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Stuff that didn't fit in the Katexic Clippings or Notabilia newsletters

[katexic]

from The Duchess of Malfi

BOS. I have a present for your grace.

DUCH. For me, sir?

BOS. Apricocks, madam.

DUCH. O, sir, where are they? I have heard of none to-year

BOS. [aside.] Good; her colour rises.

DUCH. Indeed, I thank you: they are wondrous fair ones. What an unskilful fellow is our gardener! We shall have none this month.

BOS. Will not your grace pare them?

DUCH. No: they taste of musk, methinks; indeed they do.

BOS. I know not: yet I wish your grace had par’d ’em.

DUCH. Why?

BOS. I forgot to tell you, the knave gardener, Only to raise his profit by them the sooner, Did ripen them in horse-dung.

DUCH. O, you jest.— You shall judge: pray, taste one.

ANT. Indeed, madam, I do not love the fruit.

DUCH. Sir, you are loth To rob us of our dainties. ’Tis a delicate fruit; They say they are restorative.

BOS. ’Tis a pretty art, This grafting.

DUCH. ’Tis so; a bettering of nature.

BOS. To make a pippin grow upon a crab, A damson on a black-thorn. [Aside.] How greedily she eats them! A whirlwind strike off these bawd farthingales! For, but for that and the loose-bodied gown, I should have discover’d apparently The young springal 15 cutting a caper in her belly.

DUCH. I thank you, Bosola: they were right good ones, If they do not make me sick.

ANT. How now, madam!

DUCH. This green fruit and my stomach are not friends: How they swell me!

BOS. [aside.] Nay, you are too much swell’d already.

DUCH. O, I am in an extreme cold sweat!

BOS. I am very sorry. [Exit.]

[katexic]

from Easily Distracted (Steve Coogan)

...on these summer-holiday days out, my younger brother Kevin would sit around reading or run off exploring with his best friend, Timmy Knibb. Kevin’s adventurous spirit was evident even then. He was very Lord of the Flies while I, nearly always sitting in my long trousers and shoes, drinking tea and listening to my mum and Mrs Knibb gossip, was salad days without the salad.

---Steve Coogan ---from Easily Distracted

[katexic]

from The Year of the Flood (Margaret Atwood)

On this Earthly plane it is now a desolation – a swamp or a desert, depending on rainfall. How changed is our situation from our former green and salad days! How shrunk, how dwindled are our numbers! We are driven from one refuge to another, we are hounded and pursued.

---Margaret Atwood ---from The Year of the Flood

[katexic]

“Corona” in Infinite Jest

And the sound of her wood-sole clogs against the receding staccato of brittle women's high heels on brick westward as Charles St. now approaches Boston Common and becomes less quaint and upscale: sodden litter — flat the way only wet litter can be flat — appears on the sidewalk and in the curb's seam, and now murky-colored people with sacks and grocery carts appraising that litter, squatting to lift and sift through litter; and the rustle and jut of limbs from dumpsters being sifted by people who all day do nothing but sift through I.W.D. dumpsters; and other people's blue shoeless limbs extending in coronal rays from refrigerator boxes in each block's three alleys, and the little cataract of rainwater off the edge of each dumpster's red annex's downsloping side and hitting refrigerator boxes' tops with a rhythmless thappathappappathap...

Then there's a brief rippling lull in the whole dining hall as little Evan Ingersoll emerges from the Entree Line's end on crutches, his cast new and sailor-hat-white, unsigned, prorector Tony Nwangi behind him with his hatchet-face stony, carrying the kid's tray for him. The hall's unease is almost visible, a corona around Ingersoll and the ruptured patellar tendon that'll cost him at least six months of competitive development.

luria P---------[Holding up zodiacalized placemat with a slight grease-corona'd spot of Hot and Sour Soup in the upper left corner]: Perhaps you would care now to tell your cabinet what ze contest of football calls itself, M. President.

All by David Foster Wallace

[katexic]

“Little Lion Face” (May Swenson)

"Little Lion Face"

Little lion face I stopped to pick among the mass of thick succulent blooms, the twice

streaked flanges of your silk sunwheel relaxed in wide dilation, I brought inside, placed in a vase. Milk

of your shaggy stem sticky on my fingers, and your barbs hooked to my hand, sudden stings from them

were sweet. Now I'm bold to touch your swollen neck, put careful lips to slick petals, snuff up gold

pollen in your navel cup. Still fresh before night I leave you, dawn's appetite to renew our glide and suck.

An hour ahead of sun I come to find you. You're twisted shut as a burr, neck drooped unconscious,

an inert, limp bundle, a furled cocoon, your sun-streaked aureole eclipsed and dun.

Strange feral flower asleep with flame-ruff wilted, all magic halted, a drink I pour, steep

in the glass for your undulant stem to suck. Oh, lift your young neck, open and expand to your

lover, hot light. Gold corona, widen to sky. I hold you lion in my eye sunup until night.

[katexic]

“Corona” (Paul Celan)

"Corona"

Autumn is eating a leaf from my hand: we are friends. We are picking time out of a nut, we teach it to run: and time rushes back to its shell.

In the mirror it's Sunday, in dreams people sleep, the mouth tells the truth.

My eye descends to the sex of my loved one, we gaze at each other, we whisper out darkness, we love one another like poppies and memory, we sleep like wine in a seashell, like the sea in the moon's bloody rays.

Embracing we stand by the window, and people look up from the street:

it is time that they knew! It is time that the stone grew accustomed to blooming, that unrest formed a heart. It is time it was time.

It is time.

[translated by Jerome Rothenberg]

[katexic]

from “In Praise of Boredom” (Joseph Brodsky)

Neurosis and depression will enter your lexicon; pills, your medical cabinet. Basically, there is nothing wrong about turning life into the constant quest for alternatives, into leap-frogging jobs, spouses, surroundings, etc., provided you can afford the alimony and jumbled memories. This predicament, after all, has been sufficiently glamorized on screen and in Romantic poetry. The rub, however, is that before long this quest turns into a full—time occupation, with your need for an alternative coming to match a drug addicts daily fix.

There is yet another way out of it, however. Not a better one, perhaps, from your point of View, and not necessarily secure, but straight and inexpensive. Those of you who have read Robert Frost’s “Servant to Servants” may remember a line of his: “The best way out is always through.” So what I am about to suggest is a variation on the theme. When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is, the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here, to paraphrase another great poet of the English language, is to exact full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.

In a manner of speaking, boredom is your window on time, on those prOperties of it one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. In short, it is your window on time’s infinity, which is to say, on your insignificance in it. That’s what accounts, perhaps, for one’s dread of lonely, torpid evenings, for the fascination with which one watches sometimes a fleck of dust aswirl in a sunbeam, and somewhere a clock tick-tocks, the day is hot, and your will-power is at zero.

Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open. For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life—the one you didn’t get here, on these green lawns—the lesson of your utter insignificance.

—Joseph Brodsky —from “In Praise of Boredom” —found in On Grief and Reason: Essays (1995)

[katexic]

[The feelings that hurt most] (Fernando Pessoa)

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are. The sensation we come to have of ourselves is of a deserted field at dusk, sad with reeds next to a river without boats, its glistening waters blackening between wide banks.

---Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935; translated by Richard Zenith) ---found in The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Books, 2002)

[katexic]

Aftermath

AFTERMATH

When the summer fields are mown, When the birds are fledged and flown,     And the dry leaves strew the path; With the falling of the snow, With the cawing of the crow, Once again the fields we mow     And gather in the aftermath.

Not the sweet, new grass with flowers Is this harvesting of ours;     Not the upland clover bloom; But the rowen mixed with weeds, Tangled tufts from marsh and meads, Where the poppy drops its seeds     In the silence and the gloom.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[katexic]

For K.R. on her Sixtieth Birthday

FOR K.R. ON HER SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY

Blow out the candles of your cake. They will not leave you in the dark, Who round with grace this dusky arc Of the grand tour which souls must take.

You who have sounded William Blake, And the still pool, to Plato’s mark, Blow out the candles of your cake. They will not leave you in the dark.

Yet, for your friend’s benighted sake, Detain your upward-flying spark; Get us that wish, though like the lark You whet your wings till dawn shall break: Blow out the candles of your cake.

--Richard Wilbur

[katexic]

"A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card and an inchoate 'need' for 'stuff.' A mall--the shops---are places where your money makes the wealthy wealthier. But a library is where the wealthy's taxes pay for you to become a little more extraordinary, instead."

--Caitlin Moran --from Moranthology

[katexic]

Agitrons: wiggly lines around a shaking object or character.

Blurgits, swalloops: curved lines preceding or trailing after a character's moving limbs.

Briffits: clouds of dust that hang in the spot of a swiftly departing character or object.

Dites: diagonal, straight lines drawn across flat, clear and reflective surfaces, such as windows and mirrors.

Emanata: lines drawn around the head to indicate shock or surprise.

Grawlixes: typographical symbols standing for profanities, appearing in dialogue balloons in place of actual dialogue.

Hites: horizontal straight lines trailing after something moving with great speed; or, drawn on something indicating reflectivity (puddle, glass, mirror).

Indotherm: wavy, rising lines used to represent steam or heat; when the same shape is used to denote smell, it is called a wafteron.

Lucaflect: a shiny spot on a surface of something, depicted as a four-paned window shape.

Plewds: flying sweat droplets that appear around a character's head when working hard, stressed, etc.

Solrads: radiating lines drawn from something luminous like a lightbulb or the sun.

Squeans: little starbursts or circles that signify intoxication, dizziness or sickness.

Vites: vertical straight lines indicating reflectivity (compare dites, hites).

Additional symbolia terms include whiteope, sphericasia, that-a-tron, spurls, oculama, crottles, maledicta balloons, farkles, doozex, staggeration, boozex, digitrons, nittles, quimp and jarns.

--from "Grawlix" entry in World Heritage Encyclopedia

[katexic]

There's No Such Thing As an "Untranslateable"

Endless articles, blog posts and books---many of them very good---refer to "untranslateables." There's no such thing. If a word or phrase were truly untranslateable we'd have no means to grapple with and share it. Generally, a word that is "untranslateable" simply doesn't have a single-word equivalent in English and, usually, carries a significant amount of connotation when used in the originating language.

The Portuguese word saudade, for example translates literally as nostalgia, but even non-Portuguese speaks such as myself understand that it means much more than that, something like a profound melanchololy and longing for something not just lost, but something that is, if not irretrievably lost, certainly not going to be experienced or understood the same way again.

I don't know that esprit de l'escalier--French for that feeling when you think of the perfect retort after it's too late to use it--carries quite as much connotation with it, but I'm unaware of any great analogues in English (let's forget about the horrid literal translation "staircase wit" as soon as possible), though afterwit isn't bad. And there are arguably some in other languages, such as the Yiddish trepverter...

If we want to engage in serious angel-counting, we could debate whether any translation can ultimately be truly accurate (and, by extension, whether any words in even our native language can have any kind of fixed meaning to ourselves), but let's keep our heads under the clouds for purposes of discussion.

[katexic]

M. Degas Teaches Art And Science At Durfee Intermediate School --- Detroit, 1942 (Philip Levine)

"M. Degas Teaches Art And Science At Durfee Intermediate School, Detroit, 1942."

He made a line on the blackboard, one bold stroke from right to left diagonally downward and stood back to ask, looking as always at no one in particular, "What have I done?" From the back of the room Freddie shouted, "You've broken a piece of chalk." M. Degas did not smile. "What have I done?" he repeated. The most intellectual students looked down to study their desks except for Gertrude Bimmler, who raised her hand before she spoke. "M. Degas, you have created the hypotenuse of an isosceles triangle." Degas mused. Everyone knew that Gertrude could not be incorrect. "It is possible," Louis Warshowsky added precisely, "that you have begun to represent the roof of a barn." I remember that it was exactly twenty minutes past eleven, and I thought at worst this would go on another forty minutes. It was early April, the snow had all but melted on the playgrounds, the elms and maples bordering the cracked walks shivered in the new winds, and I believed that before I knew it I'd be swaggering to the candy store for a Milky Way. M. Degas pursed his lips, and the room stilled until the long hand of the clock moved to twenty one as though in complicity with Gertrude, who added confidently, "You've begun to separate the dark from the dark." I looked back for help, but now the trees bucked and quaked, and I knew this could go on forever.

--Philip Levine --from What Work Is

[katexic]

"What Work Is" (Philip Levine)

"What Work Is"

We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work. You know what work is--if you're old enough to read this you know what work is, although you may not do it. Forget you. This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to another. Feeling the light rain falling like mist into your hair, blurring your vision until you think you see your own brother ahead of you, maybe ten places. You rub your glasses with your fingers, and of course it's someone else's brother, narrower across the shoulders than yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin that does not hide the stubbornness, the sad refusal to give in to rain, to the hours of wasted waiting, to the knowledge that somewhere ahead a man is waiting who will say, "No, we're not hiring today," for any reason he wants. You love your brother, now suddenly you can hardly stand the love flooding you for your brother, who's not beside you or behind or ahead because he's home trying to sleep off a miserable night shift at Cadillac so he can get up before noon to study his German. Works eight hours a night so he can sing Wagner, the opera you hate most, the worst music ever invented. How long has it been since you told him you loved him, held his wide shoulders, opened your eyes wide and said those words, and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never done something so simple, so obvious, not because you're too young or too dumb, not because you're jealous or even mean or incapable of crying in the presence of another man, no, just because you don't know what work is.

--Philip Levine --from What Work Is

[katexic]

"Animals Are Passing From Our Lives" (Philip Levine)

"Animals are Passing From Our Lives"

It's wonderful how I jog on four honed-down ivory toes my massive buttocks slipping like oiled parts with each light step.

I'm to market. I can smell the sour, grooved block, I can smell the blade that opens the hole and the pudgy white fingers

that shake out the intestines like a hankie. In my dreams the snouts drool on the marble, suffering children, suffering flies,

suffering the consumers who won't meet their steady eyes for fear they could see. The boy who drives me along believes

that any moment I'll fall on my side and drum my toes like a typewriter or squeal and shit like a new housewife

discovering television, or that I'll turn like a beast cleverly to hook his teeth with my teeth. No. Not this pig.

--Philip Levine --from Not This Pig

[katexic]

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