you know, I love hearing about what writers are interested in other than writing, but I didn't pick up an eight-hundred-page-long biography of Wharton to read about gardening. The thematic, as opposed to chronological, organization really didn't work for me, and there was much less discussion of Wharton's fiction than I wanted -- occasionally there was a sparkling bit on, say, "Roman Fever," or the excellent analysis of House of Mirth, but then there would be another two hundred pages about gardens.  There's a penultimate chapter on Wharton's library that I loved, and which reminded me of the beautiful chapter on Woolf's reading in the Hermione bio I absolutely fell in love with, but sadly in this book it felt like too little, much too late.

Also: Rose Under Fire, which I greatly disliked, and two three! people on GoodReads unfriended me right after I posted my review of it. Oh dear. Jesmyn Ward's Men We Reaped, which was incredible. (God, only posting to GoodReads is making me incredibly lazy about just remembering which books I've read, let alone summarizing what I thought of them. I need a break from that site so very badly.) Coming Clean, Kimberly Rae Miller's plainly written and surprisingly touching memoir of her hoarding parents, which is a lot more sensitive and even poetic at times than you might expect from her perky-as-hell food and exercise lifestyle blog.

What are you reading now?
Haven't quite decided yet -- I need something lighter, after that bio, and I'm tired of nonfiction. I've been meaning to read Byatt's Children's Book since it came out, but that's not lightweight, or maybe Cox's The Glass of Time, or Chevalier's Falling Angels; I love Victoriana and Highgate Cemetery, and her idea of showing the shift in Edwardian England through funerary customs is fascinating. Her prose style isn't all that and a bag of chips, but I'm looking to relax.

What do you expect to read next?
Maybe the Byatt. Or maybe Klaus Mann's Mephisto -- I don't think I'm going back up Die Zauberberg anytime soon. I do still want to read Doktor Faustus, though.


ETA And then after all that dithering I picked up Dick Francis instead. Do you know, he is pretty good!

ETA 2 And then I did read Falling Angels. Wow, was that terrible.

Neko

nothing more dangerous

But truth be told, there are no minor characters....everyone gets their aria as well as their comeuppance. And in my experience, it is best to keep such folk on the same page, because if they begin to wander aimlessly, like electrons or deviations from a tonic chord, nothing good can come of it. There is nothing more dangerous than a person who wants to become a character in a novel.

- Charles Newman, In Partial Disgrace

my finest hour?

'Roman Fever'

("Roman Fever") is as deceptive as one of its characters. What appears to be a story about long friendship turns out to be about long enmity; resignation turns out to be resentment; one character's apparent dominance is completely overturned.

....Grace does not take the bait: she will not meet Mrs Slade's eye, but looks "straight out at the great accumulated wreckage of passion and splendor at her feet." In that one phrase, Wharton brings in a mighty sense of all the conquests, triumphs and betrayals that make a great civilisation, and of their passing: the two women's lives, set in this context, seem tiny and ephemeral; but the "wreckage of passion" may be just as great. This is the hinge on which the story turns....

- Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton's first editions of her own novels

I need to marry Jennifer Weiner. I understand I will have to get in line

In 2010, I coined the hashtag Franzenfreude. It was very bad German for a very real problem: When Franzen’s most recent novel, Freedom, was published, newspapers and magazines devoted thousands of words to the book and its author, while giving other literary books far less attention, and, in some cases, ignoring commercial works completely. Perhaps Franzen’s recent name-check was payback for when I implied that he was the face of white male literary privilege, or for pointing out that he’s the kind of writer who goes on Facebook only to announce that he won’t be doing Facebook, with the implication that he doesn't have to do Facebook, because the media does his status updates for him.

- 'What Franzen Misunderstands About Me'

"Poem Written in A Copy of Beowulf," Borges

At various times, I have asked myself what reasons
moved me to study, while my night came down,
without particular hope of satisfaction,
the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons.

Used up by the years, my memory
loses its grip on words that I have vainly
repeated and repeated. My life in the same way
weaves and unweaves its weary history.

Then I tell myself: it must be that the soul
has some secret, sufficient way of knowing
that it is immortal, that its vast, encompassing
circle can take in all, can accomplish all.

Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing,
the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.

'waiting for birth'

It just seems to me a perfect unwonder that writing's almost never terrific fun. If it's not the hardest of the arts -- I think it is -- it's surely the most unnatural, and therefore the most wearying. So unreliable, so uncertain. Our instrument is a blank sheet of paper -- no strings, no frets, no keys, no reed, mouthpiece, nothing to do with the body whatever -- God, the unnaturalness of it. Always waiting for birth, every time we sit down to work.

- J.D. Salinger to Joyce Maynard, 1972

'This is a thing of beauty, Boss'

“He’ll turn into a serpent in your arms,” she said, “a deadly adder. Then a bear, grim and terrible; then a lion, all teeth and claws. Hold him fast and show no fear, for he shall then melt into a burning brand, and you will feel as if you are clasping Hell itself to your bosom. But he shall not – he can not – do you true and lasting harm, as long as your heart holds no fear in it. Last of all he shall turn into a flaming coal, which you must drop into a well, and he will emerge a naked man, truly himself. All you must do then is cover his nakedness and not have sex with him. Then you can go on your way. But that’s the most important part, not having sex with him at the end. Don’t forget and accidentally have sex with him.” 

“Will it kill me?” I asked her. 

“Oh, no, child,” she said. “It won’t kill you. Jonathan Franzen cannot kill. He conquers, but he never fights. The most he will do is write novels at you.” 

I buried my head into her neck. “I don’t want him to write novels at me,” I cried. “I don’t want him to write novels at anyone.” 

She laughed softly but not unkindly and stroked my hair. “There, there. No one can stop Jonathan Franzen from writing novels. Women stronger and older than you have died in the attempt. There is only so much we can accomplish in this life. Be satisfied with not having sex with him. Not having sex with him is enough.”

- via

reading.....Monday, a special edition

What did you just finish reading?
hahaha....reading that Edith Wharton bio

What are you reading now?
reading that Edith Wharton bio

What do you expect to read next?
reading that Edith Wharton bio


.....this thing is EIGHT HUNDRED AND SEVENTY PAGES LONG, I have no idea what possessed me. Jesus. It's really not as good as the gorgeous Woolf bio, either. I've been reading it forever and just passed the halfway mark. WWI. Hoo boy.

(Jilted Edith to sleazy Morton Fullerton: "You write to me like a lover, you treat me like a casual acquaintance!....When one is a lonely-hearted & remembering creature, as I am, it is a misfortune to love too late, & as completely as I have loved you. Everything else grows so ghostly afterward.")

'without the aid of Joy'

One may be strengthened & fed without the aid of Joy, & no one knows it better than I do; & I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one's centre of life inside of one's self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity -- to decorate one's inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome any one who wants to come & stay, but happy all the same in the hour when one is inevitably alone.

- Edith Wharton to Mary Berenson, July 1918 letter

from Flannery O'Connor's prayer journal

Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. . . .

via

(Fantastic review: 'If you preorder now, you will have it in plenty of time to pepper your Thanksgiving prayers with O’Connorisms like, “When I think of all I have to be grateful for, I wonder that you don’t just kill me now.”')

Emily Dickinson's cocoanut cake recipe

The History Kitchen blog does a nice writeup (with photos) here.

various quotes ricocheting around today

I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.
 - David Foster Wallace

But when one listens to music, all this is: that some people lie in their graves and sleep, and that one woman is alive—gray-haired, she is sitting in a box in the theatre, quiet and majestic, and the avalanche seems no longer meaningless, since in nature everything has a meaning. And everything is forgiven, and it would be strange not to forgive.  

-Note-Book of Anton Chekhov

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.
- Auden


I cannot live with You –
 It would be Life –
And Life is over there –
Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keeps the Key to –
Putting up
Our Life – His Porcelain –
Like a Cup –

Discarded of the Housewife –
Quaint – or Broke –
A newer Sevres pleases –
 Old Ones crack –
- Dickinson

from a profile of Peter Ackroyd

“I’ve often thought that all my books are really one book,” Ackroyd says. “They’re all just separate chapters in the long book which will be finished when I’m dead.”

- NYT

'the needle's dropped on Husker Du / they were my favourite band' = perfect lyric

The Aberdeen Bestiary

'Oldest Roman coin in Britain discovered on museum shelf' (2010)

 

The oldest Roman coin in Britain has been discovered after sitting on a shelf for a decade.

'Roman brothel token discovered in Thames'

A Roman coin that was probably used by soldiers to pay for sex in brothels has been discovered on the banks of the River Thames.

shotgun down the avalanche

reading....well shit, now it's Thursday, isn't it

Summer is haaaanging on in Seattle like that clingy ex who won't stop checking your online updates and it was NINETY-THREE DEGREES TODAY.  The cats camped out on the bathroom tile. I promise no coherence.


What did you just finish reading?
Five Days at Memorial and right after that A Paradise Built in Hell, which were both good (not that well-written, altho the Solnit is better than the Fink, which features such Reporter-Trying-To-Be-Fancy-isms as "pate" and "ilk") but also made me want to drive my fists through a concrete wall out of sheer second-hand rage. Sobering books to read as the economy declines, giant health insurance companies try to dick everyone over before October 1st and climate change ensures we'll have many more environmental disasters to come. Reading it as someone with not one but several chronic illnesses (disabling bipolar disorder, really bad RSI, chronic pancreatitis) was especially fun.

What are you reading now?
That Edith Wharton bio. Still. Up to about page 273 and then stalled out, unable to face yet another approvingly elaborate description of yet another really fancy French estate. I love Lee's bio of Woolf, but I think her thematic-rather-than-chronological approach really doesn't work here.

What do you expect to read next?
A dear friend just gave me all the books on the Booker shortlist, so I'm well-covered. So I am -- starting to read the new Grafton! because I need brain candy after reading about Katrina, but I'm not that enthused, due to the very ill-advised dual narration of the last three or four books. (What is it with mystery novelists suddenly snapping and no longer being able to write in first person anymore in long-running series? Is it like an ACL injury in the writing brain?)