interview silences troped with some confession

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After scrolling through Twitter stuff that turns up posts related to the filmmaker and seeing her Instagrams, I felt, as her, that I’m tired of being found “amazing,” etc.—weary of vapid praise.

“What I’ve done, I’ve done.”

I move on.

existential moment in light of a pole star

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I write letters that I don’t send. Below is one. Uncanny coincidence is that her last name is Martin, as I’m thinking (unspoken) of Heidegger, circa 1917, seeing boys returning from the front.

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Dear Professor Ann Martin,

A happy thing it is to find a dissertation online about Ulysses and WW-I.
My googling only anticipated some sentence or two about the matter somewhere, in some article, at best (a Wikipedia article, at worst—or maybe the worst is someone's blog). Since this was just a few minutes ago, I've only read your “Abstract” and “Conclusion.”

I suppose that the pole star for the stabilizing coordinates is “love beyond all reason.” Yet, the reconstituted security for the post-War reader is literally that text, whose love restores. One is saved by literary portability, renewing oneself through the mirror of the author finding himself through the severe uncanniness of the times, which spawns modernism. The literary mind entertains “inner monologue” and “stream of consciousness” (one and the same? surmises Britannica), always citing Ulysses as exemplar.

being there

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One’s being in “The Zone” is thrilling: as if being played. A tennis ball is hit
"perfectly.” A basketball itself finds “swish.” Thinking on her feet—the improvisation—was inspired. The jazz session was hot. My pen is conscious, and feels being penned. His creativity is in its own, and she’s the creating.

by the way

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Astute sensibility may be largely inaccessible to others’ reputed “good sense.” So, Jane Austin’s distinction can lead into profound intuitions, thanks to conceptual resourcefulness beyond her own era’s options.

But this long posting isn’t about Ms. Austin’s novel. Generally speaking, though, I love to explore differences between transpersonal Sensibility and normative sense applied to literary thinking—and that difference is integral to Literature:
[S] authentic being of oneself (and being appreciated as oneSelf) irt [s] what one is “supposed” to be or do.

After all—and very obviously—exploring gender and class is integral to
the evolution of Literature!—to say the least.

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life is strange, then you die.

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John Ashbery, 1927—2017

I was 26 when I read just-published Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.
He was in his mid-40s. In my mid-40s, I was writing a long philosophically “poetic” discourse—and happened to read Flow Chart in “one” sitting
(over several days). I may in fact have every one of his collections.
I certainly give Notes From The Air pride of place in my primary library
(a hundred-or-so books I keep nearby, among thousands stored).

London Review of Books honors him today, including links to many poems
he published via LRB.

More to say later—including employment of some Ashbery poems from LRB, now [?] available only to subscribers, to which I’m a longstanding one).