Sunday, March 25, 2018

I Saw the Weaves of Glittermeat Airborne



THE PERFECT JOURNEY IS

A.R. Ammons

The perfect journey is
no need to go

another nothingly clear day and
I went 
to walk between the pine
colonnades
up the road on the hill and there
hill-high in dry cold
I saw the weaves of glittermeat
airborne, so fine,
the breeze sifting
figurations from the snow
reservoirs of the boughs

  • The Great Gardner / Gass War.
  • Bookmark and read thebluemoment.
  • Utah-ing.
  • Dan reviews Novel Explosives, a big fat novel liked by Steven Moore, who can sell me anything.
  • { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
  • I couldn't stop thinking about Crime & Punishment so I grabbed my copy of The Idiot, opened to a random page, and Myshkin is - get this! - feverish! It would have been Devils if I'd found it first, but fit over! thanks to an idiot.
  • If I ever rebrand, or start again, JPEOFPF!
  • Trademark pending, go buy it at godaddy while you can. Live as a fart onomatopoeia.
  • A word that always makes this happen:


5 comments:

  1. Thanks for linking to my galactic disappointment! I will capture it someday.
    On another topic, is it too soon to begin bandwagoning the ineluctable 'Fire Dave Martinez'? Or must we wait until April?

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  2. My gut tells me this season is going to be more injury-fucked up than managerial, though I plan on recklessly calling for Martinez' firing the first chance he gives me.

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  3. Thankee Linky.

    Gardner and Gass; that they remained friends: really something (particularly given Gardner's long-running impersonation of Samuel Johnson). As if Adams and Jefferson had been novelists, without the vitriol.

    Sadly, I never felt comfortable reading Gass: my failing, not his. Liked Grendel and the premise behind Sunlight Dialogues, but started to peter out with Nickel Mountain. Thought I understood that On Moral Fiction was about Novels Telling The Truth, but ultimately couldn't get behind the Calvinism I sensed was living in the walls, there. Probably why The King's Indian is the only book of Gardner's I still have.

    Right after Gardner died, I was with a friend who did freelance gigs for NPR, and who had wangled an interview with John Irving in the (then closed) lower bar of the Mark Hopkins hotel. Irving was doing a publicity appearance, stumping for Hotel New Hampshire; when it was done my friend and I spent a few minutes with him. Irving made some generic response when asked for reaction about Gardner's accident, then paused and blurted out, "What the hell was he thinking?"

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    Replies
    1. Garp Hampshire was gateway drug, I'm eternally grateful.

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    2. 1)in 1980 i read three of irving's novels in close succession - garp, water-method man, 158 pound marriage - the latter two had strong personal reverberations - i was struggling with my dissertation [wmm], i had a complicated relationship [158pm] with a woman to whom i was strongly attracted and later affianced - but never married, fortunately - my destined meeting with my life partner, missus charley, still lay in the far future

      after that binge i never read any more books by irving, even though i have bought a couple and they are around somewhere

      2)The perfect journey is
      no need to go


      this reminds me of the tao te ching. chapter 47, which george harrison used in the song 'the inner light'

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWN8EKgJtrA

      john heider's prose adaptation puts it (ch. 47) in this way -

      The wise leader knows what is happening in a group by being aware of what is happening here and now. This is more potent than wandering off into various theories or making complex interpretations of the situation at hand.

      Stillness, clarity, and consciousness are more immediate than any number of expeditions into the distant lands of one's mind. Such expeditions, however stimulating, distract both the leader and the group members from what is actually happening.

      By staying present and aware of what is happening, the leader can do less yet achieve more.



      access to many translations:

      https://terebess.hu/english/tao/_index.html

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