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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Barbelith Commonplace Thread

  
  

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unheimlich manoeuvre
21:53 / 27.08.03
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

...

Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn & every Night
Some are Born to sweet Delight.
Some are Born to sweet Delight,
Some are born to Endless Night.
We are led to Believe a Lie
When we see not Thro' the Eye
Which was Born in a Night to Perish in a Night
When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light.
God Appears & God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in the Night,
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day.



Auguries of Innocence by William Blake. The quote by GPotP thankfully prompted a reread.
 
 
straylight
05:22 / 28.08.03
I cannot find my Wind in the Willows but ever since I was very small I have loved the bit about how there is nothing, absolutely nothing, like messing about in boats.

But my favoritest quote these days is too long for here, so I will post only the very beginning:

"I," she told him, "can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe."

The whole thing is, self-indulgently, of course, here:
 
 
Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless
18:35 / 30.08.03
Thomas Pynchon does Blackadder III- from Mason and Dixon- Mason chatting up a floozy at the hanging of Lord Ferrers. The whole episode is superb, like Hogarth in words, but is a couple of thousand words long, so here is a butchered bit.


. . .Orange-girls and beggars, ale-pots, gaming in the Dirt, purses wafted away, glances intercepted, dogs bravely a-prowl for Scraps, as hungry Blademen for Dogs, Buskers wandering and standing still, with a Wind from the Gallows bringing ev’ry sigh, groan and Ejaculation over the heads of the crowd to settle upon their hearing like Ash upon the Hats of spectators at a Fire, the Day wraps and fondles them as Mason and the temporarily heedless beauty move together through the crowd, till they reach a Barrow with Awnings rigg’d against the Sun. “Wine!” cries she “oh let’s do!”
“This Chateau Gorce looks interesting,” says Mason, “although, as the day is mild, perhaps a chill’d Hock would be more . . .apropos”
“If not de Rigeur,” she replies.
“But of course, Cherie.” They laugh at the Piquance of these Mots, and sip Wine as the imbecile Peer goes along toward his Doom,- till some kind of problem arises with the new Trap-door Arrangement, today’s being its first Use at any publick Proceeding.
“These frightful Machines!” she pretends to lament, “-shall our Deaths now, as well as our Lives, be rul’d by the Philosophers, and Army of Mechanicks?”
“That Trap’s probably over-constructed,” Mason has already blurted, “hence too heavy, and bearing sidewise upon the Lever and Catch,-”
He notes a sudden drop in the local Temperature.
“You are. . . a man of Science, then?” looking about, tho’ not yet with Panick
“I am an Astronomer,” Mason replies
“Ah. . .existing on some sort of Stipend, I imagine. How. . .wonderful. . .I’d taken you for one of the better sort of Kiddy, the way you were turn’d out, quiet self-possession, I mean, one is usually able to tell-, alas, ‘tis just as Mr. Bubb Dodington warn’d me,- ‘Florinda,’ said he, ‘you are too young to be able to appreciate men either in their wide diversity, or for the pitiable simplicity of what they really want. Can you guess what that is, my Wren?’ His Wren. Well,- it might’ve been one thing, mightn’t it,-and then again-“
 
 
Jack Vincennes
16:19 / 01.09.03
"Mr Atwater," I said, "do I understand that you are the man who killed my father?"
"Don't put it that way, Mr Plant. I feel sore enough about it... I want to start again, somewhere else."
I interrupted him, frigidly I thought. "And why, precisely, have you come to me?"
But nothing could disabuse him of the idea that I was well-disposed. "I knew I could rely on you," he said. "I've got a pal who went out to Rhodesia; I think it was Rhodesia. Somewhere in Africa, anyway... All I need is my passage money - third class, I don't care, I'm used to roughing it these days - and something to make a start with. I could do it with fifty pounds."
"Mr Atwater," I said, "have I misunderstood you, or are you asking me to break the law by helping you to evade your trial and also give you a large sum of money... And our sole connection is the fact that, through pure insolence, you killed my father."
"Oh well, if you feel like that about it..."
"I am afraid you greatly overrate my good nature."
"If that's how you'll take it, I'm sorry I ever came. It's typical of the world," he said, rising huffily. "Everyone's all over you till you get into a spot of trouble. It's 'good old Arthur' while you're in funds. then, when you need a pal it's 'you overrate my good nature, Mr Atwater'"

From The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh, which I appear to be endorsing as though I bought shares in the thing. If that were an option, I would do so. It is entirely wonderful.
 
 
Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless
22:34 / 06.09.03
Lawrence Durrell, from The Alexandria Quartet (Justine as I recall). Very 1940s and very much worth reading, especially for the multiple-perspective narrative and the interesting Levantine characters. This bit always reminds me of 40s movies.

Alexandria Main Station: midnight. A deathly heavy dew. The noise of wheels cracking the slime-slathering pavements. Yellow pools of phosphorous light, and corridors of darkness like tears in the dull brick façade of a stage set. Policemen in the shadows. Standing against an insanitary brick wall to kiss her goodbye. She is going for a week, but in the panic, half-asleep I can see that she may never come back. The soft resolute kiss and the bright eyes fill me with emptiness. From the dark platform comes the crunch of rifle butts and the clicking of Bengali. A detail of Indian troops on some routine transfer to Cairo. It is only as the train begins move, and as the figure at the window, dark against the darkness lets go of my hand, that I feel Melissa is really leaving; feel everything that is inexorably denied—the long pull of the train into the silver light reminds me of the sudden long pull of the vertebrae of her white back turning in bed. ‘Melissa’ I call out, but the giant sniffing of the engine blots out all sound. She begins to tilt, to curve and slide; and quick as a scene shifter the station packs away advertisement after advertisement, stacking them in the darkness. I stand as if marooned on an iceberg. Beside me a tall Sikh shoulders the rifle he has stopped with a rose. The shadowy figure is sliding away down the steel rails into the darkness; a final lurch and the train pours away down a tunnel, as if turned to liquid.
 
 
Mourne Kransky
18:03 / 20.09.03
From Last Chance To See by Douglas Adams (and Mark Carwardine). Taking the piss with tears in his eyes:

The kakapo’s pernickety dietary requirements are a whole other area of exasperating difficulty. It makes me tired just to think of them, so I think we’ll pass quickly over all that. Imagine being an airline steward trying to serve meals to a plane full of Moslems, Jews, vegetarians, vegans and diabetics when all you’ve got is turkey because it’s Christmas time and that will give you the idea.

The males therefore get extremely overwrought sitting in their bowls making noises for months on end, waiting for their mates who are waiting for a particular type of tree to fruit. When one of the rangers who was working in an area where kakapos were booming happened to leave his hat on the ground, he came back later to find a kakapo attempting to ravish it. On another occasion the discovery of some ruffled possum fur in the mating area suggested that a kakapo had made another alarming mistake, an experience which is unlikely to have been satisfying to either party.

The net result of all these months of excavating and booming and walking and scrarking and being fussy about fruit is that once every three or four years the female kakapo lays one single egg which promptly gets eaten by a stoat.

So the big question is: How on earth has the kakapo managed to last this long?

Speaking as a non-zoologist confronted with this bird I couldn’t help but wonder if nature, freed from the constraints of having to produce something that would survive a great deal of competition, wasn’t simply making it up as it went along. Doodling in fact. "How about sticking this bit in? Can’t do any harm, could be quite entertaining."
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
19:58 / 16.10.03
One of the many reasons why Rupert Thomson rocks...

Later there would be no way to bring this close again or make it seem real. Memory is a museum. Events mounted on pedestals, faces in Perspex boxes, emotions behind looped red ropes. Everything temperature-controlled, sealed off, out of reach. Looking only. No touching. That alone is distancing enough but sometimes, after a difficult journey, you arrive at the bottom of the steps, those grand stone steps with lions sprawled on either side, and you look up and the museum is closed. New hours, renovation work, an obscure public holiday. There is nothing for it. You turn away.

...from "Dreams of Leaving".
 
 
HCE
15:59 / 15.12.03
A number of good bits from Kathy Acker's book 'about' Colette Peignot and Georges Bataille, My Mother: Demonology. She really is unlike anyone else.

"I hadn't decided to become a person. I was almost refusing to become a person, because the moment I was, I would have to be lonely. Conjunction with the entirey of the universe is one way to avoid suffering."

"Once I had fucked, the only thing I wanted was to give myself entirely and absolutely to another person. I didn't and don't know what this desire means other than itself."

"I started writing you because I believed that if we told each other everything, there could be only trust between us. Then we wouldn't be able to hurt each other so much that we destroyed each other's lives."
 
 
HCE
17:23 / 16.12.03
David Rattray as quoted in Chris Kraus' I Love Dick:

"Whenever someone makes a breakthrough into honesty, that means not just self-knowledge but knowledge of what others can't see. To be honest in a real absolute way is to be almost prophetic, to upset the applecart. Because after all, the applecart is just an endless series of indigestible means and social committments that are useless and probably shouldn't even be honored and futile pointless conversations, gestures, finally to die abandoned, treated like a piece of garbage by people in white coats who are no more civilized than sanitation workers... that's what the applecart means to me."
 
 
Bed Head
00:11 / 20.12.03
One should not race along the Sacred Walk in a motor-car - it is sacrilege. One should walk, walk as the men of old walked, and allow one’s whole being to become flooded with light. This is not a Christian highway: it was made by the feet of devout pagans on their way to initiation at Eleusis. There is no suffering, no martyrdom, no flagellation of the flesh connected with this processional artery. Everything here speaks now, as it did centuries ago, of illumination, of blinding, joyous illumination. Light acquires a transcendental quality: it is not the light of the Mediterranean alone, it is something more, something unfathomable, something holy. Here the light penetrates directly to the soul, opens the doors and windows of the heart, makes one naked, exposed, isolated in a metaphysical bliss which makes everything clear without being known. No analysis can go on in this light: here the neurotic is either instantly healed or goes mad. The rocks themselves are quite mad: they have been lying for centuries exposed to this divine illumination: they lie very still and quiet, nestling amid dancing coloured shrubs in a blood-stained soil, but they are mad, I say, and to touch them is to risk losing one’s grip on everything which once seemed firm, solid and unshakable. One must glide through this gully with extreme caution, naked, alone, and devoid of all Christian humbug. One must throw off two thousand years of ignorance and superstition, of morbid, sickly, subterranean living and lying. One must come to Eleusis stripped of the barnacles which have accumulated from centuries of lying in stagnant waters. At Eleusis, one realises, if never before, that there is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy. At Eleusis one becomes adapted to the cosmos.


...because its dark and cold and horrid and wet outside, I’ve decided to make my first post in the Books forum a sun-scorched blast from Henry Miller, ranting his way up a hill on a sunny day in The Colossus of Maroussi. I just like the way the words sound, I can’t judge it for accuracy, as I’ve never been to Greece or seen Mediterranean light. But I don’t think that really matters, as I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Miller never went there either.

In fact, it’s probably very inaccurate as a description of all things Greek. But I’ll also always love the book for leading me to try Retsina and Olives, both of which I’ve since become quite fond of.
 
 
HCE
15:30 / 17.01.04
creeley/eros

and one night I said to her, do you
and she didn’t.
 
 
Topper
19:12 / 03.02.04
Couple things from Norman Mailer's "This Spooky Art," a collection of his writings on writing.

There is no answer to the problem of how a young writer can pick up experience. If you search for it but are able to quit the experience if it gets too hot for you--then such a controlled adventure can be good conceivably for a magazine piece, but it's not necessarily there for bringing you to that deeper level of writing that young scriveners aspire to.

I learned to write by writing. [by college graduation he did 30-40 short stories, a couple plays, a couple novels] This is perhaps more important than brooding sensitively on one's life and the life of others.

It's the life you can't escape that gives you the knowledge you need to grow as a writer. [referring to his stint in WWII as opposed to working in a mental hospital which he quit after one week]
 
 
Olulabelle
09:54 / 08.02.04
A little bit from What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt. It's bits that made me sigh and think 'I wish I had written that.' And really what I'd like to do is to quote the whole book since it's so lovely, but that would be utterly pointless and much more than the required 300 words.

***

Like everyone, Bill rewrote his life. The recolllections of an older man are different from those of a young man. What seemed vital at forty might lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory manterial that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odours, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

***

Apparently, Teenie retained a few scruples, a dim moral code that condemned what she called 'bad stuff' but the badness of that stuff seemed to be determined by its effect on her rather than its lack of adherence to broader ethical sanctions. She couldn't remember her conversation with Bill because she had been drugged, and by her own lights, this made her amnesia both natural and excusable. Teenie belonged to a subculture where the rules were lax and permission was broad, but as far as I could tell it was also surprisingly bland. If Mark and Teenie were any indication, these kids had little fervour. they weren't Futurists glorifying the aesthetics of violence or anarchists advocating liberation from the reigns of law. they were hedonists I suppose, but even the taking of pleasure seemed to bore them.

***

"The truth is," she said, "we all have a man and a woman inside us. We're made from a father and a mother, after all. When I'm looking at a beautiful , sexy woman in a picture, I'm always both her and the person who's looking at her. The eroticism comes from the fact that I can imagine I'm him looking at me. You have to be both people or nothing will happen."
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
14:46 / 02.08.04
As I've just reread this for the nth time, and it contains possibly my favourite start to a book ever:


Into the face of the young man in the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog looks which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French. One of hte things which Gertrude Butterwick Had impressed upon Monty Bodkin when he left for this hoilady on the Riviera was that he must be sure to practise his French, and Getrude's word was law. So now, though he knew that it was going to make his nose tickle, he said:

'Er, garcon'
'M'sieur?'
'Er, garcon, esker-vous avez un spot de l'encre et une piece de papier - note-papier, vous savez - et une enveloppe and une plume?'
'Ben, m'sieur.'

The strain was too great. Mnty relapsed into his native tongue.

This is from PGWodehouse's The Luck of The Bodkins. I love it for many of the reasons I love W's work, the sparkling use of language and his skill at evoking a certain type of comedic Englishness. I love the 'Franglais'.

And as I've just found an old blog post, a few more choice Wodehouse phrases to illustrate what a wonderful stylist he is:

1. The unpleasant, acrid smell of burnt poetry


2. Aunt calling aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps

and

3. She looked like something that might have occurred to Ibsen in his less frivolous moments
 
 
HCE
22:26 / 17.08.04
my favorite Wodehouse bit has to be about a child looking 'like a homicidal fried egg'
 
 
Jack Vincennes
15:23 / 18.08.04
Sometimes I wonder why I read books which are not by PG Wodehouse.

This one from Ted Heller's Slab Rat, which I am currently re-reading. It's making me as happy as it did the first time, which is inordinately happy for an entirely fluffy book about magazine publishing:

Willie says, "Zeke thinks that underneath the massive white glacier of Leslie there churns a seething volcano just waiting to erupt in a violent spasm of heat, lust and desire."
"You think that?" Oliver asks me.
"Yeah, I do."
"I really would doubt that. Underneath that massive white glacier there churns another massive white glacier."

Which looks even sillier written here, but it's already been read aloud this re-reading and I still feel the need to share it...
 
 
TeN
15:59 / 18.08.04
"Almost everybody I know is insane. They have been concealing it with degrees of success for a long time. They are calm during explosions and I can tell that they don't want to be. I heard the craziest thing about someone I know but I can't write it down because that would be bad. So here I am, in the woods."
- Stanley Donwood, "Explosions"

The funny thing is that that's the entire story.
 
 
Chiropteran
17:44 / 19.08.04
Two bits from Harriet the Spy (Louise Fitzhugh):

[two 11-year old girls, Harriet and Janie, in Janie's bedroom lab]

"Hey, Janie, if you were going to slit somebody's throat, wouldn't you do it in the dead of night?"

"I'd poison them." Janie didn't even turn around.

I bet you would, thought Harriet. "But, Janie, they'd just trace the poison."

"Not the one I've got."

"Did you make a new one?"

"Yes."

Harriet went back to her notebook.

[and a little later, with Janie's obnoxious mother...]

"Talked to your mother the other day. Has Janie told you about dancing school? Your mother's all for it and I am too. You girls need a few graces, you know, turning into young women any day now, don't want to be clumps on the dance floor, nothing more embarassing than a wallflower. Your mother's worried about the way you move, Harriet. And she suddenly focused on Harriet, waking her out of a reverie.

"Fast," Harriet said, "that's the way I move, fast. What's wrong with that?"

Beautiful chills. Love it. I'm actually reading the book for the first time right now - for work, of all things.

~L
 
 
Nobody's girl
14:42 / 20.08.04
The first chapter of Ben Okri's book The Famished Road is a beautiful vision of paradise. I'm not sure this passage will do it justice, but it's the passage I love the most.

With our spirit companions, the ones with whom we had a special affinity, we were happy most of the time because we floated on the aquamarine air of love. We played with fauns, the fairies, and the beautiful beings. Tender sibyls, benign sprites, and the serene presences of our ancestors were always with us, bathing us in the radiance of their diverse rainbows. There are many reasons why babies cry when thay are born, and one of them is the sudden separation from the world of pure dreams, where all things are made of enchantment, and where there is no suffering.
The happier we were, the closer was our birth. As we approached another incarnation we made pacts that we would return to the spirit world at the first opportunity. We made these vows in fields of intense flowers and in the sweet tasting moonlight of that world. Those who made such vows were know among the Living as abiku, spirit-children.
 
 
the cat's iao
05:13 / 28.08.04
We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy contact. This is another lie. We are only seeing Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our own primeval past. At the same time there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us--that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence--then we don't like it any more.

Stanislaw Lem reveals some of the dark/shadow aspects of human nature via one of the characters in his novel Solaris.
 
 
Benny the Ball
21:59 / 28.08.04
I have none of my books available at hand, all in storage. But I love in The Man Who Was Thursday by G K Chesterton the chapter that is all about the two men devising a signal method, using tiny hand gestures and facial tics, to communicate with each other in secret. It's pure quality, with one of the characters getting more and more into it, until he has devised such an absurdly complex method of communicating that they argue about the syntax and structure of what they are saying.

I haven't explained it very well, but the whole book is gloriously well written, and this scene just sticks in my mind as a particular favourite.
 
 
Topper
15:06 / 02.09.04
That is an exceptional passage, Cat's Iao. I've seen the movie (the version with Clooney) but now I'll have to look for the book as well.

Here's a piece from Twain's A Tramp Abroad:

[Twain visits France, and is asked to be the second in a duel.]

He [the opposing second] fished out of his vest pocket a couple of little things which I carried to the light and ascertained to be pistols. They were single-barreled and silver-mounted, and very dainty and pretty. I was not able to speak for emotion. I silently hung one of them on my watch chain, and returned the other. My companion in crime now unrolled a postage-stamp containing several cartridges, and gave me one of them. I asked if he meant to signify by this that our men were to be allowed but one shot apiece. He replied that the French code permitted no more. I then begged him to go on and suggest a distance, for my mind was growing weak and confused under the strain which had been put upon it. He named sixty-five yards. I nearly lost my patience. I said,--

"Sixty-five yards, with these instruments? Squirt-guns would be deadlier at fifty. Consider, my friend, you and I are banded together to destroy life, not make it eternal."

.
 
 
HCE
15:46 / 17.12.04
quickness of hand in the velvet glove
and my whole heart under your hammer

--dylan thomas

such gorgeous stuff
 
 
HCE
21:00 / 18.01.05
perhaps the immobility of the things around us is imposed on them by our certainty that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our mind confronting them

proust
swann's way
 
 
Bastard Tweed
23:28 / 08.02.05
DORA: I should very much like a very long vacation, a vacation to some place where no one has formed the higher concept of "vacuum cleaner," or "dish washing" or "ironing board." I think this place ought to be visually hyposensitive, like certain of the cold, dry valleys of Mars, or Antarctica, for that matter; and be an ecological exacta of hysteron-proteron. An edenic idyll of hydrophane, where fruits abound, vice is sweetly ignored, and our faithless wonder in other people's fatuity bars the hangman as surely as it beckons to colorful birds like macaws and toucans, lorries, parrots and lorikeets as they dodge and sway, high above the vine-canopy, the coral sea and our own wind-slathered fields of automatic, self-harvesting wheat. I feel a proper paradise ought to be perpetually self-correcting, a reflexive, introspective perpetuum mobile rather like Plato's Republic, only with people like me, roughly, on top. People with my tastes, roughly, on top. People with my tastes, temper, sensitivity and degree of education. Nothing more or less would be pleasant.

Oh my. Identity is a hellish burden. I'm completely fed up with the whole thing. Parenting, wifing, the PTA, the Democratic Party (liberalism), the Republican Party (conservatism), then the party of Ross Perot (geezer politics), highways, house paint, salad bowls, exercise machines, aerobics, lack of exercise, the Garden Club, license plates, television, night-vision, VCRs, robot cheese, coathangers, paperclips, other people, romance novels, mystery novels, novels period, other people, anything that is packaged in a safe way for children, garbage bags full of stuff, empty garbage bags, garbage, bags, sunglasses, reading glasses, glasses, glass, other people, not being able to see, toothpaste, oil for the skin, oil for salad, cooking oil, gasoline, oil companies, hospitals, smells that remind one of hospital smells, illness, pain, the suffering of others, the pleasure of others, other people.
The trap of being something definite.
A woman in the middle of her life surrounded by people who feel nothing.
An embarassment of cliches.

-The Hyacinth Macaw

A monologue from a play by Mac Wellman, one of the foremost American playwrights in what's left of the avant garde theatre scene. He weaves these bedevilingly cunning word tapestries that, in the hands of a competent actor, take your mind from bizarre linearity spiraling out into panoplic fields of abstraction without stopping for breath (your mind that is, the actor does have to stop for breath every now and then). He's one of my utmost favorites.
 
 
Shrug
17:28 / 18.09.05
Doris Lessing
Briefing for a Descent into Hell

"Nothing from police. No reports of any small boats, yachts or swimmers unaccounted for. Patient continues talking aloud, singing, swinging back and forth in bed. He is excessively fatigued. Tomorrow: Sodium Amytal. I suggest a week’s narcosis.
August 17th Doctor Y.

I disagree. Suggest shock therapy.
August 18th Doctor X.

Very hot. The current is swinging and rocking. Very fast. It is so hot that the water is melting. The water is thinner than usual, therefore a thin fast rocking. Like heat-waves. The shimmer is strong. Light. Different textures of light. There is the light we know. That is, the ordinary light let’s say of a day with cloud. Then, sunlight, which is a yellow dance added to the first. Then the sparkling waves of heat, heat-waves, making light when light makes them. Then, the inner light, the shimmer, like suspended snow in the air. Shimmer even at night when no moon or sun and no light. The shimmer of the solar wind. Yes, that’s it. Oh solar wind, blow, blow, blow, blow my love to me. It is very hot. The salt has caked my face. If I rub, I’ll scrub my face with pure sea salt. I’m becalmed, on alight, lit, rocking, deliriously delightful sea, for the water has gone thin and slippery in the heat, light water instead of heavy water. I need a wind. Oh solar wind, wind of the sun. Sun. At the end of Ghosts he said the Sun, the Sun, the Sun, the Sun, and at the end of When We Dead Awaken, the Sun, into the arms of the Sun via the solar wind, around, around, around, around, around….

Patient very disturbed. Asked his name: Jason. He is on a raft in the Atlantic. Three caps Sodium Amytal tonight. Will see him tomorrow.
Doctor Y."


When Lessing categorises the book as "Inner-space fiction. For there is never anywhere to go but in" in the preface I though I might like this book. But I never expected to love it so much. There's an enjoyable immediacy to the writing, a balanced rhythmic flow to it, cadences intuitive and associations surprising. I have alot of affection for how diverse the journey is, how passionately and disturbingly imagined it is, some of which I think is captured in the above passage. Without wishing to entertain hyperbole; the skewed journey, the wit, the horror, battle against normalcy in BFADIH truly is one of the best things I've ever read.
 
 
Mistoffelees
10:13 / 19.09.05
First sentences of Kafka´s stories are always great fun to read:

Liebster Vater,
Du hast mich letzthin einmal gefragt, warum ich behaupte, ich hätte Furcht vor Dir. (Brief an den Vater)

Als der sechzehnjährige Karl Roßmann, der von seinen armen Eltern nach Amerika geschickt worden war, weil ihn ein Dienstmädchen verführt und ein Kind von ihm bekommen hatte, in dem schon langsam gewordenen Schiff in den Hafen von New York einfuhr, erblickte er die schon längst beobachtete Statue der Freiheitsgöttin wie in einem plötzlich stärker gewordenen Sonnenlicht. (Amerika)

Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet. (Der Prozeß)

Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwnadelt. (Die Verwandlung)

In den letzten Jahrzehnten ist das Interesse an Hungerkünstlern sehr zurückgegangen. (Ein Hungerkünstler)
 
 
matthew.
23:45 / 19.09.05
So, I thought I'd hit you people with a quote that fits even this very thread, this very forum, these very readers. From Robertson Davies, one of Canada's (my country) favourite writers of all time. From the Salterton Trilogy, here goes:

She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose. Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines -- not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master's call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality. Solly was in a measure a victim of this unscrupulous passion, but Freddy was wholly in the grip of it.
 
 
Mistoffelees
08:01 / 20.09.05
You should read The Dumas Club by Arturo Perez-Reverte. That novel is about people who really are obsessed with books, rabid collectors. The way they are described and how they talk about their passion is in the same vein as your quote.

Polanski made a movie about half of the book (The ninth gate). But the book is very different from Polanski´s movie (it´s not occult thriller).
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
16:31 / 20.09.05
Man with a golf ball heart

They set about him with a knife and fork, I heard
and spooned it out. Dunlop, dimpled, perfectly hard.
It bounced on stone but not on softer ground - they made
a note of that. They slit the skin - a leathery,
rubbery eyelid thing - and further in, three miles
of gut or string, elastic. Inside that, a pouch
or sac of pearl-white balm or gloss, like Copydex.
It weighed in at the low end of the litmus test
but wouldn't burn, and tasted bitter, bad, resin
perhaps from a tree or plant. And it gave off gas
that caused them all to weep when they inspected it.

That heart had been an apple once, they reckoned. Green.
They had a scheme to plant an apple there again
beginning with a pip, but he rejected it.

Simon Armitage, from the Dead Sea Poems
 
 
imaginary friend on the phone
18:50 / 20.09.05
Born at sea in the teeth of a gale
the sailor was a dog
Scuppers was his name

From Scuppers the sailor dog

The peacful rythem of a zen koan, in the opening lines of a storybook about an anthropamorphic dog
 
 
Mourne Kransky
20:12 / 20.09.05
Then Moominpappa went round and shut all the doors and shutters and hung a mosquito net over the chandelier so that it wouldn't get dusty.

Then everyone crept into his bed and, making a cosy nest for himself, pulled his blanket over his ears and thought of something nice. But Moomintroll sighed a little and said:
'I'm afraid we shall waste an awful lot of time.'

'Don't worry,' answered Snufkin, 'we shall have wonderful dreams, and when we wake up it'll be spring.'

'Mm-m,' mumbled Moomintroll sleepily, but he had already drfited away into a hazy dream world.

Outside the snow fell, thick and soft. It already covered the steps and hung heavily from the roofs and eaves. Soon Moominhouse would be nothing but a big round, snowball. The clocks stopped ticking one by one. Winter had come.

Tove Jansson Finn Family Moomintroll
 
 
Quantum
12:53 / 21.09.05
I struggled for an hour yesterday to find the translation of Rilkes Panther I remember from my childhood, but eventually deleted the post as too low quality for this thread. Here's a (poor IMO) translation of the first verse;


'Der Panther
Im Jardin des Plantes, Paris

His gaze from going through the bars
is grown so weary that it sees no more.
To him it seems there are a thousand bars
and behind a thousand bars no world.'



And here's another beginning I have always loved-

'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog's blanket and the tea-cozy. I can't say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring--I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. Though even that isn't a very good poem. I have decided my poetry is so bad that I mustn't write any more of it.'
I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
 
 
Bed Head
22:46 / 28.03.06
A passage from ‘Pitch Dark’, by Renata Adler. I've got a bit of a schoolgirl pash for this book, from the cool, wonderfully clever-yet-hopelessly-tangled-up authorial voice right down to the rather swoonsome photo of the author on the back, but! more than anything else about it, I find paragraphs from it keep bobbing to the surface from time to time. So:


Here’s what I think is wrong with boring people to no purpose. It’s not just that it corrupts their attention, makes them less capable, in other words, of being patient with important things that require a tolerance, to some greater purpose, of some boring time. The real danger lies, I think, in this: that boredom has intimately to do with power. One has only to think of hypnosis, of being mesmerised. Monotony, as a literal method of enthrallment. So this claim to find art in boredom, for its own sake or as one of the modes of alienation, is not simply a harmless misunderstanding, which finds it avant garde to stupify. Deliberate, pointless boredom is a kind of menace, and a disturbing exercise of power. Of course, that is not always our problem here.
 
 
Shrug
19:48 / 29.03.06
A snippet from "A Severed Head" by Iris Murdoch.
The way the succint but beautiful descriptive passage smoothly swerves to an outcry of existential worry made me swoon.

********************

I was beginning to feel sick again. I walked on under Waterloo Bridge and saw through the tilting, slightly lifting, mist the long gracious pillared façade of Somerset House. Receding, swaying, variously browned and greyed, it seemed like a piece of stage scenery. Below it upon the river, clear yet infinitely soft and simple as in a Chinese print, two swans sailed against a background of watery grey light, swept steadily downstream in the company of a dipping branch of some unidentified foliage. They receded, turning a little, and disappeared. I walked on, and then paused by the parapet looking out to where in the much-curtained distance the great form of St Paul’s must be. I could now just descry the warehouses directly opposite across the river, their fronts touched by diffused but increasing intimations of sunlight. The task of peering through the mist was becoming exasperating and painful. I cannot see, I cannot see, I said to myself: it was as if some inner blindness were being here tormentingly exteriorised. I saw shadows and hints of things, nothing clearly at all.

*******************

And earlier, Honor's overwhelming presence practically emanates from the page.

********************

Something strange happened in that instant. As I turned to look at her she seemed transfigured. Divested of her shapeless coat she seemed taller and more dignified. But it was her expression that struck me. She stood there in the doorway, her gaze fixed upon the golden pair by the fire, her head thrown back, her face exceedingly pale; and she appeared to me for a second like some insolent and powerful captain, returning booted and spurred from a field of triumph, the dust of battle yet upon him, confronting the sovereign powers whom he has now ready if need be to bend his will.
 
  

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