Sugi's 42nd Bday

Sevi and I made "Rebecca & the Wolf" DVD
Chocolates from Bierkraft
Bottle of St. Peter's Cream Stout
For Dinner, Made:
Balsamic-Roasted Seitan with Cipollini Onions (Shallots used as
substitute)
Buckwheat Vegetable Pancakes with Spicy Yoghurt Sauce (hold the spice)
Maple Chestnut Mousse w/ Whipped Cream and Chocolate Shavings
--all recipes compliments of Peter Berley's "Fresh Food Fast"

Sugi's 42nd Birthday

Sevi and I made "Rebecca & the Wolf" DVD
Chocolates from Bierkraft
Bottle of St. Peter's Cream Stout
For Dinner, Made:
Balsamic-Roasted Seitan with Cipollini Onions (Shallots used as
substitute)
Buckwheat Vegetable Pancakes with Spicy Yoghurt Sauce (hold the spice)
Maple Chestnut Mousse w/ Whipped Cream and Chocolate Shavings
--all recipes compliments of Peter Berley's "Fresh Food Fast"

Oo the shots, the shots!

Talk of the gorgeous cinematography is exactly analogous to picking
up a novel and saying, "what wonderful use of the word 'asseverate'
or 'badinage' or 'quondam'." What smart sexy words and look how well
used! Or picking apart Mozart and saying, "lovely use of the 'A
note' or the "arpeggio". Certainly this kind of thing is done, but
in these cases it becomes that much more obvious that the admirer is
missing the point, which is the flow, the story, the totality and its
implications for our existence, our apprehension of beauty IN the
cosmos, not abstracted from it.

Book: Axel's Castle - p 2

You read reviews of books of fiction on websites, and much it comes
down to "The author took me away to another time and place." Is this
all that's required? The consumer criterion ne plus ultra? It seems
that the frame of interest is simply in titillating the consumer in
this way of escape. Is this the legacy of Symbolism/Modernism?
Because for the last century we seem merely to have elaborated on it.

WSJ vs. NYT

Mark Voelpel's theory that businessmen want to know the truth.
"What's really happening in Iraq, or anywhere?" makes the Wall Street
Journal politically neutral and objective in a way that the New York
Times definitely is not. He feels the NYT is in the business of
cultivating public opinion primarily to be pro-Israel, and that's why
it has found uncritical common cause with the so-called War on Terror.

He's very big on this book "Don't Think of an Elephant" which is
about the history of Republicans assiduously working to shape
rhetoric in the US.

Book: Axel's Castle

This book sat on my shelf for 18 years before I finally read it.
(Had been a roommate's I think.) Coming to it now, I was voracious
for it. It's made me realize how scattershot my knowledge of
developments in literature really has been, despite the much vaunted
English major at Yale. Granted, this study is really comparative lit,
yet I'd never HEARD of the school of Symbolism, for instance and its
real role as the handmaiden of Modernism (the latter term Wilson
never uses; don't know whether Joyce, Proust, Stein etc were even
being called modernist in 1930, when it was written). In any case,
fascinating on Eliot, Yeats, Proust and Joyce. Each essay made me
want to pick up the originals again and delve. I think it has me
fired up to re-read Swann's Way in a new translation and likely go
beyond it.

Interesting structure in the way that Wilson sort of limns Symbolism
and its exponents at the beginning, but really much more effectively
defines at the end of the book after having adduced these examples of
its heirs. Just as Romanticism was a reaction against Classicism,
and Naturalism a reaction against Romanticism, Symbolism sort of
subsumed Naturalism and Romanticism both. He talks about Joyce's
excruciating attention to the details of human behaviour and cultural
life, a Naturalist obsession, yet with the kind of lambent,
suggestive and highly idiosyncratic method of telling, a kind of
multi-valent perspective relentlessly at work. With Proust he
focuses among other things on his unconcern with naturalistic
exigencies on the one hand, the kind of dream logic plan of the
work. The symbolist thing that Wilson emphasizes in conclusion seems
to be universally escapist. On the one hand a way out of the
objective mechanistic shortcomings of say, Zola or even Flaubert, to
waken us to the possibilities of consciousness; on the other hand--
and here a marked departure from Romanticism--an absolute refusal to
engage the actual world, to affect it, but rather to construct an
alternative to it, so rigorously constructed and rich as to be an
alternative world. The title comes to Villiers D'Adams' "Axel" whose
castle really represents this rarefied alternative to having to
live. A tendency which filtered down or was echoed in Mallarme,
Valery etc, whose concerns were the periphery of consciousness as
access to the quick of things, or in the latter a renunciation of
content for process--kind zen-like it seems or Buddhistic in its need
to empty. The other option, that of Rimbaud, was literally escapist,
and in his case from literature itself, and escape into the real
world, from which he cultivated nonetheless some hermetic resistance
all the same. Gertrude Stein whittling down language to a
distillation of something overlooked or unexplored, which seems to
have nothing to do with the ostensible purpose of language, which is
communication, something like private totem or sensation freed from
history and meaning. These are just gluey ramblings to help me
remember, rattled off quickly with Sevi begging to type, so wrapping
it up

Tolstoyevsky

my favorite author

the viper couple

vying with eachother for a shot a things to bite and poison

Movie: The Human Stain

Good book, but felt sorry for all involved in this movie, even before
I saw it. Was very faithful indeed, but could not succeed on that
basis. Robert Benton, Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, all cornered
in an enterprise of phoney-ness.

The Personal Fallacy

To believe that high art and inspiration lives with any person is a
profound mistake. Some catch it through serependipity for a while.
Some struggle and never find it. The rare few continually pursue it
and get it, sometimes, again and again.

Chipmunk Boy

In Grandma's basement at the Brooklyn Children's Museum
A chipmunk boy
A Disney character without words
Smiling and nodding with degrees of vehemence
Pointing out things to Hart, who was fascinated
And I naming each thing
And this affable kid nodding
Fuzzy headed cheer
Bounding about
Perfect little time.

thrown from the throne

At the Y

Grey ponytailed plodding man/woman scowled down at us lined up against the wall in the gym at the Y. Kids were on the mat. The woman (as it turned out) was telling us about the gym and swim class. ..."Then we sometimes have them onto those colored mats over there and sing "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands. If you're not, get the hell outta my gym."

"Have them leave by that door. The next class is coming in by the other door. If they try and leave by the same door we might lose one. I get 200 kids a day here, and losing maybe one isn't so bad, only about .5% unaccounted for, not bad, but the parents do get upset about it."

Taimse 'Im Chodladh
Tráthnóinín déanach i gcéin cois leasa dom
Táimse im' chodhladh is ná dúistear mé
Sea dhearcas lem' thaobh an spéirbhean mhaisiúil
Táimse im' chodhladh is ná dúistear mé
Ba bhachallach péarlach dréimreach barrachas
A carnfholt craobhach ag titim léi ar bhaillechrith
'S í ag caitheamh na saighead trím thaobh do chealg mé
Táimse im' chodhladh is ná dúistear mé


Is mó buachaillín óg a thógadh go ceannasach
Táimse im' chodhladh is ná dúistear mé
Do cuireadh le foirmeart anonn thar farraige
Táimse im' chodhladh is ná dúistear mé
Go bheicfeadh an lá a mbeidh ár ar Shasanaigh
Ughaim ar a ndroim is iad ag treabhadh is ag branar dúinn
Gan mise a bheith ann mura dteannam an maide leo
Táimse im' chodhladh is ná dúistear mé


Ba bhachallach péarlach dréimreach barrachas
A carnfholt craobhach ag titim léi ar bhaillechrith
'S í ag caitheamh na saighead trím thaobh do chealg mé
Táimse im' chodhladh is ná dúistear mé
Táimse im' chodhladh is ná dúistear mé

(is ba mhaith liom "reputation point" le h-aghaidh sin!)

Delete It

at my funeral

please have someone play

taimse im chodlah

Father and Son Sushi

Kid rubbing noses with his warm Mediterranean papa at the sushi bar
in Cobble Hill. Dad was broad-shouldered dark and smiley with a
woolen sweater and pants with vertical black and white stripes. 6 yr
old kid and he kept rubbing noses lovingly.

Movie: Kiss of Death

Seeing Mike Leigh's "Kiss of Death" was a great surprise--one I'd
long ago missed and didn't know existed, but with all the elements
and the feel of 70s haplessness. The caricatures that nonetheless
aren't hiding nothing. Resolved in a more shaggy way but with much
the same placidity as the last scene in "Life is Sweet".

Roberta at 80

Apt strewn so I could note each trip she'd made over the past weeks
by the discarded piles.

Corporate character

with the sunny phoney uncomprehending ruthless disposition of a
corporation.