“Mr. Glowry used to say that his house was no better than a spacious kennel, for everyone in it led the life of a dog. Disappointed both in love and friendship, and looking upon human learning as vanity, he had come to a conclusion that there was but one good thing in the world, videlicet, a good dinner; and this his parsimonious lady seldom suffered him to enjoy: but, one morning, like Sir Leoline in Christabel, ‘he woke and found his lady dead’, and remained a very consolate widower, with one small child.”

(Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey, chapter 1, p. 2.)

“[William Carlos Williams] saw all the little magazines, from Others to This Quarter, and before and after them, as one single magazine, ‘a continuous magazine . . . with an absolute freedom of editorial policy and a succession of proprietorships that follows a democratic rule’. Take the little magazine away, he wrote, and a prominent support is cut from under the poet, and for years he may get nothing into print; ‘loose ends are left dangling, men are lost’, he wrote in true sorrow, ‘promises that needed culture, needed protection and wit and courage to back them simply die’.”

(Kay Boyle, p. 173 in Robert McAlmon & Kay Boyle, Being Geniuses Together.)

“He was working on Ulysses at the time and often would make appointments to read rather lengthy extracts of what he had most recently written. Probably he read to me about a third of the book. It was impressive to observe how everything was grist to his mill. He was constantly leaping upon phrases and bits of slang which came naturally from my American lips, and one night, when he was slightly spiffed, he wept a bit while explaining his love or infatuation for words, mere words. Long before this explanation I had recognized that malady in him, as probably every writer has had that disease at some time or other, generally in his younger years. Joyce never recovered. He loved particularly words like ‘ineluctable’, ‘metempsychosis’ – grey, clear, abstract, fine-sounding words that are ‘ineluctable’ a bit themselves.”

(Robert McAlmon, in Robert McAlmon & Kay Boyle, Being Geniuses Together, p. 26.)

“Where was it written that you were obliged to recite the catechism of all things seen? My father would have to be selective or he wouldn’t be able to live with himself, as the expression puts it. All these memoirs he read with faltering interest and smarting eyes had been selected from other stuff, and if God was the only realistic artist, as Camus said, then why compete? Yet I could tell that some absolute of memory taunted him, as if not to remember the all insulted memory itself, but how could you snub memory, that random exchange of fluctuating chemicals ever under the duress of the so-called present? It haunted him nonetheless, maybe because he thought he would be the only survivor, Ishmael of the Somme, deputed to do duty on Remembrance Day as if Woodcock and Race did not exist and never had. I tried to coax myself into tracing my father’s mental processes year after year, noting how, of what he elected to remember, nothing fell away, but stuck there like the images in some altar-screen, all encrusted paint and holy permanence.”

(Paul West, My Father’s War: A Memoir, pp. 152–3.)

“Beauty’s simultaneity with the pure fire of living poetry is outside contemporary critical interest. The professional discipline of literary scholarship tends to dismiss Jonathan Edwards’ religious intensity as embarrassingly outmoded. Mention his name and the title of one sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is sure to follow; that is usually that. In 2008 we see through speculative knowledge and are unwilling to embrace the imaginative and aesthetic crossing he makes between our material world – the world of types – and the spiritual world as it actively flows from revelation into human history. For Edwards, new truths are suggested through inspiration, but such light is only understood and revealed int he Word of God; it can’t be given without the Word. This Calvinist minister who spent his life in the eighteenth-century Connecticut River Valley, and didn’t write in verse, had the imagination of a poet. He believed that precise word choices, when disciplined into becoming bare embodiments of ideas, would become the source or occasion of conceptual discovery.”

(Susan Howe, “Choir Answers to Choir: Notes on Jonathan Edwards and Wallace Stevens,” pp. 52–53 in the Chicago Review 54:4.)

“[Alighiero] Boetti was just about to embark on his major work of the early ’70s, the compilation of a list of the world’s one thousand longest rivers, which would be published as a book in 1977. It may not be immediately apparent that this was a huge undertaking in geographical research, calling not for consultation with available reference works but for extensive inquiries with scientific institutes around the world. As Anne-MArie Sauzeau-Boetti wrote in the book’s preface, of the various ways of comparing rivers according to size, that of length is ‘the most arbitrary, the most naive, but even today the most common.’ Any true measurement of a river’s length, as Sauzeau-Boetti points out, is rendered ambiguous by ‘its meanders and its passages through lakes, its branching around islands or displacements in the delta, by human intervention along its course, by the ungraspable limits between fresh and saltwater.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.’ Boetti’s task in compiling his list of the thousand longest rivers was to give an apparently logical and scientific structure to an obsession, an irrational project – to produce a disinterested contribution to knowledge that would be not only useless but perhaps not even really knowledge. One wants to ask, as a narratorial voice in Ulysses does of its hero, ‘What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?’ And to answer, as did its oddly Whitmanesque interlocutor: ‘Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level.’ ”

(Barry Schwabsky, “Imaginary Itineraries: Alighiero Boetti’s Dossier Postale,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter, vol. 26 no. 3 (July–August 1995), p. 91.)

“— And I hear this and I start thinking, What is my child thinking?; now, for the first time, I need to know what my child is thinking; for what are his or her thoughts if not my own – though purified, and stripped of inessentials; that, for me, had been a reason to have a child: to be able to think again, but anew, afresh, displaced; after all, it is called conception; until now, I haven’t wanted to communicate with my child through anything even approximating language; all through my first months of pregnancy, I was glad to dispense with literal meaning, to free myself from the restrictions of verbal significance; then I could just listen, and hear what my child – my self – was telling me without words; and there was much that I heard; but no longer: now I want to hear what my child would like to say – what he or she would want to say; in an excess of significance I had waited 5 years before agreeing to conceive, following the California Organic Growers’ Association guidelines for reconversion of soil; it was foolish, I knew all along, but I needed it: I needed some objective metric; now, again, I need some objective metric: I want to know what my child is thinking; I can no longer rely on an absence of meaning: I have been betrayed by silence and interpretation; now I want to know what my child is thinking; I am terrified of unmeaning—”

(Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook, p. 419.)

“. . . I suppose, though, it’s just another expression of the inherent sadness of sound, of sound’s defective essence; after all, sound is so perishable: it’s no more than a nudging of air, a fragile sequence of crests and troughs – soft, ripply, rounded like Mallomars, and perilously dependent on its medium; it’s so different than light, which has hardness, and beaminess, and eternality; sound just dissolves, it radiates away into emptiness, resolving its curves into formlessness and passing through the atmosphere into directionless space; and this, too, is a sadness; for so much is lost; so much is lost; in fact, I can practically see the process happening right now, standing where I am – up here, on the roof; for up here, on my roof, looking towards the darkening sky, I can almost see the world’s endless dusts of sound silently dispersing – all of them powerlessly unfurling against the distant clouds, dissolving into the leveling night . . . ; and so, up here, with darkness descending, and with the breeze at my back, I plant my feet against the edges of a few sturdy slates, and get back to work, wondering what new things I’ll be able to pull in, with my antenna, so well anchored:”

(Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook, p. 58.)