Etch-a-Sketch art
Wow. Portraiture on the Etch-a-Sketch by Gila Rayberg for Julia Kay’s Portrait Party at Flickr.
The February elimae
is now posted.
The January 2012 elimae
The January 2012 elimae is now posted. Happy new year!
The December elimae
is now posted.
Gordon Lish and dictionary.com
I’m afraid this link will not be what I’m wanting past midnight today. The word of the day for November 19 is “knavery” and they use a quote from Gordon Lish to show usage! (Thanks to my friend Susan for letting me know about this.)
Update:
Yes, I took the brunt of it but not because there was a ballot on it but because I know knavery when I see knavery. Plus underhandedness and mischief.
– Gordon Lish, Collected Fictions
EDIT: The link has been edited to point to the relevant day forever.
Y’all come see me
in Galveston.
Your friendly neighborhood elimae
has just posted the November issue.
October elimae
is now posted.
September elimae
for your pleasure.
August elimae
is now posted.
The June/July issue
of elimae is now posted.
The May elimae
is up.
March elimae
for your enjoyment.
February elimae
I wish
Each of thee a lovely 2011.
Why are you not reading Yoel Hoffmann?
My father thinks: Some of the books speak of the nature of things and some of the things of nature.
– The Shunra and the Schmetterling
May she rest in peace
The December elimae,
the final issue of the year, is now posted. Rock on, all!
Yoel Hoffmann’s Curriculum Vitae
For Deron and Amy, and all you other dog lovers out there: chapter 97 of Yoel Hoffmann’s remarkably wonderful fictionalized memoir Curriculum Vitae (New Directions, 2009):
Maybe ten years before the end of the second millennium my son Yotam came back from school and behind him walked a Great Pyrenees.
The dog lay down in the yard (where, some ten years earlier, the three cows had lain) for two days and looked toward Mount Meron. And now I want to send him a kind of text message wherever he is today (most likely the Eden of dogs.):
Thank you for allowing my soul to come so close to yours. There are things that only the two of us know. Things that are impossible to say because words are made of materials resembling cut sheets of tin and man doesn’t have the tools to bring great spirit into them.
But since you were willing to look at me (for a moment) with those eyes of yours two or perhaps three times I knew something that you knew — something immeasurably more profound than these thoughts of mine and than the great river of memories that we call life.
Ignore at your peril
Ian Hamilton Finlay
“I like the poems you sent for this collection. My own feeling would be that you should set out less, I mean say less, and leave more to emerge — but I may be quite wrong — this I say on the basis that I like the poems: beyond that, I feel you tend to use the didactic level too much, like, if you could, use more making and less saying — I don’t know how to explain this feeling, I want to condense your poems — Tell me if you think I am wrong, but I feel you tend to write about a thing, instead of writing it. On the other hand, your writing is very un-nasty and un-corrupt, and its big open movement is plainly connected with its big open feeling, so I may be quite wrong, do you see? I feel you could keep the generosity and goodness and YET have more magic. But could one, I don’t know?”
– letter to Gael Turnbull, 1961, included in A Model of Order: Selected Letters on Poetry and Making by Ian Hamilton Finlay.
(Requested link here. Sorry.) (Well, heck, someone added a link before I saw the request for a link. So take your pick!)
My copy arrived today
Kathryn Rantala’s A Partial View Toward Nazareth
“A particular anger helped move the ground I worked in, the soil in which bulbs would be buried inches down — some of them dropped hastily because the digger is cold; forced to right themselves against all they would ever know of the earth, then sit in numbing frigid vaults for long and longer months trying to believe themselves safe in the dirt…” (p. 1)
Svarte Greiner
Svarte Greiner – The Sickening by _type
Julie Doiron
It’s almost like Belly or The Breeders came back.
The Radetzky March
“He saw people shuffling by with deranged faces and gruesomely contorted limbs, but for the district captain madness held little terror, even though this was his first visit to an insane asylum. Only death was terrible. Too bad! thought Herr von Trotta. If Carl Joseph had gone crazy instead of dying in action, I would have brought him back to his senses. And if I hadn’t succeeded, then I would have come to see him every day! Perhaps he would have contorted his arm as horribly as this lieutenant here that they’re walking past me. But it would have been only his arm, and you can caress a contorted arm. You can also look into twisted eyes! So long as they’re my son’s eyes. Happy the fathers whose sons are crazy!”
— Joseph Roth (translated by Joachim Neugroschel; Overlook Press, p. 325)
