Mark Reep - Il Miglior Fabbro

Mark Reep -- blog and art.
In the Thirteenth century, on the northern shore of the Mediterranean, a stonemason was a poet and a diarist, and he made pictures so that he could be inside their making.
Let us say that he lay under plane trees and ate a peach and a sheaf of flat bread, and long-contemplated the forms with which he construed spirits' paths.
This he did without permission, and without an agent, and the curator of the gallery in which he presented his works, was a red deer, that wandered by.

Frederick Reuss

Frederick Reuss – HORACE AFOOT
The prose fiction construct Horace Afoot portrays a male personal character having willfully located himself in, shall we say, the Midwest: he drinks fine wine, abjures travel by automobile; and means himself to as complete a disaffection as is practicable: vines curl about the hovel. He is a particular swirl of relational facets, by which a reader will and can be admiring and intrigued. In Ohio and Indiana and Illinois souls are nominally grey and have been planed down to a thin verso of negligible expectation, pared to a point where the only move sich pawns have left to make: is to surprise. Naturally and consequently, it is the latter who lend water and soil to the former, an exchange whose explication by sweet narrative materializes by the hand of Reuss with considerable grace of form.
Here, of this we can be sure: billions of persons daily rot in hunger, and several broad patterns of pain fester parts of the earth we can all call jewels. Some of us have been sheltered from the non-feasance of souls by capitalism and lethal greeds of other portly fashions. Those who deliquesce in measures of the unwobbling pivot by reading aloud passages from THE GREAT GATSBY can feel safe bedding down in the cold desert night, or rocked in a lifeboat by bleak waves at sea. We are all, always alone. All hypnosis is self-hypnosis, and Yogananda sees only ourselves being ourselves; no one is ever out of character. So that: but: yet still is there the grand-sky immeasurable in the alchemy of delightful Reuss’s writing; the naturally-decided chemical combinations which produce liquidity and sunrises in language-form.
Walking around Enfield Glen and Lucifer Falls, a five mile CCC path rocked and stepped and carved, glaciology rampante, I imagine that these first Reuss novels came like meteorites, each in its own way perfectly formed, quite like the lyrical reflections in Gatsby: the first few days of a transatlantic voyage by sail. And the future book that he is in fact promising us, and for which we will be duly grateful, will possess that which the first few, shining and amiably composed, did, and will also have the grandeur of telling us how we read.

Artist: Dan Bacich

The work of our noble friend Dan Bacich, upstate New York - particularly the assemblages - defy the darkest night.
My gift to you outright.

Two ways to read Paul Auster

This boy read an Auster novel.



HERE! James Wood unmasks the man who writes TV Guide synopses. (It's in The New Yorker.)

Jaymay

On some occasions it is possible to indisputably identify in art and music the quite precise source of the operating process by which a work's virtue causes the truest recognition in a viewer's or listener's heart. In Jaymay, that source is the point equidistant between the march and the waltz, with drollery.

appreci: Sara Midda

There is the abhorrence of bad manners
the manners that are called bad,
the common behavior that bears traits of
indifference to suffering
and even the palest forms of cruelty.
There is disdain for crude language
and much sadness for the ways of humankind’s
turning blossoms into mush
at the bottom of the bin.

One form of rainstorm appears so:
without wind at all, late at night,
soon pouring off the eaves and sealing
within:
gentility.
And the end of remorse
for the boors.

Juxtaposition stopped being funny in 1968

Mervyn Peake -- TITUS GROAN

Frederick Reuss

HENRY OF ATLANTIC CITY

1. Reuss’ saint-boy is never not assessing his relation to the evident world by way of an endless loop of the Gnostic Gospels, and is situated within the prose fiction in such a way that a reader may always be on the verge of realizing that the cops returning him to one of the few stable waves with which he is familiar, may not quite be the imperial guards his expressionist (Reuss) allows us to briefly suppose they might be, in full, to Henry.
2. Excepting Berkeleyan Henry, all the character figures in the novel effectively simulate both characters in a novel, and the sorts of personality-forms among whom readers will spend their day. But Henry’s voice is confined (almost entirely) within the good and affectionate Reuss, and dwells there cupped in the warm hands of our faith.
3. Longue durée has been excused from the breadth of Henry’s acuity; there are no invisible elisions, and he appears before and regards each of his subsequent idiomatic set-pieces in a state of free autism that is moderated only by the kindnesses and needs of those who are presented to us in such a way that they appear to be regarding him as being a breathing boy.
4. Those readers who injudiciously regard Atlantic City casinos and culture as depraved and morbid may have difficulty participating in Henry’s apperception that theirs is a holiness equivalent to all others, including warm naps in a hammock in the fiercely lovely Fairmount, Indiana, or squatting in a dumpster that might put us in mind of a penetrating vile heartlessness.
5. The McMurray&Beck production of the book is most pleasing. Shall we not remember that we read hundreds of books by dozens of publishers who imagine that we are only grimy and wallet-mongering monkeys, who do not respond with gladsome hearts to fine binding, exquisite typeface, and excellent clarity? Lose not thy most human of convictions, our noble Greg Michalson!
6. The arrangement I have made with Frederick Reuss allows the confection (mine own) of a few hundred pages of manuscript draft situated somewhere in the middle of the book, in which Henry’s cosmology is unfolded (context is everything) and flowers like ten thousand pink peony bushes. Perhaps there are typescripts or diskettes lying fallow in a desk, stacked under magazines or in the vertical arrearage of plastic cases, rejected or never considered, which I can pretend would have allowed the Henry construct a native semantic being unmediated by Reuss or me.
7. There is the noting that no transubstantiating doggy canine dog renders Henry peaceably extra-literate, though perhaps the author allows this in other books, which I’m eager to read, for this story told round the campfire gave me much delight and satisfaction.
8. I should very probably have preferred not to be brusquely touched upon my brow that Henry discovers Buddhist conciliation when the author and I break off our engagement, as I always am puzzled and dismayed by the convention that prose fictions shall ere have denouements, but it is hard to shuck off the delights that usually obtain from stories in which descriptions of young people learning the ways of the world illumine the insecure margins and ever-shifting boundaries of both our strongest and most faint confidences.

after postmodernism

In 1976 I was caught out in Lake Ontario in a very small boat, in rolling and tumbling waves far larger than any I had experienced on even the roughest days on Cayuga Lake. When I found land, my fingers were bleeding from grasping the gunwales, and my muscles were locked in something I might have called a death grip. Reaching the harbor and tying up at the dock – to the astonishment of those persons in the boatyard wiser than to venture out on such a day – was a moment I later came to recognize as an authoritative experience, in which there was nothing rhetorical, ironic, or satiric, about finding safe harbor.
I feel that way about Henry James. I had not imagined that anything could challenge the finite, unassailable core of Daisy and Isabel and Kate and Charlotte, until the last couple of years when I read In Search of Lost Time and had the many obscure months afterward to site the stars, and locate my one true path back to James through Proust.
Pound had presciently and famously recognized Joyce’s Ulysses as an end, not a beginning. Until literary greatness is thrust upon us once again, we will seek to find a new thinker futilely. Richard Price, especially in Lush Life, is returning to the quay of Henry James, permitting the next insurgency, which we may have difficulty recognizing.

^{Night ferry crosses still river}

Southern Mississippi.

Last leaves of lights from the passing shore

flicker on forearms rested on the railing,

and the dim cries of birds

and the fragrance of unknown trees

enfold the dreamer like a counterpane

of beneficence and peace

and is-at-home.

Such manners appeal redemption,

as a child evades execration,

the well-read searcher the woe

that from such wisps obtain.

No story provisions tribulation.

... drift to remembrance

that obscure object of desire

and the impression that bohemian village life

was not what it seemed;

the fabulous raspberries

were a temporal conveyance;

the waltz was streaked with shades of sweat,

and the place where you are,

breathing in the mossy and swampy smell of the

riverbank,

is

not

in your element.