June 2010
28 posts
This reviewer found a pubic hair in her library... →
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“And if you’ve never heard of Markson, that merely proves his point. Roland...”
– Keith Gessen
Poor David Markson could have probably gotten a... →
Assuming the “it” here is how many readers Markson has, not the “it” of his actual life. Sometimes you need 3 beers, but sometimes it only takes 1. The sadness of our greatness uncared for, unheard, reminded me of this passage in Karl Shapiro, which suggests you just give up searching for fame in America. My bold.
We have tried so hard — and failed — to...
“The Progressives have accomplished nothing of use in 50 years.”
– The lone comment to A. Theroux’s bitter and boring review of the new BEE book. Bitter and boring save the use of the word muttjack. This is that same Theroux who wrote, the greatest thing to roll joints on, after The Recognitions.
This is divorce blogging
Ab-solutely
youngmanhattanite:
INTERIOR, kitchen
Wife: I need to start working on my abs. (Lifts up shirt to reveal a deliciously soft 40 year old belly with just a hint of stretch marks from bearing our 3 children.) Me: Cool, go for it. (I guess someone will get to enjoy that.)
The Souls of Old Men
In their bodies wasted and aged
sit the souls of old men.
How grievous are the poor things
and how bored with the miserable life they endure.
How they tremble lest they lose it and how they dote on it
the confounded and contradictory
souls, that sit—comicotragical—
in their aged worn-out hides.
C.P. Cavafy
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In the Same Place
The setting of houses, cafés, the neighborhood
that I’ve seen and walked through years on end:
I created you while I was happy, while I was sad,
with so many incidents, so many details.
And, for me, the whole of you is transformed into feeling.
C.P. Cavafy
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103W
From Dave Antin’s “Durations” poem in W.I.M.T.B.A.G, on taking over teaching classes of English comp for his friend:
now he taught two courses there one was a course
in english composition that was only a little mad
teaching people who had no great desire to learn it how
to write english in a more or less comfortable and lucid way
that would not get them laughed at...
Gertember? Tubeocter? Quauary?
i was in france for a month last year between November and December
One of the slyer moments in sly Dave Antin’s “Durations” poem from W.I.M.T.B.A.G., with duration severely tested.
Things to be in the next life
1. The most beloved cardiologist in Topeka.
2. A diminutive man who lives for shred.
3. A grocer.
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“People who have swimming pools don’t need state parks. If you buy your...”
– Unidentified source in Harper’s article on Arizona. Speaker has a government job.
Jean Genet as Holden Caulfield
“As soon as I speak I am betrayed by the situation. I am betrayed by the person who is listening to me, quiet simply because I am speaking. I am betrayed by the choice of words.”
From a 1983 interview, quoted in On Late Style, Edward M. Said, page 79.
Genet smoked constantly, and he also drank, but he never seemed to change much either with drink, emotion, or thought. I recall that during the evening he once said something very surprisingly warm about Jacques Derrida—-un copain, remarked Genet—-whom I had thought of as a quietist Heideggerian type at the time; Glas had not yet appeared, and it was only six months later, when Mariam,...
One auto response next time a European tells you...
What the unification of Italy did to places like Sicily, Naples, and Sardinia was to arrest and distort, then to isolate them in their lopsided social, economic, and certainly political actualities. To Gramsci, then, the South appears, he says memorably, like a vast social disintegration: a large mass of destitute and oppressed peasants are preyed on by a class of parasitic intermediaries...
The Question about Opera
What seems to me the one absolutley central and radical question about opera is the question “Why do these people sing?”
From On Late Style, Edward M. Said, pg 59.
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Revered & Rummaged
David Markson, Postmodern Master, Dead at Age 82 ABC News AP By HILLEL ITALIE AP National Writer David Markson, a revered postmodern author who rummaged relentlessly and humorously through art, history and human … Author David Markson, postmodern master, dead at age 82 Winnipeg Free Press By: AP NEW YORK, NY - David Markson, a revered postmodern author who rummaged relentlessly and...
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Williams wanted to be a doctor, have a family, live near New York City, and write poetry. As far as anyone knows, he did all these things admirably. And the daily life has a lot to do with it. He survives as a poet even better than his contemporaries, a consequence, perhaps, of his roots in the pedestrian world. Williams never became an “exile”; how can an obstetrician be an exile?
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RIP David Markson
If Jack’s greatest lines apply to anyone, they apply to Markson: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue...
What Tony Curtis Loves Most
I love all women. Their kindness, their aloofness. And I like women being funny. You know, there’s something about big knockers and long legs, and they’ve got their makeup on, and they’re just in their underwear — and then they do something funny. I love that.
