6/18/09

King Lear, like Hamlet, is peculiarly modern because in both, nature is no longer a home... There is no new house for man. Infinity must enter the image. In the nineteenth century, man's last home is music.

-Auden

6/17/09

Chewing in Venice by Simone Decker

[via]

6/15/09

Time has told me
You're a rare rare find
A troubled cure
For a troubled mind

And time has told me
Not to ask for more
Someday our ocean
Will find its shore

So I'll leave the ways that are making me be
What I really don't want to be
Leave the ways that are making me love
What I really don't want to love

Time has told me
You came with the dawn
A soul with no footprint
A rose with no thorn

Your tears they tell me
There's really no way
Of ending your troubles
With things you can say

And time will tell you
To stay by my side
To keep on trying
'til there's no more to hide

So leave the ways that are making you be
What you really don't want to be
Leave the ways that are making you love
What you really don't want to love

Time has told me
You're a rare rare find
A troubled cure
For a troubled mind

And time has told me
Not to ask for more
For some day our ocean
Will find its shore


-Nick Drake, "Time Has Told Me"

6/14/09

O swallows, swallows, poems are not
The point. Finding again the world,
That is the point, where loveliness
Adorns intelligible things
Because the mind’s eye lit the sun.

—Howard Nemerov, from “The Blue Swallows

[via The Ramblr]

6/13/09

The play is written entirely out of spite against actors, and by its nature the role of Hamlet cannot be done by an actor. An actor can act everything except an actor. Hamlet should be played by an actor brought in off the street, and the rest of the characters should be professional actors. The point about Hamlet is that he is an actor and you can't act yourself. You can only be yourself.

-Auden, in Lectures on Shakespeare
Shakespeare's very success as a dramatic poet may have led him to a kind of dissatisfaction with his life that is reflected in Hamlet. A dramatic poet is the kind of person who can imagine what anyone can feel, and he begins to wonder, "What am I?" "What do I feel?" "Can I feel?" Artists are inclined to suffer not from too much emotion but rather from too little. This business of being a mirror - you begin to question the reality of the mirror itself.

-Auden, in Lectures on Shakespeare
Boredom is the demoniac side of pantheism. Pantheism is, in general, characterized by fullness; in the case of boredom we find the precise opposite, since it is characterized by emptiness; but it is just this which makes boredom a pantheistic conception. Boredom depends on the nothingness which pervades reality; it causes a dizziness like that produced by looking down into a yawning chasm, and this dizziness is infinite.

-Kierkegaard
[quoted]
Literary Lesson: Authors, Poets Write the News

[via Yee Sum's facebook]

6/8/09

-Alex MacLean, "Dinghies Clustered Around Dock"
Duxbury, Massachusetts

I think I could turn and live with animals

I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth.


-Walt Whitman
Sex, Drugs and Thom Gunn by Tom Sleigh

[I'm posting this because I feel cool for having heard this paper read by the author at AWP before it was published. Oh yeah.]

6/7/09

Aye! There it is!
The Great and Magnificent Artichoke

6/1/09

The proposed subtitle rankled because Phillips is against guidebooks to happiness. "A culture that is obsessed with happiness must really be in despair, mustn't it? Otherwise why would anybody be bothered about it at all?" asks the psychoanalyst, closing his eyes as he does repeatedly during the interview when he wants to clinch a thought, and then leaning forward to put his head in his hands. "It's become a preoccupation because there's so much unhappiness. The idea that if you just reiterate the word enough and we'll all cheer up is preposterous."

-in "Happiness is Always a Delusion"
Even as I concentrate all my attention on the fly on the table, I glance fleetingly at myself.

-Charles Simic