Bill Marrs
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Bill Marrs" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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06:11 pm
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Swinton on Jarman
"That the example you set us is as simple as a logo to sell a sports shoe; less chat, more action, less fiscal reports, more films, less paralysis, more process. Less deference. More dignity. Less money. More work. Less rules. More examples. Less dependence. More love."
This is a quote I liked by Tilda Swinton about Derek Jarman from the end of a documentary film she did about him (titled "Derek").
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08:38 pm
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Excerpts from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.
-- from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
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10:53 am
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Excerpts from A Confederacy of Dunces
She offered Patrolman Mancuso a torn and oily cake box that looked as if it had been subjected to unusual abuse during someone's attempt to take all of the doughnuts at once At the bottom of the box Patrolman Mancuso found two withered pieces of doughnut out of which, judging by their moist edges, the jelly had been sucked.
"Thank you anyway, Miss Reilly. I had me a big lunch."
Then there were the noises that he had grown accustomed to over the years whenever his mother was preparing to leave the house: the plop of a hairbrush falling into the toilet bowl, the sound of a box of powder hitting the floor, the sudden exclamations of confusion and chaos.
"Oh," Ignatius said calmly and paused to chew on the tip of the hot dog that was sticking from his mouth like a cigar butt. "So that's who that obvious appendage of officialdom was. He looked like an arm of the bureaucracy. You can always tell employees of the government by the total vacancy which occupies the space where most other people have faces."
"That's even worse. Only degenerates go touring. Personally, I have been out of the city only once. By the way, have I ever told you about that particular pilgrimage to Baton Rouge? Outside the city limits there are many horrors."
"No. I don't wanna hear about it.
"Well, too bad for you. You might have gained some valuable insights from the traumatic tale of that trip. However, I am glad that you do not want to hear of it. The psychological and symbolic subtleties of the journey probably wouldn't be comprehended by a Paradise Vendor mentality. Fortunately, I've written it all down, and at some time in the future, the more alert among the reading public will benefit from my account of that abysmal sojourn into the swamps to the inner station of the ultimate horror."
At last I crossed Canal Street, pretending to ignore the attention paid me by all whom I passed. The narrow streets of the Quarter awaited me. A vagrant petitioned for a hot dog. I waved him away and strode forth. Unfortunately, my feet could not keep pace with my soul. Below my ankles, the tissues were crying for rest and comfort, so I placed the wagon at the curb and seated myself. The balconies of the old buildings hung over my head like dark branches in an allegorical forest of evil. Symbolically, a Desire bus hurtled past me, its diesel exhaust almost strangling me.
-- excerpts from A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
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06:06 pm
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Great Gatsby
He smiled understandingly--much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
( more... )
-- excerpts from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
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05:41 pm
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Gogol's Cloak
But Akakiy Akakievitch saw in all things the clean, even strokes of his written lines; and only when a horse thrust his nose, from some unknown quarter, over his shoulder, and sent a whole gust of wind down his neck from his nostrils, did he observe that he was not in the middle of a page, but in the middle of the street.
"Ah! I—to you, Petrovitch, this—" It must be known that Akakiy Akakievitch expressed himself chiefly by prepositions, adverbs, and scraps of phrases which had no meaning whatever. If the matter was a very difficult one, he had a habit of never completing his sentences; so that frequently, having begun a phrase with the words, "This, in fact, is quite—" he forgot to go on, thinking that he had already finished it.
-- excerpts from The Cloak by Nikolai Gogol
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08:42 am
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Tom Sawyer
And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement.
Then they began to lay their plans. Joe was for being a hermit, and living on crusts in a remote cave, and dying, some time, of cold and want and grief; but after listening to Tom, he conceded that there were some conspicuous advantages about a life of crime, and so he consented to be a pirate.
The moment he was gone, she ran to a closet and got out the ruin of a jacket which Tom had gone pirating in. Then she stopped, with it in her hand, and said to herself: "No, I don't dare. Poor boy, I reckon he's lied about it -- but it's a blessed, blessed lie, there's such a comfort come from it. I hope the Lord -- I know the Lord will forgive him, because it was such good-heartedness in him to tell it. But I don't want to find out it's a lie. I won't look."
"It is horrid, but I better, Becky; they might hear us, you know," and he shouted again. The "might" was even a chillier horror than the ghostly laughter, it so confessed a perishing hope. The children stood still and listened; but there was no result.
"Now less fetch the guns and things," said Huck. "No, Huck -- leave them there. They're just the tricks to have when we go to robbing. We'll keep them there all the time, and we'll hold our orgies there, too. It's an awful snug place for orgies." "What orgies?" "I dono. But robbers always have orgies, and of course we've got to have them, too.
-- excerpts from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
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06:28 pm
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Great God Pan
Villiers, that woman, if I can call her woman, corrupted my soul. The night of the wedding I found myself sitting in her bedroom in the hotel, listening to her talk. She was sitting up in bed, and I listened to her as she spoke in her beautiful voice, spoke of things which even now I would not dare whisper in the blackest night, though I stood in the midst of a wilderness.
The two men sat silent by the fireside; Clarke secretly congratulating himself on having successfully kept up the character of advocate of the commonplace, and Villiers wrapped in his gloomy fancies.
"No, it was more physical than mental. It was as if I were inhaling at every breath some deadly fume, which seemed to penetrate to every nerve and bone and sinew of my body. I felt racked from head to foot, my eyes began to grow dim; it was like the entrance of death."
And I forgot, as I have just said, that when the house of life is thus thrown open, there may enter in that for which we have no name, and human flesh may become the veil of a horror one dare not express. I played with energies which I did not understand, you have seen the ending of it.
-- excerpts from The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen
( some comments )
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08:05 am
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ovine unsurprisedness at my perfidy
She was still young then, they both were, my father and mother, younger certainly than I am now. How strange a thing that is to think of. Everybody seems to be younger than I am, even the dead.
Life, authentic life, is suppose to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, the will butting its blunt head against the world's wall, suchlike, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness.
If her sense of herself were tainted, by doubt or feelings of foolishness or of lack of perspicacity, my reguard for her would itself be tainted. So there must be no confrontations, no brutal enlightenments, no telling of terrible truths. I might shake her by the shoulders until her bones rattled, I might throw her to the ground in disgust, bit I must not tell her that I loved her mother before I loved her, that she smelled of stale biscuits, or that Joe from the Field had remarked the green tinge of her teeth.
No, what unsettled me was the expression of acceptance in his glance, the ovine unsurprisedness at my perfidy. I had an urge to hurry after him and put a hand on his shoulder, not so that I might apologise or try to excuse myself for helping to humiliate him, but to make him look at me again, or, rather, to make him withdraw that other look, to negate it, to wipe the record of it from his eye.
I recall walking in the street with Anna one day after all her hair had fallen out and she spotted passing by on the opposite pavement a woman who was also bald. I do not know if Anna caught me catching the look they exchanged, the two of them, blank-eyed and at the same time sharp, sly, complicit. In all the endless twelvemonth of her illness I do not think I ever felt more distant from her than I did at that moment, elbowed aside by the sorority of the afflicted.
She was the fairground mirror in which all my distortions would be made straight. "Why not be yourself?" she would say to me in our early days together--be, mark you, not know--pitying my fumbling attempts to grasp the great world. Be yourself! Meaning, of course, Be anyone you like. That was the pact we made, that we would relieve each other of the burden of being the people whom everyone else told us we were.
-- excerpts from The Sea by John Banville
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08:50 pm
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brains without their concomitant physical structure
After what he had told, I could scarcely imagine what profounder secrets he was saving for the morrow; but at last it developed that his trip to Yuggoth and beyond - and my own possible participation in it - was to be the next day’s topic. He must have been amused by the start of horror I gave at hearing a cosmic voyage on my part proposed, for his head wabbled violently when I showed my fear. Subsequently he spoke very gently of how human beings might accomplish - and several times had accomplished - the seemingly impossible flight across the interstellar void. It seemed that complete human bodies did not indeed make the trip, but that the prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill of the Outer Ones had found a way to convey human brains without their concomitant physical structure.
There was a harmless way to extract a brain, and a way to keep the organic residue alive during its absence. The bare, compact cerebral matter was then immersed in an occasionally replenished fluid within an ether-tight cylinder of a metal mined in Yuggoth, certain electrodes reaching through and connecting at will with elaborate instruments capable of duplicating the three vital faculties of sight, hearing, and speech. For the winged fungus-beings to carry the brain-cylinders intact through space was an easy matter. Then, on every planet covered by their civilisation, they would find plenty of adjustable faculty-instruments capable of being connected with the encased brains; so that after a little fitting these travelling intelligences could be given a full sensory and articulate life - albeit a bodiless and mechanical one - at each stage of their journeying through and beyond the space-time continuum. It was as simple as carrying a phonograph record about and playing it wherever a phonograph of corresponding make exists. Of its success there could be no question. Akeley was not afraid. Had it not been brilliantly accomplished again and again?
Excerpt from "The Whisper in Darkness" by H.P. Lovecraft.
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03:43 pm
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The Day of the Locust
He got out of bed in sections, like a poorly made automaton, and carried his hands into the bathroom. He turned on the cold water. When the basin was full, he plunged his hands in up to the wrists. They lay quietly on the bottom like a pair of strange aquatic animals. When they were thoroughly chilled and began to crawl about, he lifted them out and hid them in a towel.
But he couldn't let well enough alone. He was impatient and began to prod at his sadness, hoping to make it acute and so still more pleasant. He had been getting pamphlets in the mail from a travel bureau and he thought of the trips he would never take. Mexico was only a few hundred miles away. Boats left daily for Hawaii.
His sadness turned to anguish before he knew it and became sour. He was miserable again. He began to cry.
Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears. When they finish, they feel better. But to those without hope, like Homer, whose anguish is basic and permanent, no good comes from crying. Nothing changes for them. They usually know this, but still can't help crying.
None of them really heard her. They were all too busy watching her smile, laugh, shiver, whisper, grow indignant, cross and uncross her legs, stick her tongue out, widen and narrow her eyes, toss her head so that her platinum hair splashed against the red plush of the chair back. The strange thing about her gestures and expressions was that they didn't really illustrate what she was saying. They were almost pure. It was as though her body recognized how foolish her words were and tried to excite her hearers into being uncritical. It worked that night; no one even thought of laughing at her. The only move they made was to narrow their circle about her.
-- excerpts from The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
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10:16 pm
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Californication, letter from father
To my son, the writer. Something I never said too much -- I love you. My father never said it much either and I thought I'd be different but I guess I'm not. I tried, but somewhere along the line, you slip back into what you know, and I'm sorry about that. And I'm sorry we haven't talked in a while, because I miss you. You're a good kid and a funny kid. And, you're my only son. I said I never read your books, but I lied. I read 'em all. I just didn't know how to talk about them with you. I didn't like the fathers in them. I know you writers take liberties, but I was afraid that maybe you didn't take any at all. But -- that's the thing, boys become men and men become husbands and fathers. And we do the best we can. You're doing the best you can. You've done good. Your books will be in libraries long after we're both gone. And that is important. More important is how you treat your family. I wasn't a perfect husband, but I loved your mother, and I'm glad we spent our lives together. And I'm here if you need me. That's all I wanted to say. Love, your old man.
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06:53 pm
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The Road
People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides. Others would come to help them. Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. What had they done? He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.
Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.
There is no God and we are his prophets.
By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarkable as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.
-- excerpts from The Road by Cormac McCarthy
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07:20 pm
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Waiting
Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. Together, they had appeared at the courthouse in Wujia Town many times, but she always changed her mind at the last moment when the judge asked if she would accept a divorce.
"You've been shilly-shallying and made yourself miserable. I've handled hundreds of men for many years. I know your type. You're always afraid that people will call you a bad man. You strive to have a good heart. But what is a heart? Just a chunk of flesh that a dog can eat. Your problem originates in your own character, and you must first change yourself. Who said 'Character is fate'?"
His mind shifted from the holidays to love, which perplexed him more because he had never spent a day with a woman he loved wholeheartedly--no, there had not been such a woman in his life and that emotion had been alien to him. Yet one thing he was certain about now: between love and peace of mind he would choose the latter. He would prefer a peaceful home. What was better than a place where you could sit down comfortably, read a book, and have a good meal and an unbroken sleep?
-- excerpts from Waiting by Ha Jin
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08:30 am
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Rant
Buster didn't never get me pregnant, but he gave me rabies plenty often. First time, standing under the mistletoe at the school Christmas pageant, fifth grade. One kiss, me wearing my red velvet jumper with underneath it a white blouse, standing in the middle of the front row onstage, and singing, "Oh Holy Night," singing notes sweet as any angel, my hair blond as angel hair in curls going halfway down my back, me the picture of sweetness--and I had rabies.
Come Christmas, foreign folks have a tradition of baking a cake with a itty-bitty Baby Jesus hid inside. Folks say the person who finds the Christ child will be special blessed in the next year. Just a little plastic baby-doll toy. But Irene Casey used to fold into her batter as much scoops of Baby Jesus as she did flour and sugar. Put a Christ child in every bite. Could be she only wanted more folks to feel lucky, but it never looked right, folks burping up whole packs and litters of naked pink plastic Saviours.
As we left the dinner party, Sarah and I felt so far behind the curve. Here we were considering a child of our own, and we'd never even tried anal. We'd never even discussed a three-way.
-- excerpts from Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk
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09:53 pm
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Being Dead
She knew her eyelids were a little heavy and her eyebrows rather too defined. Her skin was oily, which sometimes gave her face a lively shine but mostly was a curse, as it accounted for the blemished chin where teenage acne had left its purpled stain, Her springy hair was getting duller by the month. She even had to snap out a few white strands. But now, a little desperate and aided by what her railway-carriage lover had described as her 'dizzy' face, she could return their stares. Celice was reasonably contented with her so-so looks at last.
A woman bends to kiss her husband for the final time. Despite the warnings of the morgue attendant—sweet-breathed or not—she puts a little weight upon his chest, and is rewarded with the stench of every meal she's cooked for him in forty years.
Love songs transcend, transport, because there's such a thing as love. But hymns and prayers have feeble tunes because there are no gods.
The dunes could have disposed of Joseph and Celice themselves. They didn't need help. The earth is practiced in the craft of burial. It gathers round. It embraces and adopts the dead. Joseph and Celice would have turned to landscape, given time. Their bodies would have been just something extra dead in a landscape already sculpted out of death. They would become nothing special. Gulls die. And so do flies and crabs. So do the seals. Even stars must decompose, disrupt, and blister on the sky. Everything was born to go. The universe has learned to cope with death.
-- excerpts from Being Dead by Jim Crace
( some comments )
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09:18 am
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The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
From that frightful smell and that uncanny noise Willett's attention could no longer be diverted. Both were plainer and more hideous in the great pillared hall than anywhere else, and carried a vague impression of being far below, even in this dark nether world of subterrene mystery. Before trying any of the black archways for steps leading further down, the doctor cast his beam of light about the stone-flagged floor. It was very loosely paved, and at irregular intervals there would occur a slab curiously pierced by small holes in no definite arrangement, while at one point there lay a very long ladder carelessly flung down. To this ladder, singularly enough, appeared to cling a particularly large amount of the frightful odour which encompassed everything. As he walked slowly about it suddenly occurred to Willett that both the noise and the odour seemed strongest above the oddly pierced slabs, as if they might be crude trap-doors leading down to some still deeper region of horror. Kneeling by one, he worked at it with his hands, and found that with extreme difficulty he could budge it. At his touch the moaning beneath ascended to a louder key, and only with vast trepidation did he persevere in the lifting of the heavy stone. A stench unnameable now rose up from below, and the doctor's head reeled dizzily as he laid back the slab and turned his torch upon the exposed square yard of gaping blackness.
-- excerpt from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H.P. Lovecraft
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03:45 pm
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Prometheus Rising Notes
As I mentioned in an early post (made shortly after Robert Anton Wilson died), I recently reread Prometheus Rising. The book is a very accessible presentation of Timothy Leary's 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness. I read it when I was about 19. Reading it again, 20 years later was pretty interesting. The book continues to mean a lot to me.
Here are some quotes:
Of course, preaching itself is bad second circuit politics, since it puts you one-up on the person preached-at. You are not one-up unless imprinted as such by being a "boss" or other authority figure. The counter-culture of the 1960s, like many other idealistic movements, failed because it did so much preaching from a morally one-up position when nobody had been imprinted or conditioned to accept it as one-up.
Circuit 3, unchecked, is like a cocaine monologue. You can't remember anything, because everything changes too fast. This is profoundly disorienting to the average domesticated primate, so tribal moralists keep stability and tranquility by acting as decelerators.
Since everybody "prefers" one circuit over the others, there are people in each society who are recognizable as Narcissists (first circuit robots), Emotionalists (second circuit robots), Rationalists (third circuit robots), and Moralists (fourth circuit robots).
In general, fourth circuit problems take the form of guilt; "I cannot do what I'm suppose to do." Third circuit problems take the form of perplexity; "I cannot understand how I got into this mess, or how to get out of it, or what is expected of me," etc. Second circuit problems take the form of bullying or cowardice: "I will force them or I will surrender and let them force me." First circuit problems take the form of body symptoms: "I feel rotten all over" gradually centering in, under enough stress, on one acute disabling symptom.
( Plus some additional, personal notes of mine )
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06:48 pm
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Riddley Walker
Lissening to the nite and the rain. I leant my back agenst the fents and looking to the divvy roof. There hadnt ben no Trubba for a long time but we stil hadnt put no sides on it. Sit there nite after nite getting pist with 1 eye on the dark not to get snuck. Lissening to the rain dumming on my hood and looking at the candls and the nite fires in the roof and the crowd all sat there with the rainy dark all roun them. You know some times you get a fealing you dont want to put no words to.
And stil I aint said all there is to say about that morning in the aulders. The bloody meat and boan of it. The worl is ful of things waiting to happen. Thats the meat and boan of it right there. You myt think you can jus go here and there doing nothing. Happening nothing. You cant tho you bleeding cant. You put your self on any road and some thing wil show its self to you. Wanting to happen. Waiting to happen. You myt say, 'I don't want to know.' But 1ce its showt its self to you you wil know wont you. You cant not know no mor. There it is and working in you. You myt try to put a farness be twean you and it only you cant becaws youre carrying it inside you. The waiting to happen aint out there where it ben no mor its inside you. That old man sung his littl song and he put that waiting inside me.
-- excerpts from Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
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09:11 pm
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Blood Meridian
"Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming."
"And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creatures could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will happen again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons."
-- excerpts from Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
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07:15 am
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butter
The following is a description of the butter management system in our household:
Butter is kept in three locations or stages: the freezer, the refrigerator, and on the island/counter. The butter on the island/counter is kept at room temperature, which allows for easy, non-destructive spreading. It is kept in a glass butter dish. The dish is replenished from the butter in the refrigerator. A half stick is used at a time, since we don't use butter very quickly.
( Read more... )
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