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Daily(ish) poem → 00309 ◊ You Still In Dumbstay? ◊ Michael Gizzi
You Still In Dumbstay?
Turrets in specimen jars
turn up in a Hindu’s pajamas
frogs chirp in the linoleum
and here proceeds a sad
stream from sanitorium
spittoon flowers making depositions
to bondo your memoirs
so long as you don’t end up
some kind of montage you
to a fault floundering over
primate condiments and
serpent extracts in the pantry
the whelk of your brakes panting
for a more vernacular brandy
why’s the faith healer staring
at the wax on my furniture
why am I here in my PJs
not playing with a full deck
thinking of a Spanish explorer
while the dirigible across
the examining table calling out
pet names downloads my
stomach he knows exactly
what makes the world go ‘round
think I’ll send him a bomb for Easter
—Michael Gizzi
—found in My Terza Rima (2001)
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00051 ¶ from Instanbul: A Tale of Three Cities ¶ Bettany Hughes
Because Istanbul is uniquely well served by both land and sea, she has long satisfied our philosophical and physiological drive as a species to travel, to explore, to connect and to control. A rhino-horn of land that juts into the Sea of Marmara, 1,700 miles east of Paris and 1,400 miles north of Baghdad, Stamboul proper, which was founded at the very edge of Europe and within eyeshot of Asia, comes into her own in the classical age when boat technology developed to allow more people, trade goods, armed troops and novel ideas to travel. She flourished when men and women acted on a prehistoric word-idea that, I would argue, kick-starts civilisation. This Proto-Indo-European term ghosti (from which we get the words guest, host and ghost) referred to a kind of unspoken etiquette, a notion that on seeing strangers on the horizon, rather than choose to fell them with spears or sling-shots, instead we should take the risk of welcoming them across our threshold – on the chance that they might bring new notions, new goods, fresh blood with them. Over time this word-idea evolved into the Greek xenia – ritualised guest–host friendship, an understanding that stitched together the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. Thanks to new DNA skeletal evidence we now realise that ancient peoples travelled far greater distances and more systematically than we once thought. If civilisation is about reaching out beyond the horizon to embrace the unknown, about making connections, about working out how to live with ourselves and with others, then for both East and West alike Istanbul is perfectly placed to satisfy that urge. And today the need to understand the narrative of what one Byzantine called ‘the city of the world’s desire’ is ever more urgent.
—Bettany Hughes
—found in Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities (2017)
📺 Wow, the season finale of True Detective was bad. I mean, the whole season was ragged, but the last episode was an outlier, and not in a good way.
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Daily(ish) poem → 00308 ◊ The Flea ◊ John Donne
The Flea
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do.
Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, nay more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, w’are met,
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that, self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.
Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
Yet thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou
Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;
’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:
Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me,
Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.
—John Donne
—found in found in The Complete Poems of John Donne (2010; this poem early 1590s?)
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00050 ¶ from "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried" ¶ Amy Hempel
I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.
In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to her newborn.
Baby, drink milk.
Baby, play ball.
And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby, come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.
—Amy Hempel
—from “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried”
—found in Reasons to Live (1985)
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00049 ¶ from The Goldfinch ¶ Donna Tartt
Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? Is Kitsey right? If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement, the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or—like Boris—is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?
It’s not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out.
A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.
—Donna Tartt
—found in The Goldfinch (2013)
I don’t miss “likes” at all. Generic noise. If you “like” something, say what you feel. Makes it more meaningful. And if the effort is too much, how much could you have liked the thing? The effortless gesture of a like renders it meaningless.
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Daily(ish) poem → 00307 ◊ Unexpected Meeting ◊ David Orr
Unexpected Meeting
When he fell in the garden and cut his hand
On broken glass from the vinegar bottle
He’d thrown in drunken anger years before
(He had reached for it eagerly that night,
Mistaking it for wine in the dark kitchen),
It was no great injury, and if he felt
Amid the pain a momentary longing
To echo the longing he’d felt back then,
As you might feel stumbling on an old photo
Of yourself beside a half-forgotten person
You once were drawn to as sunflowers are drawn
Toward their namesake, which is no flower,
This quickly passed as he came to recognize
Himself at two removes, and all at once.
—David Orr
—found in Dangerous Household Items (2018)
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00048 ¶ from Joining the Resistance ¶ Carol Gilligan
Like the hysterical women of the late nineteenth century, Hester Prynne has the character of a resister: “a mind of native courage and activity” (p. 183), a woman whom fate and fortune had set free:
The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers,—stern and wild ones,—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss. (pp. 183–4)
In the end, then, she must be corrected, and unlike Dora—Freud’s patient who flees from what had become the iron framework of his treatment, leaving her analysis in mid-stream—Hester, in the dark conclusion of Hawthorne’s brooding novel, reassumes the Puritan mantle. She assures the women who come to her for counsel and comfort that there will be a new order of living between women and men, grounded not in sorrow but in mutual happiness. She knows that “the angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman” and had once imagined this prophetess might be herself. But the angel must be “lofty [and] pure” as well as beautiful, wise “not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy … and sacred love” (p. 241). Hawthorne thus captures the catch-22 of feminism: the very woman who is able to envision a new order of living is, by the same token, unable, since the passion that enables her also adulterates her in the eyes of the Puritans. Released from goodness, she is imprisoned in badness, within the framework of a puritanical order. But her mind is free to question the order.
—Carol Gilligan
—found in Joining the Resistance (2011)
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Daily(ish) poem → 00306 ◊ LVII ◊ Conrad Aiken
LVII
One star fell and another as we walked.
Lifting his hand toward the west, he said—
—How prodigal that sky is of its stars!
They fall and fall, and still the sky is sky.
Two more have gone, but heaven is heaven still.
Then let us not be precious of our thought,
Nor of our words, nor hoard them up as though
We thought our minds a heaven which might change
And lose its virtue when the word had fallen.
Let us be prodigal, as heaven is;
Lose what we lose, and give what we may give,—
Ourselves are still the same. Lost you a planet—?
Is Saturn gone? Then let him take his rings
Into the Limbo of forgotten things.
O little foplings of the pride of mind,
Who wrap the phrase in lavender, and keep it
In order to display it: and you, who save your loves
As if we had not worlds of love enough—:
Let us be reckless of our words and worlds,
And spend them freely as the tree his leaves;
And give them where the giving is most blest.
What should we save them for,—a night of frost . . . ?
All lost for nothing, and ourselves a ghost.
—Conrad Aiken
—found in Preludes for Memnon (1931)
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00047 ¶ from The Museum of Rain ¶ Dave Eggers
They were passing the old cemetery. Oisín knew it was there, but the kids took no notice. To them it would look like a tumble of ancient white stones strewn across a hillside of amber grass. Somewhere in that cemetery, Oisín remembered, were buried Spanish missionaries, Matsun Indians, innumerable cattlemen and cattlewomen, a handful of Mahoneys, one of them an infant, and the man who for thirty years drove the stagecoach between San Juan and Monterey. Now the graves were overgrown and though Oisín knew he should feel wistful, he found he did not much care. It did not move him either way; standing over the dead had never held appeal. Lives were celebrated in stories, not on stones.
—Dave Eggers
—found in The Museum of Rain (2021)
Currently reading: A Spy Alone by Charles Beaumont 📚 – I’m searching for some middle-highbrow espionage fiction.
Finished reading: The Museum of Rain by Dave Eggers 📚 – I thought this was a novella, but it’s a (touching) short story. I’m reminded what a fine writer Eggers is.
Finished reading: Crosstalk by Connie Willis 📚 – I guess it’s a sci-fi comedy romance? And the romance doesn’t land because the characters are ridiculous. Some nice ideas and touches, but just not my cup o' tea.
Some of us actually basically explored the whole web. We reached the end(s). Who amongst you superior youths can claim the same? :)
What surprised me, among all of this, concealed within a hollow chamber at the bottom of a set of bookshelves my mother built with her own hands, shelves that reached from floor to ceiling, covering the wall of my old bedroom, painted forty years ago in petal pink, was a document about a murder that she’d witnessed.
Source: Untrue crime - by Eva Talmadge [archive]
Are the lobbies of fast food restaurants not, in their own way, some of the saddest places in the world?
It’s not the longing for an earlier time, but the longing to stop that longing, that really stings.
Good choice of books :)
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Daily(ish) poem → 00305 ◊ Sonnet for Baby ◊ Jana Prikryl
Sonnet for Baby
Suddenly three of us so I had to try writing it down.
Not three of us three of us but a few minutes
each day baby and me and a third thing
between us, a membrane filled just until
its skin responds to the touch. New body
to tend, this piece of air.
He’d watch me then,
open his mouth and bleat
a sort of meow, the pink droplet waiting to sit
between his front teeth visible now,
it made his face more intricate,
about as good as English flowing out,
suddenly I loved him very much.
—Jana Prikryl
—found in Critical Quarterly (2018; Vol. 60, No. 1)