Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Rabbit, Run

they all run along together like sticks in a stream 22

But he is going eat, the worst direction 24

He doesn't drive five miles before this road begins to feel like a part of the same trap. 24

Laws aren't ghost in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them. 25

"The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there" 26

all this phony business, this twentieth-century vitamin racket 27

The farther he drives the more he feels some great confused system...reaching for him 29

31 out of america

he sees the map whole, a net, all those red lines and blue lines and stars, a net her is somewhere caught in 33

He wishes he had a cigarette, to help him decide what his instinct is 34

He feels the faded night he left behind in this place as a net of telephone calls and hasty trips, trail of tears and strings of words...faded but still existent... 37

his appetite's innocent gusto 55

"Of course, all vagrant think they're on a quest. At least at first. 110

His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. 170

Right and wrong aren't dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. 240

Funny, how what makes you move is so simple and the field you must move in is so crowded...He feels his inside as very real suddenly, a pure blank space in the middle of a dense net...Its smallness fills him like a vastness. 264

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Ginsberg

now you're really in the total animal soup of time 2581

the neon fruit supermarket 2584

gnarled steel roots of tress of machinery 2585

nothing stainless

the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty / with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotive in its eye

soon-to-be-toothless mouth

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!

the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos—all these / entangled in your mummied roots—and you there standing before me in / the sunset, all your glory in your form!

when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old / locomotive  2586

The method must be purest meat / and symbolic dressing...A naked lunch is natural to us / we eat reality sandwiches. / But allegories are so much lettuce. / Don't hid the madness. 2588

Jameson

materials they no longer simply 'quote' as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance.  (seems wrong to me)

I have rather meant to offer a periodizing hypothesis, and that at a moment in which the very conception of historical periodization has come to seem most problematical indeed.

it seems to me essential to grasp postmodernism not as a style but rather as a cultural dominant

aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production general.

(modernism is read as a depth model, hermeneutics)

depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces

there is no longer a self present to do the feeling

Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse...Pastiche is thus blank parody.

the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion

libidinal historicism...complacent eclecticism 18

approached the 'past' through stylistic connotation, conveying 'pastness'

it is organized systematically and formally to short-circuit an older type of social and historical interpretation which it perpetually holds out and withdraws. 23

the vivid perception of radical difference is in and of itself a new mode of rasping what used to be called relationship: something of which the word collage is still only a very feeble name 31

a degraded attempt...to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system. 38

My implication is that we ourselves, the human subject who happen into this new space, have no kept pace with that evolution...an imperative to grow new organs 38-9

catastrophe and progress all together 47 (on capital)

we must go on to affirm that the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imaged in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm 48

forms of cultural resistance and guerrilla warfare but also even overly political interventions...are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system 49

peculiar new forms of realism...mimesis of reality 49

the new political art...will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism...the world space of multinational capital...global cognitive mapping 54

Eliot

"Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. it cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor" (1582)

"This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.

You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered...

the confused cries of the newspaper critics (1583)

The emotion of art is impersonal.

And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

"Signs are taken for wonders. 'We would see a sign!' / The word within a word, unable to speak a word, / swaddled with darkness."

"This: were we led all that way for / Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, / We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, / But had thought they were different; this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us. like Death, our death, / We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, / But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensations, / With an alien people clutching their gods. / I should be glad of another death"

"Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable."

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; / Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is"

"To be conscious is not to be in time"

"Will the sunflower turn to us"

"Words move, music moves / Only in time; but that which is only living / Can only die. Words, after speech, reach / Into the silence. ONly by the form, the oattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness"

Pound

"Who bears the brunt of our America / And try to wrench her impulse into art"

"Had not one style from birth, but tried and pried / And stretched and tampered with the media"

" I am old enough now to make friends. / It was you that broke the new wood, / Now is a time for carving, / We have one sap and one root— / Let there be commerce between us.

"In a half savage country, out of date"

"The age demanded an image / Of its accelerated grimace, / Something for the modern stage, / Not, at any rate, an Attic grace" (Hugh Selwyn Mauberley - II)

"All things are a flowing, / Sage Heracleitus says; / But a tawdry cheapness / Shall outlas out days"

"There died a myriad, / And of the best, among them, / For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization"

"Poetry, her border of ideas, / The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending / With other strata / Where the lower and higher have ending"

"Siftings on siftings in oblivion, / Till change hath broken down / All things save Beauty alone"

Cantos: The Odyssey - the speaking dead

anti usury

"1. Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective"
"2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation"

Long Day's Journey into Night All

More stage direction. Not comedy or tragedy, just a thing.

"all the volumes have the look of having been read and reread" (1611)

"But the actor shows in all his unconscious habits of speech, movement and gesture. These have the quality of belonging to a studied technique" (1611).

"his habitual expression of cynicism it gives his countenance a Mephistophelian cast" (1614)

"Forget everything and face nothing! It's a convenient philosophy (1615)

"Yes, that's right, she did stop to listen outside his room...It was her being in the spare room that scared me. I couldn't help remembering that when she starts sleeping alone in there, it has always been a sign—" (1622) Always reading each other.

"If there was only some place I could go to get away for a day, or even an afternoon, some woman friend I could talk to—not about anything serious, simply laugh and gossip and forget for awhile" (1626) Stifled womanhood

"He doesn't understand a home. He doesn't feel at home in it. And yet, he want a home" (1632).

"Here's how" (1634) drinking. performative speech?

"In a real home one is never lonely" (1637)

Increasingly detached mother - characters that have to splinter

"I've never missed a performance in my life. That's the proof" (1641)

"If you're that far gone into the past already, when it's only the beginning of the afternoon, what will you be tonight?" (1642) compare to Death of a Salesman

"You mustn't remember! You mustn't humiliate me so!" (1643)

"The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too" (1643)

Dead baby 1643, compare to Woolf

1647 - hiding in herself, away from the others the audience

"So maimed and crippled! You would think they'd been through some horrible accident" (1650)

"And he was handsomer than my wildest dream, in his make-up and his nobleman's costume that was so becoming to him. He was different from all ordinary men, like someone from another world" (1651)

"I don't remember!...Can't you forget—?...I'm sorry I remembered out loud" (1655)

"I can tell when you're acting!" (1659)

"Enough is not as good as a feast" (1662)

"The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can't see this house. You'd never know it was here...to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself....The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost" (1663)

"We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let's drink up and forget it" (1663)

"We don't seem able to avoid unpleasant topics, do we?" (1666)

"The hardest thing to take is the blank wall she builds around her. Or it's more like a bank of fog in which she hides and loses hereself...It's as if, in spite of loving us, she hated us!" (1667)

"It's not true the way you look at it!" (1669)

"What the hell was t I wanted to buy, I wonder, that was worth—" (1672)

"For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason! It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish" (1674)

"I shall give the art of acting back to the performing seal, which are its most perfect expression" (1677)

1667 Roads

"I love you more than I hate you. My saying what I'm telling you now proves it. I run the ish you'll hate me—and you're all I've got left" (1686) audience, art

"Seal are intelligent and honest. They don't put up any bluffs about the Art of Acting. They admit they're just hams earning their daily fish" (1682)

"I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time" (1685) see also Isn't it pretty to think so.

The Grapes of Wrath All

Modernist form in the relation between the nameless mass experience and the individual narrative. The two interact and effect each other.

"all passive but armed with appliances of activity, still, but each possessed of the anlage of movement" (14) movement is inherent in them, the initial motive moment of force

"And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of the hated the mathematics that drove them...the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling...machines and masters all at the same time" (32).

"those creature don't breathe air, don't eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money" (32)

"When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size" (32).

"Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not paper with numbers on it" (33).

"The bank isn't like a man...only made of me...the bank is something else than men...Men made it, but they can't control it" (33).

"Who can we shoot? I don't aim to starve to death before I kill the man that's starving me" (38).

"Maybe the thing isn't men at all. maybe, like you said, the property's doing it" (38).

"ol' graveyard ghos'" (52)

"it's a thing that started way the hell an' gone back, an' nobody seems to be able to stop her, an' nobody got sense enough to change her. He says for God's sake don't read about her because he says for one thing you'll jus' get messed up worse, an' for another you won't have no respect for the guys that work the gover'ments" (55).

"And some day—the armies of bitterness will all be going the same way" (88)

"Gonna cuss an' swear an' hear the poetry of folks talkin'. All that's holy, all that's what I didn' understan'. All them things is the good things" (94)

"The people too were changed in the evening, quieted. They seemed to be a part of an organization of the unconscious" (99).

"She tool a letter from an envelope and dropped the trinkets in the envelope...and laid the box gently among the coals" (108).

"Well, California's a big State. / It ain't that big. The whole United States ain't that big. It ain't that big. It ain't big enough. There ain't room enough for you an' me, for your kind an' my kind, for rich and poor together all in one country, for thieves and honest men...Ever hear of the border patro on the California line?...Well, try to get some freedom to do. Fella says you're jus' as free as you got jack to pay for it" (120).

"He had become the soul of the car" (123).

"Seems to me we don't never come to nothin'. Always on the way. Always goin' and goin'...They's movement now. People moving. We know why, an' we know how. Movin' 'cause they got to" (128).

"You ain't askin' nothin'; you're jus' singin' a kinda song" (128).

"The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution...Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here 'I lost my land' is cahnged; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate—'We lost our land.' The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one" (151).

"For the quality of owning freezes you forever into 'I,' and cuts you off forever from the 'we.' (152)

"the highway became their home and movement their medium of expression" (163)

"Every night relationships that make a world, established; and every morning the world torn down like a circus. / At first the families were timid in the building and tumbling worlds, but gradually the technique of building worlds became their technique" (194)

Of CA: "She's a nice country. But she was stole a long time ago" (205).

"ever'thing in California is owned...they ain't even nice to each other...Got a million acres an' scairt of dyin'...Guess he's crazy. Mus' be crazy...He looks crazy. Crazy an' mean" (207).

221: Dehumanizing

"repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed" (238)

"Thy're scairt we'll organize, I guess. An' maybe they're right. This here camp is a organization. People there look out for theirselves. Got the nicest strang band in these parts. Got a little charge account in the store for folks that's hungry" (297).

321 Human made inhuman

"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success" The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, ad the ripe fruit. And child dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food much rot, must be forced to rot" (349).

"You don' know what you're a-doin'." (386) the crucial destructive violence of the book, people killing each other without knowing why, without specificity.

The speech: 419

"They wored jerkily, like machines" (441)

"There ain't no baby. They never was no baby. We was wrong" (446)

Breast feeding: 455