Saturday, November 25, 2006

Possibility Zero

Reality is a sort of paralysis of language, an anaesthetized condition. What else is there to do but wake up?

Friday, November 24, 2006

The View from Nowhere

Look, those figures are flying! Would it not be thrilling, to move ever onward and upward? Would it not be blissful, to inhabit the sky?

But the ones in the sky have eyes only for the ones on the ground. Who always have something, at which they are pointing. Uttering endlessly...

Saturday, November 18, 2006

A Plot Against The World

"Make a noise, and the world is yours"


This makes the secret the highest principle. To be told a secret is the greatest privilege, and the keeping of a secret is life's solemn duty.

One thinks in secret - there is no other way to think. The making of secrets is what art is about.

We make our home in secret, in the secret...


But the world is the secret - this shatters the scheme

Social Thought

"Make a noise, and the world is yours"


This makes the secret the highest principle. To be told a secret is the greatest privilege, and the keeping of a secret is life's solemn duty.

One thinks in secret - there is no other way to think. The making of secrets is what art is about.

We make our home in secret, in the secret...


But the world is a secret - this shatters the scheme.

For The Squirrel To Pick Up

Crazy-funny discourse lying in the wind

Saturday, November 11, 2006

Palafox

"Across a continent imaginary
Because it cannot be discovered now
Upon this fully apprehended planet -
No more applicants considered,
Alas, alas -

Ran an animal unzoological
Without a fate, without a fact,
Its private history intact
Against the travesty
Of an anatomy.

Not visible not invisible,
Removed by dayless night,
Did it ever fly its ground
Out of fancy into light,
Into space to replace
Its unwritable decease?

Ah, the minutes twinkle in and out
And in and out come and go
One by one, none by none,
What we know, what we don't know."

--Laura Riding

Thursday, November 09, 2006

The Novel in English

True novelists writing in English? There's Coetzee, there's Naipaul. Pynchon, perhaps, makes a third - the token American.

Glut of poets, dearth of novelists. Why is that? Even the ones who remain have shaded, into memoir, into philosophy... No stories writ in black on the mind's tablet - perhaps there were, and have dissolved. Ours this universal tongue, now, flickering into change, too casually

Egad & Agog

Conversation's splendid.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Wanted

A translation that does justice to Hölderlin. Someone? Anyone?

Please?

This side of language I'm allowed schadenfreude - I'd like to see them translate John Ashbery...