rocket to nowhere

The Khazars pray by weeping, for tears are a part of God, by virtue of always having a bit of salt at the bottom, just as shells hold pearls. Sometimes women take a handkerchief and fold it until it can be folded no more; that is a prayer.
—Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

• king of clubs: the end of Modernism and still not enough time never enough time (perhaps that sums Modernism up?) #
• that should have been the king of spades. #
• 3 of clubs. #
• 8 of clubs: PhD play date in Ft. Collins. #
• 4 of spades: PhD play date day 2. More dictionaries. #
• queen of spades: "The Dictionary appears as a vestibule between two storerooms." #
• @LairdHunt Zong, how I wish I had a Zong! in reply to LairdHunt #

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Gentle ideas are pregnant with mountains of corpses.

—Witold Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament

• Is the Montclair Rec Center the perfect or perfectly wrong place to read Waiting for Godot? #
• @LairdHunt What do the worms in the Strand look like? in reply to LairdHunt #
• Managed to read half of Lucky's tirade aloud before my wife ordered me to stop. #stillwaiting #
• 2 of hearts: Is Becket modernist or 'post-modernist'? Is 'post-modernism' just an extension of the modernist project? #
• @LairdHunt "You and your landscapes! Tell me about the worms!" — (just read that in Godot . . . hmmm) in reply to LairdHunt #
• 4 of diamonds: terribly, terribly slow today. #
• @jesswigent If you have to do it, there are worse ways. But Ouch! And Ouch! again! Hope you're okay. in reply to jesswigent #
• 7 of hearts: Dave Soldier's zebra finch recording reminded me that I needed to flip a card and tweet the results. More Modernism! #
• @kathryn_regina Any representation of cantaloupe is over. in reply to kathryn_regina #
• 3 of hearts: Rilke & Kafka. Part of me wishes this were a deathmatch. #
• @yokoono "All we have gained the machine threatens, as long / as it dares to exist in the mind and not in obedience." -Rilke in reply to yokoono #
• Jack of spades: Saving the most interesting of Modernism for last now means I have to jettison some of it because I'm running out of time. #

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Comps Deathmatch!
(you say modernism; I say modernism)

Franz Kafka vs. Rainer Maria Rilke

 

“The Truth About Sancho Panza”

Without making any boast of it Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of years, by feeding him a great number of romances of chivalry and adventure in the evening and night hours, in so diverting from himself his demon, whom he later called Don Quixote, that this demon thereupon set out, uninhibited, on the maddest exploits, which, however, for the lack of a preordained object, which should have been Sancho Panza himself, harmed nobody. A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility, and had of them a great and edifying entertainment to the end of his days.

          [trans. by Willa and Edwin Muir]

 

vs.

 

from The Sonnets to Orpheus
XIII

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

Be forever dead in Eurydice–more gladly arise
into the seamless life proclaimed in your song.
Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days,
be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.

Be–and yet know the great void were all things begin,
the infinite source of your own most intense vibration,
so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.

To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb
creatures in the world’s full reserve, the unsayable sums,
joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.

          [trans. by Stephen Mitchell]

. . . who is accused of talking too freely about his neighbors’ wives and otherwise rendering himself objectionable . . .

And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if one’s friends were attached to one’s body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread, which (as she dozed there) became hazy with the sound of bells, striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single spider’s thread is blotted with rain-drops, and, burdened, sags down. So she slept.
          —Viginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

• One of the cats disappeared for a while today. I was the kind of frantic that looks calm. #
• Queen of diamonds: More Modernism #
• 10 of clubs: I'm reading poetry & I don't understand (it). I just looked up the word concupiscent. #
• 9 of hearts: too much note typing, not enough reading, almost too hot to think. #
• queen of clubs: more modernism: Stein, Proust, more more more more. I'm tired. #
• "This is an ordinary paragraph made different by content." #
• Despite being closed, my eyes still move as though reading. #
• 2 of spades: Dalloway, Wasteland, Pound's ABC, neither properly sleeping nor properly waking, but somehow . . . #

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