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Readerly/Writerly

An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns – but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver.  The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact.  After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth.

[...]

Another ancient metaphor: the density of texture in a written or typeset page is called its color.  This has nothing to do with red or green ink; it refers only to the darkness or blackness of the letterforms in mass.



[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Via Giulio Cesare, Santa Marinella]
[marted́ 27 settembre 2016 ore 10:11:06] []

Fall, literature, voluptuousness.

I have always loved solitude.  How many long days I have passed alone with my cat.  By alone I mean without a material being, and my cat is a mystic companion, a spirit.  I can say then that I have passed long days alone with my cat and alone with one of the last authors of the Roman decadence; for since the white creature is no more I have loved, uniquely and strangely, everything summed up in the word: fall.  So, in the year, my favourite season is the last slow part of summer that just precedes autumn, and, in the day, the hour when I walk is when the sun hesitates before vanishing, with rays of yellow bronze over the grey walls, and rays of red copper over the tiles.


[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Via Giulio Cesare, Santa Marinella]
[domenica 25 settembre 2016 ore 18:13:14] []

Like brightening between the lines.

Watching the first ModPo Live webcast of the semester, in which Al Filreis awards Almost No Memory by Lydia Davis, to a caller that a girl named Emily mistakes for a man named Grass (in a week of Dickinson and Whitman, a week of slanted truths and songs of leaves, you realize, what could be righter?), you go off tangenting through the cyberbrush, to see what Lydia's done lately.

And by way of Two American Scenes (momentarily interesting in a mention of two masters of the essay discussing “found material”), you wind up at Bookslut (as one does), where you find this, on travel, by Lightsey Darst (and speaking of names...):

I have never believed that you only learn from traveling.  You find yourself traveling and you make what you can of that, but if you could stand still, you could learn the names of everything:

old maples, huckleberry,
wild pear and swamp honeysuckle,
with baybush, box and briar

You could know everyone around you, their histories and their desires and their middle names, instead of passing through, blind to the new scar and the old crush.  You could make a memory palace of everything around you, planting knowledge in the landscape:

The Garden of Eden was in no other place
than Grandfather's orchard,
and the magnificent pictures of Milton
could never remove it.

You could travel by looking closer: the grain of the wood soda sign on the wall, a story of centuries of fire, flood, drought, and regular rain.


Later.  As you copy-paste this in and read what comes together.  What comes together and what comes forward and what comes true.  Inevitable as everlasting sky.  Of course, you think.  To stand still, instead of passing through.  To learn the names of everything.  To look closer.

Of course.


[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Via Giulio Cesare, Santa Marinella]
[sabato 17 settembre 2016 ore 12:44:25] []

In loving September maybe most of all.

And there we are, with the demon
Of the art of living
Traced on the glass of some window.

[...]

It deepens.  It begins.



[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Via Giulio Cesare, Santa Marinella]
[domenica 05 settembre 2016 ore 09:05:05] []