A Notebook – Since 2007
Diary: How to
Improve the Text (You Will
Only Make Matters Worse)
John Cage titled his diary, “Diary: How to
Improve the World (You Will
Only Make Matters Worse)” (1965),
suggesting a zen koan where every move
in one direction is a move in another direction.
Cage was not too into the game of chess,
that was Nabokov. Were they neither control
freaks? One looked down on the ground
for mushrooms, the other up in the air for butterflies.
Listen to the music mushrooms make:
shiitake, for example.
“Nothing to be done,” Beckett said, and he said
it more than once: “Nothing to be done.”
Again and again, recycling the words,
imagining a future without retail,
which entailed imagination, the tale
of dead malls, hollowed out shells,
shelter for the homeless.
(artificial intelligence:
“all watched over by machines
of amazing grace,” Richard Brautigan said.)
What if anything is artificial? Artifice, father, creator:
The true ecologist loves garbage, Slavoj Zizek said,
and, we must become more artificial,
if we are to comprehend the universe,
a grasping together. GASP! (Taylor, Examined Life).
Every thing is recyclable, even no thing (as Beckett showed),
all things crawling with recycling bugs chewing,
the textual droppings of these bugs crawling across the page
two streams of ants, one going, the other coming:
ant ant ant ant ant ant ant ant ant ant ant
tna tna tna tna tna tna tna tna tna tna tna.
The ants smell textual clues.
The job of being
human
altruism and community, signage,
the shape of mouths, lip tools,
tongue, teeth, mouth to ear, surplus
age, a pantry of letters, a kitchen of words
a living room of text, a bed of books,
a shelter of stories.
It probably never was the best of times
and self-pity to call any time the worst of times.
The people bored march on nothing.
Blog is dead, someone said, sweeping up,
blogging, only dead if you thought
that; otherwise, it was still
“lots of fun for everyone!”
Retail is dead, the tinker said,
stirring her pots and pans;
on the other side of the street,
a drone drops a text.
In “For
The Pleasure
of the Text…,” Jeremy Fernando explains how
text comes into being when reading, comes and goes, his book
full of marginalia mushrooms, the writer a saprophyte,
pages flipping to and fro like butterflies, and as hard to find,
the text always disappearing, pages not mumbered [sic],
but we know where to look
for mushrooms and the colors butterflies prefer.
When speaking of the universe, keep in mind nothing is factual; everything is argument – claim and rebuttal, recycling. When speaking of the text, keep in mind everything potentially purposeful, so yes, the most effective writer knows not what will be read, can’t be sure of what’s being written. That is one pleasure of the text, the not knowing, uncertainty, ambiguity – the taking and eating of a strange mushroom, an invasion, a landing, of alien butterflies. Beckett said we can’t listen to a conversation for more than five minutes without noting inherent chaos. Yet some writers abhor ambiguity and seem to think they write with clarity. What is clear is that nothing is clear, in spite of grammar.
Understanding the text, or attempts to understand one’s own comprehension of the text, are subservient
to experiencing the text. One can only begin to experience the text by giving in to it, which is to say,
consuming it, mouthing the words, eating the text, licking the letters, smelling the ink’s decay.
The text is a meal which like the mushroom can be distasteful, cause belches or gas, even be poisonous.
One might prepare for a heartburn of the text, but that heartburn is part of experiencing the text. The
metaphor grows stale, corny. Halt. Stop. Let us retire for a break in the text to some hops.
The text plays itself out.
text
g UL p
ale
The reader returns to the text, changed, reader and text, both changed, a bit tipsy, textual vibrations: screen shots of textual cuts, rips, woven riffs, quotes like on a guitar, but cited for the newly planted who need authority to get established, but why would one want authority over/under/sideways/down another? textual authority to pass testual [sic] authority, getting testy this, this authority, King Ibid on his throne in the kingdom of Where Did You Get This Weave? There can be no misreading, only the experience of reading: vicarious. Author as vicar, vice advice, a writing vise.
a grammar of the other
another
moth (lex) toward the light
mouth (law) toward the dark
declension
every text an attempt to improve
which worsens
writing as self-medicating
for which there is no cure
curator
mother
a text that cures
Watt Ales
what is the meaning of an unpaginated (upainted) text?
citations as reproductions, pics of texts
folder paper, where the lines are the bedrock
of grammar, the grammar of the text –
the reader creates the ungrammatical (including typos)
as the police create crime (cite N+1)
calls into question any misreading
“justesse of any sentence” (JF, PT)
ripping through the text, pulling quotes out
disrupting the horizons of folder paper lines
horizontal disappearings
a following silence until a new text swells
the crowd disperses, the text shelved.
In the middle of the text we find a pic
of “Anatomie” (Ibid: 180), and this
quoted:
“To write the body,
Neither the skin, nor the muscles, nor the bones,
nor the nerves, but the rest: an awkward, fibrous,
shaggy, raveled thing, a clown’s coat”
so we get at once
Love’s Body (Norman O. Brown)
Beckett’s clown
& Bob Dylan.
Next comes the pun: body > corpus
and “authenticity” – the authority
of the corpse, already with us,
and the illuminated manuscript,
backlit screen.
And don’t miss the three asterisks.
A typo it appears? (Elfriede Jelinekl) in the text, part of the text; typos are like black holes. They suck in the light. Some readers delight in seeing them (schadenfreude), but perhaps the typo corrects one’s vision. Certainly they test it. Typos are purposeful. Theory of accidents.
Musical interlude, listen, an invisible text. Music as language must be translated. “Happy New Ears,” Cage said.
…now to dreaming:
the experience of reading. experience is not
necessarily evil, a song of experience is not
a song of evil – nor is a song of innocence
necessarily a song of good. depends on text.
No more links, likes, or comments;
and if you don’t like this post at the Toads,
take it up with JF’s RB, or RB’s JF.
The bits about death, or Death? One prefers breath, or Breath! One might here sight [sic] Walt Whitman or Charles Olson, but there follows a sketch (portrait), not traced, there are rules, after all – yes, but whose rules?
The rules of the text:
~~~
the text tails off
them’s that’s got it
Vonnegut footnote
inventions (externalizations)… to be continued, continue to be
References
Fernando, Jeremy. (2015). For The Pleasure of the Text… {etc.}
Day job workers share in common evenings. Time off, free time, leisure time, time-wasting, occupy the evenings. What to do? The question often haunts office and factory workers (workers clutching daytimer calendars are bothered by another version of the question). The evening absorbs the question of what to do like a fountain swallows wish thrown coins. The equity of time off beggars everyone. Free time hours can’t be saved, must be spent. On what?
Frits van Egters, the main character of Gerard Reve’s “The Evenings” (first published in Dutch in 1947), works an office day job he considers so boring he barely mentions it. His attention is focused on his evenings, how they might be spent, how they pass, what he might do with his free time, and what he does do. Frits lives with his parents when in December of 1946 we are invited to spend his evenings with him as they pass from around Christmas thru the new year. He talks to himself, has bad dreams, tells horrible jokes, thinks about the evening hours passing, goes out and about, visits friends, is condescending toward his parents, alienated, sarcastic, cynical. It’s freezing outside. Inside there’s the coal stove, a radio with a classical music and a news station, books, food, his bedroom. One night he goes out and drinks too much and gets sick. By the next evening he’s recovered enough to be able to go out again. He sees a film, rides a tram, crosses canals, walks along a river. He owns a bicycle, but it breaks.
The layout is dense, the dialog embedded in paragraphs, and the book is meant to pass as slow as an evening might, and to mean the same thing, which is nothing, which is to say, everything. Often, Fritz’s thoughts during a conversation are spoken to himself and interwoven with what he actually says and hears. His dreams are related in a similar way, so that the reader may not immediately realize when a dream, or the memory of a dream, has begun or ended. The writing is clear, though, the descriptions appealing to every sense. The home meals, the food, for example, are described with local, specific detail – texture, smell, look, feel, taste. You can even hear the meal cooking, eaten. The clothes, weather, walks also all described with realistic detail, a pleasure to read. There is no television, no devices to distract or synch. “The Evenings” is a book, a perfect way to pass an evening.
The Evenings: A Winter’s Tale, Gerard Reve, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett, Pushkin Press, London, 2016.
Edna O’Brien’s “The Country Girls” is the first in the trilogy telling the life and times of Kate and Baba, two girlfriends from country situations who get to the city trying to move away from the tangled mores of Irish family, church, education, and politics of the mid twentieth century. The second in the trilogy is “Girl with Green Eyes,” first published as “The Lonely Girl.” The third, received by critics at the time with the least enthusiasm, is “Girls in Their Married Bliss.”
Kate and Baba must work jobs, find a place to live, take care of themselves, all on their own. So what, we might ask. Those might be good problems to have. Indeed they are, and even better if the girls survive – the attempts to shame, the gentlemen who come into their lives, the petty but deep economic exploitations, trusts and distrusts of one another and their trysts.
“I work in a delicatessen shop in Bayswater and go to London University at night to study English. Baba works in Soho, but not in a strip-tease club, as she had hoped. She’s learning to be a receptionist in a big hotel. We share a small bed-sitting room, and my aunt sends a parcel of butter every other week” (212, “Girl with Green Eyes”).
At the time of their publications, in the early 1960’s, O’Brien’s books were banned, her family shamed. “The Country Girls” is dedicated to her mother, though it’s doubtful her mother ever read it. It wasn’t enough for the Irish censor board to simply ban the books – people burnt them in public shamings, and priests denounced them from the pulpit. It’s doubtful any of them read any of it, except maybe the pages someone said were rife with you know what, and God bless and keep you if you don’t know.
But O’Brien persisted, her work redeemed itself and a generation of girls. “My whole body was impatient now. I couldn’t sit still. My body was wild from waiting” (186, “The Country Girls”).
But redemption might not be sufficient for those who want to write their own lives, who want to be reborn every day: “Not long ago Kate Brady and I were having a few gloomy gin fizzes up London, bemoaning the fact that nothing would ever improve, that we’d die the way we were – enough to eat, married, dissatisfied” (7, “Girls in Their Married Bliss”).
My Penguin paperback copies are all three editions from 1981 (they were originally published in 1960, 1962, and 1964). Many editions have been printed, some with maybe better cover designs.
…from my Goodreads “short reviews of old personal library books.”
Bertie Wooster is a man without an immediate family but with a score of relatives and friends and a live-in butler or valet, a gentleman’s gentleman who goes by Jeeves. Bertie’s parents are conveniently dead, and he’s no siblings to shackle his adventures, which consist mainly of wasting time drinking and dining at the Drones, his men’s club, or at the racetrack, or getting into and out of engagements with young women whose mission in life would be to prop him up properly so that he might not be considered the actual wastrel he is, or getting into minor scrapes and follies with his comrades in trouble. Jeeves is the antagonist that prevents Bertie from serious injury his rich risk taking might seem headed toward.
Today, Bertie might be considered a trust fund baby, another wastrel who might someday grow up to be a president, but the Wodehouse story settings are generally around the Edwardian Era, and specifically the elite well-to-do whose fortunes have derived from conquest and capital growth. No one seems to have actually earned anything, but birthed into predicaments that are at once absurd, dastardly, and hilarious. Bertie and his buddies are royalty without the trappings of any kind of responsibility. They are moochers par excellence.
For the reader able to hold a sense of social justice in suspension for an hour or two of laugh-out-loud reading, Bertie and Jeeves provide an ideal escape. Often, the plots are thickened considerably with concerns over clothing, where Jeeves eventually outwits Bertie, stripping him of his leading edge fashion ideas. Minor characters from all walks of life enter the frays and provide a bit of economic diversity and compare and contrast action, or, at least, situation.
But the stories belong to Jeeves, whose constant background lobbying for reasonable justice in the Wooster household levels the mooching. He turns the lamp onto the mirror.
Rake the Sentiment: 3 Poems at Cosmopolitan Hotel Cairo. < Click to visit and read.
Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” contains everything Hemingway left out of “The Sun Also Rises,” which had left Ernest with the tincture of a refined sentiment. That is one difference between the Jazz Age and the Great Depression. Turned out, we didn’t always have Paris; most of us never had it. From page 1 of Miller: “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.”
I don’t remember when I first read “Tropic of Cancer,” probably ’68 or ’69. From my notes written on the back of the last page and inside the back book cover:
art sing 1
Liby 36
whore – Germaine 40-43
Popini 58
artist 60
America 86
change 87-90
room dream 114-116
woman want 117 (45, 26)
pimp & whore 143-144
Matisse 146-149
Russia America 154
working with boss 158
mona 160-166 (smile)
Paris 162-188
book 163
moon 167
paragraph (style) 167, 202, 216
converse 171
army 200
Whitman 216
gold standard 219
writer 224
what’s in the hole 225
earth 225, 226
idols 228
task of artist 228
inhuman 230
art 229-280
human 231-259 (view on goodreads)
“Tropic of Cancer” was first published in France, 1934, Obelisk Press.
My edition is First Black Cat Edition 1961 Fifteenth Printing B-10, $1.25.
Introduction c 1959 by Karl Shapiro first appeared in “Two Cities” Paris, France.
Preface by Anais Nin, 1934.
No ISBN appears in the book, but the number “394-17760-6” appears on the bottom right of back cover.
Yes, trying to do something with Goodreads for the new year. I’ll be putting up short reviews like the one above from some of my old reads.
Our Potus who hides us
from sea to lake crisis
hollow is your name.
Thy Kingdom rots
from east evidence storms
to trans west fires.
Feed us our daily diversions.
Forgive us our not tots
as we forgive those
who abandon us.
And lead us not into fees and tolls,
but deliver us our lowly titles
and our vulnerable genders,
our human based prayers.
Another review of “Alma Lolloon” released into the cybersphere, this one by Ashen Venema, author of “Course of Mirrors” and blogger friend. I paste below, and below that, please see the “TinyLetter” opportunity.
~~~
My this week’s Tiny Letter copied below. Would you like to sign up?
Three reviews of “Alma Lolloon” are now loose in the cybersphere:
Bill Currey bound his review in a tweet, to wit:
Bill Currey @williamcurrey
And here I thought I was going to get a Joycean map with footnotes and all to Linker’s Portland! I stumble blindly onwardly towards, if not to summation, at least to termination.
Joe Linker @JoeLinker
Replying to @williamcurrey @PhilippaRees1 and 2 others
Thanks for the review, Bill. Sounds like something Beckett might have said.
And Dan Hennessy posted a review of “Alma Lolloon” to his “Tangential Meanderings” blog (AKA: itkindofgotawayfromyou). Click here to read Dan’s review.
And if you’ve not read Philippa Rees’s review of “Alma Lolloon,” it’s at Queen Mob’s Tea House. Click here.
Bookmark Giveaway!
We’ll be spending the holidays with the grand girls, and for an art project we’ll be making bookmarks for a Joe Linker book.
The bookmarks use standard, toxic free materials, of paper and fabric, thematically linked to the books with original artwork.
If you’d like to receive a complementary bookmark, please send a reply to this tiny letter telling us what book you’d like the bookmark for (Penina’s Letters; Coconut Oil; Scamble and Cramble: Two Hep Cats and Other Tall Tales; Saltwort; or Alma Lolloon), and also include a snail mail address for us to mail you the bookmark. All bookmarks will be sent out by Dec 31st. If you prefer, we can send you an e-bookmark. Reply the same as above but with an email address. What’s an e-bookmark? Not sure, we’ve not made one yet.
You can view the covers of the five books here.
The Coming of the Toads 