Tuesday, April 08, 2003

In this life we are lost like one who has gone into the far corner of the garage to look for something, & the light then gets turned off; & we have to fight our way back out through collision with half-remembered forms. More annoying than wounding, yet it is more painful still to contemplate the futility of wishing for a space that contains straight lines.

dumbly stenographic - fidelity to an aesthetic

“Indeed, the difficulty in human communication lies not in withholding thoughts but in exposing them.” --Fletcher Pratt, Invaders from Rigel (1960)

Petaja: “Van Vogt adapted by Disney”

David Slavitt uses scraps of Shakespeare to render Ausonius’s Nuptial Cento (of Vergil).

A thought i have had is to write nothing new, unless it can fit into a preexisting Apocryphal slot; e.g. imaginary works mentioned in real ones (my version of “The King in Yellow”; & i have long wanted to finish the pseudo-Jacobean play given piecemeal in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 ) or works believed to exist which never did (Machen wrote a book for the notorious title The Book of the Three Impostors). Call them zoomars. -There is an exhaustive site of Apocryphal works: the Invisible Library.

“For the monotheist, bigotry is mandatory; for the polytheist, it is merely a delightful option.” --Isaac Bonewits

“...As lornly down the wan rim of the west...” -- Hubbard-Kiernan, “Ulric”, Flaming Meteor (1892)

“A writer in the middle of the last century said he could count over one hundred different schools of flower-arrangement.” --Okakura

Sometimes i think the only real philosophizing is in the form of music.

Differentia. Bookpoet & stage poet.
Liking a style & liking its individual artists.
Liking an artist & liking zer separate works.
Acceptance Vs Resignation.
Vernacular Vs Folkish.

A postcard of Mao’s tomb. The tomb of the mightiest emperor who ever lived (if sheer number of subjects be any measure), looks a whole lot like the Richardson Public Library. They were probably both built in the same decade...

“Transgressors are the lab rats of consensus.” --Momus (Nick Currie)

At the end of his rope is where a poet shines. --sayings of Asmodeus

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