The Last Word

Picture 1.
Picture 2




The last word: "To sail without ever landing doesn't have a landing-place. To never arrive implies never arriving ever."- Fernando Pessoa

Sometimes you find the right cocktail that says the right feeling of a moment. The Last Word: tart with lime, bitter with herbal complexity, all in a perfect gin hit. The last word is the word that lingers longest, whether intended or not.

a weird phrase from a notebook: " I am Jack's pulsating medulla oblongota, releasing self-regulated rage in bite-sized, consumable doses; packaged colorfully, as not to upset the viewer." (Did I write this?)

The last word, you want to leave with something witty but deep, a sort of esprit d'escalier; but instead you end up sounding petulant and whiny. Sour words in the wake and then there are those who always end up leaving literary.

The Last Word: from the Cocktailian:

Makes 1 drink

• 3/4 ounce dry gin
• 3/4 ounce maraschino liqueur
• 3/4 ounce green Chartreuse
• 3/4 ounce fresh lime juice

Instructions: Fill a cocktail shaker two-thirds full of ice and add all of the ingredients. Shake for approximately 15 seconds and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

For Another Valentine's Day gone by.

322

Pictures of Oakland.

"Every gesture, however simple, violates an inner secret. Every gesture is a revolutionary act; an exile, perhaps, from the truth of our intentions.

Action is a disease of thought, a cancer of the imagination. Action is self-exile. Every action is incomplete and flawed. The poem I dream has no flaws until I try to realize it. " -Fernando Pessoa

hypnopompic

picture 1: Color photos from WWI-http://www.worldwaronecolorphotos.com/
picture 2: Cafe in Vienna, 1971


It was the Austrian sketch-writer and habitué of Vienna's Café Central, Alfred Polgar, who perhaps best captured the essence of the literary café when he described it as "a place where people want to be alone, but need company to do so". Since the first European coffee house opened in Venice in 1645, artists and writers have adopted cafés as their unofficial workplaces - libraries in which they can eat, drink, smoke and gossip at the same time as working on the latest draft and sharing ideas.

Today, the decline of a true café society is to be mourned. One can hardly imagine Alfred Jarry's (author of Ubu Roi) pick-up line working in Starbucks. Spotting a pretty girl from his vantage point at the bar in Paris's La Closerie des Lilas, he approached her table, fired a shot into the mirror behind her with his gun and said suavely, "Maintenant que la glace est rompue, causons." ("Now the ice is broken, let's talk.") link

........................

The Muslims came to Europe, he writes, as “the forward wave of civilization that was, by comparison with that of its enemies, an organic marvel of coordinated kingdoms, cultures, and technologies in service of a politico-cultural agenda incomparably superior” to that of the primitive people they encountered there. They did Europe a favor by invading. This is not a new idea, but Lewis takes it further: he clearly regrets that the Arabs did not go on to conquer the rest of Europe. The halting of their advance was instrumental, he writes, in creating “an economically retarded, balkanized, and fratricidal Europe that . . . made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, persecutory religious intolerance, cultural particularism, and perpetual war.” It was “one of the most significant losses in world history and certainly the most consequential since the fall of the Roman Empire.” link

Peter Altenberg

Pictures form this site.

"I never, never, never should feel a woman, unless I want to feel her. My name is Altenberg after all, not Strindberg.”

“Even good books never stink, they are the distillation of all the malodorous sins one has committed of which one had finally managed to extract a drop of fragrant humanity!”

“I was nothing, I am nothing, I will be nothing. But I will live out my life in freedom and let noble and considerate souls share in the experiences of this free inner life, by putting them out in the most concentrated form on paper.” -from Telegrams of the Soul

From Wiki:

Peter Altenberg (March 9, 1859 - January 8, 1919) was a writer and poet from Vienna, Austria. He was key to the genesis of early modernism in the city.

Although he grew up in a middle class Jewish family, Altenberg eventually separated himself from his family of origin by dropping out of both law and medical school, and embracing Bohemianism as a permanent lifestyle choice. He cultivated a feminine appearance and feminine handwriting, wore a cape, sandals and a broad-brimmed hat, and despised 'macho' masculinity.

At the fin de siècle, when Vienna was a major crucible and center for modern arts and culture, Altenberg was a very influential part of a literary and artistic movement known as Jung Wien or "Young Vienna." Altenberg was a contemporary of Karl Kraus, Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, Gustav Klimt, and Adolf Loos, with whom he had a very close relationship. He was somewhat older, in his early 30s, than the others. In addition to being a poet and prolific letter writer, he was an accomplished short story writer, prose writer, and essayist.

anecdotal envelope

Photo 1: Lina Scheynius
Photo 2: Kirigami


from the notebook, December 2005:

RE: Remy de Gourmont “…confided to his personal diary his intention to devote himself to ‘l’amour et les livres,’ scrupulously noting that love would enable him to develop the sensual aspect of his personality, and books the intellectual aspect.”

“…where all the dear little adulteresses, eternally beloved, were endlessly enraptured by the impatient and imperious caresses of the angels of perversity.”

“…you will have no dream but the dream of dreaming.”

12/10/05-Random unknown note:
at times I looked at that immense solitude before me, and that other solitude that was becoming more terrible.

Tracery of harmony

12/12/05-Embers whitened by the pale reflection of the seething sun.

One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World

When I read the above headline, I knew it referred to me: I am a grump, although a well-read grump. The first picture is taken from a slideshow about Lee Miller in the 1/21/2008 issue of the New Yorker which accompanied a very interesting article but it is not available online. The second picture is Weldon Kees reading in San Francisco.

Little reads of the week:

The days get longer. It was a long time ago.
And I have come to that point in the turning of the path
Where peaks are infinite--horn-shaped and scaly, choked with

thorns.
But even here, I know our work was worth the cost.
What we have brought to pass, no one can take away.
Life offers up no miracles, unfortunately, and needs assistance.
Nothing will be the same as once it was,
I tell myself.--It's dark here on the peak, and keeps on getting
darker.
It seems I am experiencing a kind of ecstasy.
Was it sunlight on the waves that day? The night comes down.
And now the water seems remote, unreal, and perhaps it is.
-Weldon Kees A Distance From The Sea



By all accounts, Balenciaga -- severe, uncompromising, taciturn -- is couture's Soup Nazi. As his friend and Vogue's fashion editor, the high-born and high-minded Bettina Ballard, wrote, "His life is his work...It rarely seems to give him a sense of fulfillment, as it never reaches the perfection he desires. Balenciaga's art emerged from his sympathy with women. He knew, for instance, that he had three generations of women to dress, and so always had some older models. Ernestine Carter, fashion editor of The Times of London, was spot-on in her evocation of his favorite model and the muse for many of his early masterpieces, the notoriously unpleasant Colette (not the writer): "her Dracula walk, her big head low like a bull ready to charge, her shoulders hunched down,...and a look of almost violent hatred on her face." She wouldn't have fit in at the House of Dior, where woman was ornament, but she was extremely useful to Balenciaga's customers: "Any woman could wear Colette's clothes -- one of those tricks of proportion."


From the Persian Gulf to the Arctic Circle, Weiner discovers that happiness blooms where we least expect it. Who knew that the long, dark Icelandic winter gives rise to a magical, communal culture that has done away with envy and sobriety? Or that the Thais so prize "fun" that their government has created a Gross Domestic Happiness Index to ensure they get enough of it? Or that Moldovans are miserable because they "derive more pleasure from their neighbor's failure than their own success"? Or that the wealthy citizens of Qatar lead pampered, joyless lives in a "gilded sandbox" while the poor citizens of Bhutan are cheerfully obsessed with archery tournaments, penis statues and feeding marijuana to their fat (and presumably happy) pigs?

Anna Akhmatova

I drink to the wreck of our life together
And the pain of living alone.
I drink to the loneliness we shared-
My dear, I drink to you.

I drink to the trick of a mouth that betrayed me,
To the eyes and the look that lied.
I drink to the terrible world we inhabit
And to god, who never replied.

- Anna Akhmatova trans. by Paul Schmidt
from a found New Yorker, November 6, 2006

Museums of Disasters, III

Picture from here



Museum of failed products


Museum of extinct insects


Museum of Lost Wonder


icy Museum of pointless existence

Schmapp

to the coast

“I am lured away by faraway distances, the immense void I project upon the world. A feeling of emptiness grows in me; it infiltrates my body like light an impalpable fluid. In its progress, like a dilation into infinity, I perceive the mysterious presence of the most contradictory feelings ever to inhabit a human soul. I am simultaneously happy and unhappy, exalted and depressed, overcome by pleasure and despair in the most contradictory harmonies.” -E.M. Cioran, Degradation Through Work

The Paris Review Interviewer: “How do you name your characters?”

Dorothy Parker: “The telephone book and from the obituary columns”

interstice

Pictures of Shanghai

“From this moment she was convinced she was in the grip of a terrible nightmare, only there was no waking from this one: no, she was quite certain that it was reality, only more so; furthermore she realized that the chilling events in which she had been participant or to which she had been witness (the appearance of the phantasmagorical vehicle, the violence in Erdélyi Sándor Road, the lights going off with all the precision of an explosive device, the inhuman rabble in the station forecourt, and above all this, dominating everything, the cold unremitting stare of the figure in the broadcloth coat) were not merely the oppressive creation of her ever-troubled imagination, but part of a scheme so co-ordinated, so precise, that there could be no doubt of their purpose.” The Melancholy of Resistance, Lászlo Krasznahorkai

“The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.” –Walter Benjamin

“Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears the end within itself and unfolds it- as Hegel already noticed-by cunning.” –Walter Benjamin Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century

Books read in 2007

1. Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees, James Reidel
2. Low Red Moon, Caitlín R. Kiernan
3. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, Noel Riley Fitch
4. …Or not to Be: A Collection of Suicide Notes, Marc Etkind
5. The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier, Memoirs of Adrienne Monnier
6. Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Invented Lives: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald, James R. Mellow
8. Life Stories: Profiles from the New Yorker, ed. David Remnick
9. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler
10. Exile’s Return, Malcolm Cowley
11. Caresse Crosby: From Black Sun to Roccasinibalda, Anna Conover
12. A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
13. Hemingway: The Paris Years, Michael Reynolds
14. Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, Scott Donaldson
15. Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People who love Books and for those who want to Write them, Francine Prose
16. The Torrents of Spring, Ivan Turgenev
17. America and The Young Intellectual, Harold Stearns
18. Three Tales, Gustave Flaubert
19. Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
20. Library: An Unquiet History, Matthew Battles
21. Days and Nights: Novel of a Deserter, Alfred Jarry
22. After Dark, Haruki Murakami
23. Despair, Vladimir Nabokov
24. Contempt, Alberto Moravia
25. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontė
26. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
27. Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, Sam Savage
28. La Bâtarde, Violette Leduc
29. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
30. The City: A Global History, Joel Kotkin
31. Three Years, Anton Chekhov
32. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
33. The Conformist, Alberto Moravia
34. Everyone was so Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy, A Lost Generation Love Story, Amanda Vaill
35. Hunger, Knut Hamsun
36. Scent: The Essential and Mysterious Powers of Smell, Annick LeGuérer
37. Perfume: The Art and Science of Scent, Cathy Newman
38. Locus Solus, Raymond Roussel
39. Jurgen, James Branch Cabell
40. The Life of the High Countess Gritta Von Ratsinourhouse, Bettine von Armin & Gisela von Armin Grimm
41. The Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman
42. The Master and the Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
43. Dangerous Muse: Lady Caroline Blackwood, Nancy Schoenberger
44. Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris
45. The Museum of Useless Efforts, Cristina Peri Rossi
46. Diary, Chuck Palahnuik
47. The Defense, Vladimir Nabokov
48. Axel’s Castle: The Study of the Imaginative Literature 1870-1930, Edmund Wilson
49. Dubrovsky and Egyptian Nights, Aleksandr Pushkin
50. The Secret of Scent, LucaTurin
51. Indiana, George Sand
52. The Emperor of Scent: Luca Turin, Chandler Burr
53. From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, Jacques Barzun
54. A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889, Frederic Morton
55. A Night Country, Loren Eiseley
56. Pharmako/Dynamis: Stimulating Plants, Potions and Herbcraft, Dale Pendell
57. Inferno/ From an Occult Diary, August Strindberg

Some End of the Year Debris

Thoughts:

Stories. Most people need stories; they need to fabricate fictions to give some order to their lives, or they need stories to fill the holes of their misapprehensions. Creating stories allows one to be the hero of his own myth and god of his own reality.
For me, stories are no way of living; stories are only good for books.

Love can inspire us to be more compassionate and enlightened; but it is also amazing how memories of a failed romance can drag us down into such petty shit. Cf. From an Occult Diary, A. Strindberg

What is the color of "beaver"?

Wandering around the web and grabbing snippets to feed my imagination.

What is “psychogeography”? The jacket flap defines it as a “meditation on the vexed relationship between psyche and place,” and any number of well-spectacled young Ph.D.’s in sociology or urban studies will talk to you of Situationists and leave you with the bar tab. At its writerly best, though, psychogeography seems simpler to me: it is clear and vivid nonfiction writing with a sense of the past and an eye for the present that takes us close to the street. I mean “street” both literally, as in the color of the paving stones and the font of the signage and the shape of the sidewalk, and figuratively, as in the multitudes that pass by, the movers and shakers, the loiterers and bystanders, the beggars and mimes. (A bartender might mix one part local historian, one part flâneur, one part novelist, one part raconteur. Call the resulting cocktail a Peter Ackroyd or a John Berger, a Rebecca Solnit or an Iain Sinclair.)

.....

Hunter Thompson once said that satire became impossible when reality itself was too twisted and I fear that’s become the case.

Museums of Disasters, II

picture from this site: http://www.kakarigi.net/manu/vijecnic.htm

Museum of genetic catastrophe

“I understand that the idea of bringing something dead back to life is fundamentally frightening,” he went on. “It’s a power that science has come to possess and it makes us queasy, and it should. But there are many viruses that are more dangerous than these—more infectious, far riskier to work with, and less potentially useful.’’


Museum of an extinct race

"The man [Dervis Korkut] so determined to protect a Jewish book was a scion of a prosperus, highly regarded family of Muslim intellectuals, famous for producing judges of Islamic law. He studied theology at Istanbul University and Near Eastern Languages at the Sorbonne. He spoke at least ten languages and served as the Bosnian National Museum’s chief librarian."

Inferno

Inferno, by August Strindberg, from this site


"I had been reading the lovely little pamphlet "The Delight of Dying" and it had made me long to leave this world. To reconnoitre the borderland bewteen life and death I would lie down on my bed, uncork a bottle of cyanide of potassium and allow its deadly fumes to escape into the room. He would draw near, that old Readper, so mild and so seductive, but at the last moment someone always appeared or something always happened to cut me short. The waiter would enter on some errand, a wasp would fly at the window."
-August Strindberg Inferno


But if you are in the mood for something really absurd: http://www.strindbergandhelium.com/index.html

downturned randomness

It has been a week of feeling sad and defeated, but those feelings can only go on for so long. Sometimes I even feel like I want to stop writing; but I can never stop thinking.

One step positive step in the world: Absinthe, it's back!

Mostly, it seemed to him, they didn’t like the monkey.

“I had the image of a spider monkey beating on a skull with femur bones,” Mr. Winters said. But he said that the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau thought the label “implied that there are hallucinogenic, mind-altering or psychotropic qualities” to the product.

“I said, ‘You get all that just from looking at a monkey?’”


I heard a review of this novella on NPR while we were driving back from Mendocino the weekend after Thanksgiving. The reviewer glowed so much about the story, it intrigued me enough to consider reading it.

Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O’Nan

The novel contains nuanced portraits of the tensions between the workers, Manny’s rueful confusion over an affair — now over — with a waitress and his profound sadness as his work of the past several years comes to an abrupt end.

The novel’s most dramatic plot points include a vomiting toddler, a slashed leather jacket and a power failure as a snowstorm rages outside. “It is a very quiet piece,” Mr. O’Nan said. “But I think it gets a lot of life into it, considering it’s only 140 pages or so.”

196

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd; the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are. The sensation we come to have of ourselves is of a deserted field at dusk, sad with reeds next to a river without boats, its glistening waters blackening between wide banks.

-Fernando Pessoa The Book of Disquiet.

Fresno

fresno picon

Every time I visit Europe, I am always struck by a difference in quality and pacing of life compared to the US. I have tried to wrap my thoughts about this and to come up with a reasonable theory. Then I read this interview with Julen Abio, vice-president of the New York Basque Club, and what he said, so simply, summed it all up for me:

"Well, here [US] you leave your house, get into your car, put on the radio, get to work and once again back home. Here you live for work, and there [Europe], you work to live."

Oftentimes, here, I feel the pressure to define myself through the projects that I have accomplished, and the projects I have lined up for future accomplishment. Or I feel like a nobody because of my lack of ambition. There is some strange importance placed on what you have done and who you know. It has become the friend-collecting, personality-product era, but these are not my values. What I want out of this life is very straightforward: I want to understand this world that I live in; I want to read great books, look at inspired art and listen to emotionally-deep music; I want to cook well; I want to have conversations with intelligent people; I want to travel to many places; I want to be a good friend; and I want to love.

Anyway, this weekend I went to Fresno, I cannot say that Fresno was ever on my top ten or even top 100 places to visit, but I have never been there, and there's always something worth seeing in a place you've never been to. I learned that Fresno was home to many immigrant Basques in the 1900's and there were a number of hotels and restaurants that catered to these Basque sheep-herders. There are still a few of these places left in Fresno-so of course, we visited one: the Basque Hotel. We tried their famous and cheap Picon and ate their family style dinner. The Picon is an aperitif and you never drink one with a meal. It has a stunning grenadine color, with a slightly spicy- nutty flavour. From this website:

The recipe for Picon Punch is simple: it's basically a liquid parfait built out of layers of grenadine, soda water, amer, and brandy. This recipe was developed in San Francisco by Basque immigrants early in the 20th century and was later exported back to the old Basque country (a stretch of the Pyrenees mountains that spans the border between France and Spain) where it became the celebrated "National Drink" of the Basque people.

The dinner was more food than I usually eat all day, but I soldiered through it. There were seven courses: soup (vegetable), salad, beans, (garbanzo) a beef stew, (yes, I ate it, I had not had beef in over ten years, and yes I survived) potato salad, and the entrée (frog legs). There was also ice-cream at the end, but we sent it back because we could not eat anymore. If I were a real meat eater, I would have had their lamb-chops, which is their famous entrée.

more Basque family-style dinning

and if you want to visit Fresno

Bruges

Places I would like to visit in Europe, in no order:
2. Bruges

Picture #1- from this website: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/arch/bruges_arch.html

Picture #2- from this blog: http://sebald.wordpress.com/category/eugene-atget/

I first heard about Bruges a couple of years ago when I read the novel by George Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte. The Symbolist novel is heavily colored with languid prose about a widower's grief. It prominently features the city and the city's decaying repose.

And a great article from this blog:
http://symbolabs.blogspot.com/2007/01/three-symbolist-cities-bruges-ravenna.html

History:
Bruges (Brugge) was founded in the 9th century by Vikings who settled here at the end of the little river 'de Reie'. The name Bruges is probably derived from the old-Scandinavian word 'Brygga', which means 'harbor, or mooring place'. Because of the proximity of the North Sea, the settlement very quickly became an important international harbor. A sea-arm, called the Zwin, connected Bruges with the North Sea. The young settlement acquired city rights as early as the 12th century. At that time a first protective wall was built around Bruges.

Already in the 13th century Bruges was an important international trading center. Traders from all over the then known world came to the city to sell their products to each other and to buy Flemish cloth, a internationally acclaimed textile product, produced in different Flemish cities (e.g. Gent). In the early 14th century Bruges was the scene of political unrest between the citizens and the count of Flanders. Because of this unrest the French king tried to annex the county of Flanders, but the population managed to kick out the French garisson on May the 18th 1302. Later the Flemish army beat the French army in the 'Battle of the Golden Spurs' on July the 11th in the Flemish city of Kortrijk.

In the 14th century Bruges turned also into an international financial and trading center. Several countries had their own representation in Bruges: the Italians, the Germans, the Scottish, the Spanish made the city into a true European center where different languages could be heard and where the most exotic products could be found.

The decline of Bruges' wealth started in the 15th century : the unstoppable silting up of the Zwin, the competition with the bigger harbor of Antwerp and the crisis in the cloth industry resulted in less commercial activity. The crisis, however, was not immediately noticable. Bruges continued to construct splendid late-gothic buildings and churches, and the Flemish painting school (with e.g. the brothers Van Eyck and Hans Memling ) started to flourish as never before.
By the end of the 16th century the former glory was only a memory and Bruges slipped into a wintersleep that took several centuries. New textile industries were introduced in the 19th century, but to no avail. In the middle of the 1800's Brugge was the poorest city in Belgium.