- There’s a long piece about Stanley Crawford’s garlic farm in the NYTimes “Home” section. This is maybe more attention than Stanley Crawford has ever received in the Times?
- Barbara O’Brien’s Operators and Things is evidently back in print.
- How did I miss that there’s a filmed version of Gravity’s Rainbow? A. O. Scott reviews it in the Times; it’s showing in Brooklyn.
Category Archives: commonplace
the end of the world
“One morning around ten o’clock an immense fist appeared in the sky above the city. Then it slowly unclenched and remained this way, immobile, like an enormous canopy of ruin. It looked like rock, but it was not rock; it looked like flesh but it wasn’t; it even seemed made of cloud, but cloud it was not. It was God, and the end of the world. A murmuring, which here became a moan, there a shout, spread through the districts of the city, until it grew into a single voice, united and terrible, rising shrilly like a trumpet.”
(Dino Buzzati, “The End if the World,” trans. Lawrence Venuti, p. 7 in Restless Nights.)
artificial intelligence, italian style
“ ‘Excuse me,’ said Olga, interrupting her. She turned to her husband. ‘Does she speak too? The machine, I mean.’
‘Not in the normal sense, no. It doesn’t know languages. We’ve been firm about that. It would have been fatal if we’d taught it a language. Speech is the greatest enemy of mental clarity. Through wanting to express his thoughts in words at all costs, man has got himself into such a mess that—’ ”
(Dino Buzzati, Larger Than Life (1960), trans. Henry Reed, p. 72)
something you have never thought about
“Anyone whom God has given a fate of continuous encounters with Evil has been dealt a terrible blow, though Catholics, of course, don’t make the best example. For Catholics, Evil lies finally and exclusively in the absence of the Pleasures, whereas Protestants furnish a truer measure of the portent of really believing in the Devil, sometimes hanging him by the neck, sometimes cutting off his head, sometimes burning his body with billions of fiery sparks on a modernly invented chair. So, a terrible destiny has been allotted to people who have been thrown by God or their own ambitions (this is not yet clear) into continual conflict with perversity. But have you ever given a thought to the desperate plight of Perversity or Wickedness itself, deprived for virtually mathematical reasons of all possible struggle with itself, or of flight from itself, and therefore condemned to the constant horror of its own desperate presence, this presence being nothing other than itself? No, that’s something you have never thought about.”
(Anna Maria Ortese, The Iguana, pp. 92–3, trans. Henry Martin.)
the daring colloquialisms of modern slang
“ ‘I must be patient, by the Lord! of course I must . . . and I have been . . . Still, I mustn’t, either, show the energy of a jelly-fish!’
The journalist, who delighted in the daring colloquialisms of modern slang, need have had no fear of ever being credited with energy of that flabby sort.”
(Marcel Allain, Fantômas Captured, trans. A. R. Allinson (1926), p. 119)
noted
- William Gaddis (and his second wife Judith) evidently appeared as an extra in 1973’s Ganja & Hess, a cut-rate vampire movie. See him here, here, and here.
- A decent review of the new editions of Impressions of Africa and New Impressions of Africa at Open Letters Monthly.
- A newly translated (by Anne McLean) excerpt of Julio Cortázar’s From the Observatory at Agni.
- Amie Barrodale’s “William Wei” at the Paris Review.
papanek, still angry
“There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today. Industrial design, by concocting the tawdry idiocies hawked by advertisers, comes a close second. Never before in history have grown men sat down and seriously designed electric hairbrushes, rhinestone-covered shoe horns, and mink carpeting for bathrooms, and then drawn up elaborate plans to make and sell these gadgets to millions of people. Before (in the ‘good old days’), if a person liked killing people, he had to become a general, purchase a coal mine, or else study nuclear physics. Today, industrial design has put murder on a mass-production basis. By designing criminally unsafe automobiles that kill or maim nearly one million people around the world each year, by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breath, designers have become a dangerous breed. And the skills needed in these activities are carefully taught to young people.”
(Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, p. ix.)
two midwestern lists
“What far from average people have walked these streets, in old time! An angel like a hermaphrodite butterfly, a butterfly catcher, a Daniel Boone of the infinite, a finite Elijah, a herb doctor, Lot’s wife, many pastorals, many mechanics, clouded dreamers, a celibate breeder of horses, poor Yahoos, the Spirit of Nature, rational man, irrational man, patriarchs, undertakers. Nor does this list, inclusive as it seems, exhaust the possibilities of nineteenth-century salvationism, as expressed by two Utopias – the first, forerunner of a New Moral World, to encompass all nations and all governments. Two Utopias comprehended, within a half-mile square surrounded by a vast wilderness, past, present, and future, however abstrusely – the burning of Rome, city planning, explosion of stars, a new calendar, anarchy, a New Jerusalem, repression, expansion, moneyless Eden, exaltation of pearls, a three-hour working day, exaltation of horses, infinite regress, the united nations of earth, the many, the few, Lucifer, lotus-eaters, the falling of autumn leaves, the myths of Narcissus, good dentistry, many fictions. So that such perfectionist orders, which would have excluded much of mistaken life itself, with all its infinite variety.”
(Marguerite Young, Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias, p. 3.)
the truth about the opium lady
YOUNG
I knew an opium lady while I was a student at the University of Chicago, and with whom I spent much time, reading aloud the works of Shakespeare. That is how I worked my way through school.
INTERVIEWER
Who was she?
YOUNG
She had been under opium for about fifteen or twenty years and had not walked for at least ten years. She was one of the original patronesses of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, and of Jane Addams’s Hull-House. She was also a friend of Thornton Wilder, Harriet Monroe, and many of the other intellectuals of that day. I was with her during her opium dreams. I was with her when the golden bird, who was the spirit of Heroclitus, perched upon the bedpost. I was literally with her when she had a long conversation with the head of John the Baptist.
INTERVIEWER
After decapitation?
YOUNG
After decapitation. I was also there when she spoke with a little rabbit. I was with her when she entertained an imaginary elephant, and when blue fish would be floating over her bed. I began to write my novel quite unexpectedly. I had planned to write a biography of Toulouse L’Ouverture [sic], the Haitian rebel, but my publisher wanted me to write a novel . . . she was the most fabulous, single person I had ever known. I was interested in her for her dreams and her beautiful personality and surroundings.
INTERVIEWER
And the problems of opium addiction?
YOUNG
No. The doctors in her household were always rushing about with Elizabeth Barrett Browning letters to try to explain this beautiful opium lady who was their patient. She was like an Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whom, of course, I had read, along with DeQuincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. I had read Coleridge, too.
INTERVIEWER
So that you would understand her?
YOUNG
No. All this was in my background before I ever arrived. Her house was just right for a young poet. There couldn’t have been a better place. I was offered opium every evening. But I always said, “No, thanks,” and for that reason, she used to call me the “prosaic sprite,” because I didn’t need drugs to dream. I stayed with her most of the time. I was offered the bed in which Edna St. Vincent Millay had slept, when she was a visitor in Chicago, and the idea of sleeping in Millay’s bed—it would mean nothing to me now, but at that age . . . it seemed to be the most marvelous thing that could ever happen to any young person. On the opium lady’s bedside was a silver drinking cup which had belonged to John Keats, a little mosaic Persian letter set, and a beautiful bird with a sea shell. I have these things at my bedside now. Her daughter gave them to me when she died.
INTERVIEWER
You did not enter the opium lady’s dreams?
YOUNG
I do not think she dreamed about people. She dreamed about mandarins and human-sized blackbirds standing in the hallways, or invisible elephants. Adlai Stevenson—he may have known her, by the way—talked about the invisible elephant when he was running for office. I don’t know if he ever got a letter I wrote him, telling him about the invisible elephant in the opium lady’s dreams. He had the same idea: that the thing you think is not there may be there.
(Marguerite Young interviewed by Charles Ruas, Paris Review, “The Art of Fiction No. 66”.)
the problem of new york
“More disturbing than the well-known situation of commercial publishing is the possibility that the cost of living in New York discourages resident novelists from risking lengthy, time-consuming projects. The future of intellectually and aesthetically ambitious fiction is a huge and complex subject involving conglomerate publishing, new media, text technology, literary education, and literacy itself. That future is global, but I’ve come to believe that New York may well be the representative leading – and double – edge. New York nourishes home-grown writers such as Lethem and Whitehead, attracts writers from abroad such as O’Neill and McCann, and honors its elder, DeLillo. New York offers the eight million stories of the naked city and makes a few writers millions, but I fear that New York also tamps down novelists’ aesthetic ambitions, turns them into careerists of modest, consumable art – not minimalism or maximalism but medianism – that will allow them to continue publishing in and maybe living in Cosmopolis.”
(Tom LeClair, “Going Up, Falling Down”, EBR)