even*cleveland: john singer sargent

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'a shifting jamesian syntax'

The sun comes out
to purge exaggeration.
The sun enjoys short sentences
but clouds prefer
a shifting Jamesian syntax.

Peter Porter, from 'Essay on Clouds.'

John Singer Sargent: Clouds. 1897. Watercolor on white wove paper.

in case you are interested

As always, the book club is open to anyone who has read the book and wants to come.

Here's the club reading list through the end of the year:

June 10: George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss
July 8: Barbara Comyns: Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead
August 12: Virginia Woolf: The Years
September 9: Laura Riding: Progress of Stories
October 14: Edward de Waal: The Hare With Amber Eyes
November 11: Isak Dinesen: Seven Gothic Tales
December 9: James Joyce: Dubliners

I also post related materials about each book over here.

Feel free to shoot me an email at evencleveland (at) gmail dot com if you have any questions.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

'a shifting jamesian syntax'

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