Category Archives: Books

Liquid Time

Any time-plumber knows this fact.

Liquid time (viscous, variable, sociopathic; the ubiquitous matrix wet with time, time the whole banana) doesn’t always move in one direction, a waterfall churning into rivers that are also pointed down. It may, like Earth itself, corpus or organism, be careening, surface teeming, in one dark line, drawn by a fat soft pencil. But upon the surface of time, that is to say, on its protrusions, there are eddies too, things that reverse, or simply start again and again. Smarter, wiser now. Ready for more.

Harry Dodge, from My Meteorite

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On Memory

#202: For the fact is that neuroscientists who study memory remain unclear on the question of whether each time we remember something we are accessing a stable “memory fragment”—often called a “trace” or an “engram”—or whether each time we remember something we are literally creating a new “trace” to house the thought. And since no one has yet been able to discern the material of these traces, nor to locate them in the brain, how one thinks of them remains mostly a matter of metaphor: they could be “scribbles,” “holograms,” or “imprints”; they could live in “spirals,” “rooms,” or “storage units.” Personally, when I imagine my mind in the act of remembering, I see Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, roving about in a milky, navy-blue galaxy shot through with twinkling cartoon stars.

 

– Maggie Nelson, from ‘Bluets’

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Mixtapes

“The greatest act of love was to make a tape for someone. It was the only way we could share music and it was also a way of advertising yourself. Selection, order, the lettering you used for the track list, how much technical detail you went into, whether or not you added artwork or offered only artwork and no track list at all, these choices were as codified as a Victorian bouquet.”

– Lavinia Greenlaw, The Importance of Music to Girls

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TAKE THIS HAMMER

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Everything was as it should be

… but was it?  We didn’t have to look about us to answer no. It was earlier than early inside us. We were wide open.  The one looked at the other and realized that our ordinary everyday life had vanished for the time being.  If this had been true of only one of us at first, now it was true for both.  It had leaped across like lightning.  Suddenly there was a strange shimmer in the air.

I wished he would say: I can see it on you.
He looked at me and said, beyond all reason: ‘I can see it on you.’
I felt myself burn. Don’t say any more, I wished, and he didn’t.
What was to come of this?
Something is approaching.
Per was no longer his usual self.
What had we done to each other?
Without saying anything more, we knew: It is today.


 
— Tarjei Vesaas (from Spring in the Winter)
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Paradise

“On the surface, where the historical battles rage, where everything is interpreted in terms of money and power, there may be crowding, but life only begins when one drops below the surface, when one gives up the struggle, sinks and disappears from sight. Now I can as easily not write as write: there is no longer any compulsion, no longer any therapeutic aspect to it. Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy: I drop my fruits like a ripe tree  […]  Paradise is everywhere and every road, if one continues along it far enough, leads to it.”

— Henry Miller

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Nick Cave on Love Songs

I’d previously posted an excerpt of this lecture, but this recording is a treat for any fans of Nick Cave’s work or songwriting in general.

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Nirvana Diary by Steve Gullick

Steve Gullick – Nirvana Diary from Joe Watson on Vimeo.

 

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In the Looking-Glass

The house was empty, and one felt, since one was the only person in the drawing-room, like one of those naturalists who, covered with grass and leaves, lie watching the shyest animals – badgers, otters, kingfishers – moving about freely, themselves unseen. The room that afternoon was full of such shy creatures, lights and shadows, curtains blowing, petals falling – things that never happen, so it seems, if someone is looking. The quiet old country room with its rugs and stone chimney pieces, its sunken book-cases and red and gold lacquer cabinets, was full of such nocturnal creatures. They came pirouetting across the floor, stepping delicately with high-lifted feet and spread tails and pecking allusive beaks as if they had been cranes or flocks of elegant flamingoes whose pink was faded, or peacocks whose trains were veined with silver. And there were obscure flushes and darkenings too, as if a cuttlefish had suddenly suffused the air with purple; and the room had its passions and rages and envies and sorrows coming over it and touting it, like a human being. Nothing stayed the same for two seconds together.

But, outside, the looking-glass reflected the hall table, the sun-flowers, the garden path so accurately and so fixedly that they seemed held there in their reality unescapably. It was a strange contrast — all changing here, all stillness there. One could not help looking from one to the other. Meanwhile, since all the doors and windows were open in the heat, there was a perpetual sighing and ceasing sound, the voice of the transient and the perishing, it seemed, coming and going like human breath, while in the looking-glass things had ceased to breathe and lay still in the trance of immortality.

– from The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection, Virginia Woolf

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I Had a Ruby

Imperfect, beautiful like faceted blood.  It came from India where they wash up on the shore.  Thousands of them — the beads of sorrow.  Little droplets that somehow became gems gathered by beggars who trade them for rice.  Whenever I stared into its depths I felt overcome, for caught within my little gem was more misery and hope than one could fathom.

It frightened and inspired, and I kept it in my sack, a waxed yellow packet the size and shape of a razor blade.  I’d stop and take it out and look at it.  I did this so often it was no longer necessary to see what I was looking at.  And because of this I can not say for certain when it disappeared.

I can still see it though.  I see it on the foreheads of the women.  In the poet’s hollow.  I see it at the throat of a diva and in the palm of the deserter.  Pressing against a wire fence.  A drop of blood on a calico dress.  I open my bundle and dump the contents in the furrows of the earth.  Nothing — an old spoon, a rudder, the remains of a walkie-talkie.  Spreading the cloth to rest upon I take breaths as long as the furrows.  As if to quell the spirits; hold them from shaking and clanging.

  — Patti Smith (Woolgathering)

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