marginalia

cold green tea press / photography

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Cold Green Tea Press and kennethtraynor.com are temporarily offline while I do some needed work on both sites. They should be back up within the week. Thank you for your patience.

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Loneliness is the inability to speak with another in one’s private language.

Yiyun Li, from ‘Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life’

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Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salome

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Marginalia found in The Journals by Paul Blackburn

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“Thirty years ago, when reality in this country changed into a strange dream, when hope disappeared from the world, they went off quietly into an emptiness that could take various forms. They couldn’t live anywhere in the world that was coming into existence, and so they found a no-place and settled there, living nowhere for long years; and when the dream dissolved ten years ago, they were so used to the emptiness they lived in, they had fallen so much in love with their nowhere place, they knew so well its magic charms and had adapted so closely to its flora and fauna, that the world seemed to offer them horribly little. During all those years, while they had been drinking the wonderful nectar of nothingness, they had become choosy, and now no other food tasted good, no structure was equal to the brilliant palace of emptiness. And so they remained there.”

--Michal Ajvaz

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Thérèse by Francois Mauriac, cover by Edward Gorey

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It is through writing that they achieved this depersonalization, through writing that they cut themselves off from the past. Their ideal state is that of pure amnesia.

W.G. Sebald on Robert Walser and Nikolai Gogol

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New York Rooftops by Louis Michel Eilshemius

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The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

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"To drink things dissolved and diluted..." Franz Wright translating Rilke

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From 'No One Writes Back' by Jang Eun-Jin

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Camera life: Julio Cortazar & Carol Dunlop

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It was as though he were about to reveal the secret origins to him, all those years from the beginning of one's life that had been forgotten, apart from the occasional detail that rises up from the depths, a street entirely covered by a canopy of leaves, a smell, a name that is familiar but which you no longer know whom it belongs to, a slide.

--Patrick Modiano, from So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood.  Photograph by Ralph Gibson

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With the royalties for the book of which he had only written two or three pages, he would buy the house.  He would select the necessary tools: screwdrivers, hammers, crowbars, pincers, and he would devote himself to a meticulous exploration over several days.  He would slowly pull out the wood panelling from the drawing room and the bedrooms and he would smash the mirrors to see what they had concealed.  He would set about searching for secret staircases and hidden doors.  In the end he would be sure to find what he had lost, and what he had never been able to speak about to anyone.

--Patrick Modiano, So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood; photo by Ralph Gibson

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We discover, often too late to talk to them about it, an episode from their life that a loved one has concealed from you.  Has he really hidden it from you?  He has forgotten, or more likely, over time, he no longer thinks about it.  Or, quite simply, he can't find the words.

--Patrick Modiano

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Detail from The Angel Troubles the Pool, JMW Turner

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Jules et Jim by Henri-Pierre Roche