The Sound and The Fury

From the second section- June Second, 1910:
When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
It was propped against the collar box and I lay listening to it. Hearing it, that is. I dont suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You dont have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear. Like Father said down the long and lonely light-rays you might see Jesus walking, like. And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister Death, that never had a sister.
Through the wall I heard Shreve's bed-springs and then his slippers on the floor hishing. I got up and went to the dresser and slid my hand along it and touched the watch and turned it face-down and went back to bed. But the shadow of the sash was still there and I had learned to tell almost to the minute, so I'd have to turn my back to it, feeling the eyes animals used to have in the back of their heads when it was on top, itching. It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.
And so as soon as I knew I couldn't see it, I began to wonder what time it was. Father said that constant speculation regarding the position of mechanical hands on an arbitrary dial which is a symptom of mind-function. Excrement Father said like sweating. And I saying All right. Wonder. Go on and wonder.

and:

Because women so delicate so mysterious Father said. Delicate equilibrium of periodical filth between two moons balanced. Moons he said full and yellow as harvest moons her hips thighs. Outside outside of them always but. Yellow. Feet soles with walking like. Then know that some man that all those mysterious and imperious concealed. With all that inside of them shapes an outward suavity waiting for a touch to. Liquid putrefaction like drowned things floating like pale rubber flabbily filled getting the odor of honeysuckle all mixed up.

The Magic Bedknob

by Mary Norton
"The charitable attitude to adopt, Carey," said Aunt Beatrice in her precise, cutting voice, "is that you are not quite right in your head. This story about a South sea island, cannibals.... lagoons....If it were necessary to lie, a child of three could do better."
Carey swallowed.
"A magic bed..." Aunt Beatrice smiled acidly. "It might interest you to know, Carey, that I bought that bed myself in 1903, quite new, from Baring and Willow's- a most reputable firm," she added, "and not given to innovations".

Hepzibah sets up shop in "The House of Seven Gables"

"With a beating heart, she listened to the footsteps of early passengers, which now began to be frequent along the street. Once or twice they seemed to linger; these strangers, or neighbors, as the case might be, were looking at the display of toys and petty commodities in Hepzibah's shop-window. She was doubly tortured; in part, with a sense of overwhelming shame, that strange and unloving eyes should have the privilege of gazing, and partly because the idea occurred to her, with ridiculous importunity, that the window was not arranged so skilfully, nor nearly to so much advantage, as it might have been. It seemed as if the whole fortune or failure of her shop might depend on the display of a different set of articles, or substituting a fairer apple for one which appeared to be specked. So she made the change, and straightway fancied that everything was spoiled by it; not recognising that it was the nervousness of the juncture, and her own native squeamishness, as an old maid, that wrought all the seeming mischief."

An Existentialist explains sleeping on a train: More from Simone de Beauvoir's American diaries

In a train's sleeping berth:
The tension and fatigue entailed in every existence originate in other, larger forms of existence; in these berths, stacked on either side of the corridor, like tombs in the galleries of the catacombs, each person achieves an absolute solitude. This nocturnal dwelling evokes the peace of the funeral chambers of Mycenae and Cerveteri; no appeal from the outside world can penetrate here. My life is no longer pulled in different directions or tied to anyone or anything; it is closed in on itself in the silence of death. I turn off the lights and shut my eyes. I feel the rhythmic movement of teh train as it rolls into the unknown; this movement also brings me peace- the peace of an alibi. Not only am I separated from everything, but I am not situated at any particular spot in the universe. I'm just passing through. the sleep that pulls me from this world is in harmony with the rolling of the train, which minute by minute denies me my unique place in it.

Simone de Beauvoir in America

From the marvelous diaries kept while in the U.S., January to May 1947....
"what makes daily life so agreeable in America is the good humor and friendliness of Americans...(but) this amiability is disconcerting. The respect granted the citizen is completely abstract; the same polite smile that assures David Brown that he is a unique individual will also gratify John William s who is unique too. Nothing is more universal than this singularity recognized with such ceremony. One suspects a hoax. Nonetheless, thanks to these considerations, the American doesn't need to strain to feel his human dignity. It may be commercial but the cordiality of salespeople is never servile. They are not bitter or stiff, and though it is encouraged by self-interest, their kindnes is no less real. We've held German soldiers responsible for the wayy they carried out orders of extreme cruelty- and in fact, man is never passive. In obeying he commits his freedom, and submitting to evil is a way of reclaiming it for himself. Most of the time he reclaims it through inventions and initiatives that make his responsibility apparent. Likewise the American citizen does not submit passively to the propaganda of the smile; on a foundation of of obligatory optimism, it is really he who freely presents himself as cordial, trusting and generous. His kindness is less suspect the less interested he is in the success of the system- he is more duped than duping. p 24

Stanley Kauffmann on Chaplin

Stanley Kauffmann on Paulette Goddard in "The Great Dictator" from Stanley Kauffmann's "A World on Film":
All the Good people are GOOD; and when they escape they settle on a storybook farm where they dine at an outdoor table under a grape arbor in a picture so itchily pretty it would give Currier the Ives.

A sunny day

I was able to finish my Chesterfield sofa. Because of the extensive tufting, painting the areas that are folded out of sight was nightmarish. I would pull the wrinkles out and run a paintbrush along them and then discover a dozen that I had overlooked. It was like painting a Shar-Pei.

From "Pragmatism"

Quoted in "William James in the Maelstrom of American Modernism"
In Pragmatism, published a year after the quake, he wrote, “I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangent to the wider life of things.”

and

“to anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent”—and he had done both—“the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the principle of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself to all life’s purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter’s possibilities.”

From:

From "Naming Day in Eden" (1958) by Noah Jonathan Jacobs

"Adam's bold step towards freedom introduced new features of violence into the world and seriously disturbed the balance between the animal and plant kingdoms. His sudden departure must have been regarded by the others as a breach of loyalty on the part of a degenerate member who had lost his sound animal sense. They classified their poor relation as a zoological freak, a beast with brains, a man fallen from monkeyhood, and then they returned to their sensible round of duties. Naturally they refused to follow him to the perilous fronteir so far removed from corporeal being, except the dog....
The dog is aware of his own worthlessness. Waggish cynical, a slave to wretched odors, he is constantly sniffing about as if he had lost something irrecoverable."

Gerhardie

Gerhardie visits Edith Wharton at her chateau:
"He arrived late at night, carrying in his bag several large chunks of buttered bread, and these he secretively flushed down the toilet, putting the whole plumbing system out of order."
He misunderstood the butler's name and called him "father" all his visit.
-from R.W.B. Lewis' Edith Wharton

The ghost yeller

Something kicked my bed hard a few nights ago. How hard? It woke me, but in dream terms it was only the amount of impact that would be given if your bed was head-butted by a huge talking fish. It was a little less that when the utility that keeps the bed in one spot lifts and drops it for non-payment- more like the sensation when a small electric vehicle shaped like a hat hits the bed and the small electric man inside gets out to scratch his head. There were several options but as consciousness dawned the choices narrowed to two. Rationally, I know Seattle is rife with faults, bless its heart, but if I were allowed to select either a ghost or an earthquake, I'd prefer a ghost.
I've never really thought much about them: ghosts. I suppose they are our dependent clauses. They are our messy carbons. I could go on. Unlike angels, unclear beings who sustain poorly rationed faiths, ghosts have been created from a surfeit of identity. Ghosts exist in details. They've evolved from early mercenaries whose mission was vengeance and whose soul could be paid to rest into something more parochial and decidedly more personal. At some point the tentacles of the self reached beyond the pattern life. (I don't mean to suggest that a life's purpose must be exhausted like the flame's fuel or it rekindles some otherworldly aura. Ghosts have nothing to do with the dead on whom they are based.)
The individual does not pack a single personality. We are each mimics and we each covet what others are. To cope, we people the inanimate objects of our environment with Persona Babies. When that won't suffice we give personal narratives to actions. We assign actions personality traits. That reason the doll moved from where I left it or the door slammed is because of some anger or longing. To be haunted by these remnants of excessive egotism is to be chased by the scary faces we've just made in the mirror. If we did not psychoanalyze them, if we could just allow ourselves to be haunted by generic spirits- by the dead as a club that would be far different than having the touch put on you by the ghosts who are our contemporaries and equals. We are no longer terrified by the echoes in our bicameral brain, but by the identities we have formed ourselves.
Every ghost these days is a previous tenant which should say something of our feelings about property. My first expectation, surfacing from sleep was that the bed-kicker was just such a previous tenant. Probably killed by the asbestos and come back to warn me not to put any decorative hooks in the ceiling. I had forgotten about earthquakes. My exact half-waking thought was: "Damn! Now I have ghosts. Ter-rific. Well, they can go... I'm not moving out." It was a few moments before I thought of alternatives.
You can't blame me. There is something otherworldly about the motion of an earthquake. A fluid relation between walls and floors is not found in any living experience except in an earthquake. I don't suppose a ghost has the weight behind it to move my bed as much as it was moved. They are subtle in material- the breath of intent clothed in a sheet- diaphanous beings in velvet breeches or a wedding dress. (Why are we only haunted by jilted brides? We're never haunted by bridesmaids resentfully clomping up to our bed in their hideous mauve organza. 'Boo. I am cursed to stalk eternity. In this dress')

It might be possible that I suffered a sort of bilocation and kicked my own bed. If so, it is another talent wasted. It is a great pity that none of us can profitably occupy two distinct spots simultaneously- the best we could ever hope for is the ability to climb from our bodies, kick ourselves in the backside and get back in again.
Though it took the broadcast news nearly ten minutes to acknowledge it, what had happened was a sort of tectonic hiccup centered somewhere around Mt. Vernon. It can't have been more than a 4 point something or a 5. If Seattle were to have the spurs dug into it and to jump any significant amount, my dog and I would be buried alive in books, and if forced to read my way to freedom, I have a horrible feeling that the closest books would be Lady Murasaki's "Tale of Genji" and Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse".
I have to purge additional books. 3 boxes are on their way:

I've been more enthralled with the paper they wrap pomme frites in, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I can't like everything the canon lassos, John Dos Passos
Pity I don't grade on a curve, Saint-Beuve
Do go, Victor Hugo
LOL, Heinrich Boll

Nabokov

link to somewhat lengthy interviews with Nabokov and many others, including Warhol, de Kooning, Martha Graham and the unspeakably vile A Ginsberg
http://video.thirteen.org/series/show/88

Buddy, Etruscan

My dog, Buddy, as far as I can determine, is Etruscan. There are all sorts of remnants of lost civilizations around. Why not Buddy? Like the Etruscans, Buddy's genetic origins are unknown. The Etruscans were believed by some to be autochthonous. This means (roughly) they were indigenous to wherever they happened to be. Etruscans themselves seem unforthcoming. When pressed, they might casually drop a hint that they were displaced Lydians and apparently no one thought to say "Lydia must be lovely at this time of year" to find out anything useful, like what was wrong with Lydia. If I know ancient people (and I do know some pretty ancient people) I would bet my last dollar that there were also Etruscans who wouldn't shut up about where they were from. If you ducked behind an obelisk they would find you because they had nothing better to do than to walk around obelisks and tell you how much 'nicer' the drainage sluices were behind their old homes. There are legends of a great hardship in which the Lydian king sent half of his starving population away in ships- with mild encouragements to write when they found breakfast. Despite there being nothing left to divide between the remaining Lydians they thought it made perfect sense to have greater portions of it.
For nearly a thousand years, you could not even step into a toga without finding it lousy with Etruscans. Then just as suddenly as they arrived, they vanished, leaving Etruscan-shaped indentations in the sofa, Etruscan teeth-marks in the quiche, and Etruscan shaped holes in the doors. I'm sure their unencouraging smiles drifted through many a landlord's nightmare after that. Sometimes Buddy has just that Etruscan smile, like a gassy baby.
Afterwards it was found that they had managed to sneak a word or two into our vocabulary which we later discovered- like napkin-wrapped hors d'oeuvres behind our cushions. 'Tavern' is from them, as are 'cistern' and 'persona'. Film buffs might recall that "Persona" was a film by Ingmar Bergman, a story of two isolated women who slap each other and swap mental illnesses. It is distinguishable from the same director's "Through A Glass Darkly" in that the crazy lady in the latter film erroneously believes that she has seen God who is an enormous spider. What she has seen is a helicopter which is an easy mistake to make. One hoped when she subsequently clambered into the helicopter, she might have questioned whether God should have so many knobs and switches, but Bergman always ended his movies just when they were about to get fun. I digress.
Etruscan women were said to shave their bodies and bleach their hair. Buddy departs from the typical Etruscan in that regard. Etruscans were also said to be indiscriminate and would copulate in public with both sexes. That's a little more Buddy.
Every morning Buddy wakes me up by licking my eyeballs. I must appear dead to him. (When he holds a spoon to my nose, I'll know he's eyeing my stuff.) Similarly, when a Pope dies, the Secretary of State for Vatican City hammers on the dead pope's head three times shouting his given name. This makes sure the pope is not faking to get out of an audience with the Junior League of Weehauken or Pam Dawber. Hammering on the skull is a remnant, as is the pope's coiled staff, of the Etruscans, but when I look to my sources to find how it is Etruscan, they mumble and fidget.
Buddy likes to dig holes and coincidentally Etruscans popularized burial. The least contentious use of burial, as we know, was for the deceased. In fact the legacy of the Etruscans is in their tombs. Their civilization is the items that graverobbers considered hardly worth carrying off. This of course makes us think how we'll be defined by milky VHS cases and hairy knit caps and bottles of Christmas tree preservative. We are far too anxious about how we will be remembered. Personally, I'd like to be pounded into currency and circulated in small denominations.
To conclude, for insurance purposes Buddy is not a pit-bull. He is Etruscan.

My own damn sport

There is a time in a man's life when no recognized participatory sport will have him and he must invent his own. I am at that juncture.
I am a hobbyhorser.
"That doesn't even exist," you exclaim.
"On the contrary," I say, galloping about you upon my steed. "Hobbyhorsing is a venerable sport."
"Quit poking at me, jerk," you ask.
Yes. I will tell you the history. Of course alot has changed since the sport's inception in 1908. The hobbyhorsing uniforms of those days are laughable by todays standards, but almost everything seems funny today. Something seems to have gotten into us. At the turn of the century there was virtually no safety equipment available for the casual hobbyhorsist. Gorings were numerous... in the number narrowly averted. This haphazardness forced women to be relegated to the role of spectators, and rarely even that. Women were permitted into the sport in 1927 but were required to hobbyhorse side-saddle.
Hobby-horses were, of course, used in olden times (as we call them today) by the French (as we call people who live in France). Let's go back into history and take a look. Oh, not that far. We can imagine that cave-men might have domesticated the stick prior to domesticating horses but then we would have to ask what it was they thought they were doing when they put a stick between their legs, wouldn't we? Let's just scooch up to 15th century France. These stalwart early hobbyhorsers were self-appointed 'alongside-followers' and would attempt to 'up-hurry' laggers and fatties. Hobby-horses also show up in an early English engraving in which we see what looks to be a mob of Morris Dancers encouraging a lone hobbyhorser with decapitation.
Today's hobbyhorsers consider the racing from one's current spot to an entirely separate spot in time or space jejune. One's hobbyhorsemanship is not based on distance, competence or uninsaneness, but solely centers around one's cavorts. While it is possible for even a novice to score high marks for capriciousness and vagrancy, most newcomers quickly run out of ideas. There is nothing sadder than a limp steed gradually slipping down to some immobile, gape-mouthed hobbyhorseman or woman's ankles.
And while our loping might seem aimless.
Another thing that attracts me to this sport is that it offers little in the way of calamities and catastrophes. The worst thing a hobbyhorser can get is stomp-foot. Thigh-chap is almost unheard of these days- partially due to the fact that when the straddle-barrier was broken for lady hobbyhorsers new rules permitted the introduction of a looser seat. Purists decried what they described as the untightening of the strictures of straddling, pointing out that some people hardly touch their horse, and until they finish their horse, no dessert.
There were, for a number of years, two competing hobbyhorsing organizations- the National Hobbyhorsers International and the American Hobbyhorsing Association which for a time was sponsored by the beef spread Bovril until Bovril denied this.
The former sanctioned developments in the stick-mounts such as aluminum bodies that were said to enhance aerodynamic efficiency and rear end streamers which offset those gains. Today's steed would not recognize the primitive horse of old- they are as different as today's broom and the ridiculous brooms of yesteryear. The A.H.A. held fast against encroaching progress and eventually succumbed to the Nixon-era surge in popularity, led by notables such as (citation needed).
"But sport?" you might aver beneath your breath, "It's barely an activity."
"YOU'RE BARELY AN ACTIVITY!" I respond, winning eleventy points. And with my steed floating and flouncing between my legs I ride off, without traversing any distance whatsoever.

Purging

In my ongoing purge, I have given the Cheever oeuvre to Kyle who adores the downcast. I tried, and enjoyed his adept craft, but ultimately could not endure his mood. If I restock it will be the iconic orange/red paperback. I gave E.F. Benson's collected Lucia novels and "As I lay Dying" to Ken. "History and Its Images" to David. The rest...an enormous box of books.... well, 20 or so. .. I took to HPB for which I received $3.00 cash with which I bought a Dale Peck ("Hatchet Jobs") and Stephens' "The Crock of Gold". And who was lost and who was saved?
..
..
..
..
..
Au revoir, Simone de Beauvoir! (pictured....really)
Ta-ta, Yasunari Kawabata!
Blow, Malraux!
Scram, Michael Cunningham!
Begone, Michael Chabon!
Take a hike, John Updike!
Don't let the door hit you in the ass, Gunter Grass!

Crock

Maybe it's something of a palate cleanser. "Crock of Gold" by James Stephens (1882-1950) mainly concerns the fairies, satyrs and wee folk whose complex government seems to permit child abduction and theft. It is fey and dark simultaneously, fanciful but never twee.
From the book:
"All bodies grow around a skeleton. Life is a petticoat about death."
and
"A thought is a real thing and words are only its raiment; but a thought is as shy as a virgin; unless it is fittingly appareled, we may not look on its shadowy nakedness: it will fly from us..." (it continues thusly on p. 39)
and:
"The question naturally arises whether clothing is as unknown in nature as we have fancied? Viewed as a protective measure against atmospheric rigour, we find that many creatures grow, by their own central impulse, some kind of exterior panoply which may be regarded as their proper clothing. Bears, cats, dogs, mice, sheep and beavers are wrapped in fur, hair, fell, fleece or pelt so these creatures cannot by any means be regarded as being naked. Crabs, cockraoches, snails and cockles have ordered around them a crusty habiliment, wherein their original nakedness is only to be discovered by force... Clothing, therefore is not an art but an instinct and the fact that man is born naked and does not grow his clothing upon himself from within but collects it from various distant and haphazard sources is not any reason to call this necessity an instinct for decency." (p. 76)

My blue heaven

Joe Dallesandro

One of these things is not like the others

Ford Madox Ford, Joyce, Pound and (I believe) Galsworthy.

The answer? Only one was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Um.... Galsworthy. "Conrad said he was as hard as iron under a soft exterior and tenacious as a bulldog in spite of a carefully feigned pococurantism" (from Ford Madox Ford's delirious and wonderful "Portraits From Life"). Also "I had already recognized in him a certain queerness, a pixylike perversity" (for the melodramatic). And: "It used to seem almost a miracle that he could find his way about his own works while he was writing them, so frequently was he counseled by one person and another to change all the salient passages of his books".

Was that a car?

Don't ask

Dean Jones: He's looking for a cat-burgler
Suzanne Pleshette: That's ridiculous. Who would want to steal cats?