the oracle of lo - fi

"Well now, I suppose you're very happy and all that sort of thing."
Isabel answered with a quick laugh; the tone of his remark struck her almost as the accent of comedy. "Do you suppose if I were not I'd tell you?"
"Well, I don't know. I don't see why not."
"I do then. Fortunately, however, I'm very happy."
"You've got an awfully good house."
"Yes, it's very pleasant. But that's not my merit--it's my husband's."
"You mean he has arranged it?"
"Yes, it was nothing when we came."
"He must be very clever."
"He has a genius for upholstery."

From Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

Perhaps writing is really filling in the blank spaces in existence, that nullity which suddenly yawns wide open in the hours and the days, and appears betwen the objects in the room, engulfing them in unending desolation and insignificance. Fear, as Canetti has written, invents names so as to distract itself. The traveller reads and takes note of the names, of stations his train passes through, at the corners of the streets where his footsteps lead him; and he goes on his way with a breath of relief, satisfied with that rhythmic order of nothingness.

~ from Danube, by Claudio Magris

(Photo taken from New York Shitty.)

I know I haven't been around much lately...chalk that up to the distractions of work, real life, and taking a class and realizing how dumb I am. (I knew there was a reason I always hated school.) Anyway, hoping to post more in the New Year, because, as always, I'm hoping to write more. And maybe it is just a hope, but...it's there.

For now, may everyone has a great holiday and a Happy New Year!

Originally posted by twbasketcase at Mississippi Personhood Amendment

On the lake, the night was very clear, and filled with shooting stars. The mild water sparkled, phosphorescent, around our prow. Fish leaped, shone, and fell again. The shore lay softly, peaceful, half-divined. I was in that as it were tertiary state of fatigue where the nerves and senses lie bared to direct contact with the world and there is no longer distance or matter between the vision and the absorption, where the mind races, recording, lucid but empty, and beauty can become ours through osmosis.

~ from Sybille Bedford’s A Visit to Don Otavio, A Traveller’s Tale from Mexico

“Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of these lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish-hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away. For the time being, our cities still shine through the night, and the fires still spread. In Italy, France, and Spain, in Hungary, Poland, and Lithuania, in Canada and California, summer fires consume whole forests, not to mention the great conflagration in the tropics that is never extinguished. A few years ago, on a Greek island that was wooded as recently as 1900, I observed the speed with which a blaze runs through the vegetation. A short distance from the harbour town where I was staying, I stood by the roadside with a group of agitated men, the blackness behind us and before us, far below at the bottom of a gorge, the fire, whipped up by the wind, racing, leaping, and already climbing the steep slopes. And I shall never forget the junipers, dark against the glow, going up in flames one after the other as if they were tinder at the moment the first tongues of fire licked at them, with a dull thudding sound like an explosion and then promptly collapsing in a silent shower of sparks.”

~ from The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

{edited to fix typo}

I love to write, and not speak, and when I write it’s by hand, not on a typewriter. Several factors contribute to this choice. First there is a refusal: my body refuses to speak out loud to . . . nobody. Unless I’m certain that another body is listening to me, my voice gets stuck, I can’t get it out. If, in a conversation, I notice that that somebody isn’t listening to me, I stop speaking, and it is simply beyond my power to leave a message on an answering machine (I don’t think I’m alone in this). Voices are made to reach out to the other; to speak alone, with a tape recorder, strikes me as terribly frustrating. My voice is literally cut off (castrated). There is nothing to be done, it is impossible for me to be on the receiving end of my own voice, which is the only thing the tape recorder has to offer me. My writing, meanwhile, is immediately destined for everybody. Its slow pace protects me: I have the time to dangle the wrong word from the tip of my pen, the word that “spontaneity” never ceases to generate. There is a great distance between my head and my hand and I take advantage of it in order to avoid saying the first thing that comes to me. Finally, and this is probably the real reason, the challenge of tracing words on paper has a truly sculptural jouissance [une véritable jouissance plastique]. If my voice brings me pleasure, that is only out of narcissism. Writing comes from my muscles. I abandon [jouis] myself to a kind of manual labor. I combine two “arts”: the textual and the graphic.

~ Roland Barthes, from this article on his writings and ideas about "paperwork."

We love you, Liz.

Toward the end of my college days I did the communal living thing with a bunch of various gays, feminists, artists, and misfits. The house owner was a middle-aged English prof at a community college. He was a very intelligent, well-read guy and as I was an English major, our talks frequently turned to books and what I was reading/studying. How he laughed at me as I suffered through The Faerie Queen—good times! One semester I had an survey of American lit class and one of the short works we read was Melville’s “Benito Cereno.” I expressed admiration of the story. And he told me that as far as Melville was concerned that’s as far as I would go, because “women don’t read Moby-Dick.”

It took a while for me to really lost respect for him, but that was the first fissure in the foundation. Admittedly it took me a good long while to tackle the Great White Whale. Other big books kept getting in the way. Middlemarch. Don Quixote (which I never finished). The Recognitions (which I think is the longest book I’ve read, but aside from the bull sacrifice I don’t remember a damn thing about it…oh God, I hope there’s a bull sacrifice in it, otherwise that means I DON’T REMEMBER ANYTHING ABOUT IT). But a couple months ago I finally conquered the Great White Book (there’s a joke in there somewhere about the whiteness of the American literary canon). And finally I get what all the fuss is about.

But Lord, he do go on about that whale. Well, the whale in a general sense. But in such a pure marriage of poetry and prose that it carries you along, as the Pequod carried its crew to their destiny. It is a purely American book, with rough beauty and the theme of the individual—one man’s driven obsession that governs all, overriding common sense, compassion, property, prosperity, and other people’s lives. It’s the illogical, extreme outcome of the free will that our country so cherishes (and there’s a mini-essay about Charlie Sheen in there somewhere, but Little Lord Douchebag has gotten way too much attention lately, so fuck that). Who else but an American could have written it?

Have I mentioned that I’ve already broken my New Year’s Resolution of not using the word “douchebag” this year? And hundreds of times already? Like multiple times a day? Like even at meetings at work (mainly to annoy an aggravating, prudish coworker)?

Anyway, after I finished Moby-Dick, Mrs. THI congratulated me with a kiss and this: “Now you can go back to finishing Proust!” But I think I will save Proust for retirement.

I wanted to write more here, mainly about writing and The Kids Are All Right, but I think I’ll save that for another post. The Girl Scout cookies are calling.