I listen to money singing. It’s like looking
down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and
mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.
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I listen to money singing. It’s like looking
down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and
mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.
July 30, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
“Brother
Librarian groaned as yet another lead-sealed cask was rolled out of storage for
unsealing. Armbrusar was not impressed by the fact that the secular scholar, in
two days, had unraveled a bit of a puzzle that had been lying around, a
complete enigma, for a dozen centuries. To the custodian of the Memorabilia,
each unsealing represented another decrease in the probable lifetime of the
contents o the cask, and he made no attempt to conceal his disapproval of the
entire proceeding. To Brother Librarian, whose task in life was the
preservation of books, the principal reason for the existence of books was that
they might be preserved perpetually. Usage was secondary, and to be avoided if
it threatened longevity.”
July 27, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
We went to the memorial walk for Marc Abrams yesterday afternoon, joining a couple of hundred others. It was a nice event, though the heat got to little Sid, who had to be carried part of the way.
For me, it's like Griffith Park or Sunset Junction suddenly are gone. He was both a sign of Silver Lake--I saw him almost every day--and Example A of what Silver Lake pretends to be.
In a crowd of gay clones, goth chicks, and rocker slackers--all wearing their proscribed uniforms and indistinguishable from each other, Dr. A. was a genuine eccentric. Obviously mad, and a mess, perhaps (the trash is coming out), but authentic.
Wallace Stevens:
In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.
July 26, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
David
Melville played Iago as a joker—delighting in manipulating people and causing
them harm. Playing it this way made clear how the story might have provided the
basis of a very silly comedy. There’s nothing in the first half that might not
just as well have been resolved, with Iago’s lies exposed, and everybody
happily reconciled in the end.
But
when Iago really begins tormenting Othello in Act 3 it’s as if a completely
different playwright has taken over. The potentially lighthearted comedy of
misunderstanding is replaced by tragedy of misunderstanding—a vision of a hell
in which words and thought serve only to make reality unreal. The words “think”
and “thought” along with “honesty” clang again and again throughout the play
like a refrain, advertising everything Iago has industriously erased.
Iago
infects everyone with such confusion that, by Act 4, Othello falls into a
trance of incoherent babbling and Desdemona can speak to Emilia only in
fragments. Iago not only undermines society, but undermines language—removing
any possibility of reconciliation. Even at the very end, after he has been exposed, Iago refuses to provide the consolation of an explanation. Why did he do it? "Demand me nothing; what you know, you know."
I
hate to admit it, but the new location in Griffith Park is much roomier and
more comfortable than the old spot. And no helicopters. Though there was an
intermittent chorus of dogs, or were they coyotes?
July 24, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
North
Coast Recollections ends
“The
full Atlantic at September spring
Flooded
a final tide-mark up the sand,
And
ocean sank to silence under bells,
And
the next breaker was a lesser one
Then
lesser still. Atlantic, bells and birds
Were
layer on interchanging layers of sound.”
St.
Saviour’s, Aberdeen Park, Highbury, London, N. begins
“With
oh such peculiar branching and over-reaching of wire
Trolley-bus
standards pick their threads from the London sky
Diminishing
up the perspective, Highbury-bound retire
Threads
and buses and standards with plane trees volleying by
And,
more peculiar still, that ever-increasing spire
Bulges
over the housetops, polychromatic and high.”
July 21, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
After
the trial of Oscar Wilde, she began to fear for Old Ben and Tom Ashley: “those
two innocent old comrades had already had their windows broken with stones
after dark. People thought, after that, they would leave the village, but they
did not. Whoever heard of old soldiers running away?”
July 19, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
“The
record player was a red box. He’d carried it home from work one day. You could
pile six records in it, over the turntable. We only had three: The Black and
White Minstrels, South Pacific and Hank Williams The King of Country Music.
When he brought the record player home we only had one, South Pacific. he
played it all Friday night and all the weekend. He tried to make me learn I’m
Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair but my ma stopped him. She said if I
ever sang that in school or outside they’d have to sell the house and move
somewhere else.”
July 17, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
“If
Mother were pressed, she could pull a sainted poetess from her wealth of
memories like a rabbit from a hat, a somewhat disturbed woman who enjoyed
sticking banderillas into the good Lord’s back like a matador.”
July 17, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)