John Latta

Breakfasted tête à tête with the English phlegmatic—he said nothing & I ditto.

—Herman Melville, Journal

John Baldessari. I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, 1971

Art by Max Neumann, out of László Krasznahorkai’s _Chasing Homer_ (New Directions, 2021)

Somewhat relatedly, Krasznahorkai (“mathematics makes no allowance for . . . the actual reality of moral questions”), hints at a kind of unmodelable phenomenal continuum, a world indivisible.

Art by Max Neumann, out of László Krasznahorkai’s _Chasing Homer_ (New Directions, 2021)

László Krasznahorkai, in _Chasing Homer_ (2021, translated by John Batki), pointing at the grand inadjudicable smeariness of the temporal.

the large open serial form of the “Hammertown” trilogy, a work routed in place, capacious, renegade, local. Here: the triggering lines by Perec—used as epigraph to _Hammertown_ (2003), and the opening lines of the whole.

Thinking of Georges Perec (b. 7 March 1936) and, somehow inexorably, of Canadian poet Peter Culley—how, out of a tiny mention in Perec’s La Vie mode d'emploi /Life: A User's Manual (1978 / 1987 translated by David Bellos), Culley conceived of

Photographie de Georges Perec

« Écrire : essayer méticuleusement de retenir quelque chose, de faire survivre quelque chose : arracher quelques bribes précises au vide qui se creuse, laisser, quelque part, un sillon, une trace, une marque ou quelques signes. »

Georges Perec (7 mars 1936 ~ 3 mars 1982), Espèces d’espaces, 1974.

“Je cherche en même temps l’éternel et l’éphémère!”

[I seek at once the eternal and the ephemeral.]

— Georges Perec, Les Revenentes (1972)

Later used as the epigraph to the last chapter of *Life: A User’s Manual* (1978):

postcard of dog with collage and aphorism, writing in German from original sender at bottom

stay tender somehow

a reminder from @dinalrelles.bsky.social and me

A stream that flows down, now gentle, under the winter sun. - Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, March 17, 1933 - a cool brisk wind - the morning sunlight - a little reddish brown bird - a warbler, sitting in a willow tree - singing madly.

March Sunlight
Charles Burchfield 1932

Balinese palm leaf manuscript (Ramayana) / from Isamu Noguchi’s collection

(a charm for sleep)

Sound, silence
river, sea

drop, ocean

When a reading of text has proceeded by laborious stages within the test-rig of detailed study, pause to allow the overall effect to integrate back into a coherent human reading, and ponder whether your life may even have been changed, just a little, or your beliefs about large questions; whether your habits of feeling have been flattered or boastfully challenged, or whether your relation to the text builds up a kind of trust. This aspect is what you will take away with you when all the study is finished, and it should last you through a lifetime.

J. H. Prynne, on reading

Thank you, Robert. That’s wonderful! I like the rest of Guston’s remarks, too, made at a lecture at the University of Minnesota in 1978:

Philip Guston, “Cherries,” 1976

Mu Qi, “Six Persimmons,” 13th century

Wondering, under the tumult of my usual breezy wrongheadedness, whether Philip Guston knew of the thirteenth century monk and painter Mu Qi’s “Six Persimmons” when he painted the 1976 “Cherries.”

page one of Peter O’Leary’s <Phosphorescence of Thought>

Zaunkönig = fence king? What a great name for a wren.

Pertinently, perhaps, looking distantly, warily, and awry at current poet (and, elsewhere, troop) flocking manoeuvres, a piece called “All the Poets” out of Kelvin Corcoran’s sequence “A Short History of Song Set to Music and Abandoned”—in _Sea Table_ (Shearsman, 2015):

Recalling Emerson in “The Poet” (1844):

“Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”

Heidegger, out of the essay "Language in the Poem" (in _Poetry, Language, Thought_):

“. . . everyday language is a forgotten and used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer.”

“She preferred the largesse, so wide and free and without mistakes, of not-understanding.”

(Lispector, An Apprenticeship)

“To write consecutively of the beatitude of intellect . . .”—Emerson, out of the Journals. Reckoning with the inherent brokenness of joy, its unavoidable interruptedness, its romps, ruptures & fallibility. Hints in Emerson’s 1859 entry of kinship with Barthes’s destabilizing writerly _jouissance_.

“I trust it does not smell of the study & library—even of the Poets attic, as of the fields & woods.— that it is a hypaethral or unroofed book—lying open under the ether—& permeated by it. Open to all weathers—not easy to be kept on a shelf.”

Aimless, a little tired, back. Thinking yesterday—somewhere above New Boston, gunning down to earth, & admiring the haze-smudged stretches of flat Michigan farmland—how Thoreau called _A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_ (1849) an “unroofed book”:

At the airport, aesthetically distressed.

At the Morgan Library, in material surrounding Caravaggio’s “Boy with a Basket of Fruit”—a drawing by Rutilio Manetti (1571-1639) titled “A Life Study: a Monk Sleeping against a Pile of Books.” Befittingly impertinent in an age of endless immoral wars, deserving of some kind of revery or rhapsody.

Whence cometh utterance out of the radical void:

“. . . the lid there’s a sounding-board; and what in all things makes the sounding-board is this—there’s naught beneath.”
—Herman Melville, _Moby Dick_

A line I used for an epigraph in my collection _Some Alphabets_ (2022).

Et puis?

Helene Schjerfbeck, “Girl at the Gate I,” watercolor, charcoal, and pencil on paper, 1897-1902

Helene Schjerfbeck, “The Door,” oil on canvas, 1884

Another couple of works by the Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946). “Girl at the Gate I,” watercolor, charcoal, and pencil on paper, 1897-1902, and “The Door,” oil on canvas, 1884. Superb portraitist and colorist. Seemingly inherent, a tendency toward the abstract.