Lifted from its sequence, punctuation adjusted [dropping a comma after “melons”]
heat fattened
melons
guard
a standing hoe
George C. Miller. Ladders to high places (Toronto: Cló Chluain Tairbh, 1962)
And so for day 1682
22.07.2011
Back in 1998, in a little note sent to a friend working on Nietzche, I quoted this excerpt from Touch by Gabriel Josipovici.
The structure consists of a series of gestures in a certain order which satisfies.
The structure is never final. As soon as it has been completed satisfactorily it ceases to matter. The search for boundaries begins again. It will always begin again. Not as Sisyphus rolls his stone up the hill again and again, but as the sun rises each morning, as one breathes in and out and then in again and again.
Yet it is not as natural as breathing. Not even as natural as swimming or kicking a ball. For it is never possible to tell in advance where the boundaries will be or even if they exist.
There is no end to it. But ends no longer matter.
A quirky bit of irony, my signature block at the time read
Francois
wonders how machines make promises
in scifi —
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/sd/sd0003.htm
which provided a link to a mini-review of Phyllis Gotlieb’s O Master Caliban! and how it entices “reader’s awareness of the elegance of the artifice” which in a way recalls Josipovici’s observations about the perception of structure which in turn reminds me of the bittersweet joy of placing that last piece to complete a jigsaw puzzle.
And so for day 1681
21.07.2011
In her hommage to Michael Lynch (“White Glasses”) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick invokes gaps twice
the opacity loss installs within ourselves and our vision, the unreconciled and irreconcilably incendiary emerges streaming through that subtractive gap, that ragged scar of meaning, regard, address.
And across the ontological crack between the living and the dead.
[our emphasis]
Across the length of the whole book (Tendencies), it is worth coming back to the introduction (“Queer and Now”) and the section under the heading “Thought as Privilege” for it provides content to the activities that arise out of the gap/crack.
What the American intellectual right has added to this hackneyed populist semiotic of ressentiment is an iridescent oilslick of elitist self-regard. Trying to revoke every available cognitive and institutional affordance for reflection, speculation, experimentation, contradiction, embroidery, daring, textual aggression, textual delight, double entendre, close reading, free association, wit — the family of creative activities that might, for purposes of brevity, more dimply be called thought — they yet stake their claim as the only inheritors, defenders, and dispensers of a luscious heritage of thought that most of them would allow to be read only in the dead light of its pieties and exclusiveness.
What I find admirable is that in the midst of polemic there is a solid defense of the diversity of intellectual activity. The attack is a celebration. The astounding enumeration is a short list to issue out of the mindful gap over passages bookish and otherwise.
And so for day 1680
20.07.2011
Dichotomies can sometimes delight.
Gass’s essays rarely pursue a single line of thought, and they offer not a progression of ideas so much as an experience, all feints and nuance, and with the argument itself vanishing within the sportive accretions of his prose. But then that play of mind is itself the argument, and where the theorist believes that language can cripple, the novelist knows that it may set you free.
This is Michael Gorra in an introduction to On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. Strange that he marshals an opposition such as novelist to theorist to account for the generative power as a struggle against restraint. Funny, I mark Gass as working under the sign of Copia. Whatever the case may be, Gorra’s words spur us on to read Gass.
And so for day 1679
19.07.2011
There is a sequence of three words captured in one line in a poem (“July”) by George Miller that are evocative all on their own
mud growth sanctuary
In recollection they seem to irrupt but in context they flow from a description of a forest
O heat trees silence lush
mud growth sanctuary
Their position at the end of a two line stanza makes them dangle in the imagination; a question arises as to just how mud leads to growth and how that provides sanctuary. There is here an enigma. The mystery of how linkages are forged is expressed in a poem (“The World as Language”) later in the collection (Sancho). Miller writes
Each thing a word awaiting syntax
There the “elastic Listener” is likened to the Divine. But I like to shift to an ecstatic reader who completes the process initiated by the elastic listener whereby
And words not things
but meshings of relation
patterns of concern
mud growth sanctuary: meshings patterns concerns
And so for day 1678
18.07.2011
Paul Bertolli from introduction to Cooking by Hand
Any good cook knows how to dose salt in the right proportion to food by the way it feels in the hand. Take that dose, put it into a measuring spoon, and it may come up fractionally short or overfill the brim. When a cook creates a recipe to fit standard weights and measures, the measures themselves creep in to exert control over the cook’s better instincts. Precision is lost.
[…]
Following a recipe does not absolve the cook from cooking.
And he makes much of the necessity to observe the time of ripeness.
And so for day 1677
17.07.2011
History turning to an account of reading for pathos. A statue becomes emblematic of the city.
Those who are more astute, of course, brave the long lines outside the Accademia in order to see David in his authentic and inimitable glory. Living as he does now in a tribune, one might expect him to have taken on an expression of arrogance, yet in fact — and despite the change of circumstance — his look of vulnerability seems only to have intensified over the years. Perhaps this is due to old age, a lingering ache in his left arm, or in the second toe of his left foot, which a vandal broke in 1991. To invent such a motive, I know, is to assume that the statue has an identity distinct from that of the Biblical figure it represents, or even the marble from which it was hewn; indeed, it is to assume that the statue has a consciousness. And what might such a consciousness — at once freighted and fragile — possibly resemble? What kind of memory would stone possess? We can only imagine.
For some readers, this stands as a surrogate for the Anglo-Florentine colony that is the subject of David Leavitt Florence, A Delicate Case. But we are not sure.
And so for day 1676
16.07.2011
Harryette Mullen. Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary.
Usually small detached pieces succeed each other without connection but these three aptly for small poems about fungi are thematically connected like strands of mycelium.
Paramedics check vital signs as
emergency-room doctors prepare for
the arrival of amateur mycologists.Often they are immigrants, who’ve gathered,
cooked, and eaten toxic death-caps resembling
tasty wild mushrooms of their native land.Within a small family of survivors
the cost of a grandparent’s funeral
is divided between two credit cards.
And so for day 1675
15.07.2011
Carl Phillips. Reconnaissance
A tree is being mapped here under the auspices of the “maple”.
skies beneath which the leaves spiraled like what
looked like forever, mapling even the steepershafts in memory, parts the light all but missed,
“Enough, Tom Fool, Now Sleep”
And this breathless seeping of syntax
the folded black-and-copper
wings of history begin their deep unfolding, the bird itself,
shuddering, lifts up into the half-wind that comes after—
higher—soon desire will resemble most that smaller thing,
late affection, then the memory of it; and then nothing at all.
“Steeple”
Reconnoitre : early 18th cent.: from obsolete French reconnoître, from Latin recognoscere ‘know again’
And so for day 1674
14.07.2011
“To Listen” with Phil Hall from The Little Seamstress
To listen—they lean forward—kids do
when you read to them—they list
they know how to listen
The dictionary invites us to compare the verb “to list” with the verb “to heel”; both nautical terms both expressing inclination but from different reasons.
And so for day 1673
13.07.2011
