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  • BeauIXI
    Senior Member
    • Nov 2008
    • 1272

    ...
    The wind rests its cheek upon the ground and feels the cool damp
    And lifts its head with twigs and small dead blades of grass
    Pressed into it as you might at the beach rise up and brush away
    The sand. The day is cool and says, “I’m just staying overnight.”
    The world is filled with music, and in between the music, silence
    And varying the silence all sorts of sounds, natural and man made:
    There goes a plane, some cars, geese that honk and, not here, but
    Not so far away, a scream so rending that to hear it is to be
    Never again the same. “Why, this is hell.” Out of the death breeding
    Soil, here, rise emblems of innocence, snowdrops that struggle
    Easily into life and hang their white enamel heads toward the dirt
    And in the yellow grass are small wild crocuses from hills goats
    Have cropped to barrenness. The corms (rhizomes) come by mail, are planted.
    Then do their thing: to live! To live! So natural and so hard
    Hard as it seems it must be for green spears to pierce the all but
    Frozen mold and insist that they too, like mouse-eared chickweed,
    Will live. The spears lengthen, the bud appears and spreads, its
    Seed capsule fattens and falls, the green turns yellowish and withers
    Stretched upon the ground. In Washington, magnolias were in bud. In
    Charlottesville early bulbs were up, brightening the muck. Tomorrow
    Will begin another spring. No one gets many, one at a time, like a long
    Awaited letter that one day comes. But it may not say what you hoped
    Or distraction robs it of what it once would have meant. Spring comes
    And the winter weather, here, may hold. It is arbitrary, like the plan
    Of Washington, D.C. Avenues and circles in asphalt web and no
    One gets younger: which is not, for the young, true, discovering new
    Freedoms at twenty, a relief not to be a teen-ager anymore. One of us
    Had piles, another water on the knee, a third a hernia—a strangulated
    Hernia is one of life’s less pleasant bits of news—and only
    One, at twenty, moved easily through all the galleries to pill
    Free sleep. Oh, it’s not all that bad. The sun shines on my hand
    And the myriad lines that criss-cross tell the story of nearly fifty
    Years. Sorry, it’s too long to relate. Once, when I was young, I
    Awoke at first light and sitting in a rocking chair watched the sun
    Come up beyond the houses across the street. Another time I stood
    At the cables of a liner and watched the wake turning and
    Turning upon itself. Another time I woke up and in a bottle
    On a chest of drawers the thoughtful doctor had left my tonsils. I
    Didn’t keep them. The turning of the globe is not so real to us
    As the seasons turning and the days that rise out of early gray
    —The world is all cut-outs then—and slip or step steadily down
    The slopes of our lives where the emotions and needs sprout. “I
    Need you,” tree, that dominates this yard, thick-waisted, tall
    And crook branched. Its bark scales off like that which we forget:
    Pain, an introduction at a party, what precisely happened umpteen
    Years or days or hours ago. And that same blue jay returns, or perhaps
    It is another. All jays are one to me. But not the sun which seems at
    Each rising new, as though in the night it enacted death and rebirth,
    As flowers seem to. The roses this June will be different roses
    Even though you cut an armful and come in saying, “Here are the roses,”
    As though the same blooms had come back, white freaked with red
    And heavily scented. Or a cut branch of pear blooms before its time,
    “Forced.” Time brings us into bloom and we wait, busy, but wait
    For the unforced flow of words and intercourse and sleep and dreams
    In which the past seems to portend a future which is just more
    Daily life. The cat has a ripped ear. He fights, he fights all
    The tom cats all the time. There are blood gouts on a velvet seat.
    Easily sponged off: but these red drops on a book of Stifter’s, will
    I remember and say at some future time, “Oh, yes, that was the day
    Hodge had a torn ear and bled on the card table?” Poor
    Hodge, battered like an old car. Silence flows into my mind. It
    Is spring. It is also still really winter. Not a day when you say,
    “What a beautiful spring day.” A day like twilight or evening when
    You think, “I meant to watch the sun set.” And then comes on
    To rain. “You’ve got to take,” says the man at the store, “the rough
    With the smooth.” A window to the south is rough with raindrops
    That, caught in the screen, spell out untranslatable glyphs. A story
    Not told: so much not understood, a sight, an insight, and you pass on,
    Another day for each day is subjective and there is a totality of days
    As there are as many to live it. The day lives us and in exchange
    We it: after snowball time, a month, March, of fits and starts, winds,
    Rain, spring hints and wintry arrears. The weather pays its check,
    Like quarreling in a D.C. hotel, “I won’t quarrel about it, but I made
    No local calls.” Strange city, broad and desolating, monuments
    Rearing up and offices like monuments and crowds lined up to see
    The White House inside. “We went to see the White House. It was lovely.”
    Not so strange though as the cemetery with guttering flame and
    Admirals and generals with bigger gravestones than the lesser fry
    Below Lee’s house, false marble pillars and inside all so
    Everyday, in every room a shawl tossed untidily upon a chair or bed
    Created no illusion of lived-in-ness. But the periwinkles do, in beds
    That flatten and are starred blue-violet, a retiring flower loved,
    It would seem, of the dead, so often found where they congregate. A
    Quote from Aeschylus: I forget. All, all is forgotten gradually and
    One wonders if these ideas that seem handed down are truly what they were?
    An idea may mutate like a plant, and what was once held basic truth
    Become an idle thought. like, “Shall we plant some periwinkles there
    By that bush? They’re so to be depended on.” The wind shakes the screen
    And all the raindrops on it streak and run in stems. It’s colder.
    The crocuses close up. The snowdrops are brushed with mud. The sky
    Colors itself rosily behind gray-black and the rain falls through
    The basketball hoop on a garage, streaking its backboard with further
    Trails of rust, a lovely color to set with periwinkle violet-blue.
    And the trees shiver and shudder in the light rain blasts from off
    The ocean. The street wet reflects the breakup of the clouds
    On its face, driving over sky with a hissing sound. The car
    Slides slightly and in the west appear streaks of different green:
    A lid lifted briefly on the spring. Then the moon burns through
    Racing clouds, its aureole that of rings of oil on water in a harbor
    Bubbling up from an exhaust. Clear the sky. Beside a rim of moon.
    Three stars and only three and one planet. So under lilacs unleaved
    Lie a clump of snowdrops and one purple crocus. Purple. A polka-dotted
    Color little girls are fond of: “See my new dess!” and she twirls
    On one foot. Then, crossed, bursts into tears. Smiles and rain, like
    These passing days in which buds swell, unseen as yet, waiting
    For the elms to color their further out most twigs, only the willow
    Gleams yellow. Life is hard. Some are strong, some weak, most
    Untested. These useless truths blow about the yard the day after
    Rain the soft sunlight making softer shadows on the faded lawn.
    The world looks so old in the spring, laid out under the sky. One
    Gull coasts by, unexpected as a kiss on the nape of the neck. These
    Days need birds and so they come, a flock of ducks, and a bunch of
    Small fluffy unnamed balls that hide in hedges and make a racket.
    “The gift of life,” as though, existing in expectancy and then
    Someone came up and said, “Here,” or, “Happy Birthday.” It is more
    Mysterious than that, pierced by blue or running in the rain
    Or simply lying down to read. Writing a postponed letter which may
    Bring no pleasure: arduous truths to tell. And if you thought March was bad
    Consider April, early April, wet snow falling into blue squills
    That underneath a beech make an illusory lake, a haze of blue
    With depth to it. That is like pain, ordinary household pain,
    Like piles, or bumping against a hernia. All the signs are set for A OK
    A day to visit the National Gallery—Velázquez, Degas—but, and
    What a but, with water on the knee “You’ll need a wheelchair, Mummy.”
    Coasting among the masterpieces, of what use are they? Angel with a
    Hurdy-Gurdy or this young man in dun clothes who holds his hat so that
    The red lining shows and glows. And in the sitting room people sit
    And rest their feet and talk of where they’ve been, motels and Monticello,
    Dinner in the Fiji Room. Someone forgets a camera. Each day forgetting:
    What is there so striking to remember? The rain stops. April shines
    A little, stormily, the ocean off there makes its freight car noise
    Or rattles with catarrh and asks to have its nose wiped. Gray descends.
    An illuminous penetration of unbright light that seeps and coats
    The ragged lawn and spells out bare spots and winter fallen branches.
    Yardwork. And now the yardwork is over (it is never over), today’s
    Stint anyway. Odd jobs, that stretch ahead, wide and mindless as
    Pennsylvania Avenue or the bridge to Arlington, crossed and recrossed
    And there the Lincoln Memorial crumbles. It looks so solid: it won’t
    Last. The impermanence of permanence, is that all there is? To look
    And see the plane tree. Its crooked branches brush the ground, rear
    In its age, older than any of us, destined, if all goes well with it,

    ...
    Originally posted by philip nod
    somebody should kop this. this is forever.

    Comment

    • BeauIXI
      Senior Member
      • Nov 2008
      • 1272

      ...
      These old bones that creak need it.” And the gardener does not
      Come back: over the winter he had a heart attack, has to take it
      Easy. You see death shadowed out in another’s life. The threat
      Is always there, even in balmy April sunshine. So what
      If it is hard to believe in? Stopping in the city while the light
      Is red, to think that all who stop with you too must stop, and
      Yet it is not less individual a fate for all that. “When I
      was born, death kissed me. I kissed it back.” Meantime, there
      Is bridge, and solitaire, and phone calls and a door slams, someone
      Goes out into the April sun to take a spin as far as the
      Grocer’s, to shop, and then come back. In the fullness of time,
      Let me hand you an empty cup, coffee stained. Or a small glass
      Of spirits: “Here’s your ounce of whisky for today.” Next door
      The boys dribble a basketball and practice shots. Two boys
      Run by: high spirits. The postman comes. No mail of interest.
      Another day, there is. A postcard of the Washington Monument,
      A friend waving from a small window at the needle top. “Hoo
      Hoo” he calls. Another day, and still the sun shines down, warming
      Tulips into bloom, a redder red than blood. The dandelions
      Cringe before them. In the evening there will be time enough
      To drive from here to there, study the vegetable patch, admire
      The rosy violets. Life in action, life in repose, life in
      Contemplation, which is hard to tell from day dreaming, on a day
      When the sky woolgathers clouds and sets their semblance on a
      Glassy ocean. Only its edge goes lisp. On no two days the same.
      Is it the ocean’s mindlessness that troubles? At times it seems
      Calculatedly malevolent, tearing the dunes asunder, tumbling
      Summer houses into itself, a terror to see. They say there are
      Those who have never felt terror. A slight creeping of the scalp,
      Merely. How fine. Finer than sand, that, on a day like this.
      Trickles through my fingers, ensconced in a dune cleft, sun
      Warmed and breeze cooled. This peace is full of sounds and
      Movement. A couple passes, jogging. A dog passes, barking
      And running. My nose runs, a little. Just a drip. Left over
      From winter. How long ago it seems! All spring and summer stretch
      Ahead, a roadway lined by roses and thunder. “It will be here
      Before you know it.” These twigs will then have leafed and
      Shower down a harvest of yellow-brown. So far away, so
      Near at hand. The sand runs through my fingers. The yellow
      Daffodils have white corollas (sepals?). The crocuses are gone,
      I didn’t see them go. They were here, now they’re not. Instead
      The forsythia ensnarls its flames, cool fire, pendent above the smoke
      Of its brown branches. Beaches are near. It rains again: the screen
      And window glass are pebbled by it. It soaks through a rain coat that
      Has had its water repellency dry cleaned out of it. Most modern
      Inventions don’t work so well, or not for long. A breakdown occurs,
      Or something simple, like the dishwasher detergent eating off
      The pattern on china, even the etched florets on wine glasses.
      Strong stuff. From the train, a stand of larch is greener than
      Greenest grass. A funny tree, of many moods, gold in autumn, naked
      In winter: an evergreen (it looks) that isn’t. What kind of a tree
      Is that? I love to see it resurrect itself, the enfolded buttons
      Of needles studding the branches, then opening into little bursts.
      And that Washington flower, the pink magnolia tree, blooms now
      In little yards, its trunk a smoky gray. And soon the hybrid azaleas,
      So much too much, will follow, and the tender lilac. Persia, we
      Have much to thank you for, besides the word lapis lazuli. And someone
      You know well is suffering, sees it all but not the way before
      Him, hating his job and not knowing what to change it for. Have
      You any advice to give? Have you learned nothing in all these
      Years? “Take it as it comes.” Sit still and listen: each so alone.
      Someone driving decides not to take that curve, to pile it up
      In smithereens, the anxious and unsatisfying years: goodbye, life.
      Others keep on living so as not to wound their friends: the suicide
      Fantasy, to awaken rested and fresh, to plunge into a deep and
      Dreamless sleep, to be mindless and at one with all that grows,
      Dies and revives each April, here, crying, “Stir your stumps!”
      In the mental hospital a patient is ready to be discharged. “I’m
      So glad to be going home!” Where the same old problems wait;
      Still, to feel more equal to them, that’s something. “Time heals
      All wounds”: now what’s that supposed to mean? Wounds can
      Kill, like that horse chestnut tree with the rotting place will surely
      Die unless the tree doctor comes. Cut out the rot, fill with tree
      Cement, score and leave to heal. The rain comes down in buckets:
      I’ve never seen that, though you often speak of it. The rain
      Comes down and brings depression, too much and too often. And there
      Is the fog off the cold Atlantic. No one is at his best with
      A sinus headache. It will pass. Stopped passages unblock: why
      Let the lovely spring, its muck and scarlet emperors, get you
      Down. Unhibernate. Let the rain soak your hair, run down your
      Face, hang in drops from facial protuberances. Face into
      It, then towel dry. Then another day brings back the sun and
      Violets in the grass. The pear tree thickens all its boughs and
      Twigs into silver-white, a dimmed brilliance, and already at
      Its base a circle of petals on the unmowed grass. Far away
      In Washington, at the Reflecting Pool, the Japanese cherries
      Bust out into their dog mouth pink. Visitors gasp. The sun
      Drips, coats and smears, all that spring yellow under unending
      Blue. Only the oaks hold back their leaf buds, reticent.
      Reticence is not a bad quality, though it may lead to misunderstandings.
      I misunderstood silence for disapproval, see now it was
      Sympathy. Thank you, May, for these warm stirrings. Life
      Goes on, it seems, though in all sorts of places—nursing
      Homes—it is drawing to a close. Abstractions and generalities:
      Grass and blue depths into which the evening star seems set.
      As windows are set in walls in whited Washington. City, begone
      From my thoughts: childhood was not all that gay. Nor all that gray,
      For the matter of that. May leans in my window, offering hornets.
      To them too I give leave to go about their business, which is not
      Nesting in my books. The fresh mown lawn is a rug underneath
      Which is swept the dirt, the living dirt out of which our nurture
      Comes, to which we go, not knowing if we hasten or we tarry. May
      Opens wide her bluest eyes and speaks in bird tongues and a
      Chain saw. The blighted elms come down. Already maple saplings,
      Where other elms once grew and whelmed, count as young trees. In
      A dishpan the soap powder dissolves under a turned on faucet and
      Makes foam, just like the waves that crash ashore at the foot
      Of the street. A restless surface. Chewing, and spitting sand and
      Small white pebbles, clam shells with a sheen or chalky white.
      A horseshoe crab: primeval. And all this without thought, this
      Churning energy. Energy! The sun sucks up the dew; the day is
      Clear; a bird shits on my window ledge. Rain will wash it off
      Or a storm will chip it loose. Life, I do not understand. The
      Days tick by, each so unique, each so alike: what is that chatter
      In the grass? May is not a flowering month so much as shades
      Of green, yellow-green, blue-green, or emerald or dusted like
      The lilac leaves. The lilac trusses stand in bud. A cardinal
      Passes like a flying tulip, alights and nails the green day
      Down. One flame in a fire of sea-soaked, copper-fed wood:
      A red that leaps from green and holds it there. Reluctantly
      The plane tree, always late, as though from age, opens up and
      Hangs its seed balls out. The apples flower. The pear is past.
      Winter is suddenly so far away, behind, ahead. From the train
      A stand of coarse grass in fuzzy flower. Is it for miracles
      We live? I like it when the morning sun lights up my room
      Like a yellow jelly bean, an inner glow. May mutters, “Why
      Ask questions?” or, “What are the questions you wish to ask?”


      -James Schuyler
      Originally posted by philip nod
      somebody should kop this. this is forever.

      Comment

      • syed
        Senior Member
        • Sep 2010
        • 564

        Never read a Hindu scripture before, but I'm currently making my way through The Bhagavad Gita (intro and translation by Eknath Easwaran). Have to say, it is proving to be rather good thus far.
        "Lots of people who think they are into fashion are actually just into shopping"

        Comment

        • een
          Senior Member
          • Sep 2006
          • 317

          Comment

          • Faust
            kitsch killer
            • Sep 2006
            • 37852

            Started Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky.

            The media blitzkrieg surrounding The Pale King has reignited my interest in David Foster Wallace. What should I start with? Consider the Lobster?
            Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

            StyleZeitgeist Magazine

            Comment

            • viv1984viv
              Senior Member
              • Feb 2008
              • 194

              exactly the same here, but I was thinking of just jumping straight into Pale King!

              Has anyone started Pale King?
              Notes from the Vomitorium - The Nerve Of It -

              Comment

              • Fade to Black
                Senior Member
                • Sep 2008
                • 5340

                i ordered Pale King but may not get my copy till later in the month.

                Almost done with Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, that is an accessible collection of short stories by DFW. If you're really not into the PoMo metafiction thing then a few of the pieces may irk you. However "The Depressed Person" is at its heart really brilliant in its piercing ironic insight if a bit tedious in the second half (the ending is perfect though), and "Adult World" (both parts), even with the unorthodox presentation of the latter half of the story, again gets to the heart of something very "true" about the postmodern condition...am also fond of the brief one or two page snapshots scattered here and there throughout the book as stories.
                www.matthewhk.net

                let me show you a few thangs

                Comment

                • Mail-Moth
                  Senior Member
                  • Mar 2009
                  • 1448

                  Lately, mainly Antoine Volodine and his heteronyms. I am getting more and more obsessed with the man's universe - something between chamanic narratives and espionnage novels gone wrong beyond mesure. Everything here is paperthin and frail - identities, memories, the body, mankind itself. And nothing decisive can ever be accomplished, since every attempt to do anything - executing a traitor, guiding a dead soul in the afterlife, killing the last capitalist - seems bound to fail ridiculously. The only thing left to be done in this neverending aftermath is to tell things, again and again - until the light finally dims.

                  To many titles to recommend, but only one english translation - Minor angels.
                  I can see a hat, I can see a cat,
                  I can see a man with a baseball bat.

                  Comment

                  • Faust
                    kitsch killer
                    • Sep 2006
                    • 37852

                    /\ oy, vey.
                    Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                    StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                    Comment

                    • Mail-Moth
                      Senior Member
                      • Mar 2009
                      • 1448

                      ^ So much more fun than The Road, though
                      I can see a hat, I can see a cat,
                      I can see a man with a baseball bat.

                      Comment

                      • Clopek
                        Junior Member
                        • Apr 2011
                        • 19

                        Originally posted by viv1984viv View Post
                        exactly the same here, but I was thinking of just jumping straight into Pale King!

                        Has anyone started Pale King?
                        Originally posted by Fade to Black View Post
                        i ordered Pale King but may not get my copy till later in the month.
                        Originally posted by Faust View Post
                        The media blitzkrieg surrounding The Pale King has reignited my interest in David Foster Wallace. What should I start with? Consider the Lobster?
                        I'm reading Pale King at the moment - slowly, really trying to digest it. Just a few chapters in David describes a literal hell-on-earth, using vivid classical imagery (literally fire and brimstone) translated to a perfectly plausible setting in reality. Seriously dark stuff.

                        Consider the Lobster is a collection of his essays, journalism and literary reviews if I'm not mistaken. I haven't read all of his work so I can't claim to be an expert, but if you're interested in getting a feel for his fiction I'd start with a few stories from Oblivion, particularly Good Old Neon and Mr. Squishy; both of these are a good indicator for what's in store in his novels.

                        I would read Jest before moving into Pale Fire though, if for no other reason than to read the last novel we know with certainty he wanted us to read.

                        (as an aside, "A radically condensed history of post-modern life" in Brief Interviews is one of the most hilarious short stories I've ever read).)
                        Last edited by Clopek; 04-19-2011, 05:00 PM.
                        ...and the tide was way out.

                        Comment

                        • Fade to Black
                          Senior Member
                          • Sep 2008
                          • 5340

                          yeah the radically condensed history is indeed a good one. The few towards the end get annoying though (Sissee Nar, the playwright's father). overall it's a pretty uneven collection. My favorite story of the bunch may have to be "Forever Overhead" - probably the most poignant piece of fiction i've ever read about the hesitant space between childhood and adolescence - it also stands out as the single entry from which I detected a genuinely, painfully empathetic tone free from his trademark irony, although he is a supreme ironist.

                          they said my copy of pale king just came in, gonna pick it up tomorrow and plunge right in. Just started Bright Lights, Big City and thought the short first chapter was utterly brilliant in its depiction of a scenario so vivid it could only have been written out of experience, but the rest of that book will have to take a hiatus for the DFW.
                          www.matthewhk.net

                          let me show you a few thangs

                          Comment

                          • Fade to Black
                            Senior Member
                            • Sep 2008
                            • 5340

                            Originally posted by Clopek View Post
                            I'm reading Pale King at the moment - slowly, really trying to digest it. Just a few chapters in David describes a literal hell-on-earth, using vivid classical imagery (literally fire and brimstone) translated to a perfectly plausible setting in reality. Seriously dark stuff.
                            that whole stretch in Chapter 2 of Sylvanshine on the plane is fucking incredible - what a soliloquy on the irrepressible mental landscape of boredom. I might not empathize but can understand why someone capable of this level of human insight may be driven to suicide.
                            www.matthewhk.net

                            let me show you a few thangs

                            Comment

                            • Faust
                              kitsch killer
                              • Sep 2006
                              • 37852

                              /\ FtB, you must read Jonathan Franzen's personal essay in the last issue of New Yorker.
                              Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                              StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                              Comment

                              • Fade to Black
                                Senior Member
                                • Sep 2008
                                • 5340

                                will do; i've never read any Franzen, actually. His books any good?
                                www.matthewhk.net

                                let me show you a few thangs

                                Comment

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