Book MemeWhat was the last book you bought?
Sue Hubbell's A Book of Bees.
Name a book you have read MORE than once
Irene Gonzalez-Frei's Your Name Written on Water.
Has a book ever fundamentally changed the way you see life? If yes, what was it?
Yes...John Ashbery's April Galleons.
How do you choose a book? eg. by cover design and summary, recommendations or reviews
I usually make an impulsive, yet as it turns out, astute, selection by the cover...like Robert Olen Butler's Severance. Otherwise, I hear about the author through various media sources.
Do you prefer Fiction or Non-Fiction?
Fiction, because we live it.
What’s more important in a novel - beautiful writing or a gripping plot?
Beautiful writing. That being said, the first presents the latter in the form of images, word associations, probable coincidences.
Most loved/memorable character (character/book)
When I survey my deformation by degrees I think of Heathcliff from Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Maybe it is the petulant child, rather than being dealt the blows, dealing them. What can I say? A very violent book.
Which book or books can be found on your nightstand at the moment?
Among them: Kardong's Vertebrates: Comparative Anatomy, Function, Evolution 3rd ed. I live for the distraction that is feather growth or air-breathing fishes and I fantasize in The Lonely Planet: Morocco (2006).
What was the last book you’ve read, and when was it?
Haruki Murakami's After Dark, cover to cover in one night, one week ago. I am in the middle of John Fowles's The Magus.
Haruki Murakami's After Dark, cover to cover in one night, one week ago. I am in the middle of John Fowles's The Magus.
Have you ever given up on a book half way in?
Yes, I cannot appreciate Chuck Palahniuk, although I have experienced this before. Some books are waiting for a new phase of my life to open before revealing themselves to me.
Yes, I cannot appreciate Chuck Palahniuk, although I have experienced this before. Some books are waiting for a new phase of my life to open before revealing themselves to me.
21 comments:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20340
Yes.
http://www.art-and-archaeology.com/timelines/rome/empire/vm/villaofthemysteries.html
Henri Cole proves that it is still relevant:
"Self-Portrait as Four Styles of Pompeian Wall Painting"
First Style
To become oneself is so exhausting
that I am as others have made me,
imitating monumental Greek statuary
despite my own feminized way of being.
Like the empire, I was born of pain--
or like a boy, one might say, for I have
become my father, whom I cannot fathom:
the past is a fetish I disdain.
Since they found the bloodless little girl,
with voluptuous lips, buried in me,
I am unsentimental. I do not see
the gold sky at sun but blackbirds hurled
like lavastones. I am like a severed
finger lost in the wreckage forever.
Second Style
Unable to care for people, I care
mostly for things. At my bitterest,
I see love as self-censorship.
My face is a little Roman theater
in perfect perspective--with colonnades
and landscapes--making illusionistic
reference to feelings I cannot admit.
Painted in Dionysiac yellows and reds,
my unconscious is a rocky grotto
where flies buzz like formalists.
Despite myself, I am not a composite
of signs to be deciphered. In the ghetto--
where Jews, prostitutes and sailors once lived--
I am happiest because I am undisguised.
Third Style
Tearing away at an old self to make
a new one, I am my most Augustan.
I grieve little. I try to accustom
myself to what is un-Hellenized and chaste.
I let my flat black dado assert itself
without ornament. Can it be, at last,
that I am I--accepting lice clasped
to me like a dirty Colosseum cat?
On a faded panel of Pompeian red,
there's an erotic x-ray of my soul:
a pale boy-girl figure is unconsoled,
pinned from behind at the farthest edge
of human love, where the conscience is not whole,
yet finely engraved like a snail's shell.
Fourth Style
If great rooms declare themselves by the life
lived in them, each night I am reborn
as men and boys stroll among the ruins,
anonymously skirting the floodlights,
sinking into me tenderly, as they do
each other during their brief hungry acts.
"As brief as love," they used to say, Plato
and his kind, exiling man from happiness,
but I am more than a cave whose campfire,
swelling and contracting, is all that is real
Tomorrow, when I am drunk on sunlight,
I will still feel the furtive glances,
the unchaste kisses and the wet skin
imprinting me until I am born again.
http://books.google.com/books?id=OxW6UIOpO2UC&pg=PA76&dq=In+this+sense,+then,+Joan+of+Arc+is+too+early+in+her+claim+that+her+experience+should+stand+as+a+means+to+secret+knowledge+of+the+divine.&hl=en&sa=X&ei=CwLLUo7rD4bfsASmpoLQDQ&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA
Bice Benevenuto's Concerning the Rites of Psychoanalysis: Or the Villa of the Mysteries (1994) is in the mail.
"Ábel loved her. She was 'the other world' as he called her, and he loved her because she spoke softly and attached herself to them, to both of them, to father and son, with all the inexhaustible and ruthless love of the barren and constructed her life around them. [...] Later Ábel wondered if Etelka nursed some feelings for his father, if there had been a time when there was more than she let on in her heightened devotion to him. But no one ever spoke of that. [...] Only the sensation of waiting remains embedded in the nerves." (Márai trans. Szirtes, 19).
"'Tibor' asked Ábel. His throat was dry.
The cobbler stepped into a chamber of the cellar that was hidden by a curtain. 'I slept here at his feet,' he said and waved in the direction of a box bed with drawers under it. [...] That's where I heard, more than once, my son shout out the first name of young Master Prockauer. A person only calls to someone else in his sleep when he is suffering. I have no way of telling what caused my son to suffer in his sleep so that he should cry out the young gentleman's name" —The Rebel trans. Georges Szirtes (2007)
The compulsion to repeat is the unconscious retracing traumatic patterns to dissolve their power, or poison as I am fond to say. It is not quite so determined; I often find it the case that the things I failed to understand demand review, and that is the only way of diminishing my responses to past subjects.
http://books.google.com/books?id=rXnMAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA73&dq=Beyond+the+Pleasure+Principle+%22%27unpleasure+for+one+system+and+simultaneously+satisfaction+for+the+other%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=pmwGVMzmIIe_igK03YHYDQ&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Beyond%20the%20Pleasure%20Principle%20%22%27unpleasure%20for%20one%20system%20and%20simultaneously%20satisfaction%20for%20the%20other%22&f=false
http://www.mediahistory.umn.edu/timeline/1900-1909.html
To be referenced for some time.
To think, I thought that a September birthstone meant you were born in that month, then April, then May; there, the construct of astrology evolves, rather than collapses.
Yes, I seem to have accrued here (not unlike a compound eye) the subject of an art history paper, a poem over bouillabaisse that sprayed into the interlocutor's eye, interspliced with the maternal birthstone, and "my father, whom I cannot fathom". Oh yes, the book, Severance, which was placed on the shelves of the adjoining office, as a procedure before the real one. I have a terrible dread of being held to account for that. You do remember, that office, with the faded bulletin board, next to hers? I did not know how to enter it, though I remember nearly every detail of the office hour, where I like to think that I write a better draft than the one you perused, now.
The relief is always fugitive, of not wanting to return anywhere where the wrong steps were made. I hope to have acquired the clarity and humility to face all of them.
Let it be said, I liked Balzac before Ashbery. He had me at "Sarrasine", which is clunky, with the Swedenborgian spirit vapors that I normally like. I should say that Roland Barthes's reading of "Sarrasine" cultivated my interest in all of Balzac, that, and reproducing the Divine Comedy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQUYz2ONlwI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n9r7JbKR2A
https://books.google.com/books?id=JX7jSSdbwZAC&lpg=PA22&dq=%22the%20etheric%20body%20with%20its%20seven%20chakras%2C%20which%20we%20all%20possess%2C%20to%20show%20the%20reality%20of%20kundalini%22&pg=PA22#v=onepage&q=%22the%20etheric%20body%20with%20its%20seven%20chakras,%20which%20we%20all%20possess,%20to%20show%20the%20reality%20of%20kundalini%22&f=false
http://www.levity.com/alchemy/alcbirds.html
Spirit duplicator, or Ditto machine purple aniline ink; I scared myself (not to mention this retainable confession) that when attending a lady's problem I found purple ink. My guess is that it was the transfer of the applicator dye for sometime, after being retrieved from the very back of the now emptied bathroom closet, where they were stored.
Three great stories:
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2013/09/first-pictures-hydrogen-bonds-unveiled-afm
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2015/01/flowing-rivers-mercury
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2015/04/otto-schott-zeiss-glass-duran
A trio, from beyond the asteroid belt:
https://books.google.com/books?id=piXCBQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA20&dq=Venus%20Trines%20at%20Midnight%20%22Jupiter%20Prayer%20on%20Christmas%20Eve%22&pg=PA20#v=onepage&q=Venus%20Trines%20at%20Midnight%20%22Jupiter%20Prayer%20on%20Christmas%20Eve%22&f=false
"Saturn Seen from the Gesthesame in Late December"
Would you hear them just as clearly ring
if St. Michael's bell could not swing free
because the tower long ago was locked
_____or would your spring be robbed
_____of every promise?
Would you still see the garden's blazing glory
if sunset never told its sensual story
but hid behind the shadowed sorrow of the past
______or would Mori's castle crumble then, at last?
Can a barren winter bring the balm you seek
when its virgin snowflakes only kiss your cheek
then melt in tears?
Will you reach beyond these frozen midnight fears
heaven has refused to bless
with the peace that April rains release
______or will the bright and hopeful song you sing
soon cease?
Will I still find you here
as near
if you should guess
what loneliness cannot confess
while there are seven mountains yet to climb?
____________Yes
until the end of time
-Page 124-
https://books.google.com/books?id=piXCBQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA42&dq=Venus%20Trines%20at%20Midnight%20%22Venus%20in%20Virgo%20or%20Venus%20in%20Aries%22&pg=PA43#v=onepage&q=Venus%20Trines%20at%20Midnight%20%22Venus%20in%20Virgo%20or%20Venus%20in%20Aries%22&f=false
http://m.sciencesetavenir.fr/article/20150506.OBS8516/pompei-des-fresques-traitees-aux-antibiotiques.html#http://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1IrSciB&h=QAQFZR96A&enc=AZNGnfI3kVj7DwCfm21OSEjlf9uB0oFzGVIPtmxFqXM0wSnim__WTmP7-ipUXahC2pPAlpwPQJxJ7Qlz49A98KK7YQAXp_VcOpwv6Q8Uj85xuinJpw6peMhxKBpVMuxmAdrQD-2-CBlN-szLrGuQVI0s&s=1
Yes, I still want you. How do I let you know?
Same thing as last year, until time dictates.
Le terrain de sport
Florent Marchet
On était pas malins
Sans te prendre la main, on t'emmenait
Près du terrain de sport, cachés
On découvrait ton corps et très souvent
On perdait pas le Nord
Les yeux fermés et même en haut des cimes
Déçus, rien n'est sublime
Petit bateau à terre
Tes petits seins très clairs, on mélangeait
Le goût de la salive avec des parfums de lessive
Respiration prétendument lascive
Tes yeux qui flambent, des jambes qui nous animent
Au fond, rien n'est sublime
Les vapeurs de l'été
Nos mains précipitées, vers l'inconnu
Ça nous rendait plus forts, comme si,
Dans ton aéroport, jamais la vie
Pour nous ne s'évapore
Et toi tu semblais dire: "déchire, abîme!
En moi, rien n'est sublime"
On se parlait à peine
Mais le bruit de nos veines nous rappelaient
L'orgasme, la tempête
J'avais plus le goût à la fête
Alors, dégage! et remet tes lunettes
Tes yeux mouillés, la nuit qui s'illumine
Pourquoi rien n'est sublime?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwWqLAqROFo
Def. Tristesse, chagrin, état de dépression morale causé par quelque événement fâcheux.
Malgré l'air de navrement qu'elle avait pris, une joie luisait au fond de ses yeux étincelants. — (Émile Zola, Le Docteur Pascal, 1893)
Le désir est toujours là.
https://images.app.goo.gl/f2b1Ch2KnCbyuyNx9
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