the joys of being an oak tree

from Marilynne Robinson, Home (2008)

...It was a good house, her father said, meaning that it had a gracious heart however awkward its appearance. And now the gardens and the shrubbery were disheveled, as he must have known, though he rarely ventured beyond the porch.

Not that they had been especially presentable even while the house was in its prime. Hide-and-seek had seen to that, and croquet and badminton and baseball. "Such times you had!" her father said, as if the present slight desolation were confetti and candy wrappers left after the passing of some glorious parade. And there was the oak tree in front of the house, much older than the neighborhood or the town, which made rubble of the pavement at its foot and flung its imponderable branches out over the road and across the yard, branches whose girths were greater than the trunk of any ordinary tree. There was a torsion in its body that made it look like a giant dervish to them. Their father said if they could see as God can, in geological time, they would see it leap out of the ground and turn in the sun and spread its arms and bask in the joys of being an oak tree in Iowa. There had once been four swings suspended from those branches, announcing to the world the fruitfulness of their household. The oak tree flourished still, and of course there had been and there were the apple and cherry and apricot trees, the lilacs and trumpet vines and the day lilies. A few of her mother's irises managed to bloom. At Easter she and her sisters could still bring in armfuls of flowers, and their father's eyes would glitter with tears and he would say, "Ah yes, yes," as if they had brought some memento, these flowers only a pleasant reminder of flowers.

days spent indoors

from B.H. Fairchild, "The Doppler Effect" in Local Knowledge (1991)

When I would go into bars in those days

the hard round faces would turn

to speak something like loneliness

but deeper, the rain spilling into gutters

or the sound of a car pulling away

in a moment of sleeplessness just before dawn,

the Doppler effect, I would have said shrewdly then,

of faces diminishing into the distance

even as they spoke. Their children

were doing well, somewhere, and their wives

were somewhere, too, and we were here

with those bright euphoric flowers

unfolding slowly in our eyes

and the sun which we had not seen for days

nuzzling our fingertips and licking

our elbows. Oh, it was all there, 

and there again the same, our heads nodding,

hands resting lightly upon the mahogany sheen

of the bar. Then one of us would leave

and the door would turn to a yellow square

so sudden and full of fire

that our eyes would daze and we would

stare into the long mirrors for hours

and speak shrewdly of that pulling away,

that going toward something.

gendered space

from James Tiptree, Jr., "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (1976)

He begins to realize he is somewhat upset. Dave is right, damn it, they are hiding things. Is this brave new world populated by subhuman slaves, run by master brains? Decorticate zombies, workers without stomachs or sex, human cortexes wired into machines? Monstrous experiments rush through his mind. He has been naive again. These normal-looking women could be fronting for a hideous world.

ordering gestures

from Seamus Heaney, "Casualty" in Field Work (1979)

I

He would drink by himself

And raise a weathered thumb

Towards the high shelf,

Calling another rum

And blackcurrant, without

Having to raise his voice,

Or order a quick stout

By a lifting of the eyes

And a discreet dumb-show

Of pulling off the top;

At closing time would go

In waders and peaked cap

Into the showery dark,

A dole-kept breadwinner

But a natural for work.

I loved his whole manner,

Sure-footed but too sly,

His deadpan sidling tact,

His fisherman's quick eye

And turned, observant back.

too many games

from Thomas Pychon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

So he drifts, though the bright and milling gaming rooms, the dining hall and its smaller private satellites, busting up tete-a-tetes, colliding with waiters, finding only strangers wherever he looks. And if you need help, well, I'll help you. . . . Voices, music, the shuffling of cards all grow louder, more oppressive, till he stands looking into the Himmler-Spielsaal again, crowded now, jewels flashing, leather gleaming, roulette spokes whirring blurring-- it's here that saturation hits him, it's all this playing games, too much of it, too many games: the nasal, obsessive voice of a croupier he can't see-- messieurs, mesdames, les jeux sont faits-- is suddenly speaking out the Forbidden Wing directly to him, and about what Slothrop has been playing against the invisible House, perhaps after all for his soul, all day-- terrified he turns, turns out into the rain again where the electric lights of the Casino, in full holocaust, are glaring off the glazed cobbles.

a flickery second

from Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper (1965)

Shielding the flame with his hands he lit the cigarette, then dropped the dying match over his elbow into the slipstream boring past the open windwing and took the wheel once more, exhaling luxuriously and repocketing the matches. He waited.

Say, old buddy, I wonder if I could get a . . . why thanks, thank ye.

The match scratched and popped. Sylder meditated in the windshield the face of the man cast in oragne and black above the spurt of flame like the downlidded face of some copper ikon, a mask, not ambiguous or inscrutable but merely discountenanced of meaning, expression. In the flickery second in which Sylder's glance went to the road and back the man's eyes raised to regard him in the glass, so that when Sylder looked back they faced each other over the cup of light like enemy chieftains across a council fire for just that instant before the man's lips pursed, carplike, still holding the cigarette, and sucked away the flame.

spaces of appearance

from Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1957)

In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.

The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be. . . . It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.

The space does not always exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them -- like the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian in antiquity… -- do not live in it. No man, moreover, can live in it all the time. To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; "for what appears to all, this we call Being," and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality.

time and silence the only medicine

from Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson Volume 15 (1903)

[to John Adams]

MONTICELLO, November 13, 1818.

The public papers, my dear friend, announce the fatal event of which your letter of October the 20th had given me ominous foreboding. Tried myself in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well, and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medi­cine. I will not, therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief, nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more where words are vain, but that it is of some comfort to us both, that the term is not very distant, at which we are to deposit in the same cerement, our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love and never lose again. God bless you and support you under your heavy affliction.

of whales, walls, and wallowing

from Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) trans. Alfred Birnbaum

To sleep  with a woman: it can seem of the utmost importance in your mind, or then again it can seem like nothing much at all. Which only goes to say that there's sex as therapy (self-therapy, that is) and there's sex as pastime.

There's sex for self-improvement start to finish and there's sex for killing time straight through; sex that is therapeutic at first only to end up as nothing-better-to-do, and vice versa. Our human sex life - how shall I put it? - differs fundamentally from the sex life of the whale.

We are not whales - and this constitutes one great theme underscoring our sex life.

...

There were of course no whales in the aquarium. One whale would have been too big, even if you knocked out all the walls and made the entire aquarium into one tank. Instead, the aquarium kept a whale penis on display. As a token, if you will.

So it was that my most impressionable years of boyhood were spent gazing at not a whale but a whale's penis. Whenever I tired of strolling through the chill aisles of the aquarium, I'd steal off to my place on the bench in the hushed high-ceilinged stillness of the exhibition room and spend hours on end there contemplating this whale's penis.

At times it would remind me of a tiny shriveled palm tree; at other times, a giant ear of corn. In fact, it not for the plaque - WHALE GENITAL: MALE - no one would have taken it to be a whale's penis. More likely an artifact unearthed from the Central Asian desert than a product of the Antarctic Ocean. It bore no resemblance to my penis, nor to any penis I'd ever seen. What was worse, the severed penis exuded a singular, somehow unspeakable aura of sadness.

It came back to me, that giant whale's penis, after having intercourse with a girl for the very first time. What twists of fate, what tortuous circumnavigations, had brought it to that cavernous exhibition room? My heart ached, thinking about it. I felt as if I didn't have a hope in the world. But I was only seventeen and clearly too young to give up on anything. It was then and there I came to the realization I have borne in mind ever since.

Which is, that I am not a whale.

a practiced walk home

from Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) trans. Alfred Birnbaum

Then, gathering up the pieces of my mind, I started off on the sixteen steps down the hallway to my apartment door. Eyes closed, exactly sixteen steps. No more, no less. My head blank from the whiskey, my mouth reeking for cigarettes.

Drunk as I get, I can walk those sixteen steps straight as a ruled line. The fruit of many years of pointless self-discipline. Whenever drunk, I'd throw back my shoulders, straighten my spine, hold my head up, and draw a deep lungful of the cool morning air in the concrete hallway. Then I'd close my eyes and walk sixteen steps straight through the whiskey fog. 

Within the bounds of that sixteen-step world, I bear the title of "Most Courteous of Drunks." A simple achievement. One has only to accept the fact of being drunk at face value.

No ifs, ands, or buts. Only the statement "I am drunk," plain and simple.

That's all it takes for me to become the Most Courteous Drunk. The Earliest to Rise, the Last Boxcar over the Bridge.

the disorder of evil is in fact the thing itself

from Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (1994)

Yet there was still a further order to the narrative and it was a thing of which men do not speak. He said the wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose. He said that true evil has power to sober the smalldoer against his own deeds and in the contemplation of that evil he may even find the path of righteousness which has been foreign to his feet and may have no power but to go upon it. Even this man may be appalled at what is revealed to him and seek some order to stand against it. Yet in all of this there are two things which perhaps he will not know. He will not know that while the order which the righteous seek is never righteousness itself but is only order, the disorder of evil is in fact the thing itself. Nor will he know that while the righteous are hampered at every turn by their ignorance of evil to the evil all is plain, light and dark alike. This man of which we speak will seek to impose order and lineage upon things which rightly have none. He will call upon the world itself to testify as to the truth of what are in fact but his desires. In his final incarnation he may seek to indemnify his words with blood for by now he will have discovered that words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new.

true english style

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.

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.

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! [. . .]

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.

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.

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."

(meta)gallifmaufry time, bitches!

from John Lyly, Preface to Midas (1589)

Time hath confounded our mindes, our minds the matter; but all commeth to this passe, that what heretofore hath been served in several dishes for a feaste, is now minced in a charger for a Gallimaufrey. If wee present a mingle-mangle, our fault is to be excused, because the whole world is become an Hodge-podge.

explication

from Richard Siken, "Little Beast" in Crush (2005)

Someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure.
          I'm sure you remember, I was on the phone with you, sweetheart.

a world where speech has lost its power

from Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958)

. . . If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.

However, even apart from these last and yet uncertain consequences, the situation created by the sciences is of great political significance. Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes a man a political being. If we would follow the advice, so frequently urged upon us, to adjust our cultural attitudes to the present status of scientific achievement, we would in all earnest adopt a way of life in which speech is no longer meaningful. For the sciences today have been forced to adopt a 'language' of mathematical symbols which, though it was originally meant only as an abbreviation for spoken statements, now contains statements that in no way can be translated back into speech. The reason why it may be wise to distrust the political judgment of scientists qua scientists is not primarily their lack of 'character'--that they did not refuse to develop atomic weapons--or their naivete--that they did not understand that once these weapons were developed they would be the last to be consulted about their use--but precisely the fact that they move in a world where speech has lost its power. And whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about. There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.

honeyed sabers

from Isaac Babel, "The Road To Brody" (1923) in The Collected Stories trans. Peter Constantine (2002)

I mourn for the bees. They have been destroyed by warring armies. There are no longer any bees in Volhynia.

We desecrated the hives. We fumigated them with sulfur and detonated them with gunpowder. Smoldering rags have spread a foul stench over the holy republics of the bees. Dying, they flew slowly, their buzzing barely audible. Deprived of bread, we procured honey with our sabers. There are no longer any bees in Volhynia.

The chronicle of our everyday crimes oppresses me as relentlessly as a bad heart. Yesterday was the first day of the battle of Brody. Lost on the blue earth, we suspected nothing - neither I, nor my friend Afonka Bida. The horses had been fed grain in the morning. The rye stood tall, the sun was beautiful, and our souls, which did not deserve these shining, soaring skies, thirsted for lingering pain.

the larded brain

from Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary (1959, 1998)

Disgusting as he usually was, on rare occasions he showed flashes of stagnant intelligence. But his brain was so rotted with drink and dissolute living that whenever he put it to work it behaved like an old engine that had gone haywire from being dipped in lard.

the ferret of satan

from The Apprehension and Confession of Three Notorious Witches (1589)

. . . the devill appeered unto her in the Almes house aforesaide: about ten of the Clock in the night time, beeing in the shape and proportion of a dunnish culloured Ferrit, having fiery eyes, and the saide Examinate beeing alone in her Chamber, and sitting upon a low stoole, preparing her selfe to bedward: the Ferrit standing with his hinder legs upon the ground, and his fore legs setled upon her lappe, and setling his fiery eyes upon her eyes, spake and pronounced unto her these woords following, namelye: "Joan Prentice give me thy soule," to whome this Examinate being greatly amazed, answered and said: "In the name of god what art thou?" The Ferrit answered, "I am Satan, feare me not. My comming vnto thee is to doo thee no hurt but to obtaine thy soule, which I must and wil have before I departe from thee." To whome the saide examinate answered and said, that he demaunded that of her which is none of hers to give, saying: that her soule appertained onely unto Jesus Christ, by whose precious blood shedding, it was bought and purchased. To whome the saide Ferret replyed and saide, "I must then have some of thy blood," which she willingly graunting, offered him the forefinger of her left hand, the which the Ferrit tooke into his mouth, and setting his former feete upon that hand, suckt blood therout, in so much that her finger did smart exceedingye: and the saide examinate demaunding againe of the Ferrit what his name was: "It answered Bidd. and then presently the said Ferrit vanished out of her sight sodainly."

. . . Item, she saith and affirmeth, that at what time soever she would have her Ferret doo any thing for her, she used these woordes, "Bidd, Bidd, Bidd, come Bidd, come bidd, come bidd, come suck, come suck, come suck," and that presently he would appeere as is aforesaide: and suckt blood out of her left cheeke, and then perfourmed any mischeefe she willed or wished him to doo for her unto or against any of her neighbours.

why we pull the blinds

from Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary (1959, 1998)

Then I saw two figures clinging together near the reef. I recognized Yeamon and the girl who had come down with me on the plane. They were naked, standing in waist-deep water, with her legs locked around his hips and her arms around his neck. Her head was thrown back and her hair trailed out behind her, floating on the water like a blonde mane.

At first I thought I was having a vision. There scene was so idyllic that my mind refused to accept it. I just stood there and watched. He was holding her by the waist, swinging her around in slow circles. Then I heard a sound, a soft happy cry as she stretched out her arms like wings.

I left then, and drove back to Jesús Lopo's place. I bought a small bottle of beer for fifteen cents and sat on a bench in the clearing, feeling like an old man. The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories - not of things I had done but of things I failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back. I envied Yeamon and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.

bear v. bull

from Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove (1985)

The bull trotted forward another few steps and stopped again. He was no more than thirty or forty yards away from the bear. The bear dropped on all fours, watching the bull. He growled a rough, throaty growl that caused a hundred or so cattle to scatter and run back a short distance. They stopped again to watch. The bull bellowed and slung a string of slobber over his back. He was hot and angry. He pawed the earth again, then lowered his head and charge the bear.

To the amazement of all who saw it, the bear batted the Texas bull aside. He rose on his hind legs again, dealt the bull a swipe with his forepaw that knocked the bull off its feet. The bull was up in a second and charge the bear again--this time it seemed like the bear almost skinned him. He hit the bull on the shoulder and ripped a capelike piece of skin loose on his back, but despite that, the bull managed to drive into the bear and thrust a horn into his flank. The bear roared and dug his teeth into the bull's neck, but the bull was still moving, and soon bear and bull were rolling over and over in the dust, the bull's bellows and the bear's roar so loud that the cattle did panic and begin to run. . . .

. . . the bull and the bear, twisting like cats, had left the creek bank and were moving in the direction of the herd, although the dust the battle was raised was so thick no one could see who have the advantage. It seemed to Call, when he looked, that the bull was being ripped to pieces by the bear's teeth and claws, but at least once the bull knocked the bear backward and got a horn into him again.

"Reckon we ought to shoot?" Augustus said. "Hell, this outfit will run clean back to the Red River if this keeps up."

"If you shoot, you might hit the bull," Call said. "Then we'd have to fight the bear ourselves, and I ain't sure we can stop him. That's a pretty mad bear."

upon the army's schedule

from Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (1997)

Long before the Soldiers came in sight, people in their Path could hear the drums, upon fitfully directed Winds, clattering off the walls of old quarries where Weld flower'd in glows of orange, yellow, and green, raking the hillside pastures all but empty, with the lambs just sold and the breeding ewes resting up for winter, their cull'd sisters off to auctions and fates less ritual, whilst the rams were soon to go up to spend winter in the hills. Vast flights of starlings, fleeing the racket, beat across the sky at high speed, like Squall-clouds,-- Evening at Noon-tide. In the little one-street villages, women stood among the laundry they'd just put out, looking at the Light, reckoning drying time and marching time, and Cloud-speed, and how wet ev'rything might be when they'd have to bring it in again. Soon the mercilessly even drumbeat fill'd the Day, replacing the accustom'd rhythms of country People with the controlling Pulse of military Clock-time, announcing that all event would now occur at the army's Pleasure, upon the army's schedule.

handouts

from Evelyn Waugh, "The Balance: A Yarn of the Good Old Days of Broad Trousers and High Necked Jumpers" in Georgian Stories (1926)

A public house in the slums. Adam leans against the settee and pays for innumerable pints of beer for armies of ragged men. Ernest is engrossed in a heated altercation about birth control with a beggar whom he has just defeated at "darts."

Another public house: Ernest, beset by two panders, is loudly maintaining the abnormality of his tastes. Adam finds a bottle of gin in his pocket and attempts to give it to a man; his wife interposes; eventually the bottle falls to the floor and is broken.

Adam and Ernest in a taxi; they drive from college to college, being refused admission. Fade out.

riot's indoor sister

from Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (1997)

"This way, Gentlemen," Mr. Chantry helpfully steering the Surveyors to the Alley and thro' a back Entry in the Coffee-House, where they find Tumult easily out-roaring what prevails outside. With its own fuliginous Weather, at once public and private, created of smoke billowing from Pipes, Hearths, and Stoves, the Room would provide an extraordinary sight, were any able to see, in this Combination, peculiar and precise, of unceasing Talk and low Visibility, that makes Riot's indoor Sister, Conspiracy, not only possible, but resultful as well. One may be inches from a neighbor, yet both blurr'd past recognizing,-- thus may Advice grow reckless and Prophecy extreme, given the astonishing volume of words moving about in here, not only aloud but upon Paper as well, Paper being waved in the air, poked at repeatedly for emphasis, held up as Shielding against uncongenial remarks. Here and there in the Nebulosity, lone Lamps may be made out, at undefin'd Distances, snugly Halo'd,-- Servant-Boys moving to and fro, House-Cats in warm currents of flesh running invisibly before them, each Boy vigorously working his small Bellows to clear a Path thro' the Smoke, meantime calling out Names true and taken.

popularity, bitches!

from Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, a letter sent to Elizabeth I during his imprisonment (1600)

I not only am subject to their malicious informations that first envied me for my happiness in your favor, & nowe hate me out of custom: but as if I were throwen into a corner like a dead carcas, I am gnawed on & torne by the vilest and basest creatures upon earthe. The prating tavern-haunter speaks of me what he list: the frantick libeler writes of me what he list; already they print me & make me speak to the world; and shortly they will play me in what forme they list upon the stage.

interiors

from Jeffrey Eugenides, "Great Experiment" in The New Yorker (2008)

Shabby living conditions wouldn't have bothered Kendall in the old days. He'd liked the converted barns and under-heated garage apartments Stephanie and he had lived in before they were married, and he liked the just appreciably nicer apartments in questionable neighborhoods they lived in after they were married. His sense of their marriage as countercultural, an artistic alliance committed to the support of vinyl records and Midwestern literary quarterlies, had persisted even after Max and Eleanor were born. Hadn't the Brazilian hammock as diaper table been an inspired idea? And the poster of Beck gazing down over the crib, covering the hole in the wall?

. . .

From the street, as he approached under the dark, dripping trees, his house looked impressive enough. The lawn was ample. Two stone urns flanked the front steps, leading up to a wide porch. Except for paint peeling under the eaves, the exterior looked fine. It was with the interior that the trouble began. If fact, the trouble began with the word itself: interior. Stephanie like to use it. The design magazines she consulted were full of it. One was even called it: Interiors. But Kendall had his doubts as to whether their home achieved an authentic state of interiority. For instance, the outside was always breaking in. Rain leaked through the ceiling. The sewers flooded up through the basement drain.

the poison dart of my personal angel of death

from Albert Goldbarth, "How I Want to Go," in Combinations of the Universe (2003)

1.
One way would be
almost without transition: water,
rising out of water,
as water, isn't aware of the moment
(well, there isn't "a" moment) it turns
to air.
          But a letter from Rich, which came today
from brambled Scottish highland, says
that the hawk can sense exactly where
the rabbit's heart is beating--is an aerothermal
system of pinpoint location--
"then it stamps its talon into the heart,
as easily as an olive is speared."
So that would be another way:
the poison dart of my personal angel
of death come down to lift me.

. . .
3.
EMO! [eey-mo]: what, one year, the "cool guys"
(jerks) in junior high kept yelling in the hallways
and covertly inking over the walls: acronymically,
Eat Me Out. It made no sense to me. First,
wasn't this command what the woman would say, not the man?
Was this supposed to be some witticism put forth
ventriloquially? And second, cunnilingus was desirable,
a pleasure--yes? Then why did this utterance
enter the world as if it were an insult? That year,
everything was confusing.
                                            For example, my Aunt Regina
was dying, making her departure
an ordeal of miscued neural paths
and failed speech, as measured in extra millimeters
per day of unstoppable, hardening cells. The cancer,
one of the doctors shrugged and said, was eating out her brain.

the revolutionary spirit(s)

from Sean O'Casey, The Plough and the Stars (1926)

(PETER and FLUTHER enter tumultuously. They are hot, and full and hasty with the things they have seen and heard. Emotion is bubbling up in them, so that when they drink, and when they speak, they drink and speak with the fullness of emotional passion [...])

PETER (hurriedly to the BARMAN). Two more, Tom!...(To FLUTHER) Th' memory of all th' things that was done, an' all th' things that was suffered be th' people, was boomin' in me brain....Every nerve in me body was quiverin' to do somethin' desperate!

FLUTHER. Jammed as I was in th' crowd, I listed to th' speeches pattherin' on th' people's head, like rain fallin' on th' corn; every derogatory thought went out o' me mind, an' I said to meself, "You can die now, Fluther, for you've seen the shadow-dhreams of th' past leppin' to life in th' bodies of livin' men that show, if we were without a thitther o' courage for centuries, we're vice versa now!" Looka here. (He stretches out his arm under PETER'S face and rolls up his sleeve.) The blood was BOILIN' in me veins!

the audacity of thought

from Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)

[Ahab speaking]: " What a lovely day again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon the world. Here's food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that's tingling enough for mortal man! to think's audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that."

her moments

from Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (2007)

She'd come at just the right time. This was her atmosphere. This was the light for her, for sad, pale skin below the tanned neck and above the rough elbows, for a virgin martyr's poise, for her unexpectant waiting--her right calf, rather thick and like a peasant's, dangling from the bed and the foot plunged into shadow near the floor, which was of old wood, the other leg akimbo and the sole of its foot against the other knee, making a number 4 with her legs as she lay back on the bed, her hand across her breasts, the other behind her head--pond-light, church-light. Had she known how he stared, she'd never have allowed it. But she turned her eyes to him and looked at him full on as if he didn't matter, without any change of her expression. She wasn't, herself, beautiful. Her moments were beautiful.

those smug adult prefaces

from Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse (1972)

Preface to the First Edition

Edwin Mullhouse is dead. I shall not qualify the noun of his memory with the insolent adjectives of insufficient praise. Edwin Mullhouse is dead. He is as dead as a doornail.

I have studied them carefully, those smug adult prefaces. With fat smiles of gratitude, fit thanks are given for services rendered and kindnesses bestowed. Long lists of names are cleverly paraded in order to assure you that the author has excellent connections and a loving heart. Let me say at once that in this instance there are none to thank to besides myself. I am not thankful to Dr. and Mrs. Mullhouse for moving away with the remains. I am not thankful to Aunt Gladys for mislaying eleven chapters. I have always done my own typing myself, using both index fingers, and I have never received any encouragement at all from anyone about anything. And so, in conclusion, I feel that grateful thanks are due to myself, without whose kind encouragement and constant interest I could never have completed my task; to myself, for my valuable assistance in a number of points, whose patience, understanding, and usefulness as a key eye-witness can never be adequately repaid, and who in a typical burst of scrupulousness wish to point out that the 'remains' mentioned above are, of course, literary remains.

J.C.
Newfield, 1955

this country will kill you in a heartbeat

from Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (2005)

She never did remarry. Later years she was a schoolteacher. San Angelo. This country was hard on people. But they never seemed to hold it to account. In a way that seems peculiar. That they didnt. You think about what all has happened to just this one family. I dont know what I'm doin here still knockin around. All them young people. We dont know where half of them is even buried. You got to ask what was the good in all that. So I go back to that. How come people dont feel like this country has got a lot to answer for? They dont. You can say that the country is just the country, it dont actively do nothin, but that dont mean much. I seen a man shoot his pickup truck with a shotgun one time. He must of thought it done somethin. This country will kill you in a heartbeat and people still love it. You understand what I'm saying?

I think I do. Do you love it?

I guess you could say I do. But I'd be the first one to tell you I'm as ignorant as a box of rocks so you sure dont want to go by nothin I'd say.

the nightly obliteration of being

from Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie (1960) trans. Daniel Russell (1969)

The night dream (rêve) does not belong to us. It is not our possession. With regard to us, it is an abductor, the most disconcerting of abductors: it abducts our being from us. Nights, nights have no history. They are not linked one to another. And when a person has lived a lot, when he has already lived some twenty-thousand nights, he never knows in which ancient, very ancient night he started off to dream. The night has no future. 
...
We become elusive to ourselves, for we are giving pieces of ourselves to no matter whom, to no matter what. The nocturnal dream disperses our being over phantoms of unusual beings who are no longer even shadows of ourselves. The words "phantoms" and "shadows" are too strong. They are still too well attached to realities. They prevent us from going as far as the extremity of the obliteration of being, as far as the obscurity of our being dissolving into the night.

in which pore men be but the lokers on

from Thomas More, The History of King Richard III (ca. 1515)

[the context: Richard and Buckingham, in engineering their takeover of the realm, have staged a scene in which Buckingham, before a large group of citizens, offers Richard the crown several times, but he bashfully refuses--until he is compelled by the shouts of 'the people' (not really the citizens, but their hired plants in the crowd).]

With this there was a great shout, crying kyng Richarde king Richard. And then the lordes went up to the kyng (for so was he from that time called) and the people departed, talkyng diversly of the matter every man as his fantasye gave hym. But muche they talked and marveiled of the maner of this dealing, that the matter was on both partes made so straunge, as though neither had ever communed with the other thereof before, when that themselves wel wist there was no man so dul that heard them, but he perceived wel inough, that all the matter was made betwene them. Howbeit somme excused that agayne, and sayde all must be done in good order though. And men must sometime for the manner sake not bee a knowen what they knowe. For at the consecracion of a bishop, every man woteth well by the paying for his bulles, that he purposeth to be one, & though he paye for nothing elles. And yet must he bee twise asked whyther he wil be bishop or no, and he muste twyse say naye, and at the third tyme take it as compelled ther unto by his owne wyll.

And in a stage play all the people know right wel, that he that playeth the sowdayne is percase as sowter. [that is, the actor playing the sultan is actually a shoemaker]. Yet if one should have so little sense to shewe out of seasonne what acquaintance he hath with him, and calle him by his owne name whyle he standeth in his magestie, one of his tormentors might hap to break his head, and worth[il]y [so] for marring of the play. And so they said that these matters bee Kynges games, as it were stage playes, and for the more part plaied upon scafoldes. In which pore men be but the lokers on. And thei that wise be, wil medle no farther. For they that sometyme step up and play with them, when they cannot play their partes, they disorder the play & do themselves no good.

support our troops

from Benjamin Percy, Refresh Refresh (2007)

Our fathers had left us, but men remained in Tumalo. There were old men, like my grandfather, who I lived with--men who had paid their dues, who had worked their jobs and fought their wars, and now spent their days at the gas station, drinking bad coffee from Styofoam cups, complaining about the weather, arguing about the best months to reap alfalfa. And there were incapable men. Men who rarely shaved and watched daytime television in their once-white underpants. Men who lived in trailers and filled their shopping carts with Busch Light, summer sausage, Oreo cookies.

And then there were vulturous men, like Dave Lightener--men who scavenged whatever our fathers had left behind. Dave Lightener worked as a recruitment officer. I'm guessing he was the only recruitment officer in world history who drive a Vespa scooter with a Support Our Troops ribbon magneted to the rear. We sometimes saw it parked outside the homes of young women whose husbands had gone to war. Dave had big ears and small eyes and wore his hair in your standard-issue high-and-tight buzz. He often spoke in a too-loud voice about all the insurgents he gunned down when working in a Fallujah patrol unit. He lived with his mother in Tumalo, but spent his days in Bend and Redmond, trolling the parking lots of Best Buy, ShopKo, Kmart, Wal-Mart, Mountain View Mall. He was looking for people like us, people who were angry and dissatisfied and poor.

But Dave Lightener knew better than to bother us. On duty he stayed away from Tumalo entirely. Recruiting there would be too much like poaching the burned section of forest where deer, rib-slatted and wobbly legged, nosed through the ash, seeking something green.

many are the dericks

from Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)

It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard form the Pequod's mast-heads, announcing that the Jungfrau was again lowering her boats; though the only spout in sight was that of a Fin-Back, belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of its incredible power of swimming. Nevertheless, the Fin-Back's spout is so similar to the sperm whale's, that by unskilful fishermen it is often mistaken for it. And consequently Derick and all his host were now in valiant chase of this unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding all sail, made after her four young keels, and thus they all disappeared far to leeward, still in bold, hopeful chase.

Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.

how I, or you, or we, might feel, sometimes

from Italo Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni trans. Tim Parks (1993)

For the brief span of our lifetimes, everything remains there on the screen, distressingly present; the first images of eros and premonitions of death catch up with us in every dream; the end of the world began with us and shows no signs of ending; the film we thought we were watching is the story of our lives.

click and flow (or peck and stare?)

from William Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style, 4th ed. (1935, 2000)

Do not overwrite.
Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating. If the sickly-sweet word, the overblown phrase are your natural form of expression, as is sometimes the case, you will have to compensate for it by a show of vigor, and by writing something as meritorious as the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's.

When writing with a computer, you must guard against wordiness. The click and flow of a word processor can be seductive, and you may find yourself adding a few unnecessary words or even a whole passage just to experience the pleasure of running your fingers over the keyboard and watching your words appear on the screen. It is always a good idea to reread your writing later and ruthlessly delete the excess.

Do not affect a breezy manner.
The volume of writing is enormous, these days, and much of it has a sort of windiness about it, almost as though the author were in a state of euphoria. 'Spontaneous me,' said Whitman, and, in his innocence, let loose the hordes of uninspired scribblers who would one day confuse spontaneity with genius.

The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that comes to mind is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day. . . .

sleeping away from home

from Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)

Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention; he must care about her to fabricate so elaborately and over such a long stretch of time. His deceit was a form of tribute to the importance of their marriage.

lakes of coffee a cup at a time

from Larry McMurtry, Moving On (1970)

. . . it was a relief to go with someone who wasn't eternally bitching about graduate school. Everyone else felt, or at least declared, that graduate school was really no place for them, that the life was unreal, the projects inane, the themes and theses worthless, the professors disagreeable, the social conventions artificial, the competitions silly. Nonetheless, most of them stayed hermetically sealed in the graduate life, wrote the papers, kowtowed to the professors, plodded through the texts, consumed lakes of coffee a cup at a time, griped, whined, exulted over triumphs so minor they would have been unnoticeable in any other context, competed with one another endlessly, and, by the time they had been at it a few months, would scarcely have known what to do in any other world. To go back into what they liked to refer to as 'real life' they would have had to be reconditioned slowly, like divers coming up from the deep.

on academic witing

from Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (2003)

Should writing intended for academics in the humanities be readable for everyone when we don't expect the same from writing in physics? Isn't such an expectation tantamount to a demand that there be no such thing as intellectuals in the humanities, that the whole history of the humanistic disciplines make no difference, and that someone starting from scratch into a discussion--of, say, the theory of sexuality--be at no disadvantage compared with someone who has read widely in previous discussions of the issue? When the charge of bad writing comes from journalists, it is hard to avoid the feeling that some hostility to the very idea of scholarly humanistic disciplines is involved.

her majesty's a pretty nice girl

from Simon Forman, Diary (1597)

Dreamt that I was with the Queen [Elizabeth], and that she was a little elderly woman in a coarse white petticoat all unready. She and I walked up and down through lanes and closes, talking and reasoning. At last we came over a great close where were many people, and there were two men at hard words. One of them was a weaver, a tall man with a reddish beard, distract of his wits. She talked to him and he spoke very merrily unto her, and at last did take her and kiss her. So I took her by the arm still, and then we went through a dirty lane. She had a long white smock very clean and fair, and it trailed in the dirt and her coat behind. I took her coat and did carry it up a good way, and then it hung too low before. Then said I, "I mean to wait upon you and not under you, that I might make this belly a little bigger to carry up this smock and coat out of the dirt." And so we talked merrily; then she began to lean upon me, when we were past the dirt and to be very familiar with me, and methought she began to love me. When we were along, out of sight, methought she would have kissed me.

the big four

from Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)

God keep me from ever finishing anything. This whole book is but a draught-- nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!

dream made flesh

from Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972)

Now, what Dr Hoffman had done, in the first instance, was this. Consider the nature of a city. It is a vast repository of time, the discarded times of all the men and women who have lived, worked, dreamed and died in the streets which grow like a wilfully organic thing, unfurl like petals of a mired rose and yet lack evanescence so entirely that they preserve the past in haphazard layers, so this alley is old while the avenue that runs beside it is newly built but nevertheless has been built over the deep-down, dead-in-the-ground relics of the older, perhaps the original, huddle of alleys which germinated the entire quarter. Dr Hoffman's gigantic generators sent out a series of seismic vibrations which made great cracks in the hitherto immutable surface of the time and space equation we had informally formulated in order to realize our city and, out of these cracks, well - nobody knew what would come next.

A kind of orgiastic panic seized the city. Those bluff, complaisant avenues and piazzas were suddenly as fertile in metamorphoses as a  magic forest. Whether the apparitions were shades of the dead, synthetic reconstructions of the living or in no way replicas of anything we knew, they inhabited the same dimension as the living for Dr Hoffman had enormously extended the limits of this dimension. The very stones were mouths which spoke. I myself decided the revenants were objects - perhaps personified ideas - which could think but did not exist. This seemed the only hypothesis which might explain my own case for I acknowledged them - I saw them; they screamed and whickered at me - and yet I did not believe in them.

This phantasmagoric redefinition of a city was constantly fluctuating for it was now the kingdom of the instantaneous.

Cloud palaces erected themselves then silently toppled to reveal for a moment the familiar warehouse beneath them until they were replaced by some fresh audacity. A group of chanting pillars exploded in the middle of a mantra and lo! they were once again street lamps until, with night, they changed to silent flowers. Giant heads in the helmets of conquistadors sailed up like sad, painted kites over the giggling chimney pots. Hardly anything remained the same for more than one second and the city was no longer the conscious production of humanity; it had become the arbitrary realm of dream.

delight at the top of the pole

from Larry McMurtry, "Eros in Archer County," in In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas (1968)

My own first brush with small-town restrictions on frankness followed almost immediately upon the realization that sex was something worth being frank about. I was eight or nine years old, as I recall, and was climbing a street-sign pole. When I started up the pole I had no purpose in mind but casual exercise, but about the time I got to the top, the flexing activity that pole-climbing involves produced what I learned years later was an orgasm. I had not been expecting anything so delightful to happen at the top of that pole, and I hung for a moment in amazement before sliding down. A lady of my acquaintance happened to be standing nearby, so I hurried over and gave her an ecstatic report on the event. My description was probably rather vague, but I was able to pinpoint the area that felt so good, and that was enough for the lady. "Ssh," she said, looking apprehensively about. "Just don't tell anybody."

the romance of the half-hidden hangover

from L. Rust Hills, "How to Cut Down Drinking and Smoking Quite So Much," in How to Do Things Right: The Memoirs of a Fussy Man (1972)

[...] But the real reason you drink and smoke so much is that you still have the idea, formed somewhere way back when, that smoking and drinking is really a very romantic thing to do. It seems very grown-up to you if you are young, and it seems very youthful to you if you are old.

In his autobiography, Lincoln Steffens describes his romance with drinking:

Once, for example, as I staggered (a little more than I had to) away from the bar, I overheard one man say to another: "Those boys can carry some liquor, can't they?"

That was great. But better still was the other loafer's reply: "Yes," he said, "but it's tough to see young men setting out on the downgrade to hell that way."

The romantic idea that one has a brilliant future somehow being ruined by drinking is natural to a college sophomore, but it ought to be abandoned in maturity. The trouble is that it remains in the subconscious, sneakily invidious, so that even the ugly hangover becomes glamorous. When I was young and seldom got hangovers, or not bad ones, I'd often pretend to be in a very bad way "the morning after." It made for a lot of companionable talk in college about the "hair of the dog" and "getting a quick one." Drugs - which come complete with that great language about "turning on" and "highs" and "freaking out" and "coming down" and so on - must seem equivalently dangerous and romantic. Years and years later, when stupid pride in a hangover was replaced by sensible shame on a number of occasions, when for various reasons I tried to conceal how my hands were trembling, I remember even then having that invidious secret sense of how romantic it was that I was in such a bad way and actually trying to conceal it.

above and amidst the city

from Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) trans. Steven Rendall (1984)

Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide - extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today's urban irruptions that block out its space. Unlike Rome, New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future [...] On this stage of concrete, steel and glass, cut out between two oceans (the Atlantic and the American) by a frigid body of water, the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production.

[...]

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place - an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City. The identity furnished by this place is all the more symbolic (named) because, in spite of the inequality of its citizens' positions and profits, there is only a pullulation of passer-by, a network of residences temporarily appropriated by pedestrian traffic, a shuffling among pretenses of the proper, a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.

the sound of trane

from Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: the story of a sound (2007)

This is a book about jazz as sound. I mean "sound" as it has long functioned among jazz players, as a mystical term of art: as in, every musician finally needs a sound, a full and sensible embodiment of his artistic personality, such that it can be heard, at best, in a single note. Miles Davis's was fragile and pointed. Coleman Hawkins's was ripe and mellow and generous. John Coltrane's was large and dry, slightly undercooked, and urgent.

But I also mean sound as a balanced block of music emanating from a whole band. How important is this? With Coltrane, sound ruled over everything. It eventually superseded composition: his later records present one track after another of increasing similarity, in which the search for sound superseded solos and structure. His authoritative sound, especially as he could handle it in a ballad, was the reason older musicians respected him so--his high-register sound, for example, in "Say It Over and Over Again."

Coltrane loved structure in music, and the science and theory of harmony; one of the ways he is remembered is as the champion student of jazz. But insofar as Coltrane's music has some extraordinary properties--the power to make you change your consciousness a little bit--we ought to widen the focus beyond the constructs of his music, his compositions, and his intellectual conceits. Eventually we can come around to the music's overall sound: first how it feels in the ear and later how it feels in the memory, as mass and metaphor. Musical structure, for instance, can't contain morality. But sound, somehow, can. Coltrane's large, direct, vibratoless sound transmitted his basic desire: "that I'm supposed to grow to the best good that I can get to."

the quest for presence

from John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999)

Odysseus ultimately proved his identity to Penelope by revealing the scar on his thigh and the privileged knowledge of the bed he had once built her. As a message out of the past and arriving from distant places, he faced all the troubles of authentication. Odysseus's testimonies rested in the parts of his person most resistant to fabrication: scar, personal history, knowledge of intimate places outside circulation. He offered not tropes but trophies.

To view communication as the marriage of true minds underestimates the holiness of the body. Being there still matters, even in an age of full-body simulations. Touch, being the most archaic of all our senses and perhaps the hardest to fake, means that all things being equal, people who care for each other will seek each other's presence. The quest for presence might not give better access to the other's soul, per se, but it does to their body. And the bodies of friends and kin matter deeply. The face, voice, and skin have a contagious charisma. There is nothing so electric or unmanageable as touch: we feast our eyes on each other, kiss, shake hands, and embrace. Whether any of these gestures is a token of affection or constitutes harassment is a matter of interpretation subject to all the same problems as any other signifying act. Touch is no cure for communication trouble: it is more primal, but equally intractable. With his war on "the metaphysics of presence," Derrida is right to combat the philosophical principle that behind every word is a voice and behind every voice an intending soul that gives it meaning. But to think of the longing for the presence of other people as a kind of metaphysical mistake is nuts.

Touch and time, the two nonreproducible things we can share, are our only guarantees of sincerity. To echo Robert Merton, the only refuge we have against communication fraud is the propaganda of the deed. No profession of love is as convincing as a lifetime of fidelity.

rum that warms you all through body and spirit

from Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964)

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about up in Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story. I had already seen the end of fall come through boyhood, youth and young manhood, and in one place you could write about it better than in another. That was called transplanting yourself, I thought, and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things. But in the story the boys were drinking rum St. James. This tasted wonderful on the cold day and I kept on writing, feeling very well and feeling the good Martinique rum warm me all through my body and my spirit.

A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
. . .
[He intermittently stares at the girl while writing a story, probably "The Three-Day Blow."] I closed up the story in the notebook and put it in my inside pocket and I asked the waiter for a dozen portugaises and a half-carafe of dry white wine they had there. After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.

winter's greatest hits in bachelard...

from Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958) trans. Maria Jolas (1964)

...snow especially reduces the exterior world to nothing rather too easily. It gives a single color to the entire universe which, with the one word, snow, is both expressed and nullified for those who have found shelter...

In any case, outside the occupied house, the winter cosmos is a simplified cosmos. It is a non-house in the same way that metaphysicians speak of a non-I, and between the house and the non-house it is easy to establish all sorts of contradictions. Inside the house, everything may be differentiated and multiplied. The house derives reserves and refinements of intimacy from winter; while in the outside world, snow covers all tracks, blurs the road, muffles every sound, conceals all colors. As a result of this universal whiteness, we feel a form of cosmic negation in action. The dreamer of houses knows and senses this, and because of the diminished entity of the outside world, experiences all the qualities of intimacy with increased intensity.

II

Winter is by far the oldest of the seasons. Not only does it confer age upon our memories, taking us back to a remote past but, on snowy days, the house too is old. It is as though it were living in the past of centuries gone by.

he was an undergraduate

from Herman Melville, Moby Dick
[Ishmael describes his bedmate for the night, the "cannibal" Queequeg]:

But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition stage-- neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilised to show off his outlandishnes in the strangest possible manner. His education was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate.

metaphor vs. image

from Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958) trans. Maria Jolas (1964)

Now a metaphor gives concrete substance to an impression that is difficult to express. Metaphor is related to a psychic being from which it differs. An image, on the contrary, product of absolute imagination, owes its entire being to the imagination. Later when I plan to go more deeply into the comparison between metaphor and image, we shall see that metaphor could not be studied phenomenologically, and that in fact, it is not worth the trouble, since it has no phenomenological value. At the most, it is a fabricated image, without deep, true, genuine roots. It is an ephemeral expression. It is, or should be, one that is used only once, in passing. We must be careful, therefore, not to give it too much thought; nor should the reader think too much about it. And yet, what a success the drawer metaphor has had with Bergson's followers!

Contrary to metaphor, we can devote our reading being to an image since it confers being upon us. In fact, the image, which is the pure product of absolute imagination, is a phenomenon of being; it is also one of the specific phenomena of the speaking creature.

god is a brainless dad

from George Saunders, "The 400-Pound CEO":

I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a barinless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a a need for love, and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked, and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.

what is in the work

from Andre Dubus, Finding a Girl in America (1980)

Typed on a sheet of paper, thumbtacked to the wall over his desk, was this from Heart of Darkness:

No, I don't like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself, not others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

A woman had to know that: simply know it, that was all. He did not need praise from her, he rarely liked to talk about his work, and he had no delusions about it: he liked most novels he read better than he liked his own. But the work was his, and its final quality did not matter so much as the hours it demanded from him. It made the passage of time concrete, measurable. It gave him confidence, not in the work itself, but in Hank Allison: after a morning at the desk, he had earned his day on earth. When he did not work, except by choice, he disliked himself. If these days occurred in succession because of school work, hangovers, lack of will, sickness, he lost touch with himself, felt vague and abstract, felt himself becoming whomever he was with.

the heathen land of texas

from John Graves, Goodbye to a River (1959)

[Describes local atrocities near the Brazos of waged by settlers versus non-Comanche natives]. It is unlikely that his little ugliness lighted the fuse to the main powder keg, because the main powder keg was labeled "Comanche," and he hadn't ventured to touch them. But he set a pattern for other settlers like him, and it seems that more were like him than were like, say, Robert Neighbors. Many more . . . And The People themselves were getting restive, resentful of the white encroachment on so much good land and grass and water, and covetous of the big, fast, American riding stock. That was the year they massacred the Cambren and Mason families in Jack County just to the north, the first real bloodiness of its kind in the area. Companies of white Rangers, official and otherwise, were organized and began vengefully to track war parties and stolen stock across the wild prairies.

Things were shaping up. Old Sam Houston the Raven, ally of all Indians by tepee marriage and temperament, hurled objections from the southern seat of government but got nowhere. "I agreed," Austrian George Erath wrote in his memiors--he knew the Brazos country--"I agreed, but I said that no man would dare tell them so unless he wanted to be hanged, and that if he, Houston, went up there preaching peace, they would hang him."

Houston was the one who sadly, somewhere along the line, said there was no solution. He said that if he could build a wall across Texas which would keep all the Indians securely to the west, the God-damned Texans would crawl over it from their side. . . . He was right. The Brazos whites finally organized a full-scale attack on the Lower Reserve, the peaceful Indians. Because of the firmness of the army commander there, and the unexpected backbone of the Indians themselves, it came to nothing; but in 1859, Robert Neighbors had to lead an official removal of all Indians from Texas, farmers and fighters alike, up across the Red and into the Territory. After he had them there, he sent Washington a bitter message:

I have this day crossed all Indians out of the heathen land of Texas and am now out of the land of the Philistines. If you want to have a full description of our exodus, see the Bible where the children of Israel crossed the Red Sea. We have had the same show, only our enemies did not follow us to Red River.

When he returned south, one of the truly decent men of his time and place, he was immediately shotgunned down by a drunken Indian-baiting Irishman, whom he had never before seen, in the street at Fort Belknap up the Brazos. It had something to do with his having spoken out against the murder of some Reserve Indians, or, some say, with his having accused the Irishman's brother-in-law of stealing horses and letting the Indians take the blame. There was a lot of that, then and later. . . .

rilke's angels

from Rainer Maria Rilke, "The First Elegy" in Duino Elegies (1923)

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
. . .
Oh, and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space
gnaws at our faces. Whom would it not remain for--that longed-after
mildly disillusioning presence, by which the solitary heart
so painfully meets. Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breath; perhaps the birds
will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

from Robert Hass, "Looking for Rilke," in Twentieth Century Pleasures

The angels embody the sense of absence which had been at the center of Rilke's willed and difficult life. They are absolute fulfillment. Or rather, absolute fulfillment if it existed, without any diminishment of intensity, completely outside of us. You feel a sunset open up an emptiness inside you which keeps growing and growing and you want to hold onto that feeling forever; only you want it to be a feeling of power, of completeness, of repose: that is the longing for the angel. You feel a passion for someone so intense that the memory of their smell makes you dizzy and you would gladly through yourself down the well of that other person, if the long hurtle in the darkness would then be perfect inside you: that is the same longing. The angel is desire, if it were not desire, if it were pure being. Lived close to long enough, it turns every experience into desolation, because beauty is not what we want at those moments, death is what we want, an end to limit, and end to time.

boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience

from Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" in Illuminations

If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places--the activities that are intimately associated with boredom [artisanal forms of labor]--are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost when the stories are no longer retained. It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to. The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of his work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself. This, then, is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled. This is how today it is becoming unraveled at all ends after being woven thousands of years ago in the ambiance of the oldest forms of craftsmanship.

crowning his life

from  James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime

They lie on their sides. The clock is ticking. The metal of the heater cracks like glass. Downstairs the Corsicans are talking. Their passionate voices echo through the stairwell. The street door closes.

"Wait a minute," he whispers.

She is on top of him.

"I don't have anything."

"It's alright," she says.

"Are you sure?"

She is struggling. He is in agony.

"Anne-Marie?"

"Si!" she insists. He half releases her, half guides.

It begins slowly, his hands on her waist. It seems he is crowning his life.

the dick, like, claimed all of my attention

from "Signifying Nothing" in David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Here is a weird one for you. It was a couple of years ago, and I was 19, and getting ready to move out of my folks' house, and get out on my own, and one day as I was getting ready, I suddenly get this memory of my father waggling his dick in my face one time when I was a little kid. The memory comes up out of nowhere, but it is so detailed and solid-seeming, I know it is totally true. I suddenly know it really happened, and was not a dream, even though it had the same kind of bizarre weirdness to it dreams have. Here is the sudden memory. I was around 8 or 9, and I was down in the rec room by myself, after school, watching TV. My father came down and came into the rec room, and was standing in front of me, like between me and the TV, not saying anything, and I didn't say anything. And, without saying anything, he took his dick out, and started kind of waggling it in my face. I remember nobody else was home. I think it was winter, because I remember it was cold down in the rec room, and I had Mom's TV afghan wrapped around me. Part of the total weirdness of the incident was that, the whole time, he did not say anything (I would have remembered it if he said anything), and there was nothing in the memory about what his face looked like, like what his expression looked like. I do not remember if he even looked at me. All I remember was the dick. The dick, like, claimed all of my attention.