Today

 

“I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.”  Demian

Reading Not Reading

I had been happily reading some library books mostly about the fur trade and the indigenous peoples of the Canadian West, a topic of abiding interest to me. I have described the origins of this interest here.

https://thatsjustthewildwood.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-beaver.html

However the world as too much with me, and my concentration not all it should be at present so I returned them. I will borrow then again. I am holding on to library books on the history of the Madan and the history of the Anishinaabeg peoples for better days.

So instead I reread a couple of novels by my beloved Andre Norton and have set my sights on reading Johnson's "Preface to Shakespeare". I have been watching a youtube series on reading the classics by a young man using the "name" Drunzo" and want to make the reading a few classics part of my routine, with definite goals.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC72a8QL142vdH3s6Dn3NVRA

Helen and I discovered a youtube series on the history of Godzilla, and we follow each episode by watching, in my case, often rewatching the movie.

https://www.youtube.com/c/BigActionBill

I leave you with one of my favourite quotes and a photo from this summer at the cabin.

"I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours
of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres,
meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns
taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia,
Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and such like;
which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many
men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights;
peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarums. A vast confusion
of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws,
proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our
ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole
catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions,
schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now
come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments,
jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels,
sports, plays ; then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons,
cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals,
burials, deaths of princes, new discoveries, expeditions, now comical,
then tragical matters. Today we hear of new lords and officers created,
to-morrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours
conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another
breaketh; he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then
again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs,
weeps, &c. Thus I daily hear, and such like, both private and public
news, amidst the gallantry and misery of the world"


from Anatomy of Melancholy
by Robert Burton

Perhaps

"Perhaps there is a Golden Age someplace, a Renaissance  

for me sometime, a special time somewhere, somewhere 

but a ticket, a vista, a diary page away."

from This Moment of Storm

by Roger Zelazny

Books, Reading, Beauty, Summer Bird, Great Crested Flycatcher

“I try to write,” says Rachel Blau Duplessis in The Blue Studio, “so that if a single shard were rescued in the aftermath of some historical disaster, that one shard would be so touching and lucid as to give the future an idea of who we were.”

Where I found it, in this beautiful year end essay on books by Shawna Lemay's at Transaction with Beauty.

http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/bibliobalm

The old house

"And who over the ruins of his life pursued its fleeting, fluttering significance, while he suffered its seeming meaninglessness and lived its seeming madness, and who hoped in secret at the last turn of the labyrinth of Chaos for revelation and God’s presence?"

Hesse, Hermann. Steppenwolf 

“I tend to be rather inconsequential and trail off.” 

Edward Gorey

For the libraries they cannot touch.

A photo taken this morning of one of the many 

free libraries in our neighbourhood.

"One summer night several months later, a violent thunderstorm swept through the city, scaring all the dogs and burning up the sky in what looked like almost continuous threads of mad lightning. Her father used to call such storms real rock and rollers, and this one certainly was. The phrase and the memory of her father saying it was the last thing she thought of before falling asleep while the storm rocked and rolled the night world outside her window."

from Played Your Eyes
by Jonathan Carroll

full story here

https://www.tor.com/2018/04/04/played-your-eyes-jonathan-carroll/#more-351052

Saturday High Tea

We went to high tea today in our old stomping grounds of Kensington. We were married in the park there. We found a new (to us) shop selling Japanese pottery, clothing and paper products. It will merit a closer look. We also paid an expensive visit to Pages Bookstore, but we do like to support independent bookstores. (Great Stuff)

Turnips are turnips, and prunes are prunes.

Whether eaten with forks, or eaten with spoons.

            ADDEE GORRWY, 'THE POST CARD POETESS'

The Patron Saint of Undisturbed Reading Time

"and somebody would come and knock 

on this air long 

after I have gone 

and there in front of me a life 

would open"

from A Door

by W.S. Merwin

I think our trip to Venice was the greatest vacation we ever took, the Galapagos may be close. But for visual memory, the Venice trip is still fresh enough, that the photos that can be found on the Venezia blog brings it all back.

As a man with an absurd number of books the photo below struck a real chord.

http://veneziablog.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-patron-saint-of-undisturbed-reading_15.html

An awakening came. What a wonderfully complex thing! this simple seeming unity — the self! Who can trace its reintegration as morning after morning we awaken, the flux and confluence of its countless factors interweaving, rebuilding, the dim first stirrings of the soul, the growth and synthesis of the unconscious to the subconscious, the sub-conscious to dawning consciousness, until at last we recognise ourselves again. And as it happens to most of us after the night’s sleep, so it was with Graham at the end of his vast slumber. A dim cloud of sensation taking shape, a cloudy dreariness, and he found himself vaguely somewhere, recumbent, faint, but alive. The pilgrimage towards a personal being seemed to traverse vast gulfs, to occupy epochs. Gigantic dreams that were terrible realities at the time, left vague perplexing memories, strange creatures, strange scenery, as if from another planet. There was a distinct impression, too, of a momentous conversation, of a name — he could not tell what name — that was subsequently to recur, of some queer long-forgotten sensation of vein and muscle, of a feeling of vast hopeless effort, the effort of a man near drowning in darkness.

from The Sleeper Wakes
 by H. G. Wells

" An obsession is a pleasure that has attained the status of an idea"

Balzac (Cousin Pons)

Quoted in Packing my Library, Alberto Manguel

Thinking about the memoir

 After the death of the poet Donald Hall I arranged to borrow several books of his essays from the library. Most essays are memoirs of his early experiences collected from the point of view of a man obviously getting on in years. While I enjoyed his essays on other poets I began to find the memoirs less engaging. It is not surprising that many people find memory alluring as they age. It's what they have in abundance. As the Wendell Berry character stated in the quote below, " I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time." But what I am seeing is that too often I remember negative experiences. And even if the memories are good I have realized that I need to focus more on experiencing new things, the positives in life. Which seems simplistic, but many things we take an unconscionable amount of time to learn, in retrospect, are. So I have decided memory in moderation, and instead I will focus more on reading my many books, posting to my websites, working on my hobbies and connecting with family and friends. Which means these posts, which have gotten fairly perfunctory over the years will probably get longer. (Sorry)

The quote below is from a post on my Jagged Orbit  website, regarding the purchase of the magazine pictured above. It also deals with the subject of memory and aging. 

the full blog entry is here:

http://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/search/label/Edgar%20Rice%20Burroughs

"I have to admit this purchase was rooted very much in nostalgia or perhaps immaturity if you like. I have lately found the rise of irrationalism worldwide troubling and some days the world seems unrecognizable. As I get older my reading and collecting helps keep me mentally active, engaged and grounded. The process of aging has been beautifully described by Wendell Berry in his novel (a favourite of mine) Jayber Crow.

 "Back there at the beginning, as I see it now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same returns forever.
     And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time." (24)
I try very hard to avoid wallowing in memories of the past, and make sure that I read new and diverse works and authors, but I, like Edward St Ives, cannot resist the occasional winged T-Rex." 

"The stories you remember feel like mirrors,

And rereading them like leafing through your life at a certain age,

As though the years were pages."

from A Private Singularity

by John Koethe

full poem available here

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/57386/a-private-singularity

“There were no lions any more. There had been lions once. Sometimes in the shimmer of the heat on the plains the motion of their running still flickered on the dry wind — tawny, great, and quickly gone. Sometimes the honey-colored moon shivered to the silence of a ghost-roar on the rising air.” 

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

by Russell Hoban

URSULA K. LE GUIN Passes Monday January 22, 2018 (Age 88)

"What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do each morning. waking?"

from The Lathe of Heaven

Yesterday my wife mentioned that Ursula K.Le Guin had passed away, we read and enjoyed her science fiction and many years ago took the opportunity to attend a talk she gave in Calgary. She was a thoughtful and compassionate voice within the libertarian sea infesting much of science fiction. I hope to post a discussion of my favourite of her novels, The Lathe of Heaven on my science fiction site, I will post a link when it is completed a later this week.

https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.ca/2018/02/what-will-creature-made-all-of-seadrift.html

Helen supplied to this link to a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation with Le Guin by John Freeman which appeared on The Literary Hub.

My Last Conversation with Ursula K. Le Guin
// Literary Hub

"These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveller must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."

from The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

“It doesn’t do to read too much,’ Widmerpool said. ‘

You get to look at life with a false perspective. By 

all means have some familiarity with the standard authors. 

I should never raise any objection to that. But it is no good 

clogging your mind with a lot of trash from modern novels.” 

from A Question of Upbringing

by Anthony Powell

Books

"The stories you remember feel like mirrors,

And rereading them like leafing through your life at a certain age,

As though the years were pages."

from A Private Singularity

by John Koethe

"APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding 

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing 

Memory and desire, stirring 

Dull roots with spring rain. 

Winter kept us warm, covering 

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding 

A little life with dried tubers."

from The Waste Land

 T.S. Eliot

This weekend we curtailed our planned

activities as there was snow in the forecast,

while it did snow Saturday it melted as fast 

as it fell and today is lovely. However I was 

able  to get some more work done in the 

basement and while the majority of the books

 remain to be shelved I found some that I greeted

as old friends and others unread that I have 

yet to meet.

"When will I be most myself?

I remember what my father told me.

In my sleep it's never winter.

He was just past fifty then."

  from Something About The Trees

      Linda Pastan

“Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, 

We fell them down and turn them into paper,

That we may record our emptiness.” 

Kahlil Gibran

Sand and Foam?

We have been alternating here between the hopeful signs 

of spring and the return of winter. Helen and I have managed

to finish a long delayed project and converted one room in 

the basement into a library for some mysteries, science fiction,

my Darwin/biology books and the bulk of my poetry collection.

two more libraries and a wood working shop to go.

 

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"

from The Summer Day

by Mary Oliver

I have not blogged for some time and the winter ice and cold  has limited my 

taking photographs. A few weeks ago I came across some cards based on 

Nick Bantocks's Griffin & Sabine Trilogy. If you have not read it it is the story

 of a couple who have never meet exchanging cards and letters when they

 discover they have a "magical connection" They basically tell each other 

the story of their  lives and then begin to share the stories of their current 

travels. The stories are accompanied by postcards, letters and stamps with 

striking images. I have to admit I liked the third book the least when an 

antagonist was introduced and a more conventional plot was introduced. 

I preferred just hearing their personal histories and the narratives of their 

travels.  I had not been rereading them  long before I began to sense a 

connection, at least for me to the works of W.G. Sebald and I reread my 

copy of Austerlitz, his works largely avoid conventional plot, consisting 

instead of personal histories, chance encounters, descriptions of places seen 

while traveling or snippets from his reading and he includes B&W photos 

in the books.

Both authors dealt with personal history, art, conversation, descriptions, 

memory and I think convey a sense of what I, at least, feel in the internal 

mental dialogue we conduct with ourselves.

For my quotes I have chosen one from Sebald's Austerlitz about how the things

 that comprise our mental landscape will fade with time and the second a quote 

by the astronomer Martin Rees about how much our memories mean in the great 
scheme of things.

“...the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as 

I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly 

lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as 

it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects 

which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never 

described or passed on.” 

Austerlitz

"Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans 

who watch the sun's demise, 6bn years from now. Any creatures that then exist 

will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.” 

Martin J. Rees