He She

He plays a train
She plays a whistle
They move away travel.

He plays a rope
She plays a tree
They swing.

He plays a dream
She plays a feather
They fly.

He plays a general leader
She plays people
They declare war.

— Dunya Mikhail, Iraqui poet living in Michigan, emended by Emna Zghal in War: an Essay (2005).

Inspector of spiders' webs

To appoint oneself... an inspector of spiders' webs for many years in succession, and for long seasons, means joining a not overcrowded profession. No matter: the meditative mind returns from that school fully satisfied.
— Jean-Henri Fabre, quoted in "Spider Woman" by Burkhard Bilger, New Yorker March 5, 2005, 73.

Ghosts

I found this in Ye Antient Blogge:

Every new medium is a machine for the production of ghosts. (Kafka knew this.) As Friedrich Kittler argues [in Grammophon, Film, Typewriter, 1986], "The spirit-world is as large as the storage and transmission possibilities of a civilization." The oldest available print of a printing press is a 1499 image showing skeletons cavorting about a press, pages in hand, doing a dance of the dead. Spiritualists, as we have seen, did the danse macabre of the telegraph, celebrating the spirits conjured by electricity, the first of many in the nineteenth century to recognize that the realm of the immortals had expanded from the remembered dead to the transmitted and recorded dead.
— John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air, 139.

And then there's the recorded dead re-recorded in saecula saeculorum...

 

Gentle Reader...

Billy's Downtown Diner
Bethlehem, PA

When my wife Deb was associate editor for the exquisite (late) quarterly Books & Religion, editorial meetings would often concern the needs & desires of what they affectionately (and not without irony) called Our Reader. Unfortunately, this mythical creature, at least among her masters upstairs in Corporate, wasn't enough of an abstraction, and B & R tripped — or was pushed — over the bottom line into its grave.

I know it's different somehow with a blog, but my grasp of economics (which, if my Greek has not completely abandoned me for a more fertile frame in which to dwell, once meant something like "customs of the home," maybe even "Cider House Rules" without the "Cider" part) is insufficiently sophisticated to apply it to the case, and besides, the dang thing won't stand still, but keeps on transmogrifying, markets merging & splitting, devouring & excreting each other, and sometimes, like Neo inside Agent Smith, busting the matrix — i.e., "the way things are" — apart.

I've strayed from my original intent, Gentle Reader, which was to greet you after a long absence. I've brought along a few gifts, some no doubt of dubious value, as is often the case in such reunions, like the T-shirt your friends brought you upon their return from a vacation in Ireland, when what you really needed was for them to have taken you with them, and never come back.

Rambling again, sorry. Trouble with being my age is having so many damn stories to tell, & so little time to tell them in.

Which brings me round to my point at last. I'm going to perpetrate a subtle hoax — but then it's not a hoax if you're in on it, I guess — by backdating posts that actually I'm only loading in now, which will give the impression of an uninterrupted logorrhetic flow since my last "real" post of nearly two years ago. These false posts date (I *love* the ambiguity of "post" in this context, don't you?) correspond to jottings in my vademecum (if I'm using that term for my pocket notebook correctly — help me, some *REAL* classics scholar!) during my exile from the blogosphere, so I'm not lying about that.

But how can you trust me now? — short answer: you can't, and I invite you to apply that insight as widely as you wish.

What this means is that I'll be adding old stories as time allows, and they'll show up *under* this post, to preserve the appearance of chronological posting.
Enough already — except to say thank you for your patience, if you're not already long out the door, if you even exist, Gentle Reader. I hope you'll let me know if you do; I'd be grateful.

New life for an old kompyootr

Yesterday I set up a new computer in my apartment. It was paid for by my new employer, an online journal, for whom I'm the work-at-home managing editor. I've been on the job a couple months, and am just starting to feel like I know what I'm doing.

The new machine orphans the laptop that's been my main workspace for most of the millennium so far, and upon which I'm typing these words, through the soft rubber cover I put over the keyboard a long time back — a lesson learned from spilled coffee and flakes of paint falling from the old ceiling.

Naturally, I'll still use this battered re-conditioned pre-Intel Mac PowerBook for work, when I go on trips to conferences and weekends in New York City. But it's slow, one of its memory slots is hosed, and the screen's pretty cramped (though not as bad as the clamshell iBook, my first digital vademecum, fondly remembered as the ToiletSeat model or iCommode®).

Something occurred the other day that made me think of another way to use this ole thang. The details — "what really happened" — don't matter: it was just the most recent disillusionment, the kind that stops you dead in mid-stride, making traffic pile up behind you on the sidewalk. You know, when it dawns on you that things ain't what you thought they wuz?

You don't have to live very long upon this bank and shoal of time for this to happen more than once to you, though about the umpteenth iteration you have to start to wonder if you're *ever* gonna learn how to pay attention.

As with others at such moments, my first response was to wonder where I went wrong. That's what it feels like: being in the wrong, having fucked things up. And my natural reaction is to cast about for a way to fix that problem. But, as always, every solution is lame, or the cure's worse than the disease, or "all the river crossings/all the way to the sea//have been bombed" — as Galway Kinnell's exquisite new poem puts it — "and we must make our way by pure balance."

Easy for him to say. He's achieved apotheosis, he figured out years ago how to transmute his mistakes into Pure Poetry, to inspire and daunt the likes of scribblers like me.

The Buddhists are occasionally helpful in a circumstance like this, with their sad smile at mad humanity flailing about in the muck, sinking ever deeper into the morass of illusion. But it's hard to maintain that detached-though-compassionate attitude towards the human condition when a crushing deadline's bearing down on you, your feature writers are "having problems," and your server's gone down in Australia, where it's the middle of the night.

On the other hand, is it ever any different? That question encapsulates my insight du jour, and it's precisely no help, like saying, "Well, if you'd been watching where you were going, you wouldn't have stepped in front of that bus."

Not long ago, I awoke in the predawn dark, writhing to the jabber of my monkey brain haranguing and jeering at me, reciting the litany of all my failures and fuckups. I couldn't get awake enough to shake off this onslaught of self-denunciation, but I clearly wasn't going back to sleep any time soon, either. Then, into this turmoil, there dropped ten words from a quiet but commanding voice that shut up everything else: "Have a little respect, BBly. There's a soul stuggling here." In the ensuing silence, I heard the first cardinal of the morning give his wake-up call.

Hard to remember these moments of clarity — or rather, to reconstitute the immediate calm they produce. Dumping my possessions and cutting all ties with the world to go meditate in a cave in the mountains might enable me to persuade these epiphanies to come a little closer together, with less racing around and shrieking in between. Maybe not.

One thing is clear, however. I could use "a place apart" in my digital life where I can ponder such questions — including "Where did I go wrong?" — that isn't completely entangled in the wired world that sometimes appears to me to be like Ahab lashed to Moby-Dick, beckoning us all to follow him down.

Well, that's probably a bit operatic. Fact is, I love this little machine, not least because it's very comfortable to write upon, and I can set it up in front of my bedroom window, out of reach of the cable modem, and contemplate the here and now, even as it's passing away.

And because I'll be doing it for free, I can do it freely. Yeah. That can work.

Updike on the new authorship

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap. As the author is gradually retired from his old responsibilities of confrontation and provocation, he has grown in importance as a kind of walking, talking, advertisement for the book — a much more pleasant and flattering duty, it may be, than composing the book in solitude. Authors, if I understand present trends, will soon be like surrogate birth mothers, rented wombs in which a seed implanted by high-powered consultants is allowed to ripen and, after nine months, be dropped squalling into the marketplace.
— John Updike, "The End of Authorship," New York Times, June 25, 2006.

Beckett on the afterlife

Samuel Beckett, on what it will be like in the afterlife: "We'll sit around talking about the good old days, when we wished we were dead." — Louis Menand, "Notable Quotables," in New Yorker, February 19 & 26, 2007.
 

There's no

There's no care except hunger
No favors but from an enemy
Nothing edible but a bale of hay.
No lookout but there's a man asleep
No clemency without crime
No safety but among the frightened
No good faith but a disbeliever's
Nor any cool heads but lovers.
— François Villon, from "Ballade," translated by Galway Kinnell

Winter

These are the desolate, dark weeks
When nature in its barrenness
Equals the stupidity of men.
— William Carlos Williams, cited by Lourie's Word of the Day, 2/11/07.

First snow day of this winter. Class cancelled, streets white.
Septentrional: pertaining to winter.
Thanks, Jeffie!
 

on Regular Information

Every check we write is drawn on exactly one bank, for precisely one amount, and each has exactly one check number. If we need to record checks, we don't need to worry about checks that are not drawn on a bank, or where "check number" is not a number, or where "amount" is a poem or a drawing.
— Mark Bernstein, The Tinderbox Way, 43.

This blog is made with Tinderbox. The book is more than useful in figuring out how to use a software program. It helps find useful ways to think about all the information we seem to have been put here to herd. I wish there weren't so many typos, but I love the calm reassuring voice, and the examples are — well, exemplary.
 

Of Love and Other Disasters

Of Love and Other Disasters

The punch-press operator from Flint
met the assembler from West Virginia
in a bar near the stadium. Neither
had anything in mind, so they conversed
about the upcoming baseball season
about which neither cared. We could
be a couple, he thought, but she was
all wrong, way too skinny. For years
he'd had an image of the way a woman
should look, and it wasn't her, it wasn't
anyone he'd ever known, certainly not
his ex-wife, who'd moved back south
to live with her high school sweetheart.
About killed him. I don't need that shit,
he almost said aloud, and then realized
she'd been talking to someone, maybe
to him, about how she couldn't get
her hands right, how the grease ate
so deeply into her skin it became
a part of her, and she put her hand,
palm up, on the bar and pointed
with her cigarette at the deep lines
the work had carved. "The life line,"
he said," which one is that?" "None,"
she said, and he noticed that her eyes
were hazel flecked with tiny spots
of gold, and then — embarrassed — looked
back at her hand, which seemed tiny
and delicate, the fingers yellowed
with calluses but slender and fine.
She took a paper napkin off the bar,
spit on it and told him to hold still
while she carefully lifted his glasses
up on his forehead, leaving him half
blind, and wiped something off
above his left cheekbone. "There,"
she said, lowering his glasses, "I
got it," and even with his glasses on
what she showed him was nothing
he could see. He thought, better
get out of here before it's too late, but
knew too late was what he wanted.
— Philip Levine, New Yorker, February 5, 2007

Leaving The Road

In the evening the murky shape of another coastal city, the cluster of tall buildings vaguely askew. He thought the iron armatures had softened in the heat and then reset again to leave the buildings standing out of true. The melted window glass hung frozen down the walls like icing on a cake. They went on. In the nights sometimes now he'd wake in the black and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 229.

---

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate* patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes, a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
— The Road, 241. Last passage. The end.
* marked with close wavy lines. from medieval Latin vermicularis, from Latin vermiculus, diminuitive of vermis, worm.

The black shape of it

He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distand low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting in the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small penknife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 220.

Sitting over words

Riding the W train headed for South Ferry, on the adrack above the windows:

Sitting over words
very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
not far
like a night wind in the pines or like the sea in the dark
the echo of every thing that has ever
been spoken
still spinning its one syllable
between the earth and silence
— W.S. Merwin, Poetry in Motion, from Migration: New and Selected Poems, 2006.

Lost patterans

They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans. The first he'd seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches drod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sister-world in the ancient dark beyond.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 152-3.

Where men cant live/with the last god

Where men cant live, gods fare no better.
— Old man in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, 145.

---

... to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing...
Ibid.

If only...

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath. Trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 9-10.

Make notes

Pure Balance

Wherever we are is unlikely.
Our few kisses — I don't know if
they're of goodbye or of
what — or if she knows either.

Neither do I understand why it's
exhilarating — as well as the other things it is —
to know one doesn't have a future,
or how much longer one won't have one.

Future tramples all prediction.
Hope loses hope. Clarity
turns out to be
an invisible form of sadness.

We look for a bridge to cross
to the other shore where our other
could be looking for us
but all the river crossings

all the way to the sea
have been bombed. We look for a tree —
touch it — touch
right through it — sometimes nowhere

is there anything to hitch oneself to,
and we must make our way by pure balance.
This is so and can't be helped
without doing damage to oneself.
— Galway Kinnell, Strong Is Your Hold, 64.

---

... Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
balone on white with fluorescent mustard?
... What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of a world whose sub-substance
is blaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of a wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song...
— Ibid., from "Why Regret?", 65.

Make notes and make notes and make notes.
The music will appear.
 

Reservation

Bethlehem Diner

Overheard at breakfast:

Widows Club. Reservation for 14. 1 o'clock.

 

Practical use from a torn up life

A woman can always get some practical use from a torn-up life, Gabriel decided. She likes mending it and patching it, making sure the edges are straight. She spreads the last shred out and takes its measure: "What can I do with this remnant? How long does it need to last?" A man puts on his life ready-made. If it doesn't fit, he will try to exchange it for another. Only a fool of a man will try to adjust the sleeves or move the buttons: he doesn't know how.
— Mavis Gallant, Paris Stories, 183.