anytime corner: soletti happy mix

^^^ from Leonard's last plane trip.  

The pretzel-in-repose is saying "immer dabe", which is German for 'anytime'.  

(and the snack mix itself?  it's a mix of 80% pretzels and 20% cracked crackers, which might be happy for some people, but not for me)

reading corner: persian letters

I'm reading Montesquiue's Persian Letters, which would have been a good read before Calvino's Invisible Cities (a book which made no sense to me when it was on the syllabus of Modern Comp Lit a few years ago).

soulful expression in a world of ends corner: Gaddis' JR and The Wizard of Oz.

Coming soon: 

A big long post on the notion of gifts in The Wizard of Oz, the two kinds of art in JR, and the competing systems of 'status' [1] and 'contract' [2] in the world we live in.

There is a reason Twitter is so popular: it gives people the ability to express themselves to a listening audience.

It's important to listen.

Our feelings are our currency, and when we are able to spend 'em by sharing 'em with an attentive audience, the result is love, and love makes the world change.

[1] The idea of status? It's tied to the aristocracy, noblesse oblige, and also just plain ole' expressing yer current activity or maybe even your feelings (ie "how are you doing? what's your status?" etc etc).  And if you dig hard enough, it involves the expression of a soul, borrowing from the definition of 'status' under entry 3.b in the OED:

status 

3. Position or standing in society.

b. transf. of a thing.

1885 J. MARTINEAU Types Eth. Theory I. I. II. ii. §8. 201 Of this Ego, or soul, of ours,..how is it possible, after thus setting it up as a known separate entity, to cancel its status and hand over its contents to another subject?

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_James_Sumner_Maine

More (and i mean a whole lot more) soon.

*** update at 7:04am: i've just started writing the best essay of my life on this topic.

*** update at 7:28am: walltype is like twitter, but for the visual truth, and it is about to get so real.  

i'm getting my phone fixed at the 14th st apple store at 9:30, then brunch with leonard, then getting to work.

graduation day corner

^^^ homemade card from my mom! and all done and done.

paper corner: a supposedly fun thing i'm not doing again

^^^ oh mister gaddis, what you do to me

i wrote a big long paper on JR that came out stillborn, and so then wrote another one w/ some help from oscar wilde.  35pp later, its done and my theory of art is all the more robust and refined.  yay.

eliot corner: heard while making other plans

hurry up please its time 

hurry up please

hurry up

story corner: otherwhere

On Mom's day, an awesome story w/ a southern flavor, from Harpers a few months back:

Otherwhere
By Claire Bateman, from her story in the fall issue of Mississippi Review.

In this realm, not only is it not in the least uncommon to find oneself “a little bit pregnant,” it is the normal condition of most sexually active fertile women. This is because the residents of the before-life want to keep their options open, & thus, they pay strict attention to every nuance & fluctuation of actual terrestrial existence. What’s the current heat index? How’s the stock market looking? Are there any good movies out this season, & if not, does the lack of them portend a long-term dip in the quality of popular entertainment? Are seat belts holding during accidents? How many vacationers have suffered shark bites in the last several months? Does this would-be mother like to play loud music at all hours? Does that potential father’s family of origin possess a history of nasty feuds?

Compared to those who are trying to decide whether or not it would be a good idea to be born, the most fastidious curmudgeon is a model of affability. And thus, in the Realm of Vacillating Impendence, the pre-born are forever changing their minds—testing out the climates of various wombs, making their presence known, then retreating into the before-world in much the same way a cautious swimmer will dip a toe into a chilly lake only to pull it back [..cont'd..]

deep sea corner: add it to your reading list

The RAF* suggested summer reading list for 2009:

Jonathan Edwards - History of Redemption
Melville - Billy Budd
The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl - Henry James
The Opera Tosert (Toset? can't make this one out in my notes)

+ Emerson, essay on Experience

^^^ additions welcome from those w/ deep sea knowledge

* n.b this one, not this one

walltype corner: card, back

^^^ w/ the Lacanian slogan.

the 6 point asterisk is perhaps a subtle hint at the tie between the signifier and the signified, or feminine jouissance, or something else.

walltype corner: card, front

^^^ it occurs to me that it might be worth editing the smiling frame into a postcard. hmm.

autobio corner: a real wiener

I am a mathematician : the later life of a prodigy : an autobiographical account of the mature years and career of Norbert Wiener and a continuation of the account of his childhood in Ex-prodigy.

^^^ actual title (*) - with echoes of Miltonic verbosity - of the autobiography of Norbert Wiener 

(published by mit press and currently checked out, no less)

cellists 4 change

^^^ someone planning ahead for 2012, on a wavy part of bway.

keats handout corner: to autumn

^^^ the point of an engl degree? to do this to a poem. 

deep sea scrolls: and still more

Okay, posting these is starting to feel a little roughshod now, but oh such pearls o' wisdom they are:

In the presence of death, life has absolute value

        -- Dostoyevsky

My evenings I spend in a sort of mesmoric state...taking a book off the brain is akin to the ticklish and dangerous business of taking an old painting off of a panel - you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get all of it with safety.

        -- Melville to his editor, while writing Moby-Dick

What is hell? The inability to love.

        -- Dostoyevsky, in Brothers Karamazov

The problem with ambition: you want to please people, but people only applaud the conventional.

The trick of poetry is using thought to wrestle yourself into a new way of thinking (and action)

deep sea scrolls: cont'd 2

Ecclesiastes: hands down, the best book in the bible.  Hugely readable. Byron, Whitman were also huge fans.

good life == no protection

wickedness == usually unpunished

the fool + wise == treated alike in the end

The fool *never* overcomes vexation. They are caught in the vanity.

The decisions (re: choices) one makes unknowingly make the person you are.

4 cardinal virtues: justice, wisdom, moderation, courage

The world is in our heart, and our job is to see it as far as we can.

deep sea scrolls: cont'd

Man is only a reed, but he is a thinking reed. When the universe crushes him, he is still nobler than the thing that destroys him because he knows he is dying & the universe, which has him at its mercy, is unaware of it.

        -- Pascal, in the Pensées

Little things please us, because little things upset us.

        -- Pascal, ibid.

The moment for original thought? Sometimes when things are bad, they are much worse than you thought they'd be.

Few are capable of original thought.  Mark Twain might be right, and perhaps the tendency of the deeper being is rest.

Ahab cuts the meat.  n.b. the person who feeds you, controls you.

Silence is another way of enforcing authority.

Money causes people to lose their senses:  

  - faculty by which the body perceives an external stimulus

  - feeling that something is the case

  - sane, realistic attitude to situations

  - direction of motion (cf. physics)

The great man ... regards it as his prime duty to stand his ground + increase his power, and power never yet improved a man.

        -- Jacob Burckhard, _Force and Freedom_

selected thoughts from the deep sea scrolls

I'm going over my notebooks this evening, which feels like an appropriate time to bang out some words writ in water, and taken down in Prof. Ferguson's class on Deep Sea Thought:

Each of us is encased in an armor whose task is to ward off signs...there are only moments that penetrate it.

        -- Martin Buber, "Between Man + Man"

The true friend is that person who makes you wiser than yourself

        -- Bacon, "Friendship"

Melville believed contrast is how knowledge takes place.  Would friendship happen if there were no storm?  The key is in the contrast.

Your education is changing you very rapidly, and you can't go back. 

  (no kidding)

Smoking is a mutuality that leads to change.

The great problem in life? The superiority (not the inferiority) complex.

(more as i reread 'em)

dickinson corner: on sickness

For an under the weather lemon in park slope who coyly refuses to do her homework, a poem by Emily Sickinson Dickinson:

Not Sickness stains the Brave,
Nor any Dart,
Nor Doubt of Scene to come,
But an adjourning Heart --

Emily Dickinson was sick all the time; an American version of Proust, sans madeleines.  

This poem is all about its not, nors, and but: a minor slew (a flurry?) of things that don't stain the Brave.  These are all small bumps of negation.  That is to say the negative moments encountered by someone w/ courage, one who is ready to face pain.  The danger is in an adjournment: breaking off to continue later per the trusty os-x dict (rock on, oxford american dictionary).  It ain't the sickness, darts, or doubts that stain the brave.  It's their reaction to 'em: the choice either to pause or persevere.  

So even when your you're sick, do your homework. xoxo's