Silverlake Blvd.

Collected Poems, Philip Larkin

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.

 

A Canticle for Leibowitz

“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.”

 

The Silver Lake Walking Guy

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.

 

 

  

 

Rabbit is Rich

“You have to be rich from the start to get the full benefits.”

 

Othello in Griffith Park

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?

 

John Betjeman’s Collected Poems

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.”

 

Lark Rise to Candleford

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?”

 

The Book of Disquiet

 

 

“The buyers of useless things are wiser than is commonly supposed—they buy little dreams.”

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

 

 

“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.”

The Carnivorous Lamb

 

 

“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.”