"A good modern sentence proceeds evenly, loosely joined by commas, and its feel is hypothetical, approximate, unstructured, and always aiming at an impossible exactness which it knows it will not achieve." -- A. S. Byatt, "True Stories and Facts in Fiction"

Labels: commonplace book, writing

"Speaking of Accidents"
Peter Everwine

Given the general murkiness of fate
you might, in my mother's words, "Thank
your lucky stars," a phrase she'd drop
into the lull between calamities
like a rubbed stone, then nod wisely
while it sank home, pure poetry,
meaning she loved the sound of it
more than its truth.
But precisely here one needs discrimination.
Our town drunk, steering by streetlamp home one night,
as was his custom, got fooled
beyond recognition when a fast freight at the crossing
fixed him to its glare. "Some men
are like moths," we said, and that
was the poetry in it,
meaning his sudden somersault into light.
Truth is, the world fell in on him
as it commonly does when you stray
from the garden path and run head on
into the pain that, until then,
was as lost as you.
The trick is to risk collision,
then step back at the last moment:
that ringing in your ears
might be construed as the rush of stars.
We all want stars, those constellations
with the lovely names we've given them blossoming
in the icy windblown fields of the dark.
Desire is always fuming into radiance,
though even a drunk can't hope to ignore
some fixity underfoot, some vivid point
closer to home where all the lines converge --
scars, I mean,
not stars.

Labels: commonplace book, miscellaneous

"One of the reasons I love the world of the kitchen is because so much of the work of cooking has a metaphorical component. I believe that cooking well, or striving to, is a metaphor for living well. Having good mise en place is a metaphor for being organized in your life and in your mind. Its goals are to ensure preparedness and efficiency of action." Ruhlman.

I love how this observation deepens the idea of "getting things done," makes it seem more wonderful, more meaningful, and less about the metrics inevitably attached to "what gets done".

Labels: commonplace book, cooking, writing

In September, 1830, William Beckford writes to George Clarke in London: "Lord Rochford has left Easton and all his property to the D[uke] of Easton. Were there any books?"

Labels: books, commonplace book

"Old ideas in science never really die. They only sink to mother Earth, like the mythical giant Antaeus, to gain strength and rise again." -- E. O. Wilson & Bert Hoelldobler, Journey to the Ants (1994)

Labels: commonplace book, history of science

"Wrote nothing today. Doesn't matter."

-- Daniil Kharms

Labels: commonplace book, writing

She passed away in September, I wasn't watching the news...

"I see," she cried, "I got it! For just a moment, I got it. I can't possibly explain it now, but -- but there, for a second, I saw it." (The moment Meg understands the tesseract, in A Wrinkle in Time.)

Labels: commonplace book, writing

Writing from Samoa in 1892 to Sidney Colvin, Stephenson tried to describe some wallpaper he wanted: "The room I have particularly in mind is a sort of bed and sitting room, pretty large, lit on three sides, and the colour in favor of its proprietor at present is a topazy yellow. But then with what color to relieve it? For a little work room of my own at the back, I should rather like to see some patterns of unglossy -- well, I'll be hanged if I can describe this red -- it's not Turkish and it's not Roman and it's not Indian, but it seems to partake of two of the last, and yet it can't be either because it ought to be able to go with vermilion..." (Quoted in A Color Notation by A. H. Munsell, 1919)

Labels: commonplace book, house

"Place your memorandums in your book more neatly you dirty blackguard -- then you may in coming time refer to them with pleasure & see that you begin overleaf or I shall stand here a witness against you..." -- Samuel Palmer, from his Sketch-book

Labels: commonplace book, writing

O visions of salmon tremendous,
Of trout of unusual weight...

-- from Andrew Lang, Books & Bookmen, 1886

Labels: commonplace book

"Writing a thesis is a lonely obsessive activity. You live inside your head, nowhere else. University libraries are like madhouses, full of people pursuing wraiths, hunches, obsessions. The person with whom you spend most of your time is the person you're writing about." -- Hallucinating Foucault, Patricia Drucker

Labels: commonplace book, writing

"The truth is that I have always hated the Viennese coffeehouses because in them I am always confronted with people like myself, and naturally I do not wish to be confronted with people like myself, and certainly not in a coffeehouse, where I go to escape myself. " -- Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein's Nephew

Labels: coffee, commonplace book

"'Bring on the lions!' I cried.

"But there were no lions. I spent every day in the company of one dog and one cat whose every gesture emphasized that this was a day throughout whose duration intelligent creatures intended to sleep. I would have to crank myself up.

"To crank myself up, I stood on a jack and ran myself up. I tightened myself like a bolt. I inserted myself in a vise clamp and wound the handle until the pressure built. I drank coffee in titrated doses. It was a tricky business, requiring the finely tuned judgement of a skilled anesthesiologist. There was a tiny range within which coffee was effective, short of which it was useless, and beyond which, fatal.

"I pointed myself, I walked to the water. I played the hateful recorder, washed dishes, drank coffee, stood on a beach log, watched a bird. That was the first part; it could take all morning, or all month. Only the coffee counted, and I knew it. It was boiled Columbian coffee: raw grounds brought just to boiling in cold water and stirred. Now I smoked a cigarette or two and read what I wrote yesterday. What I wrote yesterday needed to be slowed down. I inserted words in one sentence and hazarded a new sentence. At once I noticed that I was writing -- which, as the novelist Friedrich Buechner noted, called for a break, if not a celebration."

-- Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Labels: coffee, commonplace book, writing

"A book, then, that crumbles even while it forms."
-- Edmond Jabés, from Desire for a Beginning Dread of One Single End

Labels: commonplace book, house

"A baby, a body, a book, abode."
-- Anne Waldman, from the poem My Life A Book

Labels: commonplace book, house

"The book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us."

-- Franz Kafka to Oskar Pollak (1904)

Labels: commonplace book, house

"So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art, with its tireless commitment to the 'new' and/or the 'esoteric.'" -- Susan Sontag

Labels: commonplace book