November 2011
15 posts
“Yet, he said, it is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the...”
– W. G. Sebald, “Austerlitz.” (via redcolornewssoldier)
My plan? To get a copy of this book in French, and slowly read it at night on the Chemin de Compostelle. I did the same thing when I walked the Camino de Santiago two years ago, but with a Spanish edition, of course. Hmm. Does this count as a...
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“They feed back exactly what is given to them. Because they do not believe in...”
– Joan Didion, from the essay ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ (1967), in which she reported on the young people moving en masse to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, to drop out and ‘turn on’. It seems to me Didion, in her own haughty manner, is saying (almost) the...
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“What is my loftiest ambition? I’ve always wanted to throw an egg at an...”
– Oliver Herford.
I owe this quote to one of my students, who opened their writer’s journal with this, and a hand-drawn image of a merino sheep. I live for these moments of levity.
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Bygone Conclusion: A corolla of shining feathers →
garbandier:
There is a sudden haunting whiteness to the south. It seems to hover on the shining surface of the sea. Then it descends, and comes closer. It is a barn owl. He glows in the last sunlight, like burning snow, a white incandescence casting a black shadow. He flies quickly through the cooling dusk of…
Oh, J.A. Baker.
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It is so strange to think that I have now outlived Emily Brontë, who died at about 2pm on a winter’s afternoon in her 31st year.
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A review, in haiku (4)
Underworld
Is the gun loaded? Cicadas. The roof tar melts. No, he says. And smiles.
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“A single seraphic word. You can examine the word with a click, tracing its...”
– Don DeLillo, Underworld. Last lines.