at rest in your own specific gravity

I soaked in the heavy nourishing air and this befriending atmosphere like rich life-cake, the kind that encourages love and brings on a mild pain of emotions. A state that lets you rest in your own specific gravity, and where you are not a subject matter but sit in your own nature, tasting original tastes as good as the first man, and are outside of the busy human tamper, left free even of your own habits. Which only lie on you illusory in the sunshine, in the usual relation of your feet or fingers or the knot of your shoestrings and are without power.

Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

flying cloud

nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die

"I wish I knew why people think it's so important to be emotional," Teddy said. "My mother and father don't think a person's human unless he thinks a lot of things are very sad or very annoying or very - very unjust, sort of. My father gets very emotional even when he reads the newspaper. He thinks I'm inhuman."

Nicholson flicked his cigarette ash off to one side. "I take it you have no emotions?" he said.

Teddy reflected before answering. "If I do, I don't remember when I ever used them," he said. "I don't see what they're good for."

J.D. Salinger, 'Teddy'

states of matter

The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy is a liquid.

J.D. Salinger, 'De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period'

Tools for bottling joy: photo by Max Dupain, 1935.

pretty mouth and green my eyes

The girl stayed propped up on her forearm and watched him. Her eyes, more just open than alert or speculative, reflected chiefly on their own size and color.
...
I start thinking about this goddam poem I sent her when we first started goin' around together. 'Rose my color is and white, Pretty mouth and green my eyes.' Christ, it's embarrassing - it used to remind me of her. She doesn't even have green eyes - she has eyes like goddam sea shells ...

J.D. Salinger, 'Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes'

Photo from Square America.

esmé

Esme was standing with crossed ankles again. "You're quite sure you won't forget to write that story for me?" she asked. "It doesn't have to be exclusively for me. It can - "

I said there was absolutely no chance that I'd forget. I told her that I'd never written a story for anybody, but that it seemed like exactly the right time to get down to it.

She nodded. "Make it extremely squalid and moving," she suggested. "Are you at all acquainted with squalor?"

I said not exactly but that I was getting better acquainted with it, in one form or another, all the time, and that I'd do my best to come up to her specifications. We shook hands.

"Isn't it a pity that we didn't meet under less extenuating circumstances?"

I said it was, I said it certainly was.

J.D. Salinger, 'For Esmé, With Love and Squalor'

catcher's mitt

Mary Hudson batted ninth on the Warriors' lineup ... The Chief left his umpire's position behind the pitcher and came forward anxiously. He told Mary Hudson to rest the end of her bat on her right shoulder. "I am," she said. He told her not to choke the bat too tightly. "I'm not," she said. He told her to keep her eye right on the ball. "I will," she said. "Get outa the way." She swung mightily at the first ball pitched to her and hit it over the left fielder's head. It was good for an ordinary double, but Mary Hudson got to third on it - standing up.

When my astonishment had worn off, and then my awe, and then my delight, I looked over at the Chief. He didn't so much seem to be standing behind the pitcher as floating over him. He was a completely happy man. Over on third base, Mary Hudson waved to me. I waved back. I couldn't have stopped myself, even if I'd wanted to. Her stickwork aside, she happened to be a girl who knew how to wave to somebody from third base.

J.D. Salinger, 'The Laughing Man'

Patented 1925 catcher's mitt.

balls

FIVE STRAIGHT SATURDAY MORNINGS, Ginnie Mannox had played tennis at the East Side Courts with Selena Graff, a classmate at Miss Basehoar's. Ginnie openly considered Selena the biggest drip at Miss Basehoar's - a school ostensibly abounding with fair-sized drips - but at the same time she had never known anyone like Selena for bringing fresh cans of tennis balls. Selena's father made them or something. (At dinner one night, for the edification of the entire Mannox family, Ginnie had conjured up a vision of dinner over at the Graffs'; it involved a perfect servant coming around to everyone's left with, instead of a glass of tomato juice, a can of tennis balls.)

J.D. Salinger, 'Just Before the War with the Eskimos'

Photos by Esther Bubley, via the Library of Congress.

see more glass

"Sharon Lipschutz said you let her sit on the piano seat with you," Sybil said.

"Sharon Lipschutz said that?"

Sybil nodded vigorously.

He let go of her ankles, drew in his hands, and laid the side of his face on his right forearm. "Well," he said, "you know how those things happen, Sybil. I was sitting there, playing. And you were nowhere in sight. And Sharon Lipschutz came over and sat down next to me. I couldn't push her off, could I?"

"Yes."

"Oh, no. No. I couldn't do that," said the young man. "I'll tell you what I did do, though."

"What?"

"I pretended she was you."

Sybil immediately stooped and began to dig in the sand. "Let's go in the water," she said.

"All right," said the young man. "I think I can work it in."

J.D. Salinger, 'A Perfect Day For Bananafish'

Photo from Square America.

monday morning conversation

rachel.madewell: it's a beautiful day.

me: it is.

rachel.madewell: don't let it get away.

me: how should i catch it?

rachel.madewell: i don't know.
prob with bubbles.

me: hm. i will give it some thought.

sunday tune: ry cooder and david lindley - fdr in trinidad/maria elena (osaka 1979)

A song for my dad.

contained and uncontained

Standing on the bare ground — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing: I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God ... I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

***

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens

small tasks

I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.

Helen Keller

Photo: Lark About.

ready to build

Jens Risom Prefab House. Seen here.

home

To the moderately poor the home is the only place of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot on the earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim. Everywhere else he goes he must accept the strict rules of the shop, inn, club, or museum that he happens to enter. He can eat his meals on the floor in his own house if he likes. I often do it myself; it gives a curious, childish, poetic, picnic feeling. There would be considerable trouble if I tried to do it in an A.B.C. tea-shop. A man can wear a dressing gown and slippers in his house; while I am sure that this would not be permitted at the Savoy, though I never actually tested the point. If you go to a restaurant you must drink some of the wines on the wine list, all of them if you insist, but certainly some of them. But if you have a house and garden you can try to make hollyhock tea or convolvulus wine if you like. For a plain, hard-working man the home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks. The home is the one place where he can put the carpet on the ceiling or the slates on the floor if he wants to.

G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World

Photo from here.

this weekend

Hopefully the wind will blow you somewhere good. Such as:

• there goes the neighborhood
• private Warhol
• a great night on Waterloo (and the return of Alley Cat Fridays)
  
• drawn and quartered
• a countdown to awesome
  
• leave her to heaven
  
• thirty-something celebration
• antiquing in Geauga County

And if you are in the western part of the state, woodcuts. Happy weekend.

Illustration by Souther Salazar via Neu Black.

isolation and efficiency

The world shifts under our feet. The rules change. Not the Bill of Rights, or the rules of tenting, but the big unspoken truths of a generation. Exhaled by culture, taken in like oxygen, we hold these truths to be self-evident: You get what you pay for. Success is everything. Work is what you do for money, and that’s what counts. How could it be otherwise? And the converse of that last rule, of course, is that if you’re not paid to do a thing, it can’t be important. If a child writes a poem and proudly reads it, adults may wink and ask, “Think there’s a lot of money in that?” You may also hear this when you declare a major in English. Being a good neighbor, raising children: the road to success is not paved with the likes of these. Some workplaces actually quantify your likelihood of being distracted by family or volunteerism. It’s called your coefficient of Drag. The ideal number is zero. This is the Rule of Perfect Efficiency.
Now, the rule of “Success” has traditionally meant having boatloads of money. But we are not really supposed to put it in a boat. A house would the customary thing. Ideally it should be large, with a lot of bathrooms and so forth, but no more than four people. If two friends come over during approved visiting hours, the two children have to leave. The bathroom-to-resident ratio should at all times remain greater than one. I’m not making this up, I’m just observing, it’s more or less my profession. As Yogi Berra told us, you can observe a lot just by watching. I see our dream-houses standing alone, the idealized life taking place in a kind of bubble. So you need another bubble, with rubber tires, to convey yourself to places you must visit, such as an office. If you’re successful, it will be a large, empty-ish office you don’t have to share. If you need anything, you can get it delivered. Play your cards right and you may never have to come face to face with another person. This is the Rule of Escalating Isolation.And so we find ourselves in the chapter of history I would entitle: Isolation and Efficiency, and How They Came Around to Bite Us in the Backside.

Barbara Kingsolver, May 11, 2008, Duke University. Full text here.

(Thanks, Kelly.)

imaginary outfit: june 1997

I graduated from high school in June, 1997, and spent the following summer dividing my time between a landscaping job and work at a small, short-lived theater company.

I had a pretty defined uniform at the time: jeans (one of two pairs: a pair I had traded my friend Jenny for - she had cut the waistband off, and they were held up by a safety pin - or a pair of ancient Levis from a thrift store in Lincoln, Nebraska, found the summer before); men's Hanes v-neck t-shirts (3 for $4.99); a pair of moccasins (then and always); and an old canvas barn coat of my father's. It was from Banana Republic, back in the day when they used to carry adventure-wear instead of yuppie-wear and its cuffs were frayed from years of use (I kept it and the jeans until they fell apart into gentle piles of string). I toted all my belongings around in a red Jansport I had covered in patches ( I would upgrade to a chartreuse Lowe Alpine rucksack in the fall) - said belongings included mix tapes, Mead spiral-bound notebooks (college rule, only), Bic blue ballpoint pens (I had a fetish for these), and whatever I was reading at the time, along with copies of The Great Gatsby and The Little Prince (personal lucky totems). I wore safety pins in my ears (to my mother's mild dismay), an assortment of cheap silver rings, and a trusty Swiss-Army watch I had gotten for my birthday - senior year, my life had been a swirl of part-time jobs, classes, tennis matches and drama practice, so timing was everything. I also was never without sunglasses - I generally searched out anything resembling Wayfarers or big round Jackie-O shades.

Looking back, what's funny to me now is how the bones of this still show through what I wear today. I had a brief, post-collegiate hiatus where I tried to dress according to the amoebic tenets of office casual, but that's gradually fallen away with time, and I am back to my old janky self these days. I still miss those jeans.

a multitude of universes

From Keri Smith's How To Be An Explorer of the World.

freedom

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

David Foster Wallace, Commencement address at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, May 21, 2005.

Full text here. Of all the speeches I've posted this week, this one is my favorite.

the fringe benefits of failure

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

...

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

J.K. Rowling, Harvard University, June 5, 2008. Full text here. (Sidenote: she studied Greek and Latin.)

greek and latin

"Greek! Latin!" she spat. "What good it will do you, Greek and Latin? They are dead, the Greeks, the Romans — all dead, for a thousand years they are dead! A thousand years! I have been to Greece, been to Athens! And I can tell you — they are dead! What good did it do them, their literature, their art?! Plato? What good will he do for you? I have been to the grave of Plato, and I can tell you: he has been dead for a thousand years! Trust me, find something else to study, you'll make a living at least, you'll be happier!"
She took a deep breath and wearily ended with a sentence that—as she could not possibly guess, that May afternoon thirty years ago—would give me the title of a book I would write one day, a book about her vanished world, and how it vanished. "Plato, the Greeks," she muttered. "In a thousand years, it will all be lost."

From Daniel Mendelsohn's commencement address to the UC-Berkeley Classics department, May 15, 2009, describing his step-grandmother's reaction to his decision to major in Classics.

Full fantastic text here.

© Daniel Mendelsohn. Via Readerville.

Photo is of the Dying Gaul at the Capitoline Museum during WWI, carefully protected by a pyramid of sandbags.

the gift of tongues

It is very certain that it is the effect of conversation with the beauty of the soul, to beget a desire and need to impart to others the same knowledge and love. If utterance is denied, the thought lies like a burden on the man. Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told: somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas; sometimes with chisel on stone; sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music; but clearest and most permanent, in words.

The man enamored of this excellency, becomes its priest or poet. The office is coeval with the world. But observe the condition, the spiritual limitation of the office. The spirit only can teach. Not any profane man, not any sensual, not any liar, not any slave can teach, but only he can give, who has; he only can create, who is. The man on whom the soul descends, through whom the soul speaks, alone can teach. Courage, piety, love, wisdom, can teach; and every man can open his door to these angels, and they shall bring him the gift of tongues.

From Ralph Waldo Emerson's address delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday evening, July 15, 1838.

do what you can

Hope isn't a choice, it's a moral obligation, a human obligation, an obligation to the cells in your body. Hope is a function of those cells, it's a bodily function the same as breathing and eating and sleeping. Hope is not naïve, hope grapples endlessly with despair. Real, vivid, powerful, thunderclap hope, like the soul, is at home in darkness, is divided; but lose your hope and you lose your soul, and you don't want to do that, trust me, even if you haven't got a soul, and who knows, you shouldn't be careless about it. Will the world end if you act? Who can say? Will you lose your soul, your democratic-citizen soul, if you don't act, if you don't organize? I guarantee it. And you will feel really embarrassed at your ten-year class reunion. People will point, I promise you; people always know when a person has lost his soul. And no one likes a zombie, even if, from time to time, people will date them.

The great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz has a poem titled "On Angels"--you can imagine why I was drawn to it--and it concludes by articulating the best possible answer to What am I doing here and Why me. The poet is haunted by a voice:

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draws near
another one
do what you can.

From Tony Kushner's commencement speech at Vassar College, May 26, 2002.