"I am half distracted, Captain Shandy, said Mrs. Wadman, holding up her cambric handkerchief to her left eye, as she approached the door of my Uncle Toby's sentry box; "a mote, or sand, or something, I know not what, has got into this eye of mine; do look into it," said she.
I see him yonder, with his pipe pendulous in his hand, and the ashes falling out of it, looking and looking, then rubbing his eyes and looking again, with twice the good nature that ever Galileo looked for a spot in the sun.
In vain, for, by all the powers which animate the organ, Widow Wadman's left eye shines this moment as lucid as her right; there is neither mote, nor sand, nor dust, nor chaff, nor speck, nor particle of opake matter floating on it. There is nothing, my dear paternal uncle! but one lambent, delicious fire, furtively shooting out from every part of it, in all direction, into thine. "



very much enjoyed Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story yesterday, though maybe 5% less Steve Coogan & more Shirley Henderson would have been nice, but really good withal, certainly hope it helps to create a new generation of Shandeans, who are advised to start-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------here-------------
 

a fine oak by William Turner of Oxford in a nice set from the Art& Architecture wing of the Courtald Institute...
 

THE WAR ON HYPE

"What is the effect of this? For one, it creates a domestic state of war, a creeping authoritarian ethos that affronts the openness and relaxation of a liberal society richer and healthier than nearly any in history. This state of affairs might be acceptable if the threat were greater, but because most Americans are safe, it becomes show business, a set of policeman and analysts in every state that buy equipment and hold press conferences to announce the success of drills for disasters that will probably never come. "

The Kootenay School of Writing have a big new PDF of "W" up with work by Derksen, Robertson, Wah, Luoma etc and an essay on Billy Budd (as played by Terence Stamp above) by the late Charles Watts, who taught me how to sound out some of the rhymes in CLA-rel...


 

good luck tomorrow to our ladies team against Denmark, in the meantime I'll brush up on these animated Curling Basics
 

Europe's contempt for other cultures can't be sustained

"Europe has never had to worry too much about context or effect because for around 200 years it dominated and colonised most of the world. Such was Europe's omnipotence that it never needed to take into account the sensibilities, beliefs and attitudes of those that it colonised, however sacred and sensitive they might have been. On the contrary, European countries imposed their rulers, religion, beliefs, language, racial hierarchy and customs on those to whom they were entirely alien. There is a profound hypocrisy - and deep historical ignorance - when Europeans complain about the problems posed by the ethnic and religious minorities in their midst, for that is exactly what European colonial rule meant for peoples around the world. With one crucial difference, of course: the white minorities ruled the roost, whereas Europe's new ethnic minorities are marginalised, excluded and castigated, as recent events have shown..."

Seattle's Stranger has two pieces on glass artist Dale Chihuly--

"The Bridge of Glass is terrible. And I never wrote about it when I was in Tacoma because I was worried that someone would try to kill me. It has completely revolutionized downtown Tacoma, but as art it is a complete failure. It is a concrete slab with some art thown up on it. The art has nothing to do with its location. It's all recycled work. You're looking at a wall of Venetian vases, these bong-like things, and there's like 70 of them, so you end up with this kind of Baskin-Robbins mentality, like, Today I'll have that one. This is glass, outdoors, and it�s completely covered, with video camera surveillance, and air control so that no steam gets in there, because if steam gets in there you can't see the glass, but it's not outdoor work. The one piece that is outdoor work is this plastic thing that looks like giant aqua rock candy, so gift shops have been making and selling aqua rock candy as souvenirs. This is what downtown Tacoma is supposed to mean? After going through the humiliation of losing the railroad terminus to Seattle, and being the laughingstock of Puget Sound--this aqua rock candy is what represents the rebirth of Tacoma? I don't know what happened there. I think Dale just wanted to experiment with aqua rock candy looking shit, and no one talked him out of it, because no one is powerful enough to talk him out of it. Akron, Ohio, recently purchased some rock candy towers for their city from Chihuly Inc. The good thing is you can shoot them, and the bullets will just sort of glance off, the art won't break. So feel free to shoot them."


 

special Saturday night treat: a sneak preview of Kevin Davies' "One-eyed Seller of Garlic" (excuse mild-reformatting)--

17.

Nothing to do
but study the architecture
of the abandoned Recluse
And examine the way Bill
deletes Dot
from various poems
containing daffodils and not
But I have stood
and stared, if not stooped
to labour
And I have introduced
a new and crucial content into verse
Defending the dalesmen and their ways
Making
visible certain devices
But I won't be translated
into French
until 1949
And I am surrounded
by trick questions, which I avoid
As I would a papist, or a Fenian
A terrible hangover one Grasmere morning
Smack dab in the middle
of literary history
Is one fucking
cup of tea too much to ask?
I ask you,
bending into the head throb
Is it all a waste
The mere ante-chamber of the chapel
In two, thirteen,
finally fourteen books
I will describe the terror beyond god
Waiting in
downtown Bangor
for the bus that connects to the mall-hopper



 

review of a novel about Gilbert White's tortoise Timothy--

"So it is with humans," Timothy explains. "Quickness draws their eye. Entangles their attention. What they notice they call reality. But reality is a fence with many holes, a net with many tears." Just as Melville revealed the ambivalence of the natural, Timothy sees ambivalence in the human: "The truth of my time among humans. As subject to their neglect, their forgetfulness, their most trivial intentions, as I am to their malice. As vulnerable to their wonder as their loathing." Yet there is cause for hope, even sympathy. "Sense of wonder rising within him," Timothy observes of the aging White. "Not at the beauty of nature alone. But at what it knows."

 

Chapter xxxii - CETOLOGY

"But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post- office is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them; to have one's hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this Leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job might well appal me. "Will he (the Leviathan) make a covenant with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain!" But I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try..."

 

Ahab gives up smoking, from chapter XXX "The Pipe" of Rockwell Kent's Lakeside Press Edition of Moby Dick (Victor Levy-Bealieu's "Monsieur Melville" very effectively uses cropped close-ups of many of these among its many illustrations)--


"Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came from his mouth in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. "How now," he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, "this smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring, - aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more - "

He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made..."




 

another review of Taylor Branch's At Canaan's Edge

"Then, of course, there were the white people. Branch very deftly documents the ways in which the careers of an entire generation of conservative politicians depended upon managing the rhetoric of racial backlash. Here, for example, is Ronald Reagan's voice playing over an ominous film of riots in a commercial for his 1966 gubernatorial campaign: “Every day the jungle draws a little closer.... Our city streets are jungle paths after dark.” And Branch notes that the man who would become Reagan's presidential successor, then-Houston congressman George H.W. Bush, gave a 1968 speech criticizing “miscellaneous purchases under the federal anti-poverty program” in which he charged that seven new microscopes the government had bought for schools in his Houston district were in fact “rifle scopes secretly retooled for insurrection.” But if there's a failure in Branch's book, it's that he dwells too briefly upon this theme. For all his great characters, Branch decides not to create even one iconic figure of what would become the great white backlash—the defining feature of politics for the next quarter-century."

Rockwell Kent's Casanova, from a nice little portfolio...
 

lured temporarily from the deck of the "Pequod" this week by the (since superseded oh well) Arthur Machen translation of the Memoirs of Casanova (here online) acquired in a bargain near-mint boxed version of the three-volume 1960 Dover (with that smooth paper they used to use still snowy white) edition with Rockwell Kent illustrations...



 

John Kricfalusi (above, with Bjork) of Ren and Stimpy fame has a cool new blog...
 

farewell Barbara Guest--

Wild Gardens Overlooked by Night Lights


Wild gardens overlooked by night lights. Parking
lot trucks overlooked by night lights. Buildings
with their escapes overlooked by lights


They urge me to seek here on the heights
amid the electrical lighting that self who exists,
who witnesses light and fears its expunging,


I take from my wall the landscape with its water
of blue color, its gentle expression of rose,
pink, the sunset reaches outward in strokes as the west wind
rises, the sun sinks and color flees into the delicate
skies it inherited,
I place there a scene from "The Tale of the Genji."


An episode where Genji recognizes his son.
Each turns his face away from so much emotion,
so that the picture is one of profiles floating
elsewhere from their permanence,
a line of green displaces these relatives,
black also intervenes at correct distances,
the shapes of the hair are black.


Black describes the feeling,
is recognized as remorse, sadness,


black is a headdress while lines slant swiftly,
the space is slanted vertically with its graduating
need for movement,

Thus the grip of realism has found
a picture chosen to cover the space
occupied by another picture
establishing a flexibility so we are not immobile
like a car that spends its night
outside a window, but mobile like a spirit.


I float over this dwelling, and when I choose
enter it. I have an ethnological interest
in this building, because I inhabit it
and upon me has been bestowed the decision of changing
an abstract picture of light into a ghost-like story
of a prince whose principality I now share,
into whose confidence I have wandered.


Screens were selected to prevent this intrusion
of exacting light and add a chiaroscuro,
so that Genji may turn his face from his son,
from recognition which here is painful,
and he allows himself to be positioned on a screen,
this prince as noble as ever,
songs from the haunted distance
presenting themselves in silks.


The light of fiction and light of surface
sink into vision whose illumination
exacts its shades,


The Genji when they arose
strolled outside reality
their screen dismantled,
upon that modern wondering space
flash lights from the wild gardens.

 

very good Charles Taylor on the third volume of Taylor Branch's Martin Luther King biography--

"Against the current certainty on the right and the left that the other side is beneath contempt, not worth talking to -- an attitude that leaves no possibility for real change and reduces democracy to majority tyranny, no matter who is in power -- we have King's belief in the ability of people and their country to overcome the worst in themselves. In his vision empathy is not appeasement but the beginning of change. In his introduction, Branch quotes the last words of Mickey Schwerner, spoken to the Klansmen who held a gun to his head: "Sir, I know just how you feel." That's the challenge this story throws down to us. How can any less be expected of those of us who don't have a gun to our heads?"

 

"Damage done by the Asiatic Exclusion League to the boarding houses of T. Kato and H. Hayashi, 230 and 236 Powell Street
8 - 9 Sept. 1907 / Vancouver, B.C"

from

Framing Canada--lots and lots of searchable pictures...

 

Aguas de Marco-- enchanting embedded b & w Quicktime (via robot wisdom) of Ellis Regina with "Tom" Jobim singing one of my favorite songs around 1970. Think of it is a belated Valentine.

interesting 1974 Clive James on the successes and failures of Sandy Denny--

"Here, had she but known it, was a straight message from the Muse: the text of "Tam Lin" should have told her that the language of the past is too alive to be copied, and can only be competed with by the language of the present. As it happened, she went on to attempt a contemporary folk language composed mainly of archaisms, and so was unable either to extend the resources of the modern song or add to the heritage of the ancient one -which was composed, in its time, not out of scholarship but out of the language of the day. Swarbrick�s excellent edition of "Tam Lin" (there are dozens of versions, but his is of exactly the right length and dramatic structure) has the continuous linguistic interest by which a strophic song can gain from its repetitive form, and inversions like "as fast as go can she" fall with a naturalness that no modern writer can possibly match. She sang the song with dazzling attack, as alive to its theatrical force as she was deaf to its lesson..."