From a search in this journal for Salinger —
“… the wind was noisy the way it is in spooky movies
on the night the old slob with the will gets murdered.”
— From the opening sentence of the first Holden Caulfield
story, published in the Collier’s of December 22, 1945
See as well the previous post.
Rules for a game codesigned by Ellie Black, the cartoonist
of yesterday's post Cutting-Edge Prize —
From A.E. Housman's 1892 lecture in the previous post —
"In the day when the strong men shall bow themselves,
and desire shall fail…."
Today's readers may be less familiar than was Housman's 1892
audience with the source of those phrases —
See also an adapted AA saying in this evening's previous post,
and Mary Karr in a "Damnation Morning" post.
The saying of poet Mary Karr that
"there is a body on the cross in my church,"
together with the crosses of the previous post,
suggests a synchronicity check of the
date discussed in that post —
“Be serious, because
The stone may have contempt
For too-familiar hands”
— Adrienne Rich in “The Diamond Cutters” (1955)
Blackboard Jungle , 1955 —
This suggests the recent link (in the Sept. 22 post Geometry for Jews)
to the post Red October (Oct. 2, 2012). That post mentioned the first
version of Hotel Transylvania.
See also Mary Karr's look at American culture in today's NY Times
Sunday Book Review .
(Friday’s Latin Club posts, continued)
The poet Allen Grossman reportedly died in
the morning on Friday, June 27, 2014.
From the cover of Anne Sexton's Transformations—
"Her metaphoric strength has never been greater —
really funny, among other things, a dark, dark laughter."
— C. K. Williams
Another dark lady:
See also Karr in this journal on the date of the above article—
May 24, 2012, the feast of the dark lady.
The eight parts of the semaphore circle
in the previous post suggest some context
for Fritz Leiber's eight-limb "spider" symbol:
See Mary Karr, Time on the Cross, and chuahaidong.org.
The title refers to a search (see below)
suggested by three things—
The search— Labyrinth 23.
(Within the search results, note particularly the post "The Infinity Point.")
|
From her left arm hung a black handbag that closed with a drawstring and from which protruded the tip of a silvery object about which I found myself apprehensively curious. Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question. The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked permanent.
Except for the bangs she wore her hair pinned up. Her ears were flat, thin-edged, and nicely shaped, with the long lobes that in Chinese art mark the philosopher. Small square silver flats with rounded corners ornamented them. Her face might have been painted by Toulouse-Lautrec or Degas. The skin was webbed with very fine lines; the eyes were darkly shadowed and there was a touch of green on the lids (Egyptian?—I asked myself); her mouth was wide, tolerant, but realistic. Yes, beyond all else, she seemed realistic. |
|
You’re not afraid to show yourself at your lowest ebb. In Lit, you stop breast-feeding because you’ve started drinking again. You describe yourself hiding in a closet with a bottle of whiskey, a bottle of Listerine, and a spit bowl. It’s not a proud moment. The temptation in Lit was to either make myself seedy or show some glamour. But there wasn’t any. It was just dark, dark, dark for days. Ugly. Were you surprised by how deeply people related to this dark stuff? If I’m doing my job then I’m able to make the strange seem familiar. Bad memoirs try to make the strange stranger, to provide something for people to gawk at. I try to create an experience where no matter how bizarre something is, it seems normal. I don’t want readers to balk, I want them to be in the experience. My goal isn’t for people to go, “Oh, poor little Mary Karr,” but rather to have the reader go, “I can be an asshole too,” or just to have enthusiasm for the possibility for change. |
"I just seemed to have more frames per second than other kids."
— Mary Karr, "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer"
See also "Signs and Symbols."
"Poetry never left me stranded, and as an atheist most of my life, I presumed its mojo was a highbrow, intellectual version of what religion did for those more gullible believers in my midst— dumb bunnies to a one, the faithful seemed to me, till I became one.
In the Texas oil town where I grew up, fierceness won fights, but I was thin-skinned— an unfashionably bookish kid whose brain wattage was sapped by a consuming inner life others didn’t seem to bear the burden of. I just seemed to have more frames per second than other kids."
— "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer," by Mary Karr
"The original movie had been slowed to a running time of twenty-four hours.
What he was watching seemed pure film, pure time.
The broad horror of the old gothic movie was subsumed in time."
— Point Omega , by Don DeLillo
In honor of
William York Tindall
(yesterday's entry):
A Literary Symbol
for Boyne Day
Click for animation.
Karr is Catholic.
Geneva is not.
Related material:
Calvinist Epiphany
for St. Peter's Day
Click to enlarge.
"There is a body
on the cross
in my church."
Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman
in "The Interpreter."
Click to enlarge.
"My card."
|
"Is Heart of Darkness the story of Kurtz or the story of Marlow’s experience of Kurtz? Was Marlow invented as a rhetorical device for heightening the meaning of Kurtz’s moral collapse, or was Kurtz invented in order to provide Marlow with the centre of his experience in the Congo? Again a seamless web, and we tell ourselves that the old-fashioned question 'Who is the protagonist?' is a meaningless one."
|
"In reality, my prose books
probably sit between
I Was a Teenage Sex Slave
and some other contemporary
memoir written in five minutes…."
— Mary Karr in the NY Times
of July 6, 2007
See also
Ballet Blanc
and the true story
0, 1, 2, 3, ….
"In a dream scenario, my memoirs…
would find another shelf.
They’d sit between St. Augustine
and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory…."
— Mary Karr, loc. cit.
Recall the
mnemonic rhyme
"Nine is a Vine."
“There is a body on
the cross in my church.”
— Mary Karr, quoted
here on July 10, 2007
From Jan. 20, 2004,
opening day of the first
Tennessee lottery–
Song of the Father
“Gonna buy me a shotgun,
long as I am tall,
Buy me a shotgun,
long as I am tall,
Gonna shoot po’ Thelma,
just to see her jump and fall.”
— Jimmie Rodgers, known as
“the father of country music.”
“They took all the trees,
put ’em in a tree museum
and they charged the people
a dollar and a half just to see ’em”
From an article (full version contains spoiler) on Bridge to Terabithia:
“In the book, a girl named Leslie Burke moves in next door to a chore-ridden farm boy, Jess Aarons, and imagines for him a kingdom she names Terabithia. Over a fall and winter, they ride the bus home from school together (sharing a seat in spite of catcalls from schoolmates), dump their backpacks at the edge of the road, and run across an empty field to the edge of a creek bed, where ‘someone long forgotten had hung a rope.’ They use the rope to swing across the gully into Terabithia, a wooded glade that Leslie makes magic….”
Art by Wendell Minor from the cover
of Magic Time, by Doug Marlette
From Bridge to Terabithia:
“I know”– she was getting excited– “it could be a magic country like Narnia, and the only way you can get in is by swinging across on this enchanted rope.” Her eyes were bright. She grabbed the rope. “Come on,” she said.
LOS ANGELES – Roger Cardinal Mahony, leader of the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese, the nation’s largest, apologized yesterday for what he called a “terrible sin and crime” as the church confirmed it would pay a record $660 million to people sexually abused by priests.
“Magic Time”—Mary Karr,
“Facing Altars:
Poetry and Prayer“–“There is a body
on the cross
in my church.”
In memory of Doug Marlette,
Marlette died in a highway
accident yesterday at about
10 AM CT. He was
"on his way to Oxford
[Mississippi]… to help a
troupe of high school students
put on a play based on
his nationally syndicated
comic strip, Kudzu."
— Chris Joyner,
Clarion-Ledger,
Jackson, Mississippi
Log24 yesterday,
7:59 AM ET:
Mary Karr,
"Facing Altars:
Poetry and Prayer"–
"There is a body
on the cross
in my church."
Corpus Hypercubus,
by Dali.
“Does the word ‘tesseract’
mean anything to you?”
— Robert A. Heinlein
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