Jeremy

I’ve come to find comfort in a reading of history, less cynical than it seems on its face, that admits that human beings have always been a mess and its only every so often that we’ve managed to muster up any real progress instead of just inventing more efficient ways of being (and making each other) miserable. I guess it reminds me that there have always been and will always be challenges and tragedies, that events are terrifying when they’re bearing down on you, and that some people rise to their times and some don’t, but most simply endure them with whatever grace they can. This helps me to worry less about the direction things are headed and be more aware of right here and right now, which, regardless of what happens, is the only place I’ll ever actually be and thus the only time I can ever actually act.

Finished “Cosmicomics” by Italo Calvino (again) / “Labrynths” by Jorge Luis Borges (again) / “Grant” by Ron Chernow / “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas” by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis / “At Swim-Two-Birds” by Flann O’Brien (again) / “Ghosts” by Cesar Aira / “The Shape of the Ruins” by Juan Gabriel Vasquez / “Secondhand Time” by Svetlana Alexievitch / “The Devils Dance” by Hamid Ismailov / “Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa / “Self Portrait with a Russian Piano” by Wolf Wondratschek / “Lakota America” by Pekka Hämäläinen / “The Last Days of Louisiana Red” by Ishmael Reed / currently reading “Hurricane Season” by Fernanda Melchor / and “PrairyErth” by William Least Heat-Moon

Today I learned that Link Wray—a Shawnee (warning: rabbit hole) who was born to sidewalk preachers (another rabbit hole) in Dunn, NC in 1929, remembers hiding from the Klan as a child, and died in Copenhagen in 2005 (ok they’re all rabbit holes)—wrote “Rumble” live on The Milt Grant Show when asked to imitate “The Stroll” by The Diamonds, thus establishing the power chord foundation of punk rock and hard rock. Amazing. Thanks Wikipedia!

Finished “A Brief History of Portable Literature” by Enrique Vila-Matas / “A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush” by Eric Newby / “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez (again) / “The Anarchist who Shared My Name” by Pablo Martín Sánchez / “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino (again) / “The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo” by Bernal Diaz del Castillo / “Not One Day” by Anne F. Garréta / “Seiobo There Below” by László Krasznahorkai (again) / “Kafka on the Shore” by Haruki Murakami (again) / currently reading “Cosmicomics” by Italo Calvino (again) / “Secondhand Time” by Svetlana Alexievitch / “Labrynths” by Jorge Luis Borges (again) / “Grant” by Ron Chernow / “The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa / and “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas” by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis.

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Finished “El Mysterio Nadal” by A. B. / “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy / “Harbart” by Nabarun Battacharya / “Tropic of Orange” by Karen Tei Yamashita / “I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe me” by Juan Pablo Villalobos / “Dhalgren” by Samuel R. Delany / “The Savage Detectives” by Roberto Bolaño (again) / “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” by John le Carré / “The Imagined Land” by Eduardo Berti / “One Hundred Twenty-One Days” by Michèle Audin / “Soviet Texts” by Dmitri Prigov / “The Story of My Teeth” by Valeria Luiselli (again) / and “The General and His Labyrinth” by Gabriel García Márquez / currently reading “Grant” by Ron Chernow / “A Brief History of Portable Literature” by Enrique Vila-Matas / “A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush” by Eric Newby / and “The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa

Pierre’s insanity consisted in the fact that he did not wait, as before, for personal reasons, which he called people’s merits, in order to love them, but love overflowed his heart, and, loving people without reason, he discovered the unquestionable reasons for which it was worth loving them.

-Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Part Four, Chapter XIX (I bet that reads badass in the Russian)

A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.

Bertrand Russel, The Conquest of Happiness, 1930, as mentioned in this Aeon article.

Finished “Abel and Cain” by Gregor von Rezzori / “The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land” by Thomas Asbridge / “Gingerbread” by Helen Oyeyemi / “Congo” by David van Reybrouck / “Inherent Vice” by Thomas Pynchon (again) / “I Hotel” by Karen Tei Yamashita / “The Invented Part” by Rodrigo Fresán / been filling empty time rereading “Seiobo There Below” by Lazlo Krasznahorkai / currently reading “El Mysterio Nadal” by A. B. / “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy (for #tolstoytogether) / and “The History of Herodotus” as well Lapham’s Quarterly.

It don’t look like a lot, but it’s thousands and thousands of pages worth, not counting all the reading I do for work.

Heres an excerpt from a fascinating speech by Republican Senator Charles Sumner in 1872, deriding President Ulysses S Grant for being “first in war, first in nepotism” during his first term. Grant of course won re-election anyway, with a pro-Grant newspaper accusing Sumner of crawling “bedaubed and bedraggled in the slime of our curbstone politics,” demonstrating once again that there’s nothing new under the sun, and that among the more notable changes over the last 150 years is the impoverishment of the vocabulary used by American politicians and propaganda.

I found these portraits in the attic of the house my wife just inherited, under four inches of blown cellulose insulation, wrapped in brittle newspapers dated 1965. The gentleman pictured, Éteinne Jambon, once owned the land on both sides of our street here in Golden Meadow, Louisiana (long story, another time perhaps). He is said to have been washed into the gulf during the 1893 Chenier Caminada hurricane, where a ship bound for New Orleans found him floating on a roof (of course, he spoke only French). Once he got to New Orleans he managed to pantomime and improvise and hitch and hustle his way all the way back down the bayou, where he discovered that he was the only member of his family who survived. Every Jambon from Golden Meadow today is thus related to this man. Not sure exactly who the woman is yet. We’ve given these to our neighbor, of course, being as how she’s a Jambon.

I love the heavy way it rains in South Louisiana. The air gets so thick and wet that it collapses into a thunderstorm, but the drops don’t land with the exhausted plop common to inland thunderstorms. In any season, the rain descends from the sky insistently. It’s overbearing at times. It demands attention; defy it dry and you’ll be soaking wet in ten seconds, easy. In a neighborhood of metal roofs, the roar can seem deafening, but then it will crescendo as water accumulates on the street like snow. There’s always water everywhere anyway. In any season it makes me thankful for shelter, three feet off the ground, where I’m damp, but in a broader sense, dry. Coastal swamp rain.

The whole usefulness of education consists only in the memory of it, for just as having heard something does not profit one who cannot understand, likewise having understood is not valuable to one who either will not or cannot remember.

Hugh of Saint-Victor, Chronicle (c. 1130)

Why, yes, I did get a new Lapham’s Quarterly in the mail earlier this week: “Memory.” Having a ball.