"Whitman also influenced Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, and was the model for the character of Dracula.
Stoker said in his notes that Dracula represented the quintessential
male which, to Stoker, was Whitman, with whom he corresponded until
Whitman's death."
whitman : stoker :: tom cruise : anne rice? oh dear. where is this headed as far as our literary search for the quintessential male?
David Lynch reports on the weather.
Los Angeles: 1. Your city: 0.
“I am a different person with everyone I know. I would never have met the Jolivet I am with Jonquille had she not created him. This is strange. I have had to find it out for myself. No one has ever explained so clear and obvious a truth about people and identity to me.
Jonquille’s Jolivet was a surprise to me. Michel’s Jolivet a delight. I like Michel’s Jolivet as much as Jonquille’s Jolivet. I like Victor’s Jolivet, a splendid person I could not otherwise have been, Maman’s Jolivet, an uncertain but confident son, and Papa’s affectionate Jolivet.
Marc Aurel’s Jolivet is an imaginary and improbable character I have never met, called into intermittent being by Marc Aurel. In Trombone’s presence I do not exist. With Tullio I have the feeling that I represent somebody Tullio mistakenly thinks is there by happy error.
Liking, then, is not only of the person liked, but of the unique and otherwise absent person the other develops in us, releases in us, creates of us. A friend is an engendering. We love those who make us lovable. A friend is the friend a friend finds and brings out in another.”
(Guy Davenport, from “On Some Lines of Virgil”, pp. 187–188 in Eclogues.) via dan.
“ ‘Thank heavens it’s all over now.’
‘What is?’
‘My youth. It took too long and got in my way.’
‘In your way Mr Thirst? How do you mean?’
‘It went on for so long,’ said Thirst. ‘I had about thirty years of it. You know what I mean. Experiment, experiment, experiment. And now . . .’
‘Ah!’ whispered someone.’ ”
(Mervyn Peake, Titus Alone, p. 837 in the Overlook edition of The Gormenghast Novels.) via dan.
http://barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com/
... after he favorited your photo.
phew! pretty heavy punditry for a friday morning.
a fabulous harper's article by jonathan lethem: a manifesto on the protection of cultural commons, the increasingly slippery definitions of plagiarism, and why mickey mouse belongs to the people.
an excerpt:
The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through with zones of utter commerce yet remains gloriously immune to any overall commodification. The closest resemblance is to the commons of a language: altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user. That a language is a commons doesn't mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole.
...
Artists and writers—and our advocates, our guilds and agents—too often subscribe to implicit claims of originality that do injury to these truths. And we too often, as hucksters and bean counters in the tiny enterprises of our selves, act to spite the gift portion of our privileged roles. People live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift. If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more than advertisements for themselves. We may console ourselves that our lust for subsidiary rights in virtual perpetuity is some heroic counter to rapacious corporate interests. But the truth is that with artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were nourished in the first place, and whose existence as the ultimate repository of our offerings makes the work worth doing in the first place.
(and his opening quote)
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. —John Donne
and, regarding our documentary, annie on the litigious elvis presley estate: "elvis built upon musicians that came before him. his songs were not original — there were several existing versions of hounddog — and he borrowed from gospel and blues and black music. but now, when artists, etc, want to borrow from Elvis —it's a whole 'nother story."
from sunday's this american life:
david rakoff on xacto knives, industrial grade adhesives, and his crafting fervor:
“on some level, me giving someone something i've made is almost the equivalent of your fitness nut friend coming into your living room, dropping and giving you 25, and then shouting HAPPY BIRTHDAY! who’s really gotten the gift in a transaction like that? you tell me.”
on a related note, if you're really nice to me i'll run my next marathon (big sur in april!) for your birthday.
first disclosure: i was inspired to write this post when i realized how accurately i could refashion its title(s) from miranda july's new book (and it's good!: characters sculpted with carver's inescapable banality, chekov's allegorical incisiveness, and a whimsical integrity that is all july). a slight reappropriation of its title tersely sums up some themes that have been coming up in conversation / that i've been thinking about on some recent long runs in cambridge and jamaica plain (JP).
second disclosure: i've spent the past week or so housesitting for my parents (in JP) — yes, that one on the hill in which i grew up. a cool late summer respite (quiet and amazing cross-winds through the house), i've gotten some good work done, mined the fridge's cheeses and fancy condiments, hung w the cats, consumed the arriving periodicals, watered the garden. yes, it's been nice. but, you know, i'm 28, and i've been sleeping in my parents' bed.
third disclosure: as alternately prosaic and overly dramatic as the forthcoming exerpt may be, i sort of really relate:
"Our sensitivity to our surroundings can be traced back to a troubling feature of human psychology: to the way we harbour within us many different selves, not all of which feel equally like 'us,' so much so that in certain moods, we can complain of having come adrift from what we judge to be our true selves.
Unfortunately, the self we miss at such moments, the elusively authentic, creative and spontaneous side of our character, is not ours to summon at will. Our access to it is, to a humbling extent, determined by the places we happen to be in, by the colour of the bricks, the height of the ceilings and the layout of the streets. In a house strangled by three motorways, or in a wasteland of rundown tower blocks, our optimism and sense of purpose are liable to drain away, like water from a punctured container. We may start to forget that we ever had ambitions or reasons to feel spirited and hopeful.
We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need–but are at constant risk of forgetting we need–within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.
In turn, those places with an outlook which matches and legitimates our own, we tend to honour with the term 'home.' Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
Our love of home is in turn an acknowledgement of the degree to which our identity is not self-determined. We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us."
– Alain de Botton The Architecture of Happiness
i haven't read the whole book yet, but i'm planning to (in conjunction w jane jacobs, which i've sadly short-stopped several times in the past year). i suspect de botton's psychology-strung-on-scaffolding is more than a little less precise, but hopefully still rigorous enough to be meaningful ("IT'S NOT A SELF-HELP BOOK!!!!" — emma and me, in unison, to a skeptical tom).
anyway. ok, sure. on some sort of sliding scale, our sense of self and capabilities is influenced by our environment. when we are in dark places we feel obscured; when in light places, there's a clarity (literally and figuratively, if you will?). whether within our control or not, we need a home, defined by places, familiar or not, and objects, accumulated or otherwise. and this phenomenon leads to all sort of things, that deny or cede: asceticism? hermetism? rampant aquisitions and superficial padding? and dear peregrine emma, what about your perpetual gypsy-ism? maybe after a little self-help reading exacting literary reflection you'll finally be able to settle down in paris? or maybe you'll realize you never want to?
anyone belongs here more than me
i confess an envy of you people (hi sarah!) who can consistently glean de botton's "home" assets (in places in which you can't even convey "home" in the local language) from gestures as simple as putting your books on a new shelf, frying up a first meal on a rusty stove, exterminating a welcoming swarm of ravenous insects. or, if you can't, it's ok. but, how is it ok? fine, cut the therapy. if you've got "home" tablets in there amongst your mefloquine, give' em up.
it took me a shockingly long time to feel comfortable when i moved to italy; sharply disarming moments of consummate disorientation left me reeling w a loneliness so severe i couldn't speak. i love you rome! i love your colors, your mushrooms, your hills, your high fashion and hand gestures! so what was up? ... learning the language helped, working alot helped, shoe-shopping helped (alot). hmm. i got past it, but was frustrated i couldn't manage it earlier. *
no belongs here more than me
empathizing w de botton's analysis, i've been caught w one outstanding point: the idea of owning spaces/homes, and why we're sometimes compelled to figuratively do so. case in point: i recently received an email from my current roommate, jeff, in which he invited some of our friends to a party at "his" apartment: to revel, etc, and meet his "new" roommates.
umm, hi! what?
a) i've lived there for, oh, two years.
b) no one is on a lease.
c) and, yeah, i have the largest room in the apartment (if a higher monthly check legitimates me as an equal real estate partner?).
nb: i wasn't offended at all; jeff and i have a great rapport, spend a bit of time together, etc. but i realized that jeff, having lived in the apartment for a bit longer than the other two occupants, sees himself as the patriarch of the place. it's "his," and i'm "new." (as i populate the kitchen vase w flowers, i consider the apartment "mine.")
a second case in point: having lived so close to JP for so long, i've visited alot in the past several years, during which it's seen a dramatic influx of students and post-college types (mostly hipsters of the DIY clothing and haircut variety. as harry once quipped when we lived there, "why do they all look like they've just fallen out of trees?"). i like them. but, walking amidst them, i've often groused "what? you're like me but you didn't grow up here! and i did! you don't belong here! i know this place! this is my home!" but then i see them chatting w friends to admire their fixed gear bikes, and i think "oh wait. they've got their people here. ... do i? maybe i don't belong here anymore ... ?" ... then i go on my familiar 8 mile high-incline JP run (tough for the fixed gear) and i feel validated again. pounding the pavement reliably gives me a sense of belonging anywhere.
back to de botton. so, he's asserting that a space is given an identity by its inhabitant (occupant, interloper, itinerant busker, etc), in which case a place (building, country, brick stoop, etc) can only assume the affectionate role of "home" if a person deems it so. logical enough. so, do we feel proprietary ownership over a space that we call "home" because it's such an intimate term, one that we don't like to share w others? a spacial reappropriation of the ridiculous adolescent "BFF" ownership? or maybe it's an issue of pronouns: when "my" home becomes "our" home, "you" and "i" become "us". or is it simply perspective? or history? and how to distinguish history from intimacy?
my friends, basta! i hope you're not far from home. lights out.
* that said, when i next move to italy, i'll be sure to make shoe-shopping the first order of business.
"first you will want to know how i got to china idaho. the answer to that is very simple. i took a boat. a boat is the smartest way to get to china idaho. you can be stupid and try to walk to china idaho but it will take you a long time to get there and probably you would get tired along the way. so i took a boat ..."
excerpt from dan's new work. it's marvelous so far!
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