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Thomas Merton

#thomas merton #oh #but i'm a delicate flower

Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland, Carson McCullers

Day and night she had drudged and struggled and thrown her soul into her work, and there was not much of her left over for anything else. Being human, she suffered from this lack and did what she could to make up for it. If she spent the evening bent over a table in the library and later declared she had spent that time playing cards, it was as though she had managed to do both those things. Through the lies, she lived vicariously. The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life.

Unending love for McCullers's women.

#Carson McCullers #lit

violentwavesofemotion-deactivat

“The difficulties (which other people surely find incredible) I have in speaking to people arise from the fact that my thinking, or rather the content of my consciousness, is entirely nebulous, that I remain undisturbed by this, so far as it concerns only myself, and am even occasionally self-satisfied; yet conversation with people demands pointedness, solidity, and sustained coherence, qualities not to be found in me. No one will want to lie in clouds of mist with me, and even if someone did, I couldn’t expel the mist from my head; when two people come together it dissolves of itself and is nothing.”

Franz Kafka, Diaries (via eulum)

#spaced out and shy

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking? And to those words, what meaning attached, after all?

Lately, all of my really strong dislikes are dissolving into neutrality.

#virginia woolf #and i like it

Bilingual editions are so distracting.

High Noon, Aimé Césaire

#aime cesaire #poetry #frenching #My french is a low growl

Wifredo Oscar de la Concepcion Lam y Castilla

#wifredo lam #Cuba #suggestive doodling

Memory's Ghost, Philip J. Hilts

Depressive illness can be characterized, in very loose terms, as a problem of memory. That is, when an individual has depression, they have preferential access to negatively charged memories. It is almost impossible for them to describe a time when they remember feeling well, or even to describe what it's like to feel well. The patients also found that when they are depressed, many of their experiences gain negative charges even as they are being laid down as memory, even if they are in fact neutral or positive. They are false memories of their own kind.

#philip j. hilts #memory #dang

melancholy-nature

literarysasquatch-blog

The Verificationist, Donald Antrim

After eating pancakes, our great mission in life becomes the repudiation of pancakes and everything served along with them. We promise ourselves that we will know better, next time, than to order pancakes in any size or in any amount. However, we fail to learn; and the days go by, two or three weeks pass, then a month, and we forget about pancakes and their dominion over us. Eventually, we need them. We crawl back to pancakes again and again.

I've never seen a more accurate book review in the form of a painting: The Portrait, Rene Magritte.

The Sound of the Mountain, Yasunari Kawabata

#yasunari kawabata #lit

The Sound of the Mountain, Yasunari Kawabata; 1954

The dream had had scarcely any plot. He had just seen a bearded man. The American government designated the beard a national monument; and so he could not of his own free will cut or dress it. The beard was of course a long one. He liked the idea of its becoming a national monument.

Walt Whitman's beard might've been worthy of national honors. I want this book to go on forever. The dreams in this book don't detract from its greatness. I think I could read an entire book of "Shingo's dreams."

#yasunari kawabata #i rearranged the lines in this quote

Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Aimé Césaire

#aime cesaire #poetry #brain aneurysm

Wanted: General manager to oversee English countryside operations at collection of large stones erected in the Neolithic period. Familiarity with Druid rituals a plus. Pay: $99,000.Stonehenge, built around 2,500 B.C. in Wiltshire, England, is seeking a general manager...

This is sitting in my American, non-druid, wage slave inbox.

#university listserv

He writes because for him doing so is luxury, the more agreeable and conspicuous the fewer who buy and read what he writes. He foresees his fate will be to be completely ignored.

Johannes de silentio (AKA Kierkegaard) in the preface to Fear and Trembling

#kierkegaard #bartleby syndrome

bintbattuta-deactivated20220322

I may be silent, but I’m thinking. I may not talk, but Don’t mistake me for a wall. Shigeji Tsuboi, Silent, but…

#good poem

The Semiology of Silence, Samuel R. Delany; 1983

I begin a sentence lover.

"In the beginning was the word..."? I suppose poets have to feel that way. But for me, the word's a degenerate sentence, a fragmentary utterance, something incomplete. Mollying along, lonesome Mrs Masters asks, "Why aren't there any decent words?" Well, no word is decent by itself; and less than a dozen indecent—shit, fuck, and the like working the way they do because when they're blurted by counter women, construction workers, or traffic bound drivers, they've got a clear capital on one end and an exclamation point at the other, so that the words alone (in the dictionary, say, or askew on the stall wall) are homonymous with the indecent expletive, which is a sentence.

The sentence is certainly the better model for the text. (The word is the model for the Bible, and that really isn't what most writers today want their texts to become.) The word is monolithic. You can't argue with it. At best it's got an etymology—which is to say it comes only from other words that most of us don't have immediate access to. And an etymology is only a genealogy, not a real history of material pressures and complex influences. The sentence is more flexible, sinuous, complex—one is always revising it—than the word. It's got style. Yet it holds real danger in its metaphorical compass. The wrong one condemns you to death.

#samuel r. delany #i dunno i still like words more #writing

Sasquatch recipe: drink your meals

in a blender put

chocolate milk

blueberries

banana

2 cups fresh spinach

spoonful of Nutella

ice

note 1: w/o the banana, it is disgusting. note 2: the color is a difficult thing to look at.

#sasquatch recipe #recipes as poetry

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

#t.s. eliot #poetry

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