i'm speechless; dude is operating on another plane right now

"The whole world, the vision of God at one moment, an abyss. — Abyss in which I stand lost on all sides!, see a great work without a name and everywhere full of names!, full of voices and forces! I do not feel myself in that place where the harmony of all these voices resounds into one ear, but what here in my place I hear by way of abbreviated, confusing sound — this much I know and hear with certainty — also has something harmonious in it!, also resounds as a song of praise in the ear of Him for whom space and time are nothing. — The human ear stays around for a few moments, and only hears few notes, often only a vexatious tuning of false notes, for this ear came precisely at the time of tuning-up and unfortunately perhaps landed in the whirlwind of one corner. The enlightened human being of later time — he wants to be not only a hearer of all but himself the final epitomizing note of all notes!, mirror of all the past and representative of the purpose of the composition of all its scenes! The precocious child slanders and blasphemes — alas, if it were even only possibly the after-echo of the last left-over death-sound or a part of the tuning!
Among the great tree of the father of all whose peak reaches above all the heavens and whose roots reach beneath worlds and hell, am I am eagle on this tree?, am I the raven who on his shoulder daily brings the worlds' evening greeting to his ear? What a little strand of foliage of the tree I may be!, a small comma or dash in the book of all worlds!"

 - Johann Gottfried von Herder, This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity, in Herder: Philosophical Writings - pp. 336-7

"Blooms, as Rilke knew, are all business; they exist for butterflies and bees, but only incidentally for us, for whom flowers are fortuitous. Autumn's hues are even more serendipital; the function of the leaves has been fulfilled, and their colors are the result of useless residues. The beauty of the world happens only in our eye; even the allure of women is as utilitarian as a wagon's wheel. The Worpswede light, the way the countryside's colors glow even on a dim wet evening, the festive stars and the warm windows of distant farms, the comforting purl of a stream: those are the purest accidents. So when one of us turns aside from living in order to admire life; when a rose petal is allowed to cool an eyelid; when a line of charcoal depicts the inviting length of a thigh; we are no longer going in nature's direction but contrary to it. What was never meant for us becomes ours entirely; what never had a use is suddenly all we need. Gradually, what Rilke's Russian adventure had appeared to teach him—how to live in harmony with nature, so appealing to the poet—would prove itself impossible for the poem"

- William H. Gass, Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation - pp. 20-1

Just picked this up the other day. I love the Harcourt Brace cover:

And this is on my "to read" list, having come highly recommended from someone:

"That child who died in the war is also the secret of each one who found him at the top of that tall tree, crucified on that tree by the carcass of his airplane.

One cannot write about that. Or else one can write about everything. To write about everything, everything at once, is not writing. It's nothing. To read it is untenable, like reading an advertisement."

- Marguerite Duras, "The Death of the Young British Pilot," Writing - p. 67

"I was humming hit tunes in the backseat watching the roadside go by as dreamily as it was watching me when I heard from my father half an inarticulate outcry and my head was slammed into the watching window. Almost immediately all of me was jerked back as though Martha was yanking one of the kids from the edge of an embankment, only now I was to be thrown onto the pile of elderberries we had wrapped in funnels of newspaper or stuffed in grocery sacks. As I rebounded from the floor of the car my ears received, like the rapid rasp of a saw, a series of terrible sounds: of rending metals, shattering glass, pissing vapors, unstaged screams. Actually, hearing scarcely intervened. They were palpable things, these noises, there like the rear window, rear seat, scissors, bags of berries. Through that window, back on the highway we had so abruptly fled, I saw two automobiles still shuddering from the force of their collision. Gray white steam rose chaotically. Glass began to patter upon the roof of our Chevrolet where we were stopped upon the shoulder. Then, almost slowly, eight door fell off or opened and people fell or otherwise came out of them, some hugging themselves and rolling over on the highway or down the bank beside it near where we were. A fragment of white arm appeared in the steam. I stared. Staring was all I was. How quickly—inexplicably—my peaceful window had been entered by this other. A woman asmear with blood stood up, fell softly down, stood slowly up again, wavering like a little flag. The car which had been in line behind us was new and shiny. I had noticed it because it had followed us awhile, unable to pass and impatient because of the traffic. The car which had struck was a heap of rust, and now weakened fenders and body panels were broken and scattered. Both hoods had risen in the air to allow the engines to rush at one another. One man had hopped away from the wreck on his unshattered leg and hugged a tree. Water appeared to be running down the leg of a lady who'd got no farther than the running board. The dust still rose in rivulets, making the air seem to shake as if it were a pane of glass in the process, like the sky, of coming to pieces. My god, we've got to get out of here, my father said. Then I also smelled the gasoline. People began to come from other cars with coats and their own anguish. They appeared to be oblivious of the gasoline. I didn't utter a word—not one. What I saw entered me like a spear." 

- William H. Gass, The Tunnel - p. 232

"Walking along the edge of the river, I no longer saw those lovely pale leaves pass me like petals, as if some river flower were blooming oddly out of season (poetry appearing abruptly in my social prose); rather I took them to be elements of a threatening metaphor, because I had suddenly seen that the world was held together only by frost and by freezing, by contraction, that its bowels contained huge compressors and ice-cold molds; so the place where I stood looking over a trivial Indiana landscape—snow freshly falling upon an otherwise turgid, uninteresting stream—was actually a point on the hazardous brink of Being. Consequently there appeared before me an emblem of all that was—all that was like a frozen fog—exhaust from the engines of entropy; and I saw in the whitened leaves floating by me an honesty normally missing from Nature's speech, because this adventitious coating threw open the heart of the Law: this scene of desolation—relieved only by the barren purity of trees—this wedge was all there was; and then I understood that the soft lull of August water was but a blanket on a snowbank; the dust that a wave of wind would raise was merely the ash of a dry summer blizzard; the daffodils which would ring our Chinese elm were blooming spikes of ice, encased in green like a thug's gloves; there was just one season; and when the cottonwoods released their seeds, I would see smoke from the soul of the cold cross the river on the wind to snag in the hawthorns and perish in their grip like every love"

- William H. Gass, The Tunnel - p. 343

DFW's syllabus

stumbled across one of DFW's syllabi from teaching at Pomona College online today.
Literary Interpretation Syllabus
so cool! had me chuckling in several places:
notably on pg. 3 where he allocates final mark percentage to his students' "alacrity of carriage." also, on pg. 1 where he provides a quote from another professor's previous syllabus for the course and refers to it as a "somewhat sexier riff." it seems that even DFW's syllabi couldn't escape his constant desire to append, to clarify, to revise through footnotes.
another syllabus from 1994 is shown here from the DFW archives.

"Rain" by Charles Bukowski

"sex" by Charles Bukowski

as anthologized in The Pleasures of the Damned

another piece from this semester that i think i might expand on

Pericope Adulterae

a piece that i finished several weeks ago

Johnnie-B

having a brainwave

for a new story. hopefully i can finish it in some form tonight and post it up here.

this is my blog

hi,
this is my blog. i think i might put things up here that i'm working on, or things that i'm interested in. i'm pretty sure this is a fairly well-known idea by now, but i'm fascinated by the parallel between modern-day blogs and commonplace books. hopefully this can be something like that. however, i'm a little wary of manifestos/totalizing statements, so i'm not sure i want to say what will/will not appear here.
i've had a little experience with blogging services before. a couple of my friends and i wrote about music for almost a year i'd say under the name GIRL ATTORNEYS. that was a funny experience because i think we eventually got sniped by Blogger for either posting a link to LCD Soundsystem's This Is Happening or The New Pornographers' Together (i can't remember) when it leaked. also really funny was that i got sent Shelby Lynne promos - god they must have been desperate. anyway, a lot of the posting on GIRL ATTORNEYS was posting of leaks like that, however, i did create some longer form pieces (i.e. enthusing about R.E.M.'s Chronic Town), which i mourned the loss of the other day (it appears the waybackmachine never crawled GIRL ATTORNEYS ... how devastating).
after that i maintained a tumblr for a while. this was interesting, but - as lame as this might sound - i didn't really feel like i could maintain an identity there. the world of tumblr is fascinating definitely - reblogging, the memeplex (is this a word?), etc. - but i'm not sure if i really saw myself in it. it did give me this though, for which i owe it a lot. and this.
anyway, yeah.

also, if you haven't checked out the new Chromatics record, Kill For Love, do so if you want. i took it for a night drive today, a la this, and it totally wrecked me.

other suggested Chromatics listening environment.
oh god, tired.
goodnight,
joel