Faceless Boys
I’ve been painting faceless boy portraits on found pieces of wooden scraps from the wood shop at my old school, and these are two of these. Some sort of window into the psyche, except it’s covered in cobwebs and when you actually squint in, you just recoil as if struck.
Probably goes to Yale. Favorite band is Deerhoof. Unironic.
The bearded red-cardiganed glasses wearing asshole-of-my-dreams who looks like he works at a library in Oregon. Probably named “Britt/Brett”.
The bums haven’t lost.
Articles that justify my lifestyle will always have a place here on clusterflock:
“Slacker,” like most labels, has always been a crude and misleading shorthand. We were a bit aimless, us urban, liberal-arts types. We were a little too enamored of irony, perhaps. A little too frivolous.
But there was something to be said for a life in the moment; for a dalliance in California, for concerts and failed screenplays, for a little fun before the fall. And the truth is, we were always more purposeful – more responsible – than our fathers and uncles and grandmothers realized.
Those of us who took low-wage jobs were not just marking time. Not all of us, anyway. We were doing work we cared about, as journalists and teachers and social workers.
All that job-hopping and freelancing? We were dilettantes, on some level, it’s true. But we also understood, before most, that something had shifted – that we were moving to an economy of telecommuters and independent contractors and less-than-loyal employers.
And while the best minds on Wall Street cooked up the real estate mess that destroyed a global economy, we were sensible enough to steer clear of that overpriced condo and move into a dingy, three-bedroom rental with a few of our meathead friends.
Dear Clusterflock: Yes we can…?
I miss our political gripe-fests of the election season. What’s your verdict on Obama’s first 30-odd days?
Live Blogging the Oscars
8:29: Wait, what channel is it on?
8:30: Hugh Jackman looks different than I remember.
8:31: Why so serious?
8:33: More Botox!
It’s difficult…
Deron
I am struggling with delivering a quote, one quote. Oftentimes my favorite quote is one that is in mind for a particular situation. “I’m reminded of…” (Then I wildly paraphrase it, because I won’t remember it word for word). And there are many favorites that got me through some tough moment in life. For instance, years ago, after I admitted my true self, to me, to those around me, *god, help me.* For whatever others here may think of this choice, Frost’s lines from The Road Not Taken. It has been several years since I’ve looked at it. OK, you’ve made me get up off my ass and go to the bookshelf to pull the exact quote:
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, And I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Peering in on the past.
Quote
“A new born child has no teeth.”—“A goose has no teeth.”—“A rose has no teeth.”—This last at any rate—one would like to say—is obviously true! It is even surer than that a goose has none.—And yet it is none so clear. For where should a rose’s teeth have been? The goose has none in its jaw. And neither, of course, has it any in its wings; but no one means that when he says it has no teeth.—Why, suppose one were to say: the cow chews its food and then dungs the rose with it, so the rose has teeth in the mouth of a beast. This would not be absurd, because one has no notion in advance where to look for teeth in a rose. ((connexion with ‘pain in someone else’s body’.))
Philosophical Investigations 188e by Ludwig Wittgenstein
quote
…Hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.
Isaiah 55:2
Weekly Picture 141
Mae as a Maniac and Ann, Austin, TX, 2.23.2009
Her Morning Elegance – Oren Lavie
Another one of the neat music videos that took entirely too long to make.
Kissing the ceiling
Photo by Fred Muram (thanks, Dale)
at Jo’s wedding
clusterflock book club
I wanted to move Lucy’s wonderful work with the first clusterflock book club back to the top of the page. All the favorite quotes yesterday knocked it quickly off. I know the intention was to offer the live audio chat as the first version of the conversation, and Lucy has done a remarkable job with editing and presenting the event.
The next step was to offer the comments as a way to talk about Daryl’s book.
Cindy did a wonderful job in comments of providing some context:
I stole some time at work and listened to this delightful conversation. I missed much of it due to bad sound on my end, but what I heard does my soul good. Thank you, dear Lucy, for doing this.
I can fill in some blanks. The group discussed how the book seems to be “all at once,” with a kind of organic wholeness to it. In fact, the pieces were written over a span of 30 years. The oldest is “Down the Rivers of the Windfall Light,” which was written in 1979 or 1980; prior to that, Daryl had written line poetry exclusively. I don’t have the book with me so am not sure which is the most recent piece–I’ll let you know.
Rick, yes, Daryl wrote the found poem in “Inscription.” I think the poem -– and the woman’s finding of it–illustrates our interconnectedness through storytelling. While some people can never “get it,” others will –- even if after we’re gone.
As to the place in “Prairie Shapes,” I think the place is what shapes the story. It has a certain control over the people (I recall Daryl saying it was like a door with a lower than standard header that knocks people out again and again). And the cave strikes me as overtly vaginal. I need to read the piece again, though, to hone my perceptions (I re-read all but “Prairie Shapes” when the book came out–but PS knocked the wind out of me the first time I read it.)
I was really interested to hear that similar language and imagery is used in various stories. This is something I’d never picked up on, but it makes perfect sense. One of Daryl’s earliest memories is of lying in his crib, looking at blue sky through a window. He says he remembers feeling like he was falling up. So it is no wonder that this imagery, along with the high ice clouds, appears again and again.
I’d originally intended to keep my private knowledge to myself and simply participate as just another reader, and if y’all would prefer that I not share details such as this (or prefer that I not participate at all), just say so. This whole thing is strange and wonderful. For all of these years, Daryl and I discussed his stories pretty much in isolation. It’s grand to hear the views of others.
Feel free to join the conversation.
Favorite Quote
You can’t breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence. (Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad.)
near Motor Square Gardens
Snow flurries in the air. (We are waiting for spring.)
Favorite Quote – In Particular
Long time Flocker, first time Poster. Love what y’all do here, and I have a further quote request.
Planning a wedding ceremony for a socially-conscious couple who’ve been together for 6+ years.
Looking for a few readings to complement the ceremony with – not necessarily religious as they’re agnostic (although the ceremony will have Catholic and Jewish attributes), but…
what would you like (or what did you like) to have read at your wedding?
You’re all brilliant in that perfect crazy sort of way, so I trust we’ll get a few great ones.
(As a hint, the groom loves RFK and has been on a hunt for a love or compassion quote from him, largely in vain.)
Favorite Quote
Poets must read and study, but also they must learn to tilt and whisper, shout, or dance, each in his or her own way, or we might just as well copy the old books. But, no, that would never do, for always the new self swimming around in the old world feels itself uniquely verbal. And that is just the point: how the world, moist and bountiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”
Mary Oliver, Long Life
Favorite Quote
Okay, this is probably not fair, but I’m going to set this up a bit. I have a quote here from the Swedish writer, Lars Gustafsson, found in his story “Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases.” This story is possibly (probably) set in Sweden in the 1930s to the late 70s, and it presents the life of a mentally retarded boy. The way the story moves across time–and is omniscient while also remaining intimately in contact with the boy–is amazing. It’s a remarkable display of technical skill that never pats itself on the back–it just does exactly what needs to be done. This quote appears early in the story. The boy lives on a farm with two older siblings, still children themselves, who aren’t mentally challenged. The boy is struggling to fit into this world, and his siblings show him about–but they also play tricks on him and laugh at the odd misunderstandings he constantly falls into. Later he is taken to live in an institution, but here he is being shown around the barn, which contains many dangers he and his siblings have been warned about. The tools, in particular, and the names for them which, themselves, strike him as ominous, are pressing in upon him here:
Above them all, hanging majestically: the ice saw, absolutely forbidden to touch, a cruel giant with dragon’s teeth, a magnification of the other saws, crueller than they, but also silent, waiting, never used.
He would dream of the teeth of all the saws.
See the book this story may be found in here. It may also be found in this wonderful anthology that I use all the time.
favorite quote
William Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt:
Those who worship symbols will be titillated by the fact that Oxen Island appears at first to be E-shaped, E for Eirik, but it is not, and Oxen Island did not quite fit Eirik. – Puffins bob in the inlets. The island is very green. It smells of sheep manure. A cormorant cries petulantly. All around, the sheep, who have inherited the island from the oxen, bleat, but their bleats are as faint and far away as the hummings of flies. The sea is so grey as almost to be white beneath the clouds. From a high rock can be seen a little white house, with a dilapidated shed beside it. The path goes past the kitchen window, in which stands a bottle of vodka, and then across a series of rotten foot-bridges over bogs and streams and pawed-up mud. Then one can leave the trail, and strike out across the hard grass-hummocks until, on a sloping field that ends in a low sea-cliff, one comes across the stone foundation of Eirik’s sheep-pen (all grass grown now). The stone wall that Eirik built begins there, running down in the direction of the white house, and then left. It seems longer than it is, because Oxen Island’s edge has become a spurious horizon for it to pretend to stretch to. Brown and black horses graze by this wall, and purple flowers grow on the stones of it. One horse mounts another, and then they both graze again. After a while, the horse-herd raises its half-dozen heads and canters away, over Eirik’s wall. A chilly breeze blows. Birds call faint and querulous against a cloud. A semicircle of pink moss campion smiles from a stone.
Favourite Quote.
My favourite quote from a book is from White Noise by Don DeLillo, one of the very best books I have ever read for a lot of different reasons. I put this quote online here previously.
She was transcribing names and phone numbers from an old book to a new one. There were no addresses. Her friends had phone numbers only, a race of people with a seven-bit analog consciousness.
If I were a revisionist, I’d append it with something about a race of people with a 140 character digital consciousness. But I’m not a revisionist.
favorite quote
And he reads to them, as he does every night, as if watering them, as if turning the earth at their feet. There are stories he has never heard of, and others he has known as a child, these stepping stones that are there for everyone. What is the real meaning of these stories, he wonders, of creatures that no longer exist even in the imagination princes, woodcutters, honest fishermen who live in hovels. He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past, that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice which protects us, the habit which gives us shape. He wants them to know both degradation and sainthood, the one without humiliation, the other without ignorance. He is preparing them for this voyage. It is as if there is only a single hour, and in that hour all the provender must be gathered, all the advice offered.
James Salter, Light Years
Favorite quote…
“The old man smiled. ‘I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.’”
-Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
favorite quote
The men stood in a line, at the field edge, facing the hill, Ozzie on the outside, and began their swing. It was a slow swing, scythes and men like a big clock, back and to, back and to, against the hill they walked. They walked and swung, hips forward letting the weighting cut. It was as if they were walking in a yellow water before them. Each blade came up in time with each blade, at Ozzie’s march, for if they ever got out of time the blades would cut flesh and bone.
Behind each man the corn swarf lay like silk in the light of the poppies. And the women gathered the swarf by armfuls, spun bants of straw and tied in armfuls into sheaves, stacked sheaves into kivvers.
Alan Garner, “The Aimer Gate,” The Stone Book Quartet
Favourite quote
A favourite quote of all time is pretty much impossible, I’m afraid. Once, when I tried to come up with a top 10 list of books, the short short-list was 67 books long. So, instead, here’s my favourite quote for the mood I’m in right now:
“Bergeron’s epitaph for the planet, I remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the flying-saucer people to find, was this:
WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT
BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP
Only he didn’t say ‘doggone’.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr ~ Hocus Pocus - [Despite doing American Lit. at university, I got into Vonnegut by accident: I picked up a copy of Hocus Pocus at the local library, because Penn & Teller had been on TV a lot that year, and I wanted to read a book about magic...]
Draw your own analogy
Richard Hughes, writing of Germany and its enormous financial problems in the years after World War I:
“Consumption has always to be paid for. Their war had been very conspicuous but in Germany there no been virtually no war-taxation to pay for it on the nail. Thus there was nothing really mysterious about this present exhaustion into outer space of every last penn’orth of new value as fast as it was created: this was a kind of natural, belated capital-cum-income levy–though levied now not equitably by any human government but blindly, by Dis himself.”
