John Latta
@lattaj.bsky.social
Poet, birder. Used to bloviate at Isola di Rifiuti.
Long avoided: Breton’s Nadja (1928), believing its author something of a blowhard, and probably a charlatan. Now reading the new Mark Polizzotti translation, I must admit I readily succumb to such brut literary chatter as this:
Adolphus Cooke of Westmeath instructed his servants to genuflect to a turkey, which he believed to be his reincarnated father, once entered into hand-to-hand combat with a bull, and ended his life believing he had been transformed into a screech owl.
Notebooks containing the first draft of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, 1988 (Ransom Center, Austin, Texas)
“The night we met was a bit of a wash” Chris Nealon’s terrific “Bro Code,” part of a selection of pieces “In Memoriam J. H. Prynne” in the new Blackfold Manifold: “It’s like your poems got denser and denser until they came out the other end and became a party game, hilarious sonic waterslides“
Blackbox Manifold - ChrisNealonJHPBM36
Bro Code Well ... maybe you were right It is a weird time to feel like all men are brothers But I remain committed to my sentiment And to say it’s muddied by eros explains nothing at all S...
sites.google.com
Somewhere William Gass (b. 30 July 1924) says “and” is a “sunderer”: any conjunct a wedge keeping distinct the objects it attempts to join. William Gass, painted (with no ands, ifs, or buts) by Philip Guston:
Shapes: An albumen silver photograph from late 19th/early 20th century, sadly without title or the photographer's name. The addition of "Qajar" period hints at Central Asia/Persia, I guess? Image and slightly more info: www.brooklynmuseum.org/de-DE/object...
Driving with Dominic in the Southern Province We See Hints of the Circus The tattered Hungarian tent A man washing a trumpet at a roadside tap Children in the trees, one falling into the grip of another -Michael Ondaatje
Linnaeus colored his monkeys with the tenderest colonial colors. He would dip his brush in Chinese lacquers and paint with brown and red pepper, with saffron, olive oil and cherry juice. -Osip Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia (tr. Clarence Brown)
'The Red Room.' (1898) Felix Vallotton's depictions of his home in Etretat are crowded with the clashing colours and patterns of clothes, wallpaper, and upholstery. The effect is luxuriant: a look associated with the new fashions from Le Bon Marché, the Paris department store.
Alan Reynolds's romantic landscapes of the 1950s perhaps owe more to Samuel Palmer's Kent than to the flat Constable country of his native Suffolk. The thorns, thistles and spiky botany of the foregrounds carry a faintly menacing air generic to 1950s art.
“No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.” ―Flannery O'Connor
Newish work in the latest Denver Quarterly (v.60 no.3), thanks to Jane Huffman, Ian Cappelli, et al. Here’s the opening three entries (of thirty-one) out of “Notes Written in October.” Part of a manuscript called “Notes for General Circulation.”
"He has conjured an artificial world — simultaneously brightly colored, slightly sinister, and cheerfully incomprehensible — usually inhabited by a delicately featured young man engaged in a mysterious activity."
Trevor Winkfield’s Cheerfully Sinister Worlds
His rejection of certainty is an urgent reminder that imagination should not be neglected in the pursuit of art.
hyperallergic.com
Vladimir Mayakovsky, born OTD in 1893, from the Smoking Poets series, 5x7 lino print
Lisa Robertson, out of Riverwork, part of a lovely paean to dust (“I am a dust artist . . . displacing cosmic matter temporarily from its solid support to make a negative image of time.”) A way of talking about quotation, circulation, infinite reuse, and how language is ever-borrowed, ever-impure.
It's World Snake Day! Ink drawing by Ray Johnson, 1975:
The late Cees Nooteboom, out of the Laura Watkinson-translated _533 Days_ (2021), talking about Mallarmé’s search for la poésie pure—“a poetry that would express the absolute . . . a poetry stripped of all that was superfluous”—rather in the way, in painting, of “Malevich or Mondrian”:
Walter Benjamin (b. 15 July 1892), who quoted “wholly, meanderingly, thumb-through-ably”: “To quote a text means to interrupt its context.” And: “The quotations in my works are like robbers lying in ambush on the highway to attack the passerby with weapons drawn and rob him of his conviction.”
Henry David Thoreau (b. 12 July 1817), who noted somewhat famously that “life is frittered away by detail,” out of _A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_ (1849):
Marvelous. _The carving of insects_ was a common phrase for mediocre writing. . . . When the singer Ch’in Ch’ing sang, the clouds stopped moving so that they could listen.
@kimdorman.bsky.social · 3w ago
Megalorchestia californiana Délicieuse créature sauteuse et joyeuse
Sudden involuntary memory of thinking (ca. 1965, aetat. 11) “I Got You Babe” was sung by Sonny and the Chairs.
Lyn Hejinian. A torrent of philosophy, enquiry, sheer poetry. A poet full of spark, her voice, her eyes are alive, she's funny, takes words to special places. An antidote to the trashing of language that we now see in our world. She 'loves to be astonished' by the beauty of life. Check this out.
Lyn Hejinian - Lunch Poems
YouTube video by University of California Television (UCTV)
youtube.com
Any little win against the maleficent household deities (they are all maleficent) must needs warrant a notice. Pulled the bathroom sink P-trap, snaked some horrifying sludge out of it and the drain pipe, cleaned up, reassembled. As Rene Daumal liked to say: “Cent cons m’enterrent sans commentaires.”
Butterfly Map Nabokov's drawing of a Melissa Blue, overlaid with the scale-row classification system he developed for mapping individual markings.
