I at last said, what is stopping me from recreating criticism in my own mind? Let's do it, then. What? Recreate criticism. What is that? It is making a new place to play for a secondary activity. Why? It lets us know who is good and for which reasons. Can you write under this strain? Precisely because of this strain I have kept writing--the thing I love is the thing I enjoy hating most.
Get a lot of air in here? Have you captivated the audience enough to tell them that tonight they will hear a story and a critique?
This shouldn't matter as much as it does. But there are intellectuals, and there are artists. They have different names because I want them to. Because I want to know which one I really am.
An ancient question, really. Though the flame is too hot now, too waxy, to allow an accurate score. We see postgrads lingering around in a hard-wood floored living room, eating each others'...
Dizzy spells. We eat the others' bad moments. We talk to the dead. We don't want to write another paper--they always reek of opinions set down merely to annoy the artists. I tell you, they are different people. They are very few. I will prove that I am one of them and that since I have learned so much--about them---I will know that playing with punctuation is primarily a sin. Of course, one cultivates a taste for that. The department? Of English? An introduction to sin! This is what I will bring to it. You thought you lived because you played these games online, and people you could see eventually on your screen just sort of sat there like you are. And this was life--
Who took the banter out? Was it pre-focused, so that in going off like that it is repeating the discourse recorded and plugged into it--you see, a classroom. Looking round. What happened...to literature? Has it been kept alive? Where is the...rub?
Inside a bubble. I hate the blogosphere. I wish it were inside so that I know what's inside always turns out to be outside the inside. Like Schenectady, that literary trope of an equine city.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
quotes, Durrell's Justine.
"Nevertheless there is no woman too humble, too battered, too old, to receive those outward attentions--those little gallantries and sorties of wit which I have come to associate with the Gallic temperament; the heady meretricious French charm which evaporates so easily into pride and mental indolence--like French thought which flows so quickly into sand-molds, the original espirit hardening immediately into deadening concepts." (38)
"The guileless playing of hermaphrodites in the green courtyards of art and science. Poetry as a clumsy attempt at the artificial insemination of the Muses" (39).
"Capodistria has the purely involuntary knack of turning everything into a woman; under his eyes chairs become painfully conscious of their bare legs. He impregnate things. At table I have seen a water-melon become conscious under his gaze so that it felt the seeds inside it stirring with life! Women feel like birds confronted by a viper when they gaze into that narrow flat face with its tongue always moving across the thin lips." (39)
"...the living limbo in which my beloved Jusine wandered, searching with such frightening singleness of mind for the integrating spark which might lift her into a new perspective of herself" (40).
"The sad thirteenth child of Valentinos who fell, 'not like Lucifer by rebelling against God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him.' Anything pressed too far becomes a sin." (40)
"Broken from the divine harmony of herself she fell, says the tragic philosopher and became the manifestation of matter; and the whole universe of her city, of the world, was formed out of her agony and remorse. The tragic seed from which her thoughts and actions grew was the seed of a pessimistic gnosticism." (40)
"Catching hold of the lapels of my coat she gazed earnestly into my eyes and said: 'What do you believe? You never say anything. At the most you sometimes laugh.' I did not know how to reply for all ideas seem equally good to me; the fact of their existence proves that someone is creating. Does it matter whether they are objectively right or wrong? They could never remain so for long." (41)
"As for Justine, her face was lit by a sort of painful academic precision." (44)
"How well I recognized her now as a child of the city, which decrees that its women shall be the voluptuaries not of pleasure but of pain, doomed to hunt for what they least dare to find!" (47)
"I saw then what I should have seen long before: namely that our friendship had ripened to a point when we had already become in a way part-owners of each other." (48)
"'Idle,' she writes, 'to imagine falling in love as a correspondence of minds, of thoughts; it is a simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded inside of each of them. Around this event, dazed and preoccupied, the lover moves examining his or her own experience; her gratitude alone, stretching away towards a mistaken donor, creates the illusion that she communicates with her fellow, but this is false. The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. All this may precede the first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point--for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.' How characteristic and how humourless a delineation of the magical gift: and yet how true...of Justine!" (50)
"The guileless playing of hermaphrodites in the green courtyards of art and science. Poetry as a clumsy attempt at the artificial insemination of the Muses" (39).
"Capodistria has the purely involuntary knack of turning everything into a woman; under his eyes chairs become painfully conscious of their bare legs. He impregnate things. At table I have seen a water-melon become conscious under his gaze so that it felt the seeds inside it stirring with life! Women feel like birds confronted by a viper when they gaze into that narrow flat face with its tongue always moving across the thin lips." (39)
"...the living limbo in which my beloved Jusine wandered, searching with such frightening singleness of mind for the integrating spark which might lift her into a new perspective of herself" (40).
"The sad thirteenth child of Valentinos who fell, 'not like Lucifer by rebelling against God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him.' Anything pressed too far becomes a sin." (40)
"Broken from the divine harmony of herself she fell, says the tragic philosopher and became the manifestation of matter; and the whole universe of her city, of the world, was formed out of her agony and remorse. The tragic seed from which her thoughts and actions grew was the seed of a pessimistic gnosticism." (40)
"Catching hold of the lapels of my coat she gazed earnestly into my eyes and said: 'What do you believe? You never say anything. At the most you sometimes laugh.' I did not know how to reply for all ideas seem equally good to me; the fact of their existence proves that someone is creating. Does it matter whether they are objectively right or wrong? They could never remain so for long." (41)
"As for Justine, her face was lit by a sort of painful academic precision." (44)
"How well I recognized her now as a child of the city, which decrees that its women shall be the voluptuaries not of pleasure but of pain, doomed to hunt for what they least dare to find!" (47)
"I saw then what I should have seen long before: namely that our friendship had ripened to a point when we had already become in a way part-owners of each other." (48)
"'Idle,' she writes, 'to imagine falling in love as a correspondence of minds, of thoughts; it is a simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded inside of each of them. Around this event, dazed and preoccupied, the lover moves examining his or her own experience; her gratitude alone, stretching away towards a mistaken donor, creates the illusion that she communicates with her fellow, but this is false. The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. All this may precede the first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point--for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.' How characteristic and how humourless a delineation of the magical gift: and yet how true...of Justine!" (50)
this...like the other
Somehow, now, I have been put in the wrong class--it seems. I want to float; no, this isn't it at all! It's just that everything is already over, and I didn't finish! Wearing thin already, it's positively heinous, as I would say if I were quaint. But it's instead...some deathly thrash band, calling me out to learn some new words before I get back to the thesis. That thesis--is scary at times. I have thrown out everything and am trying to write to Durrell from the realm of...poetry. Simply the aesthetic attitude in creating mode--look, this word seems plain dirty now. The aesthetic. Ambivalence and the like, ambiguity, occupy different spaces...not defensive as yet. Who cares anymore about them? But they are not a scourge on the differentiating mindframe as is aesthetics. So entirely removed that I cannot say where I am when I bring it up: suddenly back in my basement, mixing elements and staring off, writing! This is the space for poetry, even if I would produce only dismal prosaic lines about the same nothing I'm trying to escape. The space...of poetry? The notional space? Can Borges help?
At least allow me to explain that I'm after a process, truly. Something to rely upon. Calling it a battle between criticism and fiction--this has been a very long temporary pursuit, but it's due to my being a student still. This era will end on Friday; and of course I'm stuck wondering what I'm about. The project has to take up its own life, carry me along. I'll comment upon it. Please, allow me repose! Sitting on a divan in a boxcar tossing out quips, the humor of the secretly sick artist, hiding all and everything and thereby not making it up so much as allowing it to pass, borrowing his own dirty laundry.
Durrell and Lowry could be bad influences on me, who have grown up on Joyce, the Beats, Woolf. Only here the pain of existence is more prevalent, it makes each text glow. The others merely sing; they have style with content, with erudition and even spiritualism. In Lowry the problem is as obvious as the genius, in Durrell the intellect is as problematic as love.
Each has a symptom that plagues, the negative that produces the positive. The alcoholism of Lowry is legendary; in his life he posed as various egos, an exaggerating personality to deal with in conversation. Where's the truth--why should it matter, this is the Consul. His drinking as an author is not too close to the surface in the character Geoffrey Firmin; the quality is sincerely fictive, exposing everything that an artist should but still so we do not blame him.
The moral is certainly around here somewhere, but if Darley is struggling to conceptualize Justine, it is because Clea has difficulty painting her without kissing the painted hand and putting down the brush. The next level: Darley's easiest way of knowing the world is through Clea, the artist who came of age but not fruition preoccupied with another, the same Justine who involves Darley in the literary process. She is interested in philosophy like a syphilitic finds aspects to reflect upon her medicine, the places it takes her--love is the vehicle. Balthazar declares "all our women are Justines." And so, her involvement in ideas is telling for the redemption necessary to purge one of her: becoming an artist, or ceasing to try. For at that point she is no longer needed and returns to her husband, whom she never needed at first, whom she warned about the impossibility of her ever loving!
Yes, well, the best way of digging around in Durrell is explaining to yourself the triangulation. It is all slippery, yet centered, and so: we cannot stay for long in this set of texts alone. An entire trinity awaits, with a few onlookers besides. That little stage produces mixed results by default; try now to actually mix the elements and put them with something already mixed. Then mix. Do you see? This sort of reading has to approach poetry, it has no other choice. It is not seeking to establish anything but my own voice with the help of a batch of masters. Forget that they're all male. I write to a female audience, and yet feminism can't get a foothold.
One cannot wonder what that all means without feeling guilty already--now this is the space from which these writers write! Bad conscience, which Nietzsche explained thoroughly according to his dialectics (which took several books to come into a dialectical shape) and Freud then conceptualized with his damn trinity. The origins, the true causes, are fascinating to contemplate, but not a part of this project. I would rather fabricate my own cause for shame, the strongest motivator of these books even if the author feels it not, for it is in the background, the edges of society are ever peeked into--the writer could be mucking it up or anguishing over it, whatever the pleasure is. Perhaps lionizing the whore while condemning the critic: Justine is the concubine of individuality, Darley is the artist too intellectual for Pursewarden to call an artist, because preoccupied with the question of "writing" rather than willing to suffer on account of it. And the most suffering is the greatest art, certainly: this is proved by Pursewarden's letters, which we are not granted permission to see for both its shameful content (incestuous) and its unutterable beauty--too much pressure, one would expect, for the author, too much awe in the narrator leading up to the letters' discovery. Pursewarden's blind sister Liza, raised in mutual isolation, the other partner in the fateful taboo of Durrell's text, the sin raised up to show at what cost true art is settled: and they must be burnt. As a writer contacted by the widowing sister, he makes that decision, and we are spared the scenes perhaps barely alluded to by the artist: Pursewarden takes contrary views deliberately, saying (in my paraphrase), that words being what they are, and people being what they are, we ought to discard of language forever as a tool that can express one's meaning. But he doesn't write in Sade's space.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
from a status
That tired old canon. I wish it would come back already. Put Durrell on it. Write on him like...well, Borges. Let's be clear. Imitative and honest, admitting nothing to theorists. They'll eventually pull a few things out to correct, solve.
A literary event, a doctor visit, poof--a new reading to put on the table, let the audience gawk. The book is reborn, in your hands! It's what you get out of it, yes.
... Ver más
Clea smacks Darley across the face, causing the blood to surround his teeth, as if to mortify his grin--but we are told he's upset, livid. His response to being smacked for suggesting he'll write a book of criticism is not a grin!
Darley, that lecher "with chalk on his sleeve," bespectacled--needed wakening from someone who has lost herself and can only revive by alerting another of his slumber. And sincerely, thanks goes to Clea. The literary world ought to hear about this, the panel has got to be notified.
(They want smacking--more than the artist who here in Durrell's text was filling the silence with a dull remark about the future. The truth is he writes three of these books for us: we only know what we know because he interfered with the past, rendered it artistically. Yet he ever doubts that he is a writer. He is not an artist, he tells us. The moment he realizes it is finally poignant in the fourth book: until then, it was a slowly dawning matter of fact.)
A literary event, a doctor visit, poof--a new reading to put on the table, let the audience gawk. The book is reborn, in your hands! It's what you get out of it, yes.
... Ver más
Clea smacks Darley across the face, causing the blood to surround his teeth, as if to mortify his grin--but we are told he's upset, livid. His response to being smacked for suggesting he'll write a book of criticism is not a grin!
Darley, that lecher "with chalk on his sleeve," bespectacled--needed wakening from someone who has lost herself and can only revive by alerting another of his slumber. And sincerely, thanks goes to Clea. The literary world ought to hear about this, the panel has got to be notified.
(They want smacking--more than the artist who here in Durrell's text was filling the silence with a dull remark about the future. The truth is he writes three of these books for us: we only know what we know because he interfered with the past, rendered it artistically. Yet he ever doubts that he is a writer. He is not an artist, he tells us. The moment he realizes it is finally poignant in the fourth book: until then, it was a slowly dawning matter of fact.)
pain, etc.
The evil in each version: the love of the sadist and the writer.
Justifications for perversion from a rhetorical assault: the wounds he opens in one's morality cannot let one rest.
Durrell's Justine creates herself, seeks herself, debases and threatens (telepathically) with--herself. Catharine--who is actually Sade's Justine telling her own story by the name Catharine--does not go in for sin straight from the home as does her sister. She carries virtue until she is finally struck through the breast and into the heart so that the lightning rips through her, a cavity, passageway, orifice through the regions of her very life. Heart, arteries, blood and rhythm: destruction of the sex she's been subjected to--chapters upon chapters, positions upon torturing position, of deliberate, elaborated rape.
But we also get protracted treatises on why this is natural, how crime is the energy that moves us. Progress, growth, etc.
And where it turns from pain to pleasure is only in the 20th century, with Durrell running through the metaphysical ways Justine is caught up in desire: though the pain is still crucial: "We use each other," she says, "like axes to cut down the ones we really love."
Justifications for perversion from a rhetorical assault: the wounds he opens in one's morality cannot let one rest.
Durrell's Justine creates herself, seeks herself, debases and threatens (telepathically) with--herself. Catharine--who is actually Sade's Justine telling her own story by the name Catharine--does not go in for sin straight from the home as does her sister. She carries virtue until she is finally struck through the breast and into the heart so that the lightning rips through her, a cavity, passageway, orifice through the regions of her very life. Heart, arteries, blood and rhythm: destruction of the sex she's been subjected to--chapters upon chapters, positions upon torturing position, of deliberate, elaborated rape.
But we also get protracted treatises on why this is natural, how crime is the energy that moves us. Progress, growth, etc.
And where it turns from pain to pleasure is only in the 20th century, with Durrell running through the metaphysical ways Justine is caught up in desire: though the pain is still crucial: "We use each other," she says, "like axes to cut down the ones we really love."
Saturday, April 17, 2010
formally wizened
Without error, compiling data that serves others in different spheres--this has been repeated. Water encircling a dry space seems necessary. If he picks up the sandpaper and goes to work the result will be a surface from which there's too much to choose. Argot: the bloody nose in the delayed act of surfacing. It drips, tickling. Life might still teach the alternate routes! This is passing however and in its place we see a leather belt slamming down upon the kitchen table, to cut through the cloth.
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