Entries from May 2009
Here is a site I just discovered but it has been around a while. It no doubt seemed/seems like a really good idea, but
when I watch more than two minutes of any one of these I feel dismayed for all of us and decide once again that
this is a site that is a huge error on everyone’s part. Call me Printist, I guess, but take me back to the written word.
Or on to real theater, tv and movies. Now YouTube itself is fine. It is I guess these split-screen “diavlogs” that
scrape the chalk over my inner blackboard.
Against http://bloggingheads.tv/
Categories: Books · Current Affairs · Movies
So it is with the current generation’s experience of being alone. That is precisely the recognition implicit in the idea of solitude, which is to loneliness what idleness is to boredom. Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. But the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom. If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself. Some degree of boredom and loneliness is to be expected, especially among young people, given the way our human environment has been attenuated. But technology amplifies those tendencies. You could call your schoolmates when I was a teenager, but you couldn’t call them 100 times a day. You could get together with your friends when I was in college, but you couldn’t always get together with them when you wanted to, for the simple reason that you couldn’t always find them. If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation. We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.
And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing “in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures,” “bait[ing our] hooks with darkness.” Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading. The Internet brought text back into a televisual world, but it brought it back on terms dictated by that world — that is, by its remapping of our attention spans. Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity. This is not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it: the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude.
http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i21/21b00601.htm
Wiliiam Deresiewicz “The End of Solitude”
Categories: Books · Current Affairs · spirituality
RAINY THURSDAY may 28
Reading Kira Salak’s new novels The White Mary I came upon a term new to me—Mudita.
The character named Sebastian explains to Marika:
“Buddhists consider mudita a ‘God-like’ state.” . . . It’s supposed to be the single hardest thing for a person to feel for another. Even harder than feeling compassion for an enemy.” . . . “When I’m feeling sincerely glad for others, I’m also feeling it for myself. It comes right back.”
It took a long while for this term to get into my vocab over all these years of reading in the spiritual tracts and beat poetry and buddhist lit. But here it is. And so here is the Wikipedia entry too.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mudita is a Buddhist (Pali and Sanskrit: मुदित) word meaning rejoicing in others’ joy. Mudita is sometimes considered to be the opposite of schadenfreude.
The term mudita is usually translated as “sympathetic” or “altruistic” joy, the pleasure that comes from delighting in other people’s well-being rather than begrudging it. Many Buddhist teachers interpret mudita more broadly as referring to an inner spring of infinite joy that is available to everyone at all times, regardless of circumstances. The more deeply one drinks of this spring, the more secure one becomes in one’s own abundant happiness, and the easier it then becomes to relish the joy of other people as well.
The traditional example of the mind-state of mudita is the attitude of a parent observing a growing child’s accomplishments and successes.
Mudita is also traditionally regarded as the most difficult of the brahmaviharas to cultivate. To show mudita is to celebrate happiness and achievement in others even when we are facing tragedy ourselves.[1]
According to buddhist teacher Ayya Khema showing mudita towards sadistic joy is wrong, there should be compassion instead.
The “far enemies” of mudita are jealousy and envy, two mind-states in obvious opposition. Mudita’s “near enemy,” or quality which superficially resembles mudita but is in fact more subtly in opposition to it, is exhilaration, perceived as a grasping at pleasant experience out of a sense of insufficiency or lack.
Categories: Books · Current Affairs · spirituality
Tagged: Buddhism, Kira Salak, mudita, The White Mary
3
In the reading room of the Merton Archives in Friedsam Memorial Library, a small basement office, one wall is nearly filled with publications on Thomas Merton. This is the primary mission of these archives. The Lax holdings became an offshoot of the Merton scholarly industry. So some shelves have copies of books and some unpublished materials on Lax. One three-drawer file cabinet has correspondence neatly filed and Mr Spaeth showed me my own folder with a few letters I had sent Lax about a year ago. I saw the folder for my friend Rupert Loydell, who has published some Lax chapbooks out of his operation in Exeter, England. Lots of files. Lots of correspondents for a poet who we were told recently in Poets & Writers Magazine “fell off the map.” True and yet not true, depends on which circle of knowledge one has been a member of over the years. Clearly lots of people, a small and select group of New York poets, for one, have known about Lax’s work for years. Richard Kostelanetz for example. You could even say that knowledge of Lax has been spreading wider and wider in the last years of his life.
4
Perhaps the Merton biographies helped most of all to remind a wide audience that Lax was then still alive and writing. I think that is how I first became aware of him. Maybe we were all struck immediately by the pattern that holds these three college friends together. Merton, the painter Ad Reinhardt, and the poet, Lax. Each followed their work in art where it took them and the work of each has a strong “hermetic” quality—the search for silence and solitude. Merton’s writings about the silent life of Trappist monks became most well known. Reinhardt devoted the last ten years of his career to painting extraordinary black paintings, listening as John Berger might put it, to silence’s will-to-be-seen. And Lax’s poems and journals voice the silence of American poetry after World War II from the angle of “exile” in Greece, a silence unlike any other voice in American literature—and yet akin–to Dickinson and Thoreau perhaps. Right in the American grain and groove, the silences of Melville and Ellison, of many perhaps, but Lax’s. An American silence at the start of the age of TV, videos, internet and iphones. A poetry of silence that starts in New York in 1950 and goes through all of the last forty years away from and outside of everything and yet comes from deep within al that we’ve managed to try to cover it over with here on the “mainland” of the cultural continent. Lax heard the silence a few years before Beckett’s tramps would hear it too in their appointment with Godot.
the
world
is
cov
er
‘d
with
waves
of
wa-
ter
Categories: Books · Painting · poetry
Tagged: Beckett, Kostelanetz, Merton, Reinhardt, Robert Lax
Monday May 25 the holiday
Virginia took a Zyrtek last night and it hit her hard. She slept until 1 pm today. And it was the most beautiful day of the year—brilliant, breezy, sunny, and maybe too cool, but not for me. We got to the docks at 3, walked and then split a lobster salad. $15.95 which is not too bad. Not that much lobster but enough. Half price of Perkins Cove a month ago at Barnacle Billy’s. But they were gouging the early April crowd that day when nothing else was open in the Cove.
Most of the day I spent reading and finishing the astonishing novel Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya. I had first heard of it a year ago on the website The Quarterly Conversation. (See below.) I’m glad in that year I’ve read more of Thomas Bernhard and more about Bernhard because in reading Castellanos Moya I can see more clearly how wide and deep Bernhard’s influence has been. Bernhard perfected a narraive style that is hypnotic and compulsive, rhythmic and obsessive, using repetition and certain other ticks and bits of style that contribute greatly to the power of the stories his works involve us in. I think the work of Spanish writer Javier Marîas is deeply indebted to Bernhard and now in this short central American novel I am sure we see how a young writer has taken Bernhard’s work at put it to new uses in creating a novel that witnesses to the horrors of violence and power in Central America is very unique and even funny ways. Moya’s book is grotesque but in a very readable and enjoyable and comfortable way. It is really funny in places. And it slowly and incredibly surely builds into an amazingly intense portrait of the narrator and of what he is involved with by being hired to edit a huge manuscript that is an official report on years of political abuse, terror and genocide against indigenous peoples in Guatemala. Well, in a country like Guatemala, like Salvador, like Honduras, like Nicaragua. Never specified, perhaps, but the truth clearly told. By–as Dickinson suggests–the telling being very slant. Seems grotesque to even say it—but the book is extremely enjoyable as well as totally chilling and horrifying. You put it down rather speechless with the terrors remembered and with admiration for the power of this writer.
SENSELESSNESS BY HORACIO CASTELLANOS MOYA
Review by Scott Bryan Wilson
Senselessness, Horacio Castellanos Moya (Katherine Silver, trans.) New Directions. 160pp, $15.95.
Senselessness is the first novel by Honduras-born Horacio Castellanos Moya to be translated into English, and though it’s quite slim, it’s a stunner. Hired by the Catholic church to copyedit an 1,100-page report which details (with gruesome exactitude) military massacres against the indigenous peoples of an unnamed Central American country, the novel’s never-named narrator is swiftly seduced by what he sees as the poetry of the testimonies, as the first line of the novel is the first line of the manuscript that leaves him dumbstruck: “I am not complete in the mind.”
Categories: Blogroll · Books · Fiction · Travel · history
Tagged: Horacio Castellanos Moya, Quarterly Conversation, Thomas Bernhard
SEARCHING FOR ROBERT LAX
TWICE have I visited Archives of Robert Lax materials. Neither time did I know exactly what I was looking for. Both times I was also looking at the work of a painter. In some way Lax has been a poet who leads me to an shows me how to look at certain paintings. There’s more to it than this, I suppose, but this is the beginning.
Early in the summer 1997 I drove out to Buffalo, NY and to Olean, about an hours drive southwest of Buffalo. That is where Lax was born and grew up. At St Bonaventure University there is a growing collection of Lax manuscripts. I spent an afternoon looking through some of them. The next two days in Buffalo I visited the Albright-Knox Gallery, intent on seeing the painting of Clifford Still. This is one of the few places in the world where his work is exhibited. The paintings shown in the dedicated gallery rotate from year to year. This time there were nine paintings on view.
be
gin
by
be
ing
pa
tient
(Thing 30)
IN the Lax archives, after talking with the director, Paul Spaeth, about Lax and about the holdings at St Bonaventure’s, I tried to figure out what to do, how to look.
2. There are about ten or twenty videos people have made over the past twenty years, interviews with Lax and with people close to him at different stages of his career. I looked at some of them just to see him talking with people at his house on Patmos and to see some of the people who have known him—William Packard, longtime editor of New York Quarterly, and Emil Antonucci who helped publish him. This was interesting for a while. But it was not much of what I was looking for, even though I still didn’t know what that was. I wasn’t trying to do biographical research. I had no clearly focused or key question. Spaeth showed me some of the boxes of recently arrived materials and that was interesting in the sense that Yes there were notebooks after notebooks—a lifetime now, of notebooks—with each page marked in some way, sometimes with words or half poems or jottings, other times with squiggles or doodles or drawings, other times just with brief marks, sometimes with none. Notebooks. Mostly cheap school type notebooks, spiral or stitched with a thin cloth spine. Sheaves of papers. Some typed. Some long–european size. Some small. Piles of papers of all sorts. Now boxed in archival quality boxes. All lined up on library storage shelves in a room that felt a bit like a large walk-in safe.
Categories: Books · Travel · poetry
Tagged: archives, NY, Olean, Robert Lax, St Bonaventure
“THE ONE WAY OF TOLERATING EXISTENCE IS TO LOSE ONESELF IN LITERATURE AS IN A PERPETUAL ORGY.”
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
“When would he learn not to plunge into the labyrinths of an opinion when he had not the slightest idea of how he was to emerge?”
Murphy
JOAN DIDION
“Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”
“On Keeping a Notebook”
http://ringsofgrain.blogspot.com/
Categories: Books
Tagged: Beckett, Blake, Didion, Flaubert
Somehow our current meltdown is about our own sense of dismay that our Public Relations approach to everything really does give us hollow “victories” at every turn.
Categories: Blogroll · Books · Current Affairs · history · poetry
