Saturday, December 18, 2010

whatever... thresholding



I have my little entertainments, along with aspirations I’m actualizing publicly. Desire for literary gravity should be complemented by abundance of levity, enjoying self caricature.

The inner-directed life and world of mind can complement the outer-directed life and world of mind.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

true storylines



It’s no fiction I have a luscious range of engagements worth pursuing (not to mention economy of expression—not); and a vertiginous spectrum of attitudes that can be reliably entertaining (can be). Certainly it’s no fiction that I love writing.

Thursday, December 9, 2010

a praise of tapestry



I’m having vivid ideas about what’s to become of this blog.

Inevitably, aspects of a life’s background weave through—some echoing further back than others.

Monday, December 6, 2010

aspiration and difficulty



Generally, the thematic topography developing offline into my metonymy of irregular webpages seems to have no ending, as others’ ideas come into the gardening, shifting the hues of perspective or the horizonal point drawing excursion into transposed excursion. The Perpetual Project elates and stills.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

american children



My Emersonian moment ends with a keynote of my fascination with child growth. Eventually, everything I have online will try to come together as a singular venture.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

textual intimacy


life as literary psychology, part 2 of 5

Listening to you, a cohering sense of your attitude about what we’re talking about likely emerges. Your coherent stance is part of you, instancing something tropical of your whole sense of the world and life.

Monday, March 8, 2010

centripetal site


white space

potential

lines as sprigs
morning frission

anodyne
resort


Wednesday, February 24, 2010

response to indictment for patterning
too little information



He avowed inculpability for being concerned about implications of too little information—of connecting dots in a patternless pointillism that deserve to be connected differently, if only one had the right information. He wasn’t culpable for turning appreciation of a worrisome lack of information into a conscientious storyline framed by concerns about the liminality of reality and fiction.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

“everybody’s got a story”


Take #2

I’m somewhat obsessed by difficulties of narratability, inasmuch as writing for me is inquiry journaling itself, and I have a so-called “clinical” mind nearly haunted by presumption that the story I’m in is obvious to everyone but me, like the fish who can’t see his bowl as such.



Sunday, February 14, 2010

being “literary”



David Mikics’ new A New Handbook of Literary Terms doesn’t have an entry for ‘literary’ or ‘literature,’ so the entire “territory” (p. vii) is The Literary.

I trust a man who, on the one hand, claims to have consulted extensively with Harold Bloom (and many others) for the development of his “expansive and opinionated” pointillism; and, on the other hand, whose most recent earlier book is Who Was Jacques Derrida? Also, Mikics wrote The Romance of Individualism in Emerson and Nietzsche. Nietzsche read Emerson extensively!

Friday, February 12, 2010

fielding resonant feeling



I may seem foolish by seeking a resonant sense of living relationship with textuality—ambivalence of reading, a marrying of genres, fiction and realism mirroring each other. I want characterization that provides a site for fielding narratology, for gardening inwordness, down the road. If I have to seem foolish in the process, so be it.


Monday, February 8, 2010

ethical art, artful living: discursive homemaking


Thursday, 4.8.10

The February posting at life world with the title above—thus the February date here belonging to it there—is more philosophical than literary, so it stays there, and I link to it from here. But it belongs here as appropriately as there.

The “here” and the “there” of a literary philosophical venture transposed into conceptual prospecting is emblemized by the two blogs, literairy living and life world, implying each other, like an intimate inquiry—just you and I here.


Sunday, February 7, 2010

prologue for a marriage



So, dear Rainer, apart from odd devotions (too often spawning neologisms, perhaps), I’m an advocate for literary value, inasmuch as I can appreciate that so far. A lot I’ve done here and there might be understood best relative to that engagement, my hope for something from literary engagement that I’m learning to find.

dear Rainer



Decades ago, in my bohemian Berkeley days (at 22, steeped in Henry Miller, Merleau-Ponty—and you), I had a terrible crush on a local poet, Anita Barrows, who read in Cody’s, hung out in cafés, spaced out with her notebook.

Yesterday, I saw a flyer in a window about her and another woman who have published an anthology of selections from your “luminous poetry, piercing prose, and intimate letters,” for each day, A Year with Rilke—365 readings—which they’re performing now, accompanied by “maverick cello” played by a man named Mr. Darling (suitable companionship for nomadic flute, I thought). $20 for the joy, at Grace Church in Berkeley.

Sunday, January 31, 2010

poiesis



“Rendering a legacy of insightful novelty must stay an evolving thing,” I wrote at the “life world” blog.

That poiesis page is very rhetorical, but in the strong sense of serious engagement with conceptual prospects (as I see it).


Saturday, January 30, 2010

textual windows



Textual sketches sometimes don’t work, but that’s what sketches are for: experimentation. I have episodes of wanting to capture something purely immanent in textuality. It’s long fascinated me that phenomenology was always being done via text, such that reading was almost intrinsic to conveying what phenomenology is.


Friday, January 29, 2010

All the world as high school



The death of Salinger reminds me of high school, and that reminds me of my adult experience of teens. One of my favorite themes—which I could never have understood as a teen like I do now (because I’ve gotten so analytical, not just because adults can understand more) is the narcissistic wounding that teens do with excommunication from their circle. It’s not just an adolescent thing.


Thursday, January 28, 2010

J. D. Salinger has died.



That’s a big deal for me. Reading a NY Times appreciation of him tonight, I feel “Gawd, I thought I’d forgotten about him, but my life has been some weird commingling of Salinger characters.”
Mr. Salinger’s people tend to be outsiders—spiritual voyagers shipwrecked in a vulgar and materialistic world, misfits who never really outgrew adolescent feelings of estrangement.
However, I don’t really “identify with children.” Rather, I value a sense of temporally whole Self that hasn’t lost the spontaneity that we associate with children. Children themselves get rather tiring quickly (if they’re not your own or you’re not in charge of teaching them, etc.). But a child-centered view of parenting (and student-centered view of teaching) is quite analogous to keeping kids from falling off a cliff: facilitating free play of mind and body within safe boundaries. “Such characters have a yearning for some greater spiritual truth, but they are also given to an adolescent either/or view of the world,” which I’m not given to.

I do gladly distinguish authentic from phony, but I appreciate the survival value of polite deception; and I look dimly on hardfast categorization.

Odd, though, that I had that sudden thought a few days ago of having been a “teenage classic,“ having no association to Salinger at the time, no idea that he was dying.

And look at me this week: wanting (more or less) to “understand… ‘the main current of poetry that flows through things,’”(NYT—though having no interest in thinking of others as “morons.” I am not a Salinger character, but the background of my own teen years feels eerily inhabited by him.

I am not a Salinger character. Yet, I’m a narrative—it’s time I confessed that: I write for its own sake—and experimentally, to take the stance of another reader, turning the narrative into characterization of someone else, ambivalent about the degree to which I identify with him (or her). I sometimes make the painful mistake of sharing that with a reader who doesn’s see the writerliness of it, pleasure in play. I make up storylines of affairs and preoccupations, incapabilities and obsessions, etc., for experimental effect, not confession, but sometimes suffering loss through others’ misunderstanding (right, Terese?).

Anyway, it’s said of Salinger that he continued to write since the ‘60s, intending to have his work published only after his death. Indeed, he corroborated the surmise:
(Reuters) In a rare interview with the New York Times in 1974, he said there was “marvelous peace” in not publishing. “It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure,” he said.
That’s me.


1/29

David Lodge on Salinger as “The Pre-Postmodernist.”


Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Keatsian inspiration



I’m not a Romantic, but I want to better appreciate the importance for poetry that Romanticism was. More important to me, though, is to gain a sense of poetics that’s fair to a sense of textual intimacy that I want to develop. Keatsian inspiration helps.


Tuesday, January 26, 2010

“Every piece of writing was like a pond...”



I wish I understood more about poetics as it’s been traditionally pursued.
I came across a discussion of William Empson that’s enchanting.


Tuesday, January 19, 2010

I’m not Sartre’s son.



Before I saw you Sunday, a rainy night, I’d been at the bookstore—a long time. I won’t list all the ones I wanted to buy—too many. I have little time for even a few soon. It’s always like that! I can’t stand it. 24, I wanted for my library. I bought 6. Even 6 is too much. Maybe they’ll be inhabited within the year—after others, bought long ago, are read, having been carefully selected from many times more than those, bought way back. Or maybe the new 6 points in my pointillism of textual affairs shifts the whole sequence. (Spread them all on a floor, so the reading sequence becomes a broken line from book to book to book, maybe forming a pattern, as if a path itself is a message.)