Mark Strand Will Save Us

That feeling of being privy to a new and great truth just because you were lucky enough to pick up a particular book is a source of endless delight and amazement, yes, but in particular times and with certain literature (okay, poetry) it can almost be a source of blessedness, of certainty there is an order for good in the universe. I have to think, "Someone who could put this feeling into words exits in the universe, was lucky enough to have the words ready for the feeling, was lucky enough to be able to share these words, and I was lucky enough to discover them when I didn't know I needed them."

Or something along those lines. This is actually carved above the water feature that's in the south end of the Gallivan Center. I found it in college and, indeed, thought I was lucky.

Visions of the end may secretly seduce
our thoughts like water sinking
into water, air drifting into air;
clouds may form, when least expected,
darkening the glass of self,
canceling resemblances to what we are.
Even here, while summer sunlight
falling through the golden
folds of afternoon
brightens up the air, we mark
our progress by how much
we leave behind. And yet,
this vanishing is burnished
by a slow, melodious light,
as if our passage here
were beautiful because
no turning back is possible.
It is our knowledge of the end
that speaks for us, that has us weave,
as slowly as we can, an elegy
to all our walks. It is our way
of bending to the world's will
and giving thanks.

Cut and Color

So I made a hair appointment Saturday, which reminded me of this (fairly long) passage from The Long Goodbye. "Kingpin racketeers"--long live Raymond Chandler.

There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blonde as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take her home...

There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable kind. She is very languid and very shadowy and speaks softly out of nowhere and you can't lay a finger on her because in the first place you don't want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provencal...

And lastly there is the gorgeous showpiece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.

Band Stuff

Two more Potential Band Names Found in Everyday Conversation:
1. Crawl On Down The Wall
(From talking about "those gummy spiders you throw at the wall and they stick until they start to crawl on down.")
2. Co-dependent Consumptive
(From when I'd had a sneezing attack and then put on powder prior to going out. I asked my roommate--since the powder was a little pale and my eyes were red and puffy--"Do I look consumptive?" And hilarity ensued, and we ended up deciding I should write a personal ad that starts out "co-dependent consumptive seeks same..." and see how many dates I got then.)

Other Band Stuff:
Neko Case is playing Suede in Park City on June 17th.

Even More Band Stuff:
If you're looking for the archetypal bar experience, you can go to The Republican on Sunday nights and listen to the house band. And drink lots of beer.

There Goes Chris

Another from Chris:
"It wasn’t just Chinatown, it was more like Chinacity, and it was full of Chinese people.”

Our Chris is an invited blogger for the AdTech conference in San Francisco, which means he gets to attend all the parties and write blog entries. (A shame they don't have these conferences for literature, really.)
He'll start posting tomorrow. Click on the blue BLOG navigation at the bottom left of this page:
www.ad-tech.com

The Lady in the Taco

In the ever-evolving search for good names for things, we're moving from Potential Band Names Found In Everyday Conversation to Potential Titles of Award-Winning First Novels Found in Everyday Conversation (PTOAWFNFIEC, for short). We were telling Shea about Rio Grande (he'd never eaten there) and he asked, "They have a lady in a taco there, right?" Yes, they do.

I Just Found Out I Have Tomorrow Off

(I'm getting these here. Visit. Be happy.)

This Is Why I Love Literature

There's something so satisfying about hearing something and immediately recognizing its truth and beauty, even if it's something you've never thought of before. I picked up The Hours again last night, and found this:

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than 30 years later, to realize it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book... What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond while the mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

Alternate Post of the Day:

Finding Profound Meaning in Popular Song Lyrics

Profundity is actully pretty common in songs, I firmly believe. (Think of Bob Dylan. Enough said.) I'm discovering how much I love Neko Case, who can maybe be described as Patsy Cline channeling Tori Amos, with a killer steel guitar player. Not only can she belt, she writes her own songs. Check them out. This is from "I Wish I Was the Moon," on Blacklisted.

"How will you know if you've found me at last?
'Cause I'll be the one with my heart in my lap"

Band Names

And today, here's a list of Potential Band Names Found in Everyday Conversation:

Orcas in Antarctica
Hotdog Water
Heroin Dog
Former Penal Colony
Endless Meat Parade
Gone City
Horse Hooves and Goat Beans

(Oh yeah, you can check out The Website That Nearly Killed Us here: www.mytimeforce.com)

There Will Be New Material Tomorrow, I Promise

Until then, there's Salinger.
And a little problem with a "fatal error" message with Dreamweaver, which means creativity has to wait while a site is recovered from screen shots and old files. The wacky agency life, indeed.

From the good old "Hapworth 16, 1924":

He has a mother, however, a young divorcee with an exquisite, swanky face slightly ravaged by vanity and self-love and a few silly disappointments in life, though not silly to her, we may be sure.

What a Post-It Note On My Desk Says Right Now:

"FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DON'T FORGET THE JELLO SHOTS"


(Oh, the wacky agency life...)

Salinger, Part III

"I find it magnificent how beautiful loose ends find each other in the world if one only waits with decent patience, resilience, and quite blind strength."

Let's hope this is proved correct. We have a huge site that has to go up Monday morning, and it's still being built. I hope our blind strength will be enough. It's a little sleep-deprived at this point.

Salinger, Part II

From the same story as yesterday:

While the food itself is not atrocious, it is cooked without a morsel of affection or inspiration, each string bean and simple carrot arriving on the camper's plate quite stripped if its tiny vegetal soul...A nameless inertia hangs over these two [the cooks], alternating with fits of unreasonable wrath, stripping them of any will or desire to prepare creditable, affectionate food or even to keep the bent silverware on the tables spotless and clean as a whistle. The sight of the forks alone often whips Buddy into a raw fury. He is working on this tendency, but a revolting fork is a revolting fork.

Word, Salinger

I have to admit that last week I had a moment of doubt and thought, "Is Salinger still alive?" He is, and I discovered lots of his uncollected stories have been put online. While this is not expressly against his wishes (they were published once, after all), it's probably entering the murky waters of copyright infringement. But in the spirit of the Internet, here's a link to the story "Hapworth 16, 1924," written by a precocious 7-year-old Seymour Glass. (It's a long story, so be warned.) It had such gems as this in it:

Few of these magnificent, healthy, sometimes remarkably handsome boys will mature. The majority, I will give you my heartbreaking opinion, will merely senesce. Is that a picture to tolerate in one's heart? On the contrary, it is a picture to rip the heart to pieces.

That's just so satisfying to hear.

Literature: It's Everywhere

Take, for instance, this quote from Chris yesterday:
"This coffee is so strong, that if you think 'hot dog' and take a sip, it tastes like hot dogs."

Found It

The "weeds" bit is in the first section, but the whole thing is worth reading--all about the move from chaos to order. Water's big, too, going from mud and bog, to holding life, to supporting a boat with a rower, to the final image of water in a vase "still holding and feeding the stem of the contained flower." Fabulous. I think of this a lot in spring; the last part in summer, too, going outside in the mornings with "To have the whole air!" in my head.

The Shape of the Fire

"...weeds, weeds, how I love you!"

There's some Roethke I thought of over the weekend (I'll try to remember the book tomorrow so I can give some context). Sunday was the first really warm day, and I smelled weeds everywhere--the little, purple-flowered, sharp-smelling (stinky, according to my brother) weeds that grow in sidewalk corners and parking lots. (Does anyone know what they're called, by the way? I can't find a picture because I don't know the name.) It was a good spring smell.

Sorry, No Literature. Nobody Here But Us Ponies.

I had a literary passage about painting, of all things, from Franny & Zooey, and was going to quote it extensively today, but forgot the book. It will probably still be relevant Monday, as the painting is going slower than I thought it would. (Although painting the ceiling twice might have something to do with it. On the up side, I do know how to use a paint roller now.) Anyway, continuing the second theme of the week, here are somre more horses. The littlest one is a palomino paint! I would call him Barney!

Dappled Things

So all this talk of paint horses, and spotted animals (did we all like the alpaca's ear pom-poms?), coupled with constantly wiping ups drips of latex paint, made me think of the Gerard Manley Hopkins (great name) sonnet on spotted things.
GLORY be to God for dappled things-- For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough; 5 And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 10 Praise him.

Things That Resemble a Paint:

Paint

This is a lovely picture of a very fine paint horse. I've always liked paint horses, and "paint" may just become the topic of the week, because someone may be painting her room this week and may be learning about textured ceilings and paint rollers. Maybe.

But we can always remember yesterday's post and think of the finished result (if someone is actually painting, after all) and say, maybe while rolling a ceiling, "Paint is a guppy."

(But not this paint horse. He would be called Rob.)

The Past Is A Guppy

Today's literary phrase (in the title, in case you're confused) is courtesy of my roommate, during a discussion on perspective. We were talking about how intensely sad (or joyful) something can be at the time, but as time passes, the intensity fades, until it's almost unbelieveable you ever felt that way.

My roommate used the analogy of a child being sad about the death of his pet fish: He's heartbroken at the time, but remembering the experience as an adult doesn't carry the same weight. It may still be a sad memory, but it's not a tragedy.

At this point in the conversation my rommate pauses, and I, wanting to sum up, volunteer, "So the past is a guppy?" Which effectively ends all deep thoughts in the conversation but was fun to say.