December 2010
44 posts
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“In the end, man is an event which cannot judge itself, but, for better or worse,...”
– Jung, “Student Years,” Memories, Dreams, Reflections, page 113.
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“Children react much less to what grownups say than to the imponderables in the...”
– Jung, “Student Years,” Memories, Dreams, Reflections, page 90. This is also the theory of the enneagram, that character flaws (as Ichazo and Naranjo view the enneagram) are strategies we adopt to cope with our childhood situations.
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“The storm pushing against me was time, ceaselessly flowing into the past, which...”
– Jung, “Student Years,” Memories, Dreams, Reflections, page 88.
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“In cities, people seemed unconscious They looked down upon the ground or up...”
– Jung, “School Years,” Memories, Dreams, Reflections, page 67.
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“Other people are established inalienably in my memories only if their names were...”
– Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, page 5.
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“We are a psychic process which we only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot...”
– Carl Gustav Jung, “Prologue,” Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Vintage, 1989, page 4.
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Posting
Reading posts to Writing & Design back to the start (June 2009), I was struck by how often completed projects showed up earlier as ideas. So posting an idea is a commitment to it in my own mind, it seems. Notes: Projects is more speculative, and a lot of it consists of quotes that drew my attention. Writing an essay last weekend, though, I noticed how those quotes welled up. Posting has its...
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A gardener's year
Looking ahead, I took away (from the hours in a year) the time spent on paid work, commuting, errands, and subsistence. That left about the same number of hours for other activities. This made me think about what falls in the category of “other,” and how, because a job, like school, provides a built-in structure, what falls out of it is “time off,” often unstructured for...
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“The purpose of history is to give the past its place in us.”
– David Wootton, TLS, 24 September 2010, page 17. Part of what motivates self-expression is the desire to place ourselves in some future present. Thus Stendhal, writing one of his memoirs, comments that readers will understand him better in 120 years.
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“Finding our place means working out how to live the predicament of life. Tony...”
– David Wootton, “Formal feelings for history,” a review of Neil MacGregor’s BBC Radio 4 series, A History of the World in 100 Objects, TLS, 24 September 2010, page 17. The quote is shortened.
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“The Watergaw
Ae weet forenicht i’ the yow-trummle
I saw yon antrin...”
– Hugh MacDiarmid “arrived as a fully developed phenomenon, one who both produced and was produced by the language he wrote in, henceforth to be known variously as Synthetic Scots or Vernacular Scots or the Doric. And the first poem of the new language was called ‘The Watergaw.’ The...
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“Norman MacCaig suggested that the anniversary of Hugh MacDiarmid’s death...”
– Heaney, “A Torchlight Procession of One: Hugh MacDiarmid,” Finders Keepers, page 321.
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“Poets’ real biographies are like those of birds: their real data are in...”
– Joseph Brodsky, quoted by Seamus Heaney in “Burn’s Art Speech,” Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001, FSG, 2002, page 378. Frederick Seidel also notes how the formal structure of a poem modifies the poet’s intent.
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Preliminary accounting
Completed in 2010: at work: two monographs; an annual report, three issues of two different periodicals; own work: two polemics; three essays (two new, one newly revised); a sonnet series (“The Beach,” below); an issue of Common Place, a handful of poems for publication; blog entries; other: personal correspondence, poems, and ephemera; a 40-course radiation treatment for cancer...
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End of year
This is the season of taking stock, culminating in the advent of a new year. In a way, my birthday in mid-January also serves this purpose, but it’s in this season that I start to think about the past year and the year ahead. It’s interesting both how much gets done and how little, or how certain things get done and other things don’t. This reflects the patterns of my life, I...
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“The great engines of this world do not run on faithfulness.”
– Salter, “Forgotten Kings,” Burning the Days, page 221, describing the writer Irwin Shaw. This and the quote below are typical of the aphorisms that well up from time to time in this memoir or “recollection.”
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“Nothing is as intense as unconsummated love.”
– James Salter, “The Captain’s Wife,” Burning the Days, Vintage, 1997, page 128.
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Abandoning schedule
Today, recognizing for the millionth time my resistance to the stated schedule of another person, I saw that the idea of a schedule is a remarkable impediment to life’s natural flow. I realize that work, for instance, depends to some degree on formal schedules, but in reality much of that formality is made redundant by the rhythm of the studio (in my case), which moves projects forward...
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“After deciding that shooting himself would be too messy and drowning too...”
– Aljean Harmetz, “Blake Edwards, a Master of Hollywood Comedy and Farce, is dead at 88,” New York Times, 17 December 2010, national edition, page B11.
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“We become who we are by barnacling versions of ourselves around our names and...”
– Terri Apter, “Made new,” a review of Jane Miller, Crazy Age: Thoughts on being old, Virago, 2010, TLS, 17 September 2010, page 30. I like barnacling.
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“The angler’s state of mind: mixtures of hyper-alertness and ease,...”
– Jerome Boyd Maunsell, “Curious Prey,” a review of Luke Jennings, Blood Knots: Of fathers, friendship, and fishing, Atlantic Books, 2010, TLS, 17 September 2010, page 29. The quote is reordered and condensed.
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“Pliny’s “Natural History” had ample room for wonders. Once,...”
– Christopher Kelly, “Sweet preserves,” a review of Michael Gagarin, editor-in-chief, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome, Oxford, 2010, TLS, 17 September 2010, page 23. Kelly explains that Pliny the Elder’s Natural History was one of the first encyclopedias.
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“Having children has made me this particular writer. Without my children,...”
– Erdrich interviewed by Halliday, Paris Review 195, page 152
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“There’s something very wrong in our country. We now see what barely...”
– Louise Erdrich, interviewed by Lisa Halliday, Paris Review 195, Winter 2010, page 165.
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“I appeal to parents: never, never say, “Hurry up,” to a child.”
– Nabokov, “Speak, Memory,” chapter four, from Vladimir Nabokov: Novels and Memoirs 1941-1951, The Library of America, 1996, page 430. Not that this is very practical advice, but I agree with it nonetheless.
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“Would Orwell have believed it possible that the same overfed voices which had...”
– Or now. This question is posed by John Le Carré in his latest novel, Our Kind of Traitor, Viking, 2010, quoted by Sean O’Brien in his review, “Looking-glass lawlessness,” TLS, 17 September 2010, page 21. The answer is provisionally no, “Or if he had, he would have taken to...
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“Wren did not repeat himself once a solution was found and did not look for...”
– John Bold, “Euclid’s House,” a review of Anthony Gerbino and Stephen Johnston, Compass and Rule: Architecture and Mathematical Practice in England, 1500-1750, Yale, 2010, TLS, 17 September 2010, page 13.
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“Good is more potent a force than evil and it is because everything is in the...”
– Juliet du Boulay, quoted by Roger Just in “Earth, water and time,” TLS, 17 September 2010, page 10, a review of Boulay’s Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village, Denise Harvey, 2010. In his book on the enneagram, Facets of Unity, A.H. Almaas writes similarly that one...
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“Rabbi Kalonymos Shapiro of the Warsaw Ghetto preached that if God had failed to...”
– Mark Mazower, “God’s Grief,” Times Literary Supplement, 17 September 2010, page 8. The book cited is Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, Yale, 2010.
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“Get on with your own work: behave as if you were immortal.”
– According to Christopher Hitchens, this was the “best maxim” of Christopher Isherwood, although borrowed from E.M. Forster. It appears in Hitchens’ foreword to Isherwood’s The Sixties: Diaries 1960-1969, Harper, 2010, page x.
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“Such is the artistic deceptiveness of nature’s methods that the thing that...”
– Nabokov to Wilson, December 15, 1940, from Karlinsky (see below), page 37.
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“Without its obscurities and abracadabra, without its pernicious reticences,...”
– Vladimir Nabokov, letter to Edmund Wilson, December 15, 1940, from Simon Karlinsky, ed., Dear Bunny, Dear Volodye: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971, California, 2001, page 36. I particularly like “magnetic trash.”
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Two things written
NYC’s Living Urbanism posted an essay I wrote for its annual compendium (available from magcloud). “Density and Urbanity” asks if modernity itself makes it harder for us to talk meaningfully about density in an urban context. Architect’s Newspaper (CA edition) posted a polemic I wrote against a West Bay development, Saltworks, proposed by smart-growth guru Peter Calthorpe....
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“A place of privacy is central to the autonomy of a letter-writer.”
– Amanda Vickery, commenting on Dena Goodman’s Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters, Cornell, 2009, in the London Review of Books, 4 November 2010, page 36.
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“A friendly letter is a calm and deliberate performance in the cool of leisure,...”
– Samuel Johnson, quoted by Amanda Vickery in “Do Not Scribble,” a review of Susan Whyman, The Pen and the People, Oxford, 2009, and Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters, Cornell, 2009, London Review of Books, 4 November 2010, page 34.
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“One reason children figure so much in Victorian fiction is that they are among...”
– Terry Eagleton, “Nothing Nice about Them,” a review of Christine Alexander, ed., The Brontës, Oxford, 2010, London Review of Books, 4 November 2010, page 31.
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“This idea that intellectuals don’t know how to fuck or have a good time is...”
– Mathieu Amalric, interviewed by Tobias Grey in the Financial Times, 4-5 December 2010, US edition, “Life & Arts,” page 15. (First of two.)
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“Work is like a shelter where you can do all the things you’re not allowed...”
– Amalric, FT, 4-5 Dec. ‘10, US ed., “L&A,” pg. 15. (Shortened from original.)
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“Children may be best placed to judge what they want to get from the sweetshop,...”
– Stefan Collini, “Browne’s Gamble,” London Review of Books, 4 November 2010, page 24, a review of Lord Browne, et al., Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education: An Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance, October 2010. (The Browne report can be...