Bibliophile

If I fall in love/lust with your body and your brain, that is only half as hot as falling in love/lust with your body and your mind. (If you are smart you are sexy because your mind is interesting -- not your brain, an organ to which we have little access. Even in an mFRI gadget, meaning does not give up its secrets). Is this evidence for mind-body dualism? [That is not a LOL jape or an a

A Universe From Nothing, Lawrence Krauss (M, 30s, short hair, stubble, black and white plaid shirt, khakis, L train) http://bit.ly/11I9pk9

I seem to have run out of steam on the story, which is unusual these days. Didn't write at all yesterday, for the first time in a long time on a day off. My son Todd was home so that was somewhat distracting, but not really an excuse.Anyway, I'm finding it very hard to write the "Cold" and "Starving" chapters.Hey, they're hungry. Hey, they're cold. Hey, have I mentioned theyre hungry and cold?I thought I could just have a narrative, but it may be that I'll have to concoct some incidents and scenes. Which points up the fact that this is the first book in a long time where I've allowed myself straight narrative, without detailing individual scenes every time. There is something very liberating and hypnotic about a few pages of Then they did This -- Then they did That. Kind of a purposeful breaking of the rule, Show don't Tell.Well, I have to whole day to myself, so I'm going to see if my sub-conscious can come up with anything. Can't believe it's been letting me down for a few days...

I am still not a big fan of colour blocking when it comes to arranging my bookshelves (I prefer a more functional approach), but I also can’t deny that it is a striking look, especially in an otherwise neutral room.

I'm fond of strange and amusing place names (see, for instance, this post), and there's a magnificent crop of them at Dull Flag and Tongue of Gangsta: The Laugh-out-loud Place-names of Shetland and Orkney, a Strange Maps post by Frank Jacobs (see here):These two maps, both produced by Steve Goldman, show the place names in both groups of islands that he considers strange. "I've loved place names on Orkney and Shetland since I was a kid. They are by turns surreal, beautiful, nonsensical, rude, and bizarre? There seems to be no consistency to them at all", says Goldman. ?I've done some online research to try to find their derivation, but there seems to be little out there?. Indeed, apart from Mr. Goldman?s suggestion to recycle some toponyms as band names (Whirly would be a good indie band, Brethren could be a bearded folk quartet, and Twisting Nevi a dance act, etc), there seems to be little sense to be made from Orkney/Shetland place names, except to enjoy them as mellifluous bizarrery per se. Go thither and enjoy the mellifluous bizarrery!

May 25, 2013 Succulents Point Lobos 1921Imogen Cunningham1883 - 1976 _______________________ The Far FieldTheodore Roethke (....) I learned not to fear infinity, The far field, the windy cliffs of forever, The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow, The wheel turning away from itself, The sprawl of the wave, The on-coming water.(....) IV The lost self changes, Turning toward the sea, A sea-shape turning around, -- An old man with his feet before the fire, In robes of green, in garments of adieu. A man faced with his own immensity Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire. The murmur of the absolute, the why Of being born falls on his naked ears. His spirit moves like monumental wind That gentles on a sunny blue plateau. He is the end of things, the final man. All finite things reveal infinitude: The mountain with its singular bright shade Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow, The after-light upon ice-burdened pines; Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope, A scent beloved of bees; Silence of water above a sunken tree : The pure serene of memory in one man, -- A ripple widening from a single stone Winding around the waters of the world....(more) Theodore Roethke May 25, 1908 – August 1, 1963Photograph by Imogen Cunningham, 1959 Stanley Kunitz on Theodore Roethke _______________________ The WakingTheodore Roethke I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go. We think by feeling. What is there to know? I hear my being dance from ear to ear. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. Of those so close beside me, which are you? God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there, And learn by going where I have to go. Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how? The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair; I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. Great Nature has another thing to do To you and me, so take the lively air, And, lovely, learn by going where to go. This shaking keeps me steady. I should know. What falls away is always. And is near. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go. _______________________ Map Merchant Paris, 1949Vilem Kriz, An American SurrealistScott Nichols Galleryvia _______________________ Word Choice Five Poems Sommer Browningbomb From Friend (....) Sommer, I’m dying. I get this message on my phone in line at Rite-Aid. Sommer, I’m dying, you scream in my ear at the rock show. Sommer, I’m dying, you write in closing on a postcard from San Francisco. Sommer, I’m dying, it’s my heart, Sommer I’m dying, can you feel this? Is it normal? as we stomp through the snow to get cigarettes. Jesus woke up, but who muscled the boulder away? Some prince kissed the beauty, but who wrote it all down? Let’s go to the mummy exhibition, let’s read aloud Fear and Trembling, let’s slow the flow through our carotid. Sommer, I’m dying. Present tense. Subject. Verb. The thinning blood vessel, the soft pulsating stone, retina shriveled and rattling around in the skull. I can hear it when I jump. Then don’t jump, I say....(more) _______________________ At Point Lobos Imogen Cunningham 1921 _______________________ You might want to ask—if there is such a simple argument for physicalism, how come everybody hasn’t always been a physicalist? That’s a good question, and there is a good answer. The ‘causal completeness of physics’ wasn’t widely accepted until recently. A century ago mainstream science was still quite happy to countenance vital and mental powers which had a ‘downwards’ causal influence on the physical realm in a straightforwardly interactionist way. It was only in the middle of the last century that science finally concluded that there are no such non-physical forces. At which point a whole pile of smart philosophers (Feigl, Smart, Putnam, Davidson, Lewis) quickly pointed out that

In which I write of my long love for this show, my gratitude for clop and bray. I'll be posting photos of the show on this blog in the days to come. I will also be posting news of an incredible new novel—Asunder, by Chloe Aridjis—due out this September and edited by the magical Lauren Wein. Look for my thoughts on this glorious work of art tomorrow.

We’ve been away last week – we went here: the Cairngorms – and there was snow in May. Lower down the snow fell too but didn’t stick. The photo below is of a beautiful little loch in the Glenmore Forest Park, An Lochan Uaine the ‘green lochan’ (although in my photo it looks blue – it was really green!). ‘Lochan’ is Gaelic for ‘ a small loch, or lake’. The green shows up more in this photo: We have many more photos, which no doubt, I’ll be posting and writing about later. Click on the photos to see them enlarged. For more Saturday Snapshots see Melinda’s blog West Metro Mommy.

OK, so a bunch of us are going to try to read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay together over the next couple of weeks. Anyone and everyone is welcome to join us. The rules are simple as there aren't any really. Just a few suggestions and/or guidelines. If we start reading on Monday then we can all check back here at the end of each day and I will have left a blog post with some sort of thoughts and, if you are in the mood, you can add to them. There'll be conversations going on at Facebook and Twitter, no doubt. I will use the hashtag #kavalier if you want to tag along, so to speak. I have had a look at my copy, purchased for £1.35 from Save the Children, and it is split into six parts. Part one takes us to page 67 and part two gets us to 163. I was going to aim to get to the end of part two by next weekend. That's just over 30 pages a day. Sound OK? Feel free to read along at your own pace but things tend to work better if most of us are roughly in the same place as it avoids too many spoilers. Er, that's it. Any questions?

Her 17th century cottage near Llanbedr, during my 2008 visit. Anne Stevenson turned 80 in January – and the occasion whizzed past without my noticing it.  So it was a pleasure to be reminded of my neglect by the Times Literary Supplement this week, in an article by Thea Lenarduzzi.  I was also unaware of Anne’s newest “probably my last” collection, Astonishment. I wrote about Anne a dozen years ago, here, and have had the pleasure of visiting her at both her residences, in Durham, and more recently staying in Wales, where she lives with husband Peter Lucas in a 17th century cottage near Llanbedr. “One has to maintain a distance, an air pocket between the poet and the poem—a pocket of objectivity. The poem isn’t an expression of what you could say better in ordinary language, or in theoretical language,” she told me in 2000. “I do believe that writing poetry is not something everybody needs to indulge in. Encouraging more and more people to express themselves and, above all, to publish poems or put them on the internet, does tend to thin the blood—of literature, I mean. People forget how to read. They forget that you need to develop a strong degree of attention to read intelligently the poetry of, say, Auden or Yeats, or even Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop. You need to be sensitive to all the sounds, rhythms, echoes, et cetera, that constitute a poem to know what’s going on in it. If nothing is going on except the promulgation of some one-dimensional idea or personal experience, if the so-called poem is nothing but a cut-up piece of not-very-interesting prose, then it isn’t poetry at all. It’s not asking anything of the reader, except perhaps fellow-feeling or sympathy.” “A pocket of objectivity” Not surprisingly, she is still a woman of strong opinions.  From the TLS piece: More overtly underwhelmed by the possibilities of mixed media was Stevenson. “There’s an awful lot of poetry about”, she said, emphasizing one word in particular. “And with 9,000 teachers of Creative Writing in US Colleges, turning out ten protégés each . . . you’re bound to bring the standard down”. With characteristically wry humour she questioned that age-old obsession with “doing something ‘new’” (“it’s terribly hard to do anything new, you know”), which operates at the expense of more self-probing verse (not to be confused with the “Words about words about words to pamper the ego / Of some theoretical bore”); and “Do It Yourself Poetry” built in ignorance of proper craftsmanship (with no sense of rhythm, form, heritage ). “We are losing contact with language . . . . I wouldn’t even begin to talk about the visual arts, ‘Conceptual Art…’” (that carefully placed emphasis again, a glint in her eye, and a laugh: “I am eighty, you know!”). “I’ll just throw all of that in”, Stevenson quipped before bringing the evening to a close with a reading of her most recent poem, “An Old Poet’s View from the Departure Platform”, its final stanza running thus: “I gaze over miles and miles of cut up prose, / Uncomfortable troubles, sad lives. / They smother in sand the fire that is one with the rose. / The seed, not the flower survives.” Oh, and this will keep me in my place: she says ““Blog is the ugliest word I ever heard …”  Read the whole thing here.