I came so far for beauty left
So much behind
My patience and my family
My masterpiece unsigned
I thought I'd be rewarded
For such a lonely choice
And surely she would answer
To such a very hopeless voice
I practiced all my sainthood
I gave to one and all
But the rumours of my virtue
They moved her not at all
I changed my style to silver
I changed my clothed to black
And where I would surrender
Now I would attack I stormed the old casino
For the money and the flesh and I myself decided
What was rotten and what was fresh
And men to do my bidding
And broken bones to teach
The value of my pardon
The shadow of my reach
But no, I could not touch her
With such a heavy hand
Her star beyond my order
Her nakedness unmanned
I came so far for beauty
I left so much behind
My patience and my family
My masterpiece unsigned
Friday, 25 March 2011
Imogen Heap - "Aha" (Ellipse)
Heap, of Imogen Heap, was part of Frou Frou.
Song goes all over the (aural) place. Pretty nice. Think Kate Bush / Tori Amos
Thursday, 24 March 2011
Monday, 21 March 2011
Roy Blount Jr - "Alphabet Juice"
A mishmash of words and their meaning, their origin, their usage.
A lot is taken from the internet, particularly urbandictionary.com is quoted a lot, which is a bit silly.
Still, a nice lazy browsing book for words and their meanings, to meander through meanings and useless facts.
J.D. Salinger - "Fanny & Zooey" (half-finished)
Only read "Fanny", couldn't finish "Zooey", which is a separate story but writes to the Fanny character.
Amazing how he can set a mood by describing how people act, react and think.
Quite explicit at times; sometimes he seems to forego the "show don't tell" completely, but on a deeper level there's so much more (which is not "shown" directly).
Bill Morgan and Nancy J. Peters - "'Howl' on trial, the battle for free expression"
the Beats: Ginsberg, Gregorio Nunzio, Corsa, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Peter Orlovsky
- 1873 - Comstock Laws forbid anything that "has to do with sex" from being mailed
- 1954 - Ginsberg takes peyote and has vision of Moloch in the shape of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel and the Medical Arts building
- 1955 - "Howl" is published
- 1957 - Trial. Not convicted.
Justice Potter Stewart: "I cannot define 'obscenity', but I know it when I see it."
Ginsberg in letter: "Burroughs is getting fantastically dirty in his mss. but it is high art, but he doesn't shilly-shally, in fact he's been writing pornography with a vengeance lately, and my own work is full of orgies."
Ginsberg: "'Footnote to Howl' is too lovely and serious a joke to try to explain. The built-in rhythmic exercise should be clear, it's basically a repeat of the Moloch section. It's dedicated to my mother who died in the madhouse and it says I loved her anyway and that even in worst conditions life is holy."
"Poetry is what poets write, and not what other people think they should write."
chilicosm: may be defined as the interpenetration of many different levels of cosmic creation.
"... a word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged. It is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used."
honi soit que mal y pense: evil to him to evil thinks
"as it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence."
"San Francisco," said a cynic, "is getting too much like L.A. It's where neon goes when it dies"
"The birds have eaten the berries. Haven't I sent this latter before in another life? And haven't you received it?" (Alan Ginsberg to John Hollander, sept 7, 1958)
Ulysses: judge book in its entirety, not word by word!
"The Miscellaneous Man", a Berkeley magazine.
Joseph Conrad - "Heart Of Darkness"
(ouch, too long ago)
I liked the story, though some parts couldn't "catch me".
There was darkness in the writing, and I could easily imagined the darkness of that world, though whether he described it so perfectly, or whether I overlay my own dark times in days of travel, I cannot say.
update April 2014
Read it again while in Africa. Big change. Many sentences and words got to me.
"We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand, because we were too far and could not remember, because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign and no memories."
"Well, you know, that was the worst of it - this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar."
"You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence."
"They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him - some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last - only at the very last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude - and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core... "
"but it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares."
"It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference: perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible."
"I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance."
update 2019-07-22. Read the last part again when coming across this book in the grey house in Scotland, 6 miles south of Ullapool. The exact same part - "I found myself back in the sepulchral city" - spoke to me as strongly as it did then.
I liked the story, though some parts couldn't "catch me".
There was darkness in the writing, and I could easily imagined the darkness of that world, though whether he described it so perfectly, or whether I overlay my own dark times in days of travel, I cannot say.
update April 2014
Read it again while in Africa. Big change. Many sentences and words got to me.
"We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand, because we were too far and could not remember, because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign and no memories."
"Well, you know, that was the worst of it - this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar."
"You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence."
"They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him - some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last - only at the very last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude - and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core... "
"but it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares."
"It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference: perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible."
"I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance."
update 2019-07-22. Read the last part again when coming across this book in the grey house in Scotland, 6 miles south of Ullapool. The exact same part - "I found myself back in the sepulchral city" - spoke to me as strongly as it did then.
Mono - "Life In Mono" (Formica Blues)
(this does not seem to be the same Mono as http://weesbij.blogspot.com/search/label/mono)
Trip-hop, soft echoing female voices that remind of OST "Huit Femmes", slightly melancholy.
Influenced by cool jazz,'60s pop and classic film-soundtracks, the trip-hop duo Mono formed around vocalist Siobhan De Maré and producer Martin Virgo, a one-time member of Nellee Hooper's production team which worked on Massive Attack's seminal "Unfinished Sympathy" as well as Björk's Debut. After Virgo hooked up with De Maré in mid-1996, the pair recorded the Life in Mono EP and signed to Mercury by the end of the year. After working on their debut album Formica Blues, Mono gained a comparatively high profile through an appearance on the soundtrack to the American film Great Expectations. Formica Blues was released in America in February 1998, six months after its British appearance. ~ John Bush, Rovi
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)