not even improper

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“Fleming did most of the talking. He ended up by asking us if we knew the definition of a gentleman. He waited and then said slowly:

‘A gentleman is a person who uses the butter-knife when he’s alone.’

He looked at us triumphantly and we tried to force a laugh. My growing dislike crystallized. It was degrading to have to laugh at anything so suburban and B.B.C. It wasn’t even improper, and I’d been preparing my face for something dirty!

I turned to Paul, saying it was time to get ready for dinner.”

(Denton Welch, Maiden Voyage, p. 100.)

that’s not bad

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“Well, I opened the door. The Doberman came at me raging and snarling and generally carrying on in the way he felt was expected of him. I threw him a fifty-five-pound reinforced concrete pork chop which knocked him silly. I spoke to Constanze. We used to walk down the street together bumping our hipbones together in joy, before God and everybody. I wanted to float in the air again some feeling of that. It didn’t work. I’m sorry. But I guess, as the architects say, there’s no use crying over spilt marble. She will undoubtedly move on and up and down and around in the world, New York, Chicago, and Temple, Texas, making everything considerably better than it was, for short periods of time. We adventured. That’s not bad.”

(Donald Barthelme, “The Abduction from the Seraglio”, p. 95 in Great Days.)

section 43

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Sayings that illuminate
architecture
lapidary inscriptions
saying the writing
writing the architecture
writing architecture writing   through
up and down manually
or left-handedly or with an intercession

and a few photons, jolly
“in a sudden feeling of shock, surprise, or disappointment,” that’s not
joyous or a joint resolution exactly
even as festivities jolt a centenary
in reading for the archive that is at once a central nervous system
and a center of intentionalities—what were graphics
designating transitive writing arts
in visual culture that left the logo
and remaindered it to information, each of four
letters vetted a rhetoric
technologies opted for rhinestones to the eye
notwithstanding rhizomes in the brilliance

of mind, of the mind in multiplex.

(Marjorie Welish, from “From Dedicated To”, p. 97 in Isle of the Signatories.)

charles s. peirce has a plan

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“The idea which occurs to me is this. Bierstadt has invented a car which opens out into a room 27 feet wide. The Russian & German governments have taken it up; the N.Y. Central people are about to go into it. It is a very practical thing. It goes about like a car, and then can be transofrmed in a few minutes, by lifting the roof and drawing up sides for part of the roof and by letting down inner sides for a floor and other movements, into a chapel, or a theatre, or a picture gallery, or a shop, etc.

I believe a car costs $8000. It is quite cheap. Now let Hegeler pay me $2000 and I will get him the right to build a number of such cars for Sunday or other lectures on the Religion of Science, which being sent about the country & free sermons & lectures given, & would distribute the Open Court and raise that to a satisfactory paying basis. The lecturers (preferably two) would sleep and eat in the car, and their expenses would be light. If it would add to the inducement I will give 100 lectures.”

(Charles Sanders Peirce, letter to Francis C. Russell, 5 November 1896, quoted on p. 256 of Joseph Brent’s Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life.

at any rate

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“At any rate she was wonderful with horses and he loved automobiles only he would never take a job where he would have to lie down under an automobile with his legs sticking out. This was distasteful to him.”

(Gertrude Stein, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, pp. 4–5.)

endings

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“Actually, this is a device used brilliantly by George Borrow, whose books simply stop. I like this sense of ‘okay, that’s it’ that eloquently supersedes the expectation of surprise and closure. It’s a new kind of surprise. Little Niels Bohr is said to have shown his father a homework assignment to look over. The homework was about the periodic table, and Father noted that Niels had left out hydrogen. This was easily fixed: ‘In conclusion, I would like to mention hydrogen.’ This is worthy of Calvin, but suggests with uncorrupted honesty that grand finales are a suspect posture.”

(Guy Davenport interviewed by John Jeremiah Sullivan, The Paris Review 163.)

a sort of a song

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Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
—through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

(William Carlos Williams.)

no swan so fine

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“No water so still as the
     dead fountains of Versailles.” No swan,
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine
     as chintz china one with fawn-
brown eyes and toothed gold
collar on to show whose bird it was.

Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth
     candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-
tinted buttons, dahlias,
sea-urchins, and everlastings,
     it perches on the branching foam
of polished sculptured
flowers—at ease and tall. The king is dead.

(Marianne Moore, 1932.)