I am awake, not sour; an iris yawns.

I say, ‘quiet iris, the sun is still sleeping.

G.

‘Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet, and see what sort of a place this “Spouter” may be.’

-H.Melville

‘No, Hamilcar! No,’ I said to him; ‘there is no rest in this world, and the quietude you long for is incompatible with the duties of life. And you say that we are old, indeed!  Listen to what I read in this catalogue, and then tell me whether this is a time to be reposing…’

-A. France

‘Already there are fine days and dust,

Already a blazing, azure sky,

The walls are on fire, the evenings lengthening,

And the green going; little by little

A reddish reflection decorates

The towering trees with their black branches.

This fine weather weighs me down and wearies me.

It is only after rainy days

That spring should surge up,

A picture going green and rose-colored,

Brought out like a new nymph

Who steps from the water, smiling.’

G. de Nerval

‘I am conscious that, as a writer, I have many defects, because I am the first to be dissatisfied with my own efforts. You can just picture the times when I cross-examine myself, to find that I have literally not expressed the twentieth part of what was in my mind, and could, perhaps, have been expressed! My salvation lies in the sure hope that one day God may grant me such strength and inspiration that I shall find perfect self-expression and be able to make plain all that I carry in my heart and imagination.’

F. Dostoevsky

menses n. pl. monthly discharge of blood, etc., from womb.

mesode n. part of ode between strophe and antistrophe.

meralgia n. neuralgia of thigh.

mephitis n. foul exhalation from earth; stink.

(Slang and Hard Talk)

Chicago lightning-gunfire

Dip the bill-take a drink

Grape-liquor

Cough yourself off-beat it

Eel juice-liquor

Creased, bent- knocked off, also stolen

Circulation drops-drinks

Lip-lawyer

Squibbed off-shot

New sweet-new girl

Giver her hello-say hello to her

Kick the joint-break in

Under glass-in prison, caught

- R.Chandler

‘As far as I am concerned, a mind’s arrangement with regard to certain objects is even more important than its regard for certain arrangements of objects, these two kinds of arrangement controlling between them all forms of sensibility.’

- A.Breton

‘Everything is and is new. Only the imagination is undeceived.’

‘Has life its tail in its mouth or its mouth in its tail?’

‘Tradition! The solidarity of life!’

‘Only through the imagination is the advance of intelligence possible, to keep beside growing understanding.’

‘In my life the furniture eats me

the chairs, the floor

the walls

which heard your sobs

drank up my emotion-

they which alone know everything

and snitched on us in the morning’

‘Life’s processes are very simple. One or two moves are made and that is the end. The rest is repetitious.’

- W.C.Williams

‘It is in such supreme moments that growth is the greatest.  It comes as with a vast surge, this feeling of strength and sufficiency. We may still tremble, the fear of doing wretchedly may linger, but we grow. Flashes of inspiration come to guide the soul. In nature there is no outside. When we are cast from a group or a condition we have still the companionship of all that is. Nature is not ungenerous. Its winds and stars are fellows with you. Let the soul be but gentle and receptive, and this vast truth will come home- not in set phrases, perhaps, but as a feeling, a comfort, which, after all, is the last essence of knowledge.’

- T.Dreiser

‘It is true, we suffer less from love, and I deplore it. I never forget those fine lines which Byron puts into the mouth of one of his heroes, making him say that god would be wretched in his place, since a god could not suffer or die for the woman he loved.’

- A.France

liaise v.i.  establish and maintain contact; co-operate.  Liaison, n.  communication, contact and co-operation; illicit sexual relationship; thickening agent for soups and sauces; pronunciation of normally silent final consonant before word beginning with a vowel.

delectus n. chrestomathy.

peduncle n. flower stalk; stem.

sculpsit (Latin) ‘carved (it)’; engraved (it)’.

"In a world like this one, it's difficult to devote oneself to art body and soul. To get published, to get exhibited, to get produced often requires ten or twenty years of patient, intense labor. I spent half my life at it! And how do you survive during all that time? Beg? Live off other people until you're successful? What a dog's life! I know something about that! You're always recognized too late. And today, it's no longer enough to have talent, originality, to write a good or beautiful book. One must be inspired! Not only touch the public but create one's own public. Otherwise, you're headed straight for suicide."

- H. Miller

‘If we were expected to love all the people we find attractive, life would be pretty ghastly, wouldn’t it?’

- M.Proust.

I grew heavy with breath beneath the valance of her breast,

Heavy and wide, unburdened of a shore I became full.

On a dead and dying July foul and coarse

The distant dissonance of a young moon mixed

With puerile thoughts upon the ménage of soft hands,

The coarse coat of her furless fur distends,

And land is land, died and dying land…

Over how many tables did our conversation grow stale?

Upon mendacious eyes and unbalanced hallways

As unheard footsteps littered clothes littered with riposte

To turn and to ask if only you would have

As I sat and watched drywall mold

Times when silence was not enough

When this autumn oak held together an uniformed frown

And the children of now are awake in a dream

I would never want to be awake in…

Days of wonder to wonder unafraid of the morning

As fall tongues fall and meet over flakes of gold and cream

And dust is just an idea of a morning, afternoon, or night

Burdened by the weight of it are we not infallible

Under silk sheets have we not as thighs met hands

And hands met chests said and spared of disparity

Under the weather of a day which unwithered hours hung

As sepals in bloom waiting to be plucked

And I knew not of disappointment but made the appointment

To say for once it might have left

Yet disappoint is salient and even under lovelier days will it bloom.

-G.

‘It leaves out the great romance of construction…It leaves out all the affirmative and life sustaining force that in the greatest modernists is always interwoven with assault and revolt: the erotic joy, natural beauty and human tenderness in D.H. Lawrence, always locked in mortal embrace with his nihilistic rage and despair; the figures in Picasso’s Guernica, struggling to keep life itself alive even as they shriek their death; the triumphant last choruses of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme; Alyosha Karamazov, in the midst of chaos and anguish, kissing and embracing the earth; Molly Bloom bringing the archetypal modernist book to an end with “yes I said yes I will Yes.”’

- M.Berman

‘My fancy is a wall between myself and truth.  There is a world of the fancy into which I constantly plunge and out of which I seldom completely emerge.  I want every day to be absorbingly interesting and exciting to me and if it will not, I, with my fancy, try to make it so.  If you, a stranger, come into my presence there is a chance that for a moment I shall see you as you are but in another moment you will be lost.  You say something that starts my fancy working and I am off.  To-night perhaps I shall dream of you.  We will have fancied conversations.  My fancy will throw you into strange, noble- or perhaps even mean situations.  Now I have no scruples.  You are my rabbit and I am a hound pursuing you.  Even your physical being changes under the driving lash of my fancy.’

- S.Anderson

‘-A bed witnesses our birth and it witnesses our death; it is the ever-changing theater where the human species enacts, by turns, engaging dramas, ridiculous farces, and horrible tragedies.- It is a cradle decked with flowers;- it is love’s throne;- it is a sepulcher.’

- X.Maistre

‘Come now, my dear Celeste, surely it must be dull to live only at night, with an invalid.’

- C.Albaret

   ‘Because I know that time is always time

And place is always and only place

And what is actual is actual only for one time

And only for one place

I rejoice that things are as they are and

I renounce the blessed face

And renounce the voice

Because I cannot hope to turn again

Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something

Upon which to rejoice’

- T.S.Eliot

‘People in general attach too much importance to words.  They are under the illusion that talking effects great results.  As a matter of fact, words are, as a rule, the shallowest portion of all the argument.  They but dimly represent the great surging feelings and desires which lie behind.  When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens.’

- T.Dreiser

We lay and we laid well.

We laid with legs lazy of farewells.

Kissed and hugged the sun and toes;

How our toes and dripping noses

Dropped atop the tussis of our hearts.

Over tea and shared toast.

Over coffee with cigarette smoke.

Of littered steps atop a litterless floor,

Her ankles like wine anklets I adore;

Toes to toe, salient and infallible,

With a beat to beat as beats meet

With the plucking of each plume

How ever could I have said ever better never a goodbye?

-G.

'I am little subject to such violent emotions.  My sensitiveness [i]is naturally not keen, and I harden and deaden it every day intentionally [ii].'

- Montaigne

---

[i] Apprehension.  Montaigne uses this word frequently in the sense of “the action of feeling anything emotionally”- an obsolete sense of the similar English word.

[ii] Je l’ encrouste et espessis … par discours.

- George B. Ives(Notes)