entries in an online commonplace book – Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Gleanings

A couple of birds and a few commonplace entries . . .

“My Aunt Maria asked me to read the life of Dr. Chalmers, which however I did not promise to do. Yesterday, Sunday, she was heard through the partition shouting to my Aunt Jane, who is deaf, ‘Think of it! He stood half an hour to-day to hear the frogs croak, and he wouldn’t read the life of Chalmers.’ ” —Henry D. Thoreau, journal, 28 March 1853

“I simply could not have endured the touch of their stupid, kind, sympathetic fingers on my private soul.” —Gwen Raverat, Period Piece

“And there is a great difference whether the tortoise gathers himself within his shell hurt or unhurt.” —Francis Bacon to Essex, March 1599, quoted in R. Waldo Emerson, journal, May 1822

“Marriage is not only time; it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time.” —Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“One hour of a scholar lying on his bed but meditating on his knowledge is more valuable than the worship of a devout person for seventy years.” —Ahmad Baba, quoted in Andrew Hui, The Study

“We have lived enough for others; let us live at least this remaining bit of life for ourselves.” —Montaigne, “Of Solitude”

“They [entities, possibly from outer space, conjured by a mushroom trip] told me to trust myself. ‘Observe and report,’ they kept repeating, and all would be good; it was my mission in life.” —Emily Witt, Health and Safety

“History will continually grow less interesting as the world grows better.” —Emerson, journal, January–February 1823 (age 19, so don’t be too hard on him)

“Brougham’s review is not in good taste; he should have put on an air of serious concern, not raillery and ridicule; things are too serious for that. But it is very able. It is long yet vigorous like the penis of a jackass.” —Sydney Smith to Francis Jeffrey, 26 December 1809, quoted in James Schuyler to Harry Mathews, 28 February 1971

“—in reading it I felt [ms. torn] the [ms. torn] of that Species, not inclin’d to part [ms. torn]” —Sydney Smith to Henry Brougham, December 1809, commenting on the same review and extending the metaphor

Real and unreal

Further entries in an online commonplace book

“The good or ill accidents of life are very little at our disposal; but we are pretty much masters what books we shall read, what diversions we shall partake of, and what company we shall keep.” —David Hume, “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion”

“He moves like he’s being yelled at by invisible people whom he hates but whom he basically agrees with.” —Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

Social media for thee but not for me.

“I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.” —Alice Munro, “Miles City, Montana”

“It is said that Balzac on his deathbed inquired anxiously after the health and prosperity of characters he had created.” —John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

“I believe one reason why Americans look so careworn is because they all feel so intensely the responsibility of governing the country.” —Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, journal, 27 December 1857

“A sort of alter-egotism in the book was unavoidable.” —F. L. Olmsted, A Journey through Texas

“It is pleasant to embark on a voyage, if only for a short river excursion, the boat to be your home for the day, especially if it is neat and dry. A sort of moving studio it becomes, you can carry so many things with you. It is almost as if you put oars out at your windows and moved your house along.” —Henry D. Thoreau, journal, 31 August 1852

“What person, for example, could possibly be so comforting as one’s bed?” —Barbara Pym, Crampton Hodnet

“And you know how it is with charm—the more you distrust it the more it excites you.” —Thom Gunn to Douglas Chambers, 18 May 2001

“History was mysterious, the remembrance of things unknown, in a way burdensome, in a way a sensuous experience. It uplifted and depressed, why he did not know, except that it excited his thoughts more than he thought good for him. This kind of excitement was all right up to a point, perfect maybe for a creative artist, but less so for a critic. A critic, he thought, should live on beans.” —Bernard Malamud, “The Last Mohican”

One of the very few advantages of having a brain like mine is that when you’re listening to the Allegro of the Divertimento #3 in F major, you notice that Mozart is borrowing a melody from Cheap Trick.

“One never knows, Craft, whether what happens to one is, in the final analysis, good or bad.”
“Usually it’s bad,” replied the other coldly as he went up to the looking-glass and adjusted the knot of his white tie.

—Eça de Queiroz, The Maias

“The body grows weaker, but gazing at the mountains remains the same.” —Eliot Weinberger, The Life of Tu Fu

“In film, tricks win over truth. They provide the variations, the dimension and depth.” —Jean Cocteau, Diary of a Film

“After talking with Uncle Charles the other night about the worthies of the country, Webster and the rest, as usual, considering who were geniuses and who not, I showed him up to bed, and when I had got into bed myself, I heard his chamber door opened, after eleven o’clock, and he called out, in an earnest, stentorian voice, loud enough to wake the whole house, ‘Henry! was John Quincy Adams a genius?’ ‘No, I think not,’ was my reply. ‘Well, I didn’t think he was,’ answered he.” —Thoreau, journal, 1 January 1853 (N.B.: Uncle Charles had found the vein of graphite that became the basis for the family’s pencil-making business)

Readings

“Some products of the eighties are immortal, I realized the other night, while I was listening to the Pet Shop Boys and thinking about Raymond Carver’s short story ‘Careful.’ ” Here’s my essay for the Paris Review’s Redux newsletter about Carver and PSB, in case you haven’t seen it yet. The link here is kind of makeshift, and I suspect it will only work this week, so go for it now, if you’re interested.

“You need a human to check that the AI is being fed the right type of data and maybe another human who checks its work before passing it to another AI that writes a report, which goes to another human, and so on. ‘AI doesn’t replace work,’ he said. ‘But it does change how work is organized.’ ” —Josh Dzieza on AI in New York magazine

“I arrived here on Friday night from London. I’m staying at the Hotel Artist for $30 a night. Most of the plugs don’t work, so I can’t put my apple juice in the refrigerator. There’s a stool by the window with an ashtray. The shower isn’t bad. The room could use a desk, and the wifi from the router in the hall a floor down is spotty.” —Christian Lorentzen checks in from Tirana, where he has briefly settled as he “walks the earth”

“H. P. Severson (1921) tells of a nest that was placed on a trolley wire; ‘cars passed under this nest every few minutes, their trolley being only a few inches below it. On each occasion the Robin stood up, then settled back on the nest.’ ” —Winsor Marrett Tyler, “Eastern Robin,” in A. C. Bent, Life Histories of North American Thrushes (1949)

“It’s an impressive feat, in its way, to write novels spanning four decades in which style and characterization remain entirely stagnant.” —Claire Lowdon on Richard Ford in The TLS, taking no hostages

“Each written thing a response to a particular stimulus. That may be why you think you’ll never write anything else—because you finished responding to that particular stimulus.” —Lydia Davis, “Selections from Journal, 1996,” in the Paris Review

“Laurence Tribe, the Harvard professor, put an even finer point on it: ‘This wasn’t something that had an organic development in the law. It was, frankly, something that was pulled out of somebody’s butt, because they thought it was a convenient way to fulfill a short-term partisan agenda.’ ” —Andrew Marantz in The New Yorker on the Independent State Legislature Theory, which is the idea that state legislatures can award their Presidential electors to whoever they want, regardless of how their constituents voted

“An engineer at the dam describes a situation so chaotic they didn’t even know if the site of the command center was safe from flooding if the dam failed.” —Christopher Cox in the New York Times Magazine on whether California’s dams are ready for a storm as big as one the state had in 1862

Off center

“The Ellipse Maker,” a new short story of mine, is in the spring 2023 issue n+1magazine. Check it out! Subscribe! If you’re within striking distance of Brooklyn, there’s a reading/party for the issue at the n+1 office on Tuesday, May 16, 7pm.

Also, I sort of did a free-standing handstand for Insta.

More entries in an online commonplace book

“The difference between the artists’ work is like the difference between a grand aristocratic portrait and a psychologically nuanced character sketch. Audubon gets the dress and regalia right, and his birds project a powerful, self-fashioning sense of their own presence and importance. Brasher’s birds live contentedly in their own world and don’t need to perform or impress the viewer.” —Philip Kennicott on Rex Brasher in WaPo

“Writing had always been slow and agonising—she called it ‘the most loathsome of all activities’—but that was before the decline in her health made it all but impossible. Perhaps she also disliked the implied finality of ‘collected works.’ She took her friend’s copy of the book, picked up a pencil and added a word to the cover. It was now The Collected Works of Dead Jane Bowles.” —Joe Dunthorne on Jane Bowles in the LRB

“Where the mainsail should have been, four rigid sails stuck straight up into the air, like window blinds turned vertically; each one had the shape of an airfoil and generated forward thrust. They also allowed him to carve the wind with more control than a cloth sail would allow: instead of turning the entire boat at an angle to catch the wind, by either tacking or jibing, Walker could simply spin a crank, and the wings above his head would swivel into a configuration that would drive the boat forward, sideways, or even in reverse.” —Pagan Kennedy in the New Yorker on the possible return of the Age of Sail

“As a writer, while his recurring subject is himself—he continues to probe his self-doubts and proclivities, always finding some new angle from which to contemplate the vagaries of his own thought process—he somehow keeps himself at a distance, an object of detached contemplation in a world of other objects, other bodies. His self-disclosure provides a relief from the burden of self.” —Geoffrey O’Brien on Joe Brainard in the NYRB

Marginalia

“To see a painting or a statue, he thought, and then to look out of the window, is to see how fresh and richer life itself is. He had read this a few weeks before in the volume of a German philosopher, and because Ezekiel had always felt so, the sentence had significance.” —Charles Reznikoff, By the Waters of Manhattan

Does anyone know which German philosopher Reznikoff’s hero was reading? I had the impression that the idea in question was originated by Muriel Spark, but Reznikoff’s novel was published in 1930, so this can’t be Spark in German drag. I bought (from Better Read than Dead) and read By the Waters of Manhattan because, shallow person that I am, I thought the cover of the paperback, by Amy Drevenstedt, was gorgeous, and as usual, my superficiality was rewarded. It’s a solid page-turner. The first two-thirds is about a Jewish woman growing up in eastern Europe in a family full of idealistic and often hapless men. The second is about her son starting a bookstore on the Lower East Side and venturing into a somewhat amoral romance with one of his customers.

“Haven’t smoked for three days. Busy night and day not smoking. Already I can climb stairs better but that’s not much of a life. With smoking one has a life while dying. How did the Greeks ever run a whole culture without it? Maybe that’s why there was so much homosexuality.” —Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary

“Car horns serve the same purpose as birdsong—to warn away rivals, or to express annoyance.” —Sparrow, The Princeton Diary

This isn’t quite the case, of course, or anyway not exclusively—birds also use song for courtship, spooking prey, begging, and staying findable to mates and colleagues—but I lolled. I wrote a post about Sparrow’s previous novel, Abraham, a couple of years ago, and so far the new one is also very quotable (“Princeton is what New Jersey would be like without the mafia.”)

Years ago, soon after I landed my first real job, as a senior (sc. junior) editor at Lingua Franca, I bought a set of the old Houghton Mifflin / Riverside Press edition of Thoreau’s journals, which happened to have belonged to the late critic Alfred Kazin. I had read “in” Thoreau’s journals a fair amount in grad school, and I read “in” them some more when I did a Thoreau-related review soon after buying the set, but it was only last year that I sat down with the intention of reading them through. Having started birdwatching myself makes it more plausible, somehow. Sometimes I cross-check with the new Princeton edition, which I have many but not all volumes of, but I seem to prefer the old Riverside Press edition for actual reading, just as I seem to prefer the more-edited editions of John Clare. It turns out I’m not a purist and appreciate punctuation. Adding to the pleasure of the copy of Thoreau’s journal that I have are Kazin’s copious pencil annotations. I particularly liked this one, of Thoreau’s entry for October 14, 1851:

Me, too, by the way.

“She had no ambition to write a good book, but was painfully anxious to write a book that critics should say was good.” —Trollope, The Way We Live Now