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Dream
Riding and then moving by car through a quiet, commotionless city. A police motorcade, flashing red and blue through the streets, passes by and then vanishes in the fog that's regrouped behind us. We come to the glass doors of a hotel or apartment building or convention center (outside it was like the Jamaica concourse on the LIRR ( Read more... ) -
Notes, In the Open
Saying that she was looking forward to being forty (still a long way off), and saying it as though Forty were a mountain she'd seen in some remote area of the country and was looking forward to finally climbing. I've said things like this -- to others -- and, in a contrarian mood, said them quickly and flippantly, sometimes to test the other person ( Read more... ) -
As from the distance...
As if a child had tossed into these loose flames a handful of birch twigs (gathered out of the woods at field's edge), the fall opens at once in a cheer, brightly flaring and coloring to its tips. Little by little, after the children've turned in and talk's grown quiet, it dims down to an evening glow. Stories pass from person to person. The fire ( Read more... ) -
'It is well known that Goethe is no friend to eye-glasses.'
'"We should only utter higher maxims so far as they can benefit the world. The rest we should keep within ourselves, and they will diffuse over our actions a luster like the mild radiance of a hidden sun ( Read more... ) -
Warriors
I dipped again this morning into Glenn Gray's Warriors. He tries to write in the most detached and impersonal way, the author, but it's his voice that first drew me into this book and that I remembered best: quiet, even-keeled, warm, the voice of a reader rather than that of a story-teller. In that group of men sitting around a fire, listening as ( Read more... ) -
The Old West
Mandeville: 'I have often thought of a story I have heard, when I was young, of a worthy man of our country who went once upon a time to see the world. He passed India and many isles beyond India, where there are more than 5,000 isles, and travelled so far by land and sea, girdling the globe, that he found an isle where he heard his own language ( Read more... ) -
Notes
I'd like to post here again, a bit like someone who's walked back from the next room to get some ice. I've moved to Maine in the last year, from Brooklyn to Augusta to York County, and I'll likely be here for the next few years. The weather's been keeping me. Stayed with parents last weekend in St. Louis. We talked a few of those late summer ( Read more... ) -
(Untitled)
But there's still dread, he went on. And not even the triumph, a trick's success, and good applause, none of these is enough ( Read more... ) -
Dream
Dreamt this morning that I and a stoker set a machine in a fireplace, and plug it with coals, trying to destroy it. It hated people, the stoker said, sweating. We succeed finally in melting the iron panels and control mechanism. It wanted death for all people... And then the fear that, the fire gone, some spark of energy might combust the remains ( Read more... ) -
Oates, Knausgaard
You must find a place where you're nobody, Knausgaard was saying. He'd locked his fingers together and then relaxed them, as though letting go of somebody's neck ( Read more... )