'i wanted to fill my elegy with light'

1.0 I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds. But death makes us stingy. There is nothing more to be expended on that, we think, he's dead. Love cannot alter it. Words cannot add to it. No matter how I try to evoke the starry lad he was, it remains a plain, odd history.  So I began to think about history.

1.1 History and elegy are akin. The word 'history' comes from an ancient Greek verb meaning 'to ask.' One who asks about things -- about their dimensions, weight, location, moods, names, holiness, smell -- is an historian. But the asking is not idle. It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.

 6.1 When my brother died (unexpectedly) his widow couldn't find a phone number for me among his papers until two weeks later. While I swept my porch and bought apples and sat by the window in the evening with the radio on, his death came wandering slowly towards me across the sea.

(Anne Carson, Nox)

'i've lived in new york for five years...'

"I’ve lived in New York for five years, long enough to understand why some people hate it here: the crowds, the noise, the traffic, the expense, the rents, the messed-up sidewalks, the weather that brings hurricanes named after girls that break your heart.

It requires a certain kind of unconditional love to love living here. But New York repays you in time in memorable encounters. Just remember: Ask first, don’t grab, be fair, say please and thank you, always say thank you — even if you don’t get something back right away. You will."

(Bill Hayes, Lessons From the Smoke Shop)

'roland ducked beneath the tape...'

"Roland ducked beneath the tape and then just stood where he was for a moment, listening to the honk and pound of the city on this bright June day, relishing its adolescent vitality. He would never see another city, of that much he was almost positive. And perhaps that was just as well. He had an idea that after New York, all others would be a step down."
(Stephen King, The Dark Tower)

'some of the books had actually become migratory...'

I did not particularly like this book, but I LOVED this passage.

"I don't see anything."

"That's right. And where on campus does even a very good locator spell not work?"

"I have no idea." Admitting ignorance promptly was the fastest way to get information out of a Brakebills professor.

"Try the library." Professor Brzezinski closed his eyes again, like an old walrus settling back down onto a sunny rock. "There are so many old seek-and-finds in that room, you can't find a Goddamned ting."

Quentin had spent very little time in the Brakebills library. Hardly anybody did if they could help it. Visiting scholars had been so aggressive over the centuries in casting locator spells to find the books they wanted, and spells of concealment to hide those same books from rival scholars, that the entire area was more or less opaque to magic, like a palimpsest that has been scribbled on over and over, past the point of legibility.

To make matters worse, some of the books had actually become migratory. In the nineteenth century Brakebills had appointed a librarian with a highly Romantic imagination who had envisioned a mobile library in which the books fluttered from shelf to shelf like birds, reorganizing themselves spontaneously under their own power in response to searches.  For the first few months the effect was said to have been quite dramatic. A painting of the scene survived as a mural behind the circulation desk, with enormous atlases soaring around the place like condors.

But the system turned out to be totally impractical.  The wear and tear on the spines alone was too costly, and the books were horribly disobedient. The librarian had imagined he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call number, but in actuality they were just too willful, and some were actively predatory. The librarian was swiftly deposed, and his successor set about domesticating the books again, but even now there were stragglers, notably in Swiss History and Architecture 300-1399, that stubbornly flapped around near the ceiling. Once in a while an entire sub-sub-category that had long been thought safely dormant would take wing with an indescribable papery susurrus.

So the library was mostly empty, and it wasn't hard to spot Josh in an alcove off the second floor, sitting at a small square table across from a tall, cadaverously thing man with chiseled cheekbones and a pencil mustache. The man wore a black suit that hung on him. He looked like an undertaker.

(Lev Grossman, The Magicians, p, 127-128)

overdue

A professor dropped off a bag of books at the library this afternoon, saying, "I think these might be a little bit late."

They were due in September of 1972 and May of 1973.

I kid you not.

seven seconds

[After a woman asks about Ben's father at a party, and he reveals his father died many years ago] "Everyone looked at the floor for the obligatory seven seconds before someone changed the subject, a ritual deeply familiar to people whose parents die young. Ben waited for the obligatory seven seconds to pass. It had been years since he had felt embarrassed during those seconds. By now they felt to him like time spent waiting for an elevator: boring, wasteful, a chance to run errands in one's head."
(from The World to Come, by Dara Horn)

'the way you listen to New York City...'

I am dying
because you have not
died for me
and the world
still loves you

I write this because I know
that your kisses
are born blind
on the songs that touch you

I don't want a purpose
in your life
I want to be lost among
your thoughts
the way you listen to New York City
when you fall asleep

(Leonard Cohen)

'i'm going to barnard, i think,' she said

Sadly, my dread of last week was well-founded. But before that sadness there was this lovely scene which, I must admit, made my heart sing the littlest bit:

Steenie left us, and I walked Marcia home. It was pleasant to walk with the snow melted, and we held hands and scuffed our shoes on the clay sidewalks, doing a lot of pointed inhaling to sniff the first scents of spring, which were largely imaginary.

"I'm going to Barnard, I think," she said as we reached the rectory. "My mother went there. I'm scared to death. I'm so stupid, and it'll break my poor father."

"You'll do fine," I said. "You've already got a head start on the New York girls in categories like blunt talk and dirty words."

"Are you really going to Harvard? I don't think anybody from De Crispin has ever gone to Harvard."

"That's always been a pitiful little dream of my mother's," I said. "It's more likely that I'll go to the University of Alabama. It's more my speed. They have forty fraternity houses and one classroom, where they teach the History of the Confederacy. They have a good record, though. They haven't been guilty of education since eighteen thirty-one."

"Well, where do you want to go? Don't you care?"

"Barnard's part of Columbia, isn't it?"

"That's right."

"I want to go to Columbia."

(Red Sky At Morning, Richard Bradford)

dread

I am reading Richard Bradford's Red Sky at Morning, a surprisingly beautiful coming-of-age novel about a boy suffering through his high school years during the Second World War.  This is one of those crumbling, brittle-paged books that I must have inherited from my parents, who apparently inherited it from one Joanne O'Neill (or so says the name inscribed on the first page).

Particularly moving, to me, is the relationship shared between the main character and his father. And this scares me, because the father has volunteered for the Navy and is off battling U-boats off the coast of France. It seems practically inevitable that he will end up not coming home, and I'm afraid this will break my heart.

'i prefer winter and fall...'

"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.”
Andrew Wyeth

sandy remnants

guilty pleasures

Over our now traditional lunch of a shared Sezz Medi pizza and a salad,  I asked Richard yesterday what he's reading these days. (This, too, is tradition, and we often trade notes on good books.)

This time, though, he looked embarrassed.  He hemmed and hawed and eventually I told him to just fess up already.

"Tom Clancy," he mumbled, and only half-jokingly cringed away from me, hiding his face with his hands.

I burst out laughing.

He glared at me, disconcerted and blushing, and grumped, "Well? What's so funny?"

"Me, right now? Robert Ludlum."

"Nooooooooooooo!" he said. And that was the end of that.

it's all relative

I'm not sure which is goofier: the fact that I am reading Kathy Reichs' Monday Mourning, or the fact that I am reading it using an OECD bookmark.

that momentary kind of love

Some current loves of mine.

Underground New York Public Library: This woman wanders around the subway taking pictures of people reading books, and sometimes ebooks, and that's pretty much it. It's great. There's a lovely interview with her this month on Vanishing New York (which is also a wonderful, wonderful thing). Follow her Facebook page for daily updates.

Jeremiah's Vanishing New York: the subtitle of his blog pretty much says it all, but he's got some great stuff here.

Humans of New York: wonderful, quirky, gorgeous photographs of people walking and talking and living in the streets and parks and plazas of this beloved city of mine.

Scouting New York: a movie location scout's take on the big apple.

"It is a funny question. Do you know what I mean? That kind of momentary falling in love that happens when you see a person on the train with a book."
(Jeremiah, Vanishing New York)

'everyday life is a life lived...'

"Everyday life is a life lived on the level of surging affects, impacts suffered or barely avoided. It takes everything we have. But it also spawns a series of little somethings dreamed up in the course of things."
(Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects)

'inside there is the deep quiet...'

"Inside there is the deep quiet of protection and near-abandonment. You hear the hum of the lights, turned on as needed; that’s it. There’s a phone to make outgoing calls on the fifth floor. To me the stacks are the most sacred space in the library, yet here nobody’s telling you not to talk. You’re on your own. It’s a situation for adults."
(Ben Ratliff, Grazing in the Stacks of Academe, about Columbia University's Butler Library)

'the stars will come out over and over...'

"The stars will come out over and over
the hyacinths rise like flames
from the windswept turf down the middle of upper Broadway
where the desolate take the sun
the days will run together and stream into years
as the rivers freeze and burn
and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us
which will we claim
how will we go on living
how will we touch, what will we know
what will we say to each other."
-Adrienne Rich, from Nights and Days (1976)

(And more Adrienne)

'observing her mother...'

"Observing her mother with her adopted daughter at the beach one day, the author muses: 'It made me think of girls -- little girls, teenage girls, even old girls like me -- who at one point or another discover, like all girls do, their sadness.'"
(Hilton Als, New Yorker, on Diane Keaton's new book Then Again)

'pokey the tortoise rings the bell on the transom...'

Some Cats I know

Pokey the tortoise

Rings the bell on the transom

Runs away laughing.

Nora the buzz

Nail in the coffin of love

Under cover in a ball.

Ernest the tub

Knocks over a jar of water

Steps daintily in broken glass.

Olive the small

Asleep, face in food dish

Wakes up for a homemade racecar.

Zora the elemental

Observes bubbles rising

As the dishwasher hums below.

Adelaide, minicat

Head cocked always,

Vietnamese or simply thoughtful?

Milo the stretch

Peeks out the window

But he wasn’t looking for me.

Zeke the kitten

Held up by a gauzy curtain

Gnawing at its threads.

Duncan the elder

Died at 21, was replaced

By a strapping tabby.

Llama causes trouble

Only when the knits come out,

Lying on the blocked yarn.

Ericat is me,

Cat with thumbs and

Restless sleepy spirit.

(Erica Sklar, 2011)

'someone i loved once...'

The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep, I dreamed this poem.)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

(Mary Oliver)