from Joseph O'Neill, Netherland (2008)
She would never, in the old days, have expressed curiosity about something as prosaic as a flight. Her truest self resisted triteness, even of the inventive romantic variety, as a kind of falsehood. When we'd fallen for each other it had not been a project of bouquets and necklaces and strokes of genius on my part: there were no ambushes by string quartets or surprise air tickets to a spit of Pacific coral. We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically. Our love started in drink at a party in South Kensington, where we made out for an hour on a mound of dark woolen overcoats, and continued in drink a week later at a pub in Notting Hill. As soon as we left the pub she kissed me. We went to my flat, drank more, and grappled on a sofa squeakily adrift on a four wheels. "What's that horrible noise?" Rachel exclaimed with a ridiculous jerk of the head. "The caster," I said, technically. "No, it's a mouse," she said. She was casting us in a screwball comedy, herself as Hepburn, whose bony beauty I recognized in her, me as the professor with his head up his ass.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Sunday, May 11, 2008
the violation of an old order
from Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (1994)
[The wolf] carried a scabbedover wound on her hip where her mate had bitten her two weeks before somewhere in the mountains of Sonora. He'd bitten her because she would not leave him. Standing with one forefoot in the jaws of a steeltrap and snarling at her to drive her off where she lay just beyond the reach of the chain. She'd flattened her ears and whined and she would not leave. In the morning they came on horses. She watched from a slope a hundred yards away as he stood up to meet them.
She wandered the eastern slopes of the Sierra de la Madera for a week. Her ancestors had hunted camels and primitive toy horses on these grounds. She found little to eat. Most of the game was slaughtered out of the country. Most of the forest cut to feed the boilers of the stampmills at the mines. The wolves in that country had been killing cattle for a long time but the ignorance of the animals was a puzzle to them. The cows bellowing and bleeding and stumbling through the mountain meadows with their shovel feet and their confusion, bawling and floundering through the fences and dragging posts and wires behind. The ranchers said they brutalized the cattle in a way they did not the wild game. As if the cows evoked in them some anger. As if they were offended by some violation of an old order. Old ceremonies. Old protocols.
She crossed the Bavipse River and moved north. She was carrying her first litter and he had no way to know the trouble she was in. She was moving out of the country not because the game was gone but because the wolves were and she needed them. When she pulled down the veal calf in the snow at the head of Foster Draw in the Peloncillo Mountains of New Mexico she had eaten little but carrion for two weeks and she wore a haunted look and she'd found no trace of wolves at all. She ate and rested and ate again. She ate till her belly dragged and she did not go back. She would not return to a kill. She would not cross a road or a rail line in daylight. She would not cross under the same fence twice in the same place. These were the new protocols. Strictures that had not existed before. Now they did.
[The wolf] carried a scabbedover wound on her hip where her mate had bitten her two weeks before somewhere in the mountains of Sonora. He'd bitten her because she would not leave him. Standing with one forefoot in the jaws of a steeltrap and snarling at her to drive her off where she lay just beyond the reach of the chain. She'd flattened her ears and whined and she would not leave. In the morning they came on horses. She watched from a slope a hundred yards away as he stood up to meet them.
She wandered the eastern slopes of the Sierra de la Madera for a week. Her ancestors had hunted camels and primitive toy horses on these grounds. She found little to eat. Most of the game was slaughtered out of the country. Most of the forest cut to feed the boilers of the stampmills at the mines. The wolves in that country had been killing cattle for a long time but the ignorance of the animals was a puzzle to them. The cows bellowing and bleeding and stumbling through the mountain meadows with their shovel feet and their confusion, bawling and floundering through the fences and dragging posts and wires behind. The ranchers said they brutalized the cattle in a way they did not the wild game. As if the cows evoked in them some anger. As if they were offended by some violation of an old order. Old ceremonies. Old protocols.
She crossed the Bavipse River and moved north. She was carrying her first litter and he had no way to know the trouble she was in. She was moving out of the country not because the game was gone but because the wolves were and she needed them. When she pulled down the veal calf in the snow at the head of Foster Draw in the Peloncillo Mountains of New Mexico she had eaten little but carrion for two weeks and she wore a haunted look and she'd found no trace of wolves at all. She ate and rested and ate again. She ate till her belly dragged and she did not go back. She would not return to a kill. She would not cross a road or a rail line in daylight. She would not cross under the same fence twice in the same place. These were the new protocols. Strictures that had not existed before. Now they did.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
come friendly bombs and fall on slough!
from John Betjeman, "Slough" in Continual Dew (1937)
Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death! [. . .]
Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death! [. . .]
And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:
And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.
But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted Hell. [. . . ]
Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
junk to junk
from Jim Harrison, Returning to Earth (2007)
David didn't say all that much about depression. He thought that one of the central diseases of our culture was that meaningful work was available to so few. He said it was obvious that I didn't think my university studies were meaningful work but there were certainly ways of making them so if I followed my own curiosities rather than the prescribed university programs toward making me fodder for the economy. He also thought I should walk a couple of hours a day because the primitive rhythm of walking tended to delight the mind. Strangely, when I totally emerged from this slump I couldn't comprehend how I had almost drowned in it. However, I neglected a clue to other minor slumps to follow when on the plane home from Tuscon to Detroit David advised that as much as possible I should avoid the junk of our culture. He said it was hard enough to live with what we know without drowning in this junk. It was a year later, when I visited a friend in Los Angeles, that I began to understand what David had said. In defense of L.A., it is essentially no junker than the rest of our urban centers, it's just more on the surface. In New York City the endless blocks of huge buildings say to us, I'm serious and within me serious people are doing serious things, even though five thousand people in a building might only be playing with the market edge. In L.A. they've largely dispensed with the delusion of seriousness. In a rather radical economics seminar at the university we collectively decided that ninety-nine percent of the products of the culture were junk and this included books, movies, television, art, new food products, political speech. This was temporarily distressing because all of the twelve students were deeply immersed in this junk and were perhaps doomed to earn our livelihoods buying and selling junk. Our young professor, a gay princeling from Harvard, thought it all quite funny and disappeared into Europe after a year at the University of Michigan. When I went north that June to spend the summer working for Donald, a job on which my sanity depended, the bleakness disappeared in the exhaustion of manual labor, but not the overwhelming sense that everything was a generic mistake. When David sent me to France and Spain as a graduation present the following year I felt sorry for the young intellectuals I met because the option of manual labor over there was unthinkable for the educated class. For better or worse, I was the only one who knew how to build a house. I fixed a number of faucets, toilets, and sink traps for Sorbonne students that summer.
David didn't say all that much about depression. He thought that one of the central diseases of our culture was that meaningful work was available to so few. He said it was obvious that I didn't think my university studies were meaningful work but there were certainly ways of making them so if I followed my own curiosities rather than the prescribed university programs toward making me fodder for the economy. He also thought I should walk a couple of hours a day because the primitive rhythm of walking tended to delight the mind. Strangely, when I totally emerged from this slump I couldn't comprehend how I had almost drowned in it. However, I neglected a clue to other minor slumps to follow when on the plane home from Tuscon to Detroit David advised that as much as possible I should avoid the junk of our culture. He said it was hard enough to live with what we know without drowning in this junk. It was a year later, when I visited a friend in Los Angeles, that I began to understand what David had said. In defense of L.A., it is essentially no junker than the rest of our urban centers, it's just more on the surface. In New York City the endless blocks of huge buildings say to us, I'm serious and within me serious people are doing serious things, even though five thousand people in a building might only be playing with the market edge. In L.A. they've largely dispensed with the delusion of seriousness. In a rather radical economics seminar at the university we collectively decided that ninety-nine percent of the products of the culture were junk and this included books, movies, television, art, new food products, political speech. This was temporarily distressing because all of the twelve students were deeply immersed in this junk and were perhaps doomed to earn our livelihoods buying and selling junk. Our young professor, a gay princeling from Harvard, thought it all quite funny and disappeared into Europe after a year at the University of Michigan. When I went north that June to spend the summer working for Donald, a job on which my sanity depended, the bleakness disappeared in the exhaustion of manual labor, but not the overwhelming sense that everything was a generic mistake. When David sent me to France and Spain as a graduation present the following year I felt sorry for the young intellectuals I met because the option of manual labor over there was unthinkable for the educated class. For better or worse, I was the only one who knew how to build a house. I fixed a number of faucets, toilets, and sink traps for Sorbonne students that summer.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
a democratic shout
from Don DeLillo, Mao II (1991)
"Do you know why I believe in the novel? It's a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street. I believe this, George. Some nameless drudge, some desperado with barely a nurtured dream can sit down and find his voice and luck out and do it. Something so angelic it makes your jaw hang open. The spray of talent, the spray of ideas. One thing unlike another, one voice unlike the next. Ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints. And this is what you want to destroy."
He found he was angry, unexpectedly.
"And when the novelist loses his talent, he dies democratically, there it is for everyone to see, wide open to the world, the shitpile of hopeless prose."
"Do you know why I believe in the novel? It's a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street. I believe this, George. Some nameless drudge, some desperado with barely a nurtured dream can sit down and find his voice and luck out and do it. Something so angelic it makes your jaw hang open. The spray of talent, the spray of ideas. One thing unlike another, one voice unlike the next. Ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints. And this is what you want to destroy."
He found he was angry, unexpectedly.
"And when the novelist loses his talent, he dies democratically, there it is for everyone to see, wide open to the world, the shitpile of hopeless prose."
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