…and with his erratic, irregular gait, as if he had pebbles in his shoes, he would make his way to dissolute Avenida Floral, that impertinent ramshackle avenue with its little rusting houses, where prostitutes, transsexuals, and young homosexuals stood leaning, shielded by the lampposts’ dim light, and the food carts and the little windows of the stores. Immune to the air, the cold, the fear, Katzuo crossed the gas station goaded on by delight, approached the open lots, and stationed by the wall, there in the street, hallucinatory, he stared captivated…
Augusto Higa Oshiro, The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, tr. Jennifer Shyue
There is something new on those particular blocks of Market or Telegraph—in good lighting, of course, when the danger radar isn’t going off. The weird ease of knowing what kind of trash you are, that it’s exactly the trash one is supposed to find in these neighborhoods.
Thank you emotion, I’m ready for the recollected in tranquility part now.
The sun’s chariot never gets too high these days. I think there’s not enough feed for the horses.
When melancholy comes down feather-light, not enough to tip the scale, that’s the sweet spot. A cat in a sunbeam, that’s all I am. The bliss of an empty hour. Watching motes vector in 3-space, squandering God’s gifts. Like some other things Dante had to come down hard on.
BREACHED FOR GOOD
And broached too, I guess.
I like the songs on the Cindy Lee record and the lo-fi production has its aura, but my sticking point is how rhythmically sloppy the playing is. The thing about the Motown girl groups was, whether or not the muse had visited the songwriters that day, you could count on the backing band for a groove. Yes modern recording software makes it trivial to snap to the grid, yes the human touch etc., but if you don’t have access to those particular session musicians I think you have to work around it somehow. It feels like a much bigger deal than vocal fragility, which is easy to love. In this genre at least.
The first section of Je Tu Il Elle, where she’s eating sugar out of a paper bag, is about the best post-Beckett routine I’ve seen, and in the context of the whole film maybe the most hopeful.
Nous n'irons plus au bois,
Les lauriers sont coupés…
Sautez, dansez,
Embrassez qui vous voudrez
Readers have long noted the copious references to drinking in Tao’s poems: the first known editor of Tao’s works, Xiao Tong (501-531), wrote that “there are those who have doubts about Tao Yuanming’s poetry, since wine is present in each poem.” Xiao then opined that “I, however, think that his true intentions do not lie in wine; rather, he made his mark through wine.”
[...]
啸傲东轩下
聊复得此生I whistle complacently from the eastern veranda,
Somehow having found my life again.—Wendy Swartz, “Pentasyllabic Shi Poetry: Landscape and Farmstead Poems,” in How To Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology, ed. Zong-Qi Cai
Coming back east over the bridge, dusk was powder blue, high and low. The hills so pale. The hour of vanishing sun can be a bad one, especially when it comes so early; but the light in the park had been so gorgeous before that J. asked me what drugs I was on. I can’t even use them any more. The thing people try to crack open that way, I think it’s breached for good.
Samhain’s Hangover
The season of the witch in review:
All the narrators want autonomy. When they get it, all they want is to squander it on love. They’re clear-eyed on the humiliation of that. They understand the cyclical cosmology: that any affair, given time, will become the thing from which the affair was supposed to free them. This knowledge helps very little.
What is the aim of philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. A play-by-play of the fly-bottle: is that the aim of art? Verisimilitude isn’t always the thing. Susan Minot’s 400-page contribution would have made a good short story.
Annie Ernaux does it best because sparest. This subject matter leaves you grasping after any trace of form, intelligence, lucidity. O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown, etc., but with Ernaux you’re never actually in doubt that it’s going to right itself.
Confidential to Miranda July: a woman doing Philip Roth is not any less obnoxious than Philip Roth just because it’s a woman doing it.
Queerness is present in most of these books but as a sidelight: a passion that is not the governing passion, or represented by a daughter or friend. A gesture at a broader canvas, but also comparative reassurance: it’s not like they have it any better.
Children in these books are unsolved problems. All of the mothers protest their love. Something about the structure of the protest is not right.
Rachel Cusk (not pictured) ends up more appealing than most of these because the narrator of the Outline trilogy is post-crisis and in many ways post-eros: it may still come up in her life but not as a terrible god. The divorce story, whatever it was, is complete, and has left her with as much autonomy as any of us could hope for. Reassuring to think it’s possible. And that the use of this autonomy, as far as we can see it, is not to lay claim to anyone, nor to exercise any power, but just to observe.
It got better. How come?
Standing with one foot on the pier and one foot on a boat departing, the arc of my stride widened, and I grew new bones.
...viewers, as Akerman said in an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma, “divide themselves into two camps: some say it is a very sad film, others find that it gives energy, that it makes you want to go out, that it produces a kind of cocaine effect. When I see it, I feel that too: it makes me want to live strongly [vivre fort].”
It wasn’t cocaine but I felt it pulling me toward the side of life. I also think that just about any movie in the right mood is that kind of Rorschach, which is why I spent decades finding them all sad in the same monotonous way. The world was always at the same distance, held off behind the same pane, transparent and impassable; so what could the silver screen deliver but a mockery of that condition? Now, well, it’s different. I guess slow cinema is like what they say about Antoni Tàpies and the conjuring trick; you know the conjuror didn't actually make the card disappear, you know all the artist did was glue some rope onto the canvas. You have to want to be led along. And these days I do want to be led along. That article quoting Lacan on desire and lack actually seems meaningful—the final stage of degeneration, I’m sure.
The devil’s new October. Everything has a fever. I am too pure for you or anyone
But the Trader Joe’s clerk was kind to me. Appreciated my help with the bagging. Someone else liked my hair. World of blessings, dream kingdom, day after day—
“You have much gold upon your head,”
They answer’d all together:
“Buy from us with a golden curl.”
And I was given fruit to eat.
Later, he dropped me off at the pension. I walked through the moonlit garden, went up the stone staircase, took a shower, and wrote copy until I fell asleep, with the feeling of leading “a full life.”
—Elif Batuman, Either/Or
