Before I began life this time
I took a crash course in Counter-Intelligence
Once here I signed in, see name below, and added
Some words remembered from an earlier time,
“The intention of the organism is to survive.”
My earliest, & happiest, memories pre-date WWII,
They involve a glass slipper & a helpless blue rose
In a slender blue single-rose vase: Mine
Was a story without a plot. The days of my years
Folded into one another, an easy fit, in which
I made money & spent it, learned to dance & forgot, gave
Blood, regained my poise, & verbalized myself a place
In Society. 101 St. Mark’s Place, apt. 12A, NYC 10009
New York. Friends appeared & disappeared, or wigged out,
Or stayed; inspiring strangers sadly died; everyone
I ever knew aged tremendously, except me. I remained
Somewhere between 2 and 9 years old. But frequent
Reification of my own experiences delivered to me
Several new vocabularies, I loved that almost most of all.
I once had the honor of meeting Beckett & I dug him.
The pills kept me going, until now. Love, & work,
Were my great happinesses, that other people die the source
Of my great, terrible, & inarticulate one grief. In my time
I grew tall & huge of frame, obviously possessed
Of a disconnected head, I had a perfect heart. The end
Came quickly & completely without pain, one quiet night as I
Was sitting, writing, next to you in bed, words chosen randomly
From a tired brain, it, like them, suitable, & fitting.
Let none regret my end who called me friend.

(via Claire)

Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper turning its pages on his bared knees.  Something new and easy.  No great hurry.  Keep it a bit.  Our prize titbit.  Matcham’s Masterstroke.  Written by Mr Philip Beaufoy, Playgoers’ club, London.  Payment at the rate of one guinea a column has been made to the writer.  Three and a half.  Three pounds three.  Three pounds thirteen and six.

Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column, and yielding and resisting, began the second.  Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently, that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone.  Hope it’s not too big bring on piles again.  No, just right.  So.  Ah!  Costive one tabloid of cascara sagrada.  Life might be so.  It did not move or touch him but it was something quick and neat.  Print anything now.  Silly season.  He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell.  Neat certainly.  Matcham often thinks of the masterstroke by which he won the laughing witch who now. Begins and ends morally.  Hand in hand. Smart.  He glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling his water flow quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and received payment of three pounds thirteen and six.

Ineluctable modality of the visible…

On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.

“Enquiries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths.”

Steven Millhauser on the state of the short story vis-à-vis novels, from the New York Times.

The novel is insatiable—it wants to devour the world.  What’s left for the poor short story to do?  It can cultivate its garden, practice meditation, water the geraniums in the window box.  It can take a course in creative nonfiction.  It can do whatever it likes, so long as it doesn’t forget its place—so long as it keeps quiet and stays out of the way.  “Hoo ha!” cries the novel.  “Here ah come!”  The short story is always ducking for cover.  The novel buys up the land, cuts down the trees, puts up the condos.  The short story scampers across a lawn, squeezes under a fence.

David Sedaris on Undecided voters.

Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I’ve never been able to start or finish anything.  Granted, granted I’m a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are.  But what’s to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble—that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground

…As Imagined by Famous Directors.

Suddenly the sky goes very dark, the Kung Fu Panda feels his pulse quicken, and “Embraceable You” plays in the background.  The Kung Fu Panda dreams that he makes love to Girl Panda.  She asks him to hit her and he does, raising his paw against the numbing ignorance of values-centric Middle America.

Words with no direct English translation fascinate me.  Like mamihlapinatapai.  Or l’esprit de l’escalier.  There are plenty of others, of course.

In Three Lines or Less, by Ben Joseph.

Moby-Dick
ISHMAEL:  I’m existential.
AHAB:  Really?  Try vengeance.
ISHMAEL:  I dig this dynamic.  Can we drag it out for 600 pages?