lugubrious letters

“She and Cook used to write the most lugubrious letters to each other about the unpleasantness of sunrises met suddenly. Sunrises were, they contended, alright when approached slowly from the night before, but when faced abruptly from the same morning they were awful.”

(Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, p. 820)

possible pessoa

In Fascicle, a translation by Chris Daniels of C. Pacheco’s “Beyond Another Ocean”. The poem, from 1917, dedicated to Pessoa’s heteronym Alberto Caeiro; in an interview with Kent Johnson in Jacket, Daniels suggests that Pessoa is the author.

(Interestingly: all of Pessoa went into the public domain on 1 January 2006. Also: the Pessoa entry in the wikipedia is shockingly good.)

(Also in the current issue of Jacket: a couple of pieces on Gilbert Sorrentino.)

noted: proust, quotation marks

There’s a nice post at The Valve which nicely gets at how deeply weird Proust gets w/r/t jealousy towards the end of the book.

And a nice post at pas au-delà on the connotations of punctuation. There’s a fine discursion on this (more precisely, what it means to emphasize things in the German style, by increasing letterspace in the emphasized word) towards the end of Agamben’s The Time That Remains. And there was another one recently about dashes – where was that?