Monday, October 18, 2010

a writing desk

Jane Austen's desk

:image

"You fold the dish towel. You remind me of someone who walks backwards, sweeping away his footsteps. You go up to your room and close the door. Yesterday I stood and listened. What did I think I would hear? The scratching of a pen?" excerpt: Great House

Illustration by André Da Loba

Great House

Dov had wished to become a writer, but the father, in an outraged protest against literature’s elective affinity with suffering, squashed the ambition. “Who do you think you are? I asked. The hero of your own existence?”

"To call it a desk is to say too little. The word conjures some homely, unassuming article of work or domesticity, a selfless and practical object that is always poised to offer up its back for its owner to make use of, and which, when not in use, occupies its allotted space with humility. ... This desk was something else entirely. An enormous, foreboding thing that bore down on the occupants of the room it inhabited, pretending to be inanimate but, like a venus fly trap, ready to pounce on them and digest them via one of its many little terrible drawers. Perhaps you think I'm making a caricature of it. I don't blame you. You'd have to have seen the desk with your own eyes to understand that what I'm telling you is perfectly accurate." Nicole Krauss

:NY Times, : npr

1 comment:

simon said...: Nice desk for sure. I wrote a friend a letter by hand some time back. It was so difficult; October 19, 2010 at 3:15 PM

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“Wherever
his hand has lain there is
a tiny purple blemish. Each part
is a blossom under his touch
to which the fibres of her being
stem one by one, each to its end,
until the whole field is a
white desire, empty, a single stem,
a cluster, flower by flower,
a pious wish to whiteness gone over—
or nothing.”

—	Queen-Anne’s-Lace, William Carlos Williams (via sketchofthepast)

Then there was someone else I met,

whose face and voice I can’t forget,

and the memory of her

is like a jail I’m trapped inside,

or maybe she is something I just use

to hold my real life at a distance.

Happiness, Joe says, is a wild red flower

plucked from a river of lava

and held aloft on a tightrope

strung between two scrawny trees

above a canyon

in a manic-depressive windstorm.

Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it—,

And when you do, you will keep looking for it

everywhere, for years,

while right behind you,

the footprints you are leaving

will look like notes

falling

Damiel;

It's great to live by the spirit, to testify day by day for eternity, only what's spiritual in people's minds. But sometimes I'm fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above I'd like to feel a weight grow in me to end the infinity and to tie me to earth. I'd like, at each step, each gust of wind, to be able to say "Now." Now and now" and no longer "forever" and "for eternity." To sit at an empty place at a card table and be greeted, even by a nod. Every time we participated, it was a pretense. Wrestling with one, allowing a hip to be put out in pretense, catching a fish in pretense, in pretense sitting at tables, drinking and eating in pretense. Having lambs roasted and wine served in the tents out there in the desert, only in pretense. No, I don't have to beget a child or plant a tree but it would be rather nice coming home after a long day to feed the cat, like Philip Marlowe, to have a fever and blackended fingers from the newspaper, to be excited not only by the mind but, at last, by a meal, by the line of a neck by an ear. To lie! Through one's teeth. As you're walking, to feel your bones moving along. At last to guess, instead of always knowing. To be able to say "ah" and "oh" and "hey" instead of "yea" and "amen."

Catherine Hessling, La fille de l’eau, Jean Renoir, 1924.

secretfragileskies

Monday, October 18, 2010

a writing desk

Jane Austen's desk

:image

"You fold the dish towel. You remind me of someone who walks backwards, sweeping away his footsteps. You go up to your room and close the door. Yesterday I stood and listened. What did I think I would hear? The scratching of a pen?" excerpt: Great House

Dov had wished to become a writer, but the father, in an outraged protest against literature’s elective affinity with suffering, squashed the ambition. “Who do you think you are? I asked. The hero of your own existence?”

:NY Times, : npr

1 comment:

august

an altered space

“The world is airtight
yet held together
by what it does not house,
by the vanished. They are everywhere.”

Dead men make such convenient Heroes

falling

secretfragileskies

Monday, October 18, 2010

a writing desk

Jane Austen's desk

:image

"You fold the dish towel. You remind me of someone who walks backwards, sweeping away his footsteps. You go up to your room and close the door. Yesterday I stood and listened. What did I think I would hear? The scratching of a pen?" excerpt: Great House

Dov had wished to become a writer, but the father, in an outraged protest against literature’s elective affinity with suffering, squashed the ambition. “Who do you think you are? I asked. The hero of your own existence?”

:NY Times, : npr

1 comment:

august

an altered space

“The world is airtight yet held together by what it does not house, by the vanished. They are everywhere.”

Dead men make such convenient Heroes

falling

“The world is airtight
yet held together
by what it does not house,
by the vanished. They are everywhere.”