Edmund Wilson

LUCIDITY FORCE EASE
The thin strains of linkéd sweetness, with now and then a note frailly sour of the harp and the violin – some old musical-comedy tune I remembered from my college days - seemed to me even in this false and elfin echo to keep more that was human and charming than the pace of the newer dance music had ever allowed it to possess; and as I glanced at Daisy, gazing out like a charming good-natured child, at the sights of the passing shore, I was touched with sentimental revery.

Ce devait être quelque vieux refrain de comédie musicale datant de mes années d’université; ses échos douceâtres avec de temps en temps la note un peu aigre d’une harpe ou d’un violin semblaient, même avec cet écho faux et iréel, avoir conservé plus d’humanité et de charme que la musique de danse le plus moderne n’en pouvait suggérer. Je jetai un coup d’oeil à Daisy – elle regardait maintenant comme une gentille petite fille la rive qui défilait – et je tombai dans une rêverie sentimentale.

Les souches mince d'une douceur liée, avec de temps en temps une note frailly sure de la harpe et le violon - certaines musiques old-tune comédie Je me souvenais de mes années de collège - me semblait même dans ce échos parasites et de lutins de conserver une plus ce qui était humain et plus charmante que le rythme de la musique de danse plus récente avait jamais permis de posséder, et comme je l'ai regardé à Daisy, regardant comme un enfant charmant bonhomme, à des sites de la côte en passant, j'ai été touché par sentimentale rêverie.

Robert Briffault and the woe of foetid inheritance

But rebellion may be, after all, one of our most desirable traits. In his ground-breaking work The Mothers, British anthropologist Robert Briffault found that Western children are indeed rebellious by nature. Briffault argued that it is only when we are able to "shake off the dead hand of traditional heredity" that we reach our highest potential.

Episodes of Sublime Transubstantiation by Means of Prose

It is possible to safely and faithfully say that over the last thirty years I have recited to myself, three hundred times, often aloud, a passage from the vastly under-appreciated novel of Edmund Wilson
I THOUGHT OF DAISY:
The thin strains of linkéd sweetness, with now and then a note frailly sour of the harp and the violin – some old musical-comedy tune I remembered from my college days - seemed to me even in this false and elfin echo to keep more that was human and charming than the pace of the newer dance music had ever allowed it to possess; and as I glanced at Daisy, gazing out like a charming good-natured child, at the sights of the passing shore, I was touched with sentimental revery.
Call it sleep, call it praying; a peace mantra.
From Robert Craft's AN IMPROBABLE LIFE:
What I learned in the hospital is that the time between heartbeats varies in healthy hearts, but not in diseased ones on the verge of failure. Thus a perfectly steady heartbeat is more likely to be found in elderly, rigid bodies than in flexible young ones. The corollary of this is that fractal patterns of considerable complexity are linked to healthy heart functioning, and that when the complexity disappears, sudden death may follow.

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.)