Malcolm Lowry

Passage taken from Under The Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry- "The platform slept. The tracks were vacant, the signals up. There was little to suggest that any train ever arrived at this station, let alone left it: QUAUHNAHUAC"

Happy November 3rd to all who celebrate, and to all who celebrate- mind how you go.

Today is a special one for us, the "lunatic admirers" of Lowry (Firminists). I ask that you pause for a moment today, and reflect on that most special book, whose "quality is too rare to be successful".

A sense of a shared, a mountain peace seemed to fall between them; it was false, it was a lie, but for a moment it was almost as though they were returning home from marketing in days past.

1) “Ah, the harbour bells of Cambridge! Whose fountains in moonlight and closed courts and cloisters, whose enduring beauty in its virtuous remote self-assurance, seemed part,

2) less of the loud mosaic of one’s stupid life there, though maintained perhaps by the countless deceitful memories of such lives, than the strange dream of some old monk, eight hundred years dead,

3) whose forbidding house, reared upon piles and stakes driven into the marshy ground, had once shone like a beacon out of the mysterious silence, and solitude of the fens. A dream jealously guarded: Keep off the Grass. And yet whose unearthly beauty compelled one to say: God forgive me."

Editor's note: These are amazing.

Lowry Lounge returns this weekend, book your tickets today! 📖

Since 2009 we've been celebrating the life and work of local writer Malcolm Lowry, and this year's celebration will explore his early years spent in the Wirral.

"Besides after a while one begins to feel, if the man can hold his liquor as well as that why shouldn't he drink?"

[F]or some reason this simple fact appeared to make these two good people-for nearly all people are good who walk in parks-very happy again.

Windy shadows swept the pavement.

19 September (1931): Malcolm Lowry to Conrad Aiken | The American Reader

"I have discovered one first rate author, an American, Julian Green, who writes in French, which is translated back again into English."

theamericanreader.com/19-september...

...but still the old bandstand stands where no band stands.

But my lord, Yvonne, surely you know by this time I can’t get drunk however much I drink.

Taken at "Lieben", Bowen Island. Left to right are Reg Watters (Canadian editor and anthologist), Malcolm, Margerie, and Earle Birney. July 1947.

Special Collections Library, UBC - BC 1614/25.

Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.

Plato, The Republic

How could he have thought so evil of the world when succor was at hand the whole time?

Rain - rain - rain here, Vancouver's Jubilee, and the city full of wild Indians.

Yours sincerely, Malcolm Lowry

Some words on David Markson.

themillions.com/2016/03/this...

A documentary on Lowry that is not for the faint of spirit. Regardless, a must watch.

www.nfb.ca/film/volcano/

| 'It was doubtless the almost tactile absence of the music however, that made it so peculiar the trees should be apparently shaking to it, an illusion investing not only the garden but the plains beyond, the whole scene before his eyes, with horror, the horror of an intolerable unreality. This must be not unlike, he told himself, what some insane person suffers at those moments when, sitting benignly in the asylum grounds, madness suddenly ceases to be a refuge and becomes incarnate in the shattering sky and all his surroundings in the pre- sence of which reason, already struck dumb, can only bow the head. Does the madman find solace at such moments, as his thoughts like cannonballs crash through his brain, in the exquisite beauty of the madhouse garden or of the neigh- bouring hills beyond the terrible chimney?' Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

"Come amigo, throw away your mind," Dr. Vigil said behind him.

Slightly to the right and below them, below the gigantic red evening, whose reflection bled away in the deserted swimming pools scattered everywhere like so many mirages, lay the peace and sweetness of the town.

The spectators laughed and cheered, though Hugh, really indistinguishable from a Mexican now, looked serious, even grim. He leaned back, holding on determinedly, with feet splayed, heels knocking the sweaty flanks. The charros galloped across the arena.

I have lived only nineteen years and all of them more or less badly. --letter to Conrad Aiken, 1929.

And it seemed to me that until I knew her I had lived my whole life in darkness.

'Look up at that niche in the wall over there on the house where Christ is still, suffering, who would help you if you asked him: you cannot ask him. Consider the agony of the roses. See, on the lawn Concepta's coffee beans, you used to say they were María's, drying in the sun. Do you know their sweet aroma any more? Regard: the plantains with their queer familiar blooms, once emblematic of life, now of an evil phallic death. You do not know how to love these things any longer. All your love is the cantinas now: the feeble survival of a love of life now turned to poison, which only is not wholly poison, and poison has become your daily food-' Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

Tortoiseshell cat sleeps on a bed using a hardcover copy of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano.

Afraid to imagine what she's dreaming.

"...where is the sunrise? Where is the frost? Where are my seagulls? Where is my coffee? Where is love?"

Lowry to Markson, 1951.

Black geometry angled against dark skies.