<= 2012.01 | up (archive) | none =>
Stanford, bicycle, night: the beautiful wrecks of the future fly past my head: is it because they're consciously built as monuments that I can only see them as wrecks?
The car that showed me its rear today was one of those cars so luxurious that I didn’t recognize the logo. The vanity plate had been “hacked,” possibly with electrical tape, to read
VC+E=IPO
Let us be clear: I know who’s been paying my bills lately. The structure is entirely open to view. After all, each link in the chain is so proud of its position.
This town and I have a limited half-life in combination.
i had no idea ecstasy was involved in IPOs.
E-HP=SLVTN
I wish you a happy Easter/Hanamatsuri: as for us, on the day᾿s tenth diaper change over a diaper rash caused by some GI ailment or other, something I read maybe fifteen years ago popped into my head:
“Work! work! with no thought for today, nor hope for tomorrow; only this is salvation.”
That’s a paraphrase. No idea what it’s from. Google has nothing. Ring any grim bells?
Autobibliography Approaches Middle Life
The best book I read in 2010 was Mandarins, a collection of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa stories translated by Charles De Wolf and put out by the culture stewards at Archipelago. My rudiment of Japanese gives me insight into no translations but the awful ones, but I think De Wolf has brought over something like the ultraviolet glow that shines through Maupassant (Akutagawa’s guiding light) or Babel (a fellow apostle). A brilliant comparative study of those three is waiting to be written, under some imaginary regime that encourages brilliant comparative studies.
The usual two stories that Kurosawa mashed into Rashōmon are passed over. What we get instead is a sampling to make one weep for the lack of an English complete works. They begin as careful miniatures, gain depth of field as they project back into history, and make a queasy last turn in the year of the author’s breakdown and suicide. The last piece, “Cogwheels,” has the same generic uncertainty as the Kafka papers—it is either fiction under unusual constraints, or the best-crafted diary entry in history—and stands as one of the century’s unmatched terror texts.
The best book I read in 2011, not my best year for reading, was László Krasznahorkai’s latest, now accessible in German as Seiobo auf Erden and forthcoming someday from New Directions as Seiobo Down Below. I love what’s been translated of his work from the eighties and nineties, but as a partisan I feel obliged to insist that it’s not all apocalypse... there is also the recent Krasznahorkai who has turned to writing about mathematics and Japanese gardens. These are stories, but the numbering is canny: they follow the Fibonacci sequence and are meant to be cumulative. The major players are Nō drama, Japanese shrines (Buddhist and Shinto both), and early Renaissance painting; also Baroque music, the Venus de Milo, Rublev icons, the Alhambra and Acropolis: that is, an attempt to cull a representative sample of anything that might count as an art object. (Also, there can be no complete account of the human relation to art objects without acknowledging the small agonies of scholarship and curation, and the great annoyances of tourism.) Pessimism and fatalism are still the governing humors, often appearing in the convulsive last turn of a twenty-page sentence; it’s obviously the work of the man who gave this interview. It conjoins art and madness again and again, not because madness is interesting in itself, but because it can’t imagine the mind for which art is not maddening.
A gunmetal labyrinth in the shape of a ring around the heart. I wanted to live outside structures, to go coextensive with their shadows. Now, inside the labyrinth, I take the left turn every time it appears. The left turn is the lucky one. To get in for good, or to get out for good.
Happy Valentine’s Day from genus Hallucigenia!
thats sick is this real or cgi?
burgess shale = my tweed-porn name.
The buses, serving the public, have banners with a shot of an infant on its back and the plea, “Always put me on my back to sleep”... it’s the vulnerability in the first person that’s so shattering.
Sometimes when I happen on the Stanford campus the air is yellow and dry, and eucalyptus leaves skitter by in the breeze, and I feel like Phlebas the Phoenician passing the stages of his age and youth in the whirlpool.
Wisława Szymborska, 1923-2012
Four in the Morning
The hour from night to day.
The hour from side to side.
The hour for those past thirty.
The hour swept clean to the crowing of cocks.
The hour when earth betrays us.
The hour when wind blows from extinguished stars.
The hour of and-what-if-nothing-remains-after-us.
The hollow hour.
Blank, empty.
The very pit of all other hours.
No one feels good at four in the morning.
If ants feel good at four in the morning
- three cheers for the ants. And let five o’clock come
if we’re to go on living.
(tr. Magnus J. Krynski, Robert A. Maguire)
Czwarta nad ramen
Godzina z nocy na dzień.
Godzina z boku na bok.
Godzina dla trzydziestoletnich.
Godzina uprzątnięta pod kogutów pianie.
Godzina, kiedy ziemia zapiera nas.
Godzina, kiedy wieje od wygasłych gwiazd.
Godzina a-czy-po-nas-nic-nie-pozostanie.
Godzina pusta.
Głucha, czcza.
Dno wszystkich innych godzin.
Nikomu nie jest dobrze o czwartej nad ranem.
Jeśli mrówkom jest dobrze o czwartej nad ranem
- pogratulujmy mrówkom. I niech przyjdzie piąta,
o ile mamy dalej żyć.
It's hard to choose, but I'd say three in the morning is worse, because it really is too early to get up and too late to fall asleep before dawn.
44! Magnum
Twelve years ago, when I had just started this blog and was writing a lopsided early draft of my set-theory novel, my desktop background was an allegorical Alphabeta Artis that I later lost, and never found the right Google terms for until tonight. It is pegged, finally, as the frontispiece to Athanasius Kircher’s Ars Magna Sciendi, Sive Combinatoria.
There is much to love here, but I especially like the eye and the ear. I am happy to take Kircher on as a lexically garbled ancestor. Among other achievements, he takes the time to write out the factorials all the way up to fifty.
my sister knew a fellow who would shout "shrinkage factorial!" whenever he had to wade through a river. it happened a lot?