in the library, part II

The Movement. An early, short-lived, and little-known movement started by the Surrealists Breton, Eluard, and Desnos before they came to be known as such all began when the three happened upon an abandoned trampoline. The haphazard acrobatics of each in their turn developed within hours into a highly stylized, unified performance: Breton, standing akimbo in the center of the trampoline with Eluard and Desnos each curled in a foetal position at his feet, begins to bounce, timidly at first, but then with great fury, catapulting Eluard and Desnos randomly about the perimeter. The movement, birthed by this single performance, was never named, or rather, its name was never recorded, much as stillborns' are never. They once had called themselves, only once, The Bouncing Foetus Brothers.

Because I refuse to reduce my ideas about the world to convictions simple enough to fit on a bumper-sticker, those who do, perceive me as not having done enough thinking about certain issues in order to be able to do so, when quite the contrary is the case. . . . It suddenly strikes me that these bumper-sticker convictions serve precisely the same purpose as the vehicle bumper itself.

Reading myself: dichotomy: low, high; youth, age; body, mind; life, death . . . .
***
The circle scribed by the poles surrounding me, so dense they create the rim of the copper pot of soup I stir with wooden spoon to conjure the whirlpool, the vortex, to attract the hungry, soggy-winged, floundering fly of my soul to the true center of it all.

Dear author: Plots are never novel; all become burial.

Events: mere bumps on a skull. How many writers become nothing but well-manicured phrenologists! The balding pate of plot. . . .

The only reason one writes a novel nowadays is to become eligible for some prize or other.

Those writers who want to become beauty queens, for whom writing is a beauty pageant. How they try to pierce each other's craniums with their six-inch heels; how they claw with their long, glossy fingernails in a desperate lunge for a literary tiara.

A snowy Sunday spent sitting by the fireplace, reading a modernist novel. The cozy sense of security that comes with one's getting to know well-rounded characters in their well-described settings. . . . But when the novel has been read, one must let the book close as the door of an exited church, and one must chuckle at oneself for feeling so foolishly refreshed.

And so the plot, our newspaper, unfolds. . . .

If epistolary novels, then how about a novel of multiple-choice test questions, of wine-tasting notes?

When an ellipsis means "and unfortunately nothing happened after that."

What a horrible matter when one thinks one has coined a word-- in this case, "somniloquies"-- only to discover the same word used by another almost half a century ago-- in this case, Gaston Bachelard, in his Poetics of Reverie.

Authoress? Or Interior Decorator of Books?

The non sequitur maxims of _________.

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century gave us license to write about our own shit.

Always spiritualists who celebrate the soul or materialists who celebrate shit.
***
I revel in the idea of the soul and the smell of shit.

Why my particular appreciation of French Letters? Through their cultivation of concision, precision and polish, the French have produced the most concentrated strain of vitriol in literature.

What dry, prosaic scraps Maugham had available to gather in his Writer's Notebook. And how odd he should have should have been inspired to do so after reading the brilliant Journals of Jules Renard, whom, incidentally, he proceeds to belittle throughout his arrogant preface, one soon understands, out of justifiable feelings of inadequacy.

Credit must be given to Valery as one who so thoroughly understood and clearly articulated the reasons why he was never able to write a good poem.

Moby Dick is a Frankenstein’s monster.

Ah, La Fontaine! Why did you deny us the fable of The Cock and the Ass?

Honore de Ball Sack.

The greatest book ever written: Soap by Ponge.

Beckett's poetic renderings of the grotesque.

How many writers of the nouveau roman employed the stable, if oversimple, character of the "Private Dick" to assist them in their crisis of character and plot. . . . The most unfortunate detectives in the business. . . .

That wonderful scene in Robbe-Grillet's The Voyeur, where the narrator removes from his pocket to finger and review one last time the newspaper article, the "objective" source of information concealed from readers throughout the novel, and, concealing it forever, leisurely burns cigarette holes through it until it's a pile of ash before the reader's eyes.

I humbly assert that, in Mahu, Pinget succeeded in writing the greatest second-to-last paragraph in all of literature.

Reading Nietzsche is like plunging naked into dark, chilly lake-water-- a baptism indeed. Good for the circulation, but I clamber out as quickly to swaddle myself in the warmth of metaphysics.

Although not Neitzsche's best work, The Antichrist holds a special place in my heart. Such a voice! The reader feels on his face the droplets of bloody phlegm and venom propelled by its breath! And O how many flies and spiders I've swatted with my soft little copy of that book!

I recall reading somewhere the words of a noted biologist who, growing old, began to succumb to all the common maladies associated with old age. He chronicled his worsening condition: his stiffening joints, his failing memory and bowels. . . . But he concluded with this: "I am falling apart, and I find it all very interesting."

That old Japanese haiku writer who refused to read any other form of writing, including the newspaper. He did this to force himself to experience and interpret the world only through the haiku form. I think of him when I find myself weeding through novels and treatises for a notebook or journal in the second-hand bookstores, and wonder whether his eventual suicide should not be carefully considered.

A week reading through volumes of slave narratives. Beautiful description of stars in the night sky that I haven't been able to find since.

Snowbound,
nose buried
in books.

How wonderful to suddenly remember this statement made by an ancient oriental philosopher: "Do not curse forgetfulness, that failing of man which permits the thrill of rediscovery."

Pliny states that wool often having been boiled in vinegar is impenetrable. Must remember to boil my wool in vinegar.

As valuable to me as rereading my notebook would be my perusing my personal library and there reread those passages which I have chosen to underscore. The possibility of compiling these passages into a book itself.

Still can't comprehend reading a book published in 1923 gifted to someone with an inscription dated 1944 in the year 2002.

Of late, my time in the library is not spent reading, but in musing over the check-out dates chronicled in the backs of the books. . . .