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.