The one that I would most like to write a novel about, set mostly during
his dashing early years, is Cpt. Lydgate: “He had, moreover, that sort
of high-breeding which consists in being free from the petty solicitudes
of middle-class gentility, and he was a great critic of feminine charms”
(Ch. LVIII).
Norman Mailer remarked that he couldn’t get past the bananas in
Gravity’s Rainbow. I have now passed the equivalent point in Against
The Day. We are too accustomed to Pynchon, I think, to appreciate him.
I did happen to catch and release a croaker considerably larger than the
one pictured below, but I chose not to photograph it so as not to
compromise the considerable dignity of that aged fish. It was then
caught and eaten by a mocking otter.
I’m also catching up on the Litvinenko news and theories, and I have
wondered what the odds are that it was a situation similar to that
described in Lem’s book. Given the origin of polonium-210, I’d suppose
that’d be nearly impossible; but that’s just the kind of one-thousandeth
of a percent doctrine Lem invoked. Perhaps there’s been research into
applied tychomancy. I also enjoy the logical abyss of spiraling
motivations brought on by this case, which I should separate from the
quite-real horror of both how he died and (if true) that which he wrote
about.
I recently finished this
entry in the most recent
Interactive Fiction competition. The game,
written by Andrew Plotkin, noted IF auteur, under the pseudonym Edgar O.
Weyrd (anagram of “Edward Gorey”), has two section: the first is the
best IF-implementation of a Rhem-like game I’ve ever played. While
nowhere near as complex or difficult as the aforementioned graphical
puzzlers, which I first learned about from Plotkin’s
reviewsof, it is tricky. The
game has a unique feature of keeping track of all the changes your
movements make through the house, which is both nifty and
difficulty-reducing.
A textual note about “Matinee D’Ivresse”: “ASSASSINS dans le ms est en
plus grand caracteres et souligne” (Pleiade, 1963).
You can also learn, at least in this edition, about the then-recent
vogue for Robert Faurisson’s topo-typo-erotic interpretation of
“Voyelles,” along with some suitably apoplectic remarks from Etiemble.
Perhaps the unhappy fate of that controversy is what turned Faurisson
mad; perhaps he always was. Granting his premise, his reading of “O”’s
“l’extase finale,” however, given what we know of Rimbaud’s tastes,
might have been a bit off the mark. I wonder how long it took someone to
point that out.
Borges cites this approvingly in his essaylet, “On William Beckford’s
Vathek,” and he also notes that it is almost impossible to read
because of Mallarme’s “etymological dialect.” Belloc also called
Beckford one of the “vilest men of all time,” which is quite a
compliment, considering.
Also, Borges’s remark about the distinction between the atrocious place
and the place of atrocity in versions of hell is nice.
You remember Tennyson reading an unpublished poem to Jowett; when he
had finished, Jowett said, I shouldn’t publish that if I were you,
Tennyson. Tennyson replied, If it comes to that, Master, the sherry
you gave us at lunch was downright filthy.
As told by Philip Larkin in his Paris Reviewinterview.
I also recommend Larkin’s “Who is Jorge Luis Borges?”
And I suppose this, also:
I suppose everyone has his own dream of America. A writer once said to
me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West
Coast; the rest is a desert full of bigots. That’s what I think I’d
like: where if you help a girl trim the Christmas tree you’re regarded
as engaged; and her brothers start oiling their shotguns if you don’t
call on the minister. A version of pastoral.
Will Adam Morrison average more than 15 pts. a game this season?
Had left heredity, Narcissus bent
Above the gene pool. As at a thrown stick
Still waking echoes of that give-and-take
—Repercussions dire in the event—
I would interpret that as a yes, though with perhaps historically low
rebound and assist figures. Who are other players who tend to score a
lot and do nothing else?
fryday 15th. Set out from the vessel with my servant and portmantle on
his Sholder. we walked 7 miles to where there were some whale fishers
tents, and got one of them to Cary us over the Sound [Core Sound] in
their boat to Beaufort, a Small vilage not above 12 houses, the
inhabitants seem miserable, they are very lasy and Indolent, they live
mostly on fish and oisters, which they have here in great plenty.
(733)
I’m increasingly interested in the work of Paul
Laffoley (and hope to see the exhibit running
between Jan 4 and Feb 17 at the Kent Gallery).
One of the bits of lore that Laffoley tends to repeat in interviews and
his writings is that his first word, spoken at six months of age, was
“Constantinople.” He then purportedly remained silent for several years
afterwards.
Thinking perhaps that the meaning here may be to change the world, not
interpret it, I noticed the following from Stefan Collini’s Absent
Minds: Intellectuals in Britain: “Trawling through the literature on
the Dreyfus affair, I eventually discovered the original of General
Mercier’s remarks: ‘At the moment when the Turkish army forced the
ramparts of Constantinople, the so-called intellectuals of the capital
of the Lower Empire were debating theological quibbles. We, too, are
undergoing our acute paroxysm of intellectual Byzantinism’” (25).