This just turned up in an old book.

Later replaced by Borders, which also closed (sometime in the aughts?) and Kitchen Window expanded into the space. Kitchen Window, in turn, didn’t survive the pandemic…

(Original series here, with subsequent discoveries here.)

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow:

Don’t forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ’n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.

Virginia Heffernan (via):

“Let’s get out of here” addresses itself to the anxiety of an earlier age: that a would-be hero might never get off the starting block. He’d get stuck and never leave his hometown, his high-school girl or his “dead-end job,” as screenwriters once wrote. Today’s anxiety is something else. It’s that our heroes in training — ourselves or our children — won’t settle on a path at all. We’ll scatter their attention to the four winds, get lost in diversion and frivolity. More than malaise we fear distraction. More than tragedy we fear trivia. On highways we die not in high-speed chases but because we can’t stop texting.

J.A. Baker, The Peregrine:

Predators overcome their prey by the exploitation of weaknesses rather than by superior power.

Brian Eno:

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

WS Merwin, Introduction to Second Four Books of Poems:

…poetry like speech itself is made out of paradox, contradiction, irresolvables … It uses comparision to speak of what cannot be compared. It cannot be conscripted even into the service of good intentions.

Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices:

Far from being an amoral free-for-all, liberalism is, in fact, extremely difficult and constraining, far too much so for those who cannot endure contradiction, complexity, diversity, and the risks of freedom.

J.A. Baker, The Peregrine:

To be recognized and accepted by a peregrine you must wear the same clothes, travel by the same way, perform actions in the same order. Like all birds, it fears the unpredictable. Enter and leave the same fields at the same time each day, soothe the hawk from its wildness by a ritual of behavior as invariable as its own. Hood the glare of the eyes, hide the white tremor of the hands, shade the stark reflecting face, assume the stillness of a tree. A peregrine fears nothing he can see clearly and far off. Approach him from across open ground with a steady unfaltering movement. Let your shape grow in size but do not alter its outline. Never hide yourself unless concealment is complete. Be alone. Shun the furtive oddity of man, cringe from the hostile eyes of farms. Learn to fear. To share fear is the greatest bond of all. The hunter must have the quivering intensity of an arrow thudding into a tree. Yesterday is dim and monochrome. A week ago you were not born. Persist, endure, follow, watch.

I was thinking about the early days of blogging, and remembered an old post from 2003. I reposted it a few years ago, but I took my archives offline earlier this year. (I’ve been republishing them gradually & selectively.)

Here is Blogs: A Brief Reader’s Guide, dead links & all.

Birthday week acquisitions. Not a bad haul. (Over half were used bookstore serendipities.)

It’s one thing to find a book signed by the poet in a used bookstore—

—but then to notice there’s a broadside tucked inside, signed by that poet?…

And all for ten bucks?

Happy Birthday to me.

Thirty-five years with this machine.

Phrasing

Just now, over my morning coffee, I’ve been listening to an album from the 70s, deep in the Era of LPs. Fortyish minutes long, twenty-odd minutes to a side.

I know the topic was flensed to death all through the 80s and 90s by the pro-LP mobs on the A-side and the pro-CD thugs on the B – warmth & loudness, shrunken cover art, longevity & durability, blablabla. But the only thing that I ever really thought about was how LPs were comprised of two parts while CDs were one long arc.

And it occurs to me that even now, after nearly three decades of CD hegemony, I still have not quite gotten used to the longer phrasing. I like to feel the pause between Act 1 and Act 2, even if I don’t get up from the couch to flip the platter or anything so quaint and sepia-tinted as that.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow:

In one of these streets, in the morning fog, plastered over two slippery cobblestones, is a scrap of newspaper headline, with a wirephoto of a giant white cock, dangling in the sky straight downward out of a white pubic bush. The letters

MB DRO ROSHI

appear above with the logo of some occupation newspaper, a grinning glamour girl riding astraddle the cannon of a tank, steel penis with slotted serpent head, 3rd Armored treads ’n’ triangle on a sweater rippling across her tits. The white image has the same coherence, the hey-lookit-me smugness, as the Cross does. It is not only a sudden white genital onset in the sky — it is also, perhaps, a Tree…

• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed 2013)
• Lawrence Kilham, On Watching Birds (Chelsea Green 1988) (reread)
• Ann Zwinger, Beyond the Aspen Grove (University of Arizona Press 1970, 1988) (reread)
• John M Marzluff & Tony Angell, In the Company of Crows and Ravens (Yale 2005)
• Thoreau, Walden (Library of America 1989) (reread)
• Dana Levin, Now Do You Know Where You Are (Copper Canyon 2022)
• Paul J Pastor, Bower Lodge (Fernwood 2021)
• Vaan Nguyen (trns Adriana X. Jacobs), The Truffle Eye (Zephyr Press 2021)

Last, next.

88: Wednesday Blue
89: Great Lakes (Michigan)

Starting with Lake Michigan, since I was born about a thousand feet from its shore. I love Superior, but I’ve always thought of Michigan as “my” lake…

🔗 Ken Knabb’s situationist archive is now housed in the Beinecke Library at Yale.

Some years ago, when I was young and impressionable, a knowledgeable academic said to me, “There are two interesting things in the world — integration and disintegration — and they are equally interesting.” My response was the nineteen-thirties equivalent of Wow! — I felt I had learned everything worth knowing, if I could just hold onto this formula.

More and more, I have come to realize how wrong it is. Integration and disintegration are not equally interesting. Pathology is not as interesting as health, the journey to chaos is not as interesting as the journey to order. The poet may — in fact must — plunge into disintegration, pathology, chaos, maintaining as best he can his own freeboard, his balance — but it is the return to the surface, the return to sanity, where the experience may be recorded, that confirms our interest. Ishmael survived the sinking of the Pequod.

—Paul Metcalf, “Where Do You Put the Horse?”
(Collected Works Vol 3, pp 49–50)

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities:

When human affairs reach, in truth and in fact, new levels of complication, the only thing that can be done is to devise means of maintaining things well at the new level. The alternative is what Lewis Mumford has aptly called “unbuilding,” the fate of a society which cannot maintain the complexity on which it is built and on which it depends.

Joseph Brodsky:

Pushkin called translators “the post-horses of enlightenment.” If we take this metaphor to its logical conclusion (which is always dangerous), we should note that horses run as hard as they can only when a whip is whistling over them.

Or when they’re free.

“Says I to myself” should be the motto of my journal. It is fatal to the writer to be too much possessed by his thought. Things must lie a little remote to be described.

—Thoreau, Journal, 11 Nov 1851

Happy 205th, Henry.

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Questions) 1991

• Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Balantine 1970)
• Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks (FSG 2021)
• Edward Gorey, Thoughtful Alphabets (Pomegranate 2012)
• Philip Metres, Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon 2020)
• Claudia Serea, Writing on the Walls at Night (Unsolicited Press 2022)

This just turned up in an old book. Long gone. The Aster Café is there now.

(Original series here, with subsequent discoveries here.)