February 2012
9 posts
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music time back way back
No 1 uses the old place names now they ben unspoak this long time but mos of them are stil there in the places. You know Cambry ben Canterbury in moufs long ago. Canterbury. It has a zanting in it like a tall man dantsing and time back there ben foun there girt big music pipes as big as fents poals peopl said. You try to think of how it musve soundit when the Power Ring ben there and working not...
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Robert Graves on mechanical prose
And from the inability to think poetically — to resolve speech into its original images and rhythms and re-combine these on several simultaneous levels of thought into a multiple sense — derives the failure to think clearly in prose. In prose one thinks on only one level at a time, and no combination of words needs to contain more than a single sense; nevertheless the images resident in words...
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They killed him entirely
A young man died after injuries received in a row, and his friend says:– ‘It is dreadful about the poor boy: they made at him in the house and killed him there; then they dragged him out on the road and killed him entirely, so that he lived for only three days after.’
P. W. Joyce, English As We Speak It In Ireland (1910)
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“There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of...”
– William James on the subject effects of nitrous oxide.
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Grammar and speech
It is not the business of grammar, as some critics seem preposterously to imagine, to give law to the fashions which regulate our speech. On the contrary, from its conformity to these, and from that alone, it derives all its authority and value.
George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776)
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The glimpse of a form
I begin with the glimpse of a form, a kind of remote island, which will eventually be a story or a poem. I see the end and I see the beginning, but not what is in between. That is gradually revealed to me, when the stars or chance are propitious. More than once, I have to retrace my steps by way of the shadows. I try to interfere as little as possible in the evolution of the work. I do not want...
January 2012
22 posts
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Renunciation of scientific past
When it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces, as a fit subject for professional scrutiny, most of the books and articles in which that paradigm has been embodied. Scientific education makes use of no equivalent for the art museum or the library of classics, and the result is a sometimes drastic distortion in the scientist’s perception of his...
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The old stone house
Nothing on the grey roof, nothing on the brown, Only a little greening where the rain drips down; Nobody at the window, nobody at the door, Only a little hollow which a foot once wore; But still I tread on tiptoe, still tiptoe on I go, Past nettles, porch, and weedy well, for oh, I know A friendless face is peering, and a clear still eye Peeps closely through the casement as my step goes by.
...
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The right answer
The Master once exposed his disciples by means of the following advice: He gave each of them a sheet of paper and asked them to write down the length of the hall they were in. Almost everyone gave flat figures like fifty feet. Two or three added the word “approximately”. Said the Master, “No one has given the right answer.” “What is the right answer?” they...
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Banana-skin pirouette and collapse
Nobody wants a motorcar till there are motorcars, and nobody is interested in TV until there are TV programs. This power of technology to create its own world of demand is not independent of technology being first an extension of our own bodies and senses. When we are deprived of our sense of sight, the other senses take up the role of sight in some degree. But the need to use the senses that...
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Sounds and smells of senior school
The girls on the Modern side were doing German and Spanish, which, when rehearsed between periods, made the astonishing noises of foreign stations got in passing on the wireless. A mademoiselle with black frizzy hair, who wore a striped shirt with real cufflinks, was pronouncing French in a foreign way which never really caught on. The science room smelt unevenly of the Canongate on that day of...
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“I sleep with my feet on moss carpets, my branches in the cotton of the clouds.”
– Anaïs Nin, Houseboat
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The spiritual hazards of cheese
I was home in suburban London in 1946 and back in the world of extramural studies when this weird, nocturnal visitation shattered my calm. I had no possible reason to expect so violent a disturbance; by my own subjective standards I was more than normal when I retired to bed that night. Perhaps I was overworked and a little worried, for I had a wisdom tooth that might prove impacted, but no...
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Storm in the west of Ireland
My mental pictures of wild Connacht weather would furnish a municipal gallery, each of them hugely framed in gilt and called something like ‘Tempest in Mayo’. The story the other night would have suited Turner to a T: in the fierce headlights of a friend’s minibus, it swarmed about us in flourishes of silver, in washes of ochre and umber. Only a minibus, driven with knowledge...
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A metronome of quilts
Tuesday had come down through Dundrum and Foster Avenue, brine-fresh from sea-travel, a corn-yellow sun-drench that called forth the bees at an incustomary hour to their day of bumbling. Small house-flies performed brightly in the embrasures of the windows, whirling without a fear on imaginary trapezes in the limelight of the sunslants. Dermot Trellis neither slept nor woke but lay there in his...
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Buster Keaton's use of space
[Buster] Keaton is never so great as when he manages to organise (to seize simply) the countryside into his overall design, giving, in a flashing surge of beauty, his personal vibration to the secret modulation of its lines, to its concrete harmony…
Jean-Patrick Lebel, Buster Keaton, English edition 1967
Keaton is probably the only comic who, apart from the classic race-chase,...
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Ringsend
To soothe that wild breast With my old-fangled songs, Till she feels it redressed From inordinate wrongs, Imagined, outrageous, Preposterous wrongs, Till peace at last comes, Shall be all I will do, Where the little lamp blooms Like a rose in the stew; And up the back-garden The sound comes to me Of the lapsing, unsoilable, Whispering sea.
from Ringsend (after reading Tolstoy) by Oliver St....
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A letter from C. S. Lewis
Remember that there are only three kinds of things anyone need ever do. (1) Things we ought to do (2) Things we’ve got to do (3) Things we like doing. I say this because some people seem to spend so much of their time doing things for none of the three reasons, things like reading books they don’t like because other people read them. Things you ought to do are things like doing...
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How thronged the soul
For moments together my heart stood still between delight and sorrow to find how rich was the gallery of my life, and how thronged the soul of the wretched Steppenwolf with high eternal stars and constellations.
Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf
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A lump of coal on the road
‘Dan,’ she said when she saw him stir. ‘D’you know what I was just thinking about? D’you remember the winter of the big freeze and you found a lump of coal on the road and brought it home and it turned out to be ice that was black with soot?’ ‘I remember it,’ he said. It was the only memory they ever resorted to. The ice had melted in the grate,...
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December 2011
12 posts
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You must change the whole pattern at once
There are too many complaints about society having to move too fast to keep up with the machine. There is great advantage in moving fast if you move completely, if social, educational, and recreational changes keep pace. You must change the whole pattern at once and the whole group together — and the people themselves must decide to move.
Margaret Mead, in Time magazine, 1954
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The Eye of Picasso
Formerly the eyes had been dissected, distorted, masked, hollowed out, uncovered so as to show their unfathomable depths or covered by the architectural facets of the head, but now this new freedom opened up new situations in which the eyes could become interchangeable with other features. An eye could become a mouth — a devouring eye with aggressive teeth instead of soft protective lashes. It...
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Woman in her own terms
I would like to convert the diary into a long novel. From it I have already borrowed the themes of Winter of Artifice and Under a Glass Bell. I do want to dramatize the conflicts of woman. Conflict between maternal love and creation. Between romanticism and realism. Between expansion and sacrifice. The conflicts of woman in present-day society. Theme of development of woman in her own terms, not...
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Gunshot wound
Fighting the pain only made it worse. Gambol paid attention to the pain, to its shape, its location, and its travels, and tried to stay relaxed. A doorbell rang. Voices spoke in another world, where people had thoughts worth voicing. Laughter. Silence. She came to him with a hypo and said, “The cavalry has arrived.” By this time the pain had conquered every physical part of him and...
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A hiding game
At first piecemeal, then point-blank, he let his attention be drawn to a little scene that was being acted out sublimely, unhampered by writers and directors and producers, five stories below the window and across the street. A fair-sized maple tree stood in front of the girls’ private school — one of four or five trees on that fortunate side of the street — and at the moment a child of...
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Woollen socks, woollen socks!
Shrinking Song Woollen socks, woollen socks! Full of colour, full of clocks! Plain and fancy, yellow, blue, From the counter beam at you. O golden fleece, O magic flocks! O irresistible woollen socks! O happy haberdasher’s clerk Amid that galaxy to work! And now it festers, now it rankles Not to have them round your ankles; Now with your conscience do you spar; They look expensive, and...
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Between me and the rising sun
Cobwebs Between me and the rising sun, This way and that the cobwebs run; Their myriad wavering lines of light Dance up the hill and out of sight. There is no land possesses half So many lines of telegraph As those the spider-elves have spun Between me and the rising sun.
Edith L. M. King
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Preparing to listen
Celia halted, raised her clasped hands though she knew his eyes were closed and said:
‘Will you please pay attention to this, tell me what it means and what I am to do?’
‘Stop!’ said Mr Kelly. His attention could not be mobilized like that at a moment’s notice. His attention was dispersed. Part was with his caecum, which was wagging its tail again; part with his...
November 2011
5 posts
4 tags
beneath what waves
Sleep
The ring and rim Of tidal sleep Will slip and creep Along my limbs And I shall watch, But never catch The final change, The water-plunge, And through what caves Beneath what waves I then shall go I shall not know, For I shall come From that lost land Half-blind, half-dumb, With, in my hand, A fish’s head, A shell, a shred Of seaweed and Some grains of sand. — A. S. J. Tessimond
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Casino in Vegas a light jump away
The floormen wear suits and expressions of feigned usefulness. The place pops with quick detonations of elation and anguish, money won and lost. The ceiling spits light and pretends not to know about the cameras that it not-so-secretly dangles. Security men crawl like cockroaches on catwalks hidden behind one-way mirrors. Chrome hemispheres eye the room tirelessly, showing it back to itself...
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Look what they do with the wind
And look what they do with the wind! At first sight, you, poor human being, think that the storm is playing with the birds, like a cat with a mouse, but soon you see, with astonishment, that it is the fury of the elements that here plays the role of the mouse and that the jackdaws are treating the storm exactly as the cat its unfortunate victim. Nearly, but only nearly, do they give the...
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The fault in Fichte's system
Late into the windy lamp-lit autumn night Jena’s students met to fichtisieren, to talk about Fichte and his system. They appeared to be driving themselves mad. At two o’clock in the morning Fritz suddenly stood still in the middle of the Unterer Markt, letting the others stagger on in ragged groups without him, and said aloud to the stars, ‘I see the fault in Fichte’s...