The New Year (Jason Shinder)

0 comments By chris Filed in Contents, Creators, Jason Shinder, Poem Tagged with holidays, jason shinder, new year, poems January 1st, 2012 @ 9:32 am

“The New Year”

I will dive to the bottom of the hotel pool and find my mother’s hairpin.

With the mouth of a drowning woman on my lap,
I will add her breath to mine. In the dark, I will lay the thin white sheet

of the moonlight over the blue plums of my wife’s breasts.

With the new planet I discovered just when I thought I was losing my sight,
I will love another man because I will be a woman.

Everything important will never as yet have happened. Let it happen.

I will throw a lit match on the secrets my body
has kept from me and stand in the fire. The people I have sawed in half

will appear in my bedroom mirror, getting dressed.

–Jason Shinder
found in Stupid Hope

Anthony Lane on “Home Cinema”

0 comments By chris Filed in Anthony Lane, Contents, Creators, Review Tagged with anthony lane, cinema, film, reviews December 13th, 2011 @ 5:33 pm

“There’s only one problem with home cinema: it doesn’t exist. The very phrase is an oxymoron. As you pause your film to answer the door or fetch a Coke, the experience ceases to be cinema. Even the act of choosing when to watch means you are no longer at the movies. Choice—preferably an exhaustive menu of it—pretty much defines our status as consumers, and has long been an unquestioned tenet of the capitalist feast, but in fact carte blanche is no way to run a cultural life (or any kind of life, for that matter), and one thing that has nourished the theatrical experience, from the Athens of Aeschylus to the multiplex, is the element of compulsion. Someone else decides when the show will start; we may decide whether to attend, but, once we take our seats, we join the ride and surrender our will. The same goes for the folks around us, whom we do not know, and whom we resemble only in our private desire to know more of what will unfold in public, on the stage or screen. We are strangers in communion, and, once that pact of the intimate and the populous is snapped, the charm is gone. Our revels now are ended.”

–Anthony Lane
found in The New Yorker, 11/7/2011

on Being an Instrument for Experiencing (May Sarton)

0 comments By chris Filed in Contents, Creators, Essay, May Sarton Tagged with psyche, solitude, writing December 5th, 2011 @ 11:08 pm

“My own belief is that one regards oneself, if one is a serious writer, as an instrument for experiencing. Life–all of it–flows through this instrument and is distilled through it into works of art. How one lives as a private person is intimately bound into the work. And at some point, I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth. If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and artist, we have to know all we can about one another, and we have to be willing to go naked.”

–May Sarton
from Journal of a Solitude

Martin Amis on Loving All of an Author’s Work

0 comments By chris Filed in Contents, Creators, Essay, Martin Amis Tagged with books, criticism, reading, review December 5th, 2011 @ 10:58 pm

‘When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less. The vast presence of Joyce relies pretty well entirely on “Ulysses,” with a little help from “Dubliners.” You could jettison Kafka’s three attempts at full-length fiction (unfinished by him, and unfinished by us) without muffling the impact of his seismic originality. George Eliot gave us one readable book, which turned out to be the central Anglophone novel. Every page of Dickens contains a paragraph to warm to and a paragraph to veer back from. Coleridge wrote a total of two major poems (and collaborated on a third). Milton consists of “Paradise Lost.” Even my favorite writer, William Shakespeare, who usually eludes all mortal limitations, succumbs to this law. Run your eye down the contents page and feel the slackness of your urge to reread the comedies (“As You Like It” is not as we like it); and who would voluntarily curl up with “King John” or “Henry VI, Part III”?

Proustians will claim that “In Search of Lost Time” is unimprovable throughout, despite all the agonizing longueurs. And Janeites will never admit that three of the six novels are comparative weaklings (I mean “Sense and Sensibility,” “Mansfield Park,” and “Persuasion”). Perhaps the only true exceptions to the fifty-fifty model are Homer and Harper Lee. Our subject, here, is literary evaluation, so of course everything I say is mere opinion, unverifiable and also unfalsifiable, which makes the ground shakier still. But I stubbornly suspect that only the cultist, or the academic, is capable of swallowing an author whole. Writers are peculiar, readers are particular: it is just the way we are. One helplessly reaches for Kant’s dictum about the crooked timber of humanity, or for John Updike’s suggestion to the effect that we are all of us “mixed blessings.” Unlike the heroes and heroines of “Northanger Abbey,” “Pride and Prejudice,” and “Emma,” readers and writers are not expressly designed to be perfect for each other.’

–Martin Amis
From “Laureate of Terror”

Sven Birkerts on Writer’s Block

0 comments By chris Filed in Contents, Creators, Essay, Sven Birkerts Tagged with psyche, writing December 5th, 2011 @ 10:20 pm

“Writer’s block — or, maybe more accurately, a writer’s expressive frustration — has many presenting symptoms and many causes, but it is at root language-related. Versions of creative stasis may afflict those who practice in other fields — painters and composers can find themselves short of ideas or inspiration — but the situation is not quite the same. Certainly we never hear anything comparable affecting statesmen, lawyers, coaches, electricians or pastry chefs. This affliction afflicts self-anointed users of language, writers, and because their medium of choice — or compulsion — happens to be the universal medium of consciousness and communication, it takes on a metaphysical inflection. If language is the distinctive human feature, its single greatest evolutionary feat, then writers are in a most privileged and vulnerable situation. In the movement from ape to apex, the engaged — successful — use of language, literary expression, represents the latter. It follows then that a frustration or failure in its use must be seen as something more sweepingly indicative as well. The fact that any true success is rare and difficult is not consoling to the person who is failing in the attempt.

Reason naturally persuades otherwise, but for many of us the deeper superstitions rule. Though the writer may believe that the finest productivity is fickle and cannot be willed, arriving on its terms, not his, he might still blame himself for productive lack. For he has the idea — I do, certainly — that inspiration has something to do with being in the right relation to things, and if arrival of words is out of his control, the achievement of that relation is not. If he has not made himself a worthy vessel, he has in the largest sense failed. Call it complete and utter nonsense, but when it eludes you — the tone, or the feeling of surprise, the current you can feel when the circuit is complete — when you know what that’s like and don’t have it — then such repudiation is useless. The psyche is irrational.”

–Sven Birkerts
from “The Pump You Pump the Water From”

To Write Well is to Think Clearly (David McCullough)

0 comments By chris Filed in Contents, Creators, David McCullough, Interview Tagged with thinking, writing December 5th, 2011 @ 9:17 pm

“The great thing about the arts is that the only way you learn how to do it is by doing it. If a child learns nothing but that as a guide to life, that’s invaluable. You can’t learn to play the piano without playing the piano, you can’t learn to write without writing, and, in many ways, you can’t learn to think without thinking. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”

–David McCullough
found in “The Title Always Comes Last”

Ephesus on Ears

0 comments By chris Filed in Contents, Ephesus, Essay Tagged with hearing, listening November 19th, 2011 @ 10:15 pm

“To clean ears that are filled with dirt or pus signifies that one will receive good news from somewhere, whereas to be cuffed on the ears signifies bad news from somewhere. To dream that ants are entering one’s ears is auspicious only for sophists. For the ants are like young men who attend courses to listen to teachers.
…
To dream that one has the ears of an ass is auspicious only for philosophers, because an ass does not move his ears very quickly.”

–Ephesus. From The Interpretation of Dreams

David Foster Wallace on Private Language

0 comments By chris Filed in Contents, Creators, David Foster Wallace, Essay Tagged with language November 19th, 2011 @ 10:11 pm

CC Licensed image by Christian Tonnis

INTERPOLATIVE DEMONSTRATION OF THE FACT THAT THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PRIVATE LANGUAGE

It’s sometimes tempting to imagine that there can be such a thing as a Private Language: Many of us are prone to lay-philosophizing about the weird privacy of our own mental states, for example, and from the fact that when my knee hurts only I can feel it, it’s tempting to conclude that for me the word pain has a very subjective internal meaning that only I can truly understand. This line of thinking is sort of like the adolescent pot-smoker’s terror that his inner experience is both private and unverifiable, a syndrome that is technically known as Cannabic Solipsism. Eating Chips Ahoy! And staring very intently at the television’s network PGA event, for instance, the adolescent pot-smoker is struck by the ghastly possibility that, e.g., what he sees as the color green and what other people call “the color green” may in fact not be the same color experience at all: The fact that both he and someone else call Pebble Beach’s fairways green and a stoplight’s GO signal green appears to guarantee only that there is a similar consistency in their color experience of fairways, and GO lights, not that the actual subjective quality of those color experiences is the same; it could be that what the ad. pot-smoker experiences as green everyone else actually experiences as blue, and what we “mean” by the word blue is what he “means” by green, etc., etc., until the whole line of thinking gets so vexed and exhausting that the a.p.-s. ends up slumped crumb-strewn and paralyzed in his chair.

The point here is that the idea of a Private Language, like Private Colors and most of the other solipsistic conceits with which this particular reviewer has at various times been afflicted, is both deluded and demonstrably false.

In the case of Private Language, the delusion is usually based on the belief that a word such as pain has the meaning it does because it is somehow “connected” to a feeling in my knee. But as Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations proved in the 1950s, words actually have the meanings they do because of certain rules and verification tests that are imposed on us from outside our own subjectivities, viz., by the community in which we have to get along and communicate with other people. Wittgenstein’s argument, which is admittedly very complex and gnomic and opaque, basically centers on the fact that a word like pain means what it does for me because of the way the community I’m part of tacitly agreed to use pain.

If you’re thinking that all this seems not only abstract but also pretty irrelevant to the Usage Wars or to anything you have any real interest in at all, you are very much mistaken. If words’ meanings depend on transpersonal rules and these rules on community consensus, language is not only conceptually non-Private but also irreducibly public, political, and ideological. This means that questions about our national consensus on grammar and usage are actually bound up with every last social issue that millennial America’s about—class, race, gender, morality, tolerance, pluralism, cohesion, equality, fairness, money: You name it.

–David Foster Wallace. From “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage”
found in Harper’s Magazine, April 2001

from “Reconstruction” (John K. Samson)

0 comments By chris Filed in Contents, Creators, John K. Samson, Lyric Tagged with john k samson, lyrics, weakerthans November 13th, 2011 @ 12:05 pm

Beauty’s just another word
I’m never certain how to spell
Go tell the nurse to turn the TV back on
And throw away my misery
It never meant that much to me
It never sent a Get Well card

I broke like a bad joke
Somebody’s uncle told
At a wedding reception in 1972
Where a little boy under a table with cake in his hair
Stared at the grown-up feet as they danced and swayed

And his father laughed and talked on the long ride home
And his mother laughed and talked on the long ride home
And he thought about how everyone dies someday
And when tomorrow gets here where will yesterday be
And fell asleep in his brand-new winter coat

Buy me a shiny new machine
That runs on lies and gasoline
And all those batteries we stole from smoke-alarms
And disassembles my despair
It never took me anywhere
It never once bought me a drink

–from “Reconstruction” (lyrics by John K. Samson)