Category Archives: commonplace

a very mixing thing

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“It is a very queer thing this not agreeing with any one. It would seem that where we are each of us always telling and repeating and explaining and doing it again and again that some one would really understand what the other one is always repeating. But in loving, in working, in everything it is always the same thing. In loving some one is jealous, really jealous and it would seem an impossible thing to the one not understanding that the other one could have about such a thing a jealous feeling and they have it and they suffer and they weep and sorrow in it and the other one cannot believe it, they cannot believe the other on can really mean it and sometime the other one perhaps comes to realise it that the other one can really suffer in it and then later that one tries to reassure the other one the one that is then suffering about that thing and the other one the one that is receiving such reassuring says then, did you think I ever could believe this thing, no I have no fear of such a thing, and I’d is all puzzling, to have one kind of feeling, a jealous feeling, and not have a fear in them that the other one does not want them, it is a very mixing this and over and over again when you are certain it is a whole one some one, one must begin again and again and the only thing that is a help to one is that there is really so little fundamental changing in any one and always every one is repeating big pieces of them and so sometimes perhaps some one will know something and I certainly would like very much to be that one and so now to begin.”

(Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, p. 305 in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten.)

the mail

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“261. Letter. A letter is an unannounced visit; the mailman, the mediator of impolite incursions. One ought to have one hour in every eight days for receiving letters, and then take a bath.”

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, trans. Walter Kaufmann.)

scarry, for reference

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“Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.”

(Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, p. 3.)

craft

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“We live in a world, [Richard] Sennett argues, that singles out comparatively few for recognition, yet where we are endlessly assessed and judged. His solution is perhaps surprising: ‘The best protection I’m able to imagine against the evils of invidious comparison’, he writes, is

craftwork, and the reason for this is simple. Comparisons, ratings, and testings are deflected from other people into the self; one sets the critical standard internally. Craftwork certainly does not banish invidious comparisons to the work of others; it does refocus a person’s energies, however, on getting the act right in itself, for oneself. The craftsman can sustain his or her self-respect in an unequal world.”

(Tanya Harrod, “Why craft still matters”, p. 14 in the 26 October 2007 edition of the Times Literary Supplement.)

eccentricity

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“The commonest phrase overheard at an English club or dinner-table was that So-and-So ‘is quite mad.’ It was no offence to So-and-So; it hardly distinguished him from his fellows; and when applied to a public man, like Gladstone, it was qualified by epithets much more forcible. Eccentricity was so general as to become hereditary distinction. It made the chief charm of English society as well as its chief terror.”

(Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, chapter XIII, “Eccentricity”.)

magnificent stomachs

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“Whether we like it or not, our eyes gobble squares, circles, and all manner of fabricated forms, wires on poles, triangles on poles, circles on levers, cylinders, balls, domes, tubes, more or less distinct or in elaborate relationships. The eye consumes these things and conveys them to some stomach that is tough or delicate. People who eat anything and everything do seem to have the advantage of their magnificent stomachs.”

(Paul Klee, from The Thinking Eye, quoted in Lyn Hejinian’s “The Rejection of Closure” (1984).)

prepositions

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“We say: to write about a subject, to write on a subject, to write of something; also to write for and against something or someone; also to write by a certain light, and with the implement of our choice, and to our correspondents. About, on, of, for, against, by, with, to: is there a logic in this set of prepositions, or a logic in the set of missing ones, like around, in, into, at, inside, outside? Would it be possible, and if so what would it be like, to write around, or in, or into – to write around politics, write in compost preparation, write into love, write at fiction, write inside the genesis of the universe, write outside a friend? (Is there yet another logic or consistency in the set of prepositions that I haven’t been able to think of at this moment?) Writing around a subject or a person seems a promising possibility. The subject or addressee would play a role like the letter e in La Disparition – never appearing and at the same time figuring as an object or unrelenting attention, staring us in the face all the harder for never being named. Writing in might require participation in the subject at the moment of writing – in the case of compost preparation, here I am knee-deep in mulch. (All writing would be an act of writing in writing.) Writing into: discovery, aggressive curiosity. Writing at: against, or towards, or in haphazard approach. And writing inside – inside the genesis of the universe: where else can one be? It’s all so easy then. (Forget belief.) And writing outside: out of a context larger than the subject, so that we can at last see it whole, as if we had only five minutes left to live, or five seconds.

Wainscott, 7/21/83″

(Harry Mathews, 20 Lines a Day, p. 46.)

autoisolation

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“In Thomas More’s Utopia separation was the founding gesture: Utopus Rex commanded a trench be dug to cut Utopia off from the mainland. A friend of Erasmus, reviewing Moore’s Utopia, described this in a dedicatory poem:

Me, once a peninsula,
Utopus Rex made an island.
Alone among all nations,
without complex abstraction
I set the philosophical city
before the human reader.

I give freely;
and if you have better ideas

I’m all ears.

Erasmus and friends were perpetuating a hoax – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they were suggesting one – refusing to dispel the thought formed by some naifs that Utopia was a real place.”

(Bob Perelman, pp. 117–118 in The Grand Piano, part 4.)