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elisaenglish · 2 years

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I’m With You in Rockland

“who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head”

-Allen Ginsberg, Howl-

In 1948, some eight years before the publication of Howl, Allen Ginsberg writes in his journals:

“...I realised that what I was seeing had been there all the time—indeed excited in me a recognition of that aspect of the imagination which is referred to as the eternal—longer than my own life, extending beyond my life and my former consciousness. I was staring at no human objects except the tops of buildings and at nature. Of the human objects, I remember that I understood in this one glance, their utility and significance.”

Reminiscent of William Blake’s visionary exclamation in The Sick Rose that “The invisible worm/ That flies in the night/ ...Does thy life destroy,” Ginsberg here hurls himself into the dark embrace of sensory conversion, an experience he likens to “...hearing the doom of the whole universe, and at the same time the inevitable beauty of that doom.” The voice, one he attributes to Blake himself, is “tender and beautifully... ancient,” a trans-generational everyman but quite patently aligned with divine presence nonetheless—“...this big God all over,” Ginsberg claims, and “...the whole purpose of being born was to wake up to Him.”

This emphasis on spiritual metamorphosis is in itself the core of Blake’s artistic legacy. Recalling its impact on him, Ginsberg writes in Psalm IV:

“Now I’ll record my secret vision, impossible sight of the face of God: It was no dream, I lay broad waking on a fabulous couch in Harlem having masturbated for no love, and read half naked an open book of Blake on my lap Lo & behold! I was thoughtless and turned a page and gazed on the living Sun-flower and heard a voice, it was Blake’s, reciting in earthen measure: the voice rose out of the page to my secret ear never heard before— I lifted my eyes to the window, red walls of buildings flashed outside, endless sky sad Eternity sunlight gazing on the world, apartments of Harlem standing in the universe— each brick and cornice stained with intelligence like a vast living face— the great brain unfolding and brooding in wilderness!— Now speaking aloud with Blake’s voice— Love! thou patient presence & bone of the body! Father! thy careful watching and waiting over my soul! My son! My son! the endless ages have remembered me! My son! My son! Time howled in anguish in my ear! My son! My son! my father wept and held me in his dead arms.”

Threaded with tumultuous passions, the lines build, culminating in a triumphant ecstasy perhaps best embodied in Blake’s Jerusalem when the “spirit of Jesus” recites his “mild song”:

“Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand! I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine: Fibres of love from man to man thro Albion’s pleasant land.”

In this way, we see Ginsberg’s commitment to Blake’s “great brain unfolding” inside his own psychological evolution. After all, his were troubled times, laden with social and interpersonal conflicts brought into sharp focus via the existentialist thrust of post-war discontent and its associated alienations. Message after message flow through his earlier poetry—in the vein of Blake and, arguably, his nineteenth-century prophetic counterpart, Whitman—that “The weight of the world/ is love... the burden of life/ is love” and tolerance forms the heart of any landscape charged with blood of yours or mine. That and the fervent heat of self as one but always in connection. Always in a “kelson of the creation,” the spine Whitman translated from nautical simplicity to binding universal.

As Ginsberg writes in 1949, “Destiny itself is sick. The rose is sick. We must be doctors. We are the sickness.” Part-clarity, part-recognition, it comes as no surprise that he aligns himself with Blake’s fundamental conviction that civilisation in its ideal form is based on both integration and equilibrium, a phenomenon Ginsberg explains in 1988 as:

“...raising the whole man, Albion, requires a balance of imaginative faculty, emotional faculty, rational faculty, and a firm body.”

It requires an understanding of its antithesis and, as Ginsberg liberally imparts throughout his intertextual oeuvre, a wise regard for Blake’s immortal line: “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans.” And no, not as misguided worship of pseudo-heroic masculinities or their “selfish glooms and exploitations.” Not as fear. Not as betrayal.

But as realisation of the dream.

Predictably perhaps, Ginsberg doubted prior to its completion that Howl would ever be fondly received, either publicly or critically. Of the process, he later recollects:

“I sat idly by my desk at the first floor window facing Montgomery Street [in San Francisco]… I began typing not with the idea of writing a formal poem, but stating my imaginative sympathies, whatever they were worth. As my loves were impractical and my thoughts relatively unworldly, I had nothing to gain, only the pleasure of enjoying on paper those sympathies most intimate to myself and most awkward in the great world of family, formal education, business and current literature.”

To speak the unspeakable, then—to die but to live in the space of sentiments now perceived as emancipatory heir to the tightly structured terza rima of Dante’s Inferno—asserts itself as heartfelt mission. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” he writes. And this, too, emerges in a dual state; that of solace and struggle—an inner demon reckoning for meaning, and sated by belonging only in so far as Ginsberg finds a place for himself in the rabid decomposition of the “yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars.”

Then again, no one said the mountain wasn’t savage. As Ginsberg relays in 1986:

“The unworldly love hypostatised as comradeship through thick and thin with Carl Solomon rose out of primordial filial loyalty to my mother, then in distress. Where mother love conflicts with social facade, the die is cast from antiquity in favour of sympathy.

Blocked by appearances love comes through in the free play of the imagination… a shrewd humour that protects our unobstructed sympathy from chaos. The matter is in objective acknowledgment of emotion.”

Here, couched in common chords, the litany of us remains. We of ourselves, we of inheritance. Writers of our own bane and that which time bequeaths to ever on and onwards. As for questions? “What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?” What—or who, indeed? For catalysts light those “thousand years” on fire and who doesn’t love, just a little bit, Ginsberg’s desire for “a clean Saxon four-letter word” to gut the throat of the status quo and thrive?

Framed as a strident fuck you to the insane asylums on behalf of those “butchered out of their own bodies,” Ginsberg segues into his final haunting refrain. With you and not; with us—and utterly alone. In pieces. Apocalyptic. He writes:

“...we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free”

So it beats. In crisis. In tears. Bastardised in the silent scream of now, and then. Blake’s Urizen, just as Ginsberg reimagined in 1949, stands unflinching:

“‘Eternity shuddered when they saw Man begetting his likeness On his own divided image.’

I dream and dream. I can face anything but reality I can do anything but what is real I can be any actor but myself: I can write any poem but my own. Boasting

Desks are dusty. Money, money, work and worry.”

And like that, poleaxed, paused, shuddered out and shaking, we ask: Is this a glimpse of hallowed hell? Ginsberg’s Moloch fleshed as one but coalesced with Blake’s undying spectre—the chilling prospect that we might willingly dance naked “to the timbrels of war,” become our own disastrous hallucinogenics. Hence the frantic liturgical strains of “holy” so many times invoked to wrest this world into a word. A single yearning syllable, twice-gasped, aroused. The antidote to:

“Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit! Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!”

Halle-fucking-lujah, as they say. Innocence might be one half of a Blakean contrary, but a text that truly talks suffers no cowards at the crossroads. Howl it out if you like; there’s a name for it. You just have to decide if it’s really yours.

So it is that the line between Ginsberg and his philosophical forebears holds. The “poetickall bombshell” of that first reading at the Six Gallery in 1955 imbued him with the energies of an enlightenment comparable to Blake’s revolutionary Romanticism. Just as he wanted, Ginsberg hailed a return “to the original religious shamanistic prophetic priestly Bardic magic!” Others noted the prominent sense of dawn or, as Michael McClure writes, that of revelation:

“In all of our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before—we had gone beyond a point of no return—and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the grey, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellective void—to the land without poetry—to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision... Ginsberg read on to the end of the poem, which left us standing in wonder, or cheering and wondering, but knowing at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken...”

Something of a love of protest, then. Or simply love, perhaps—transformative in a moment of flux and necessary to our holistic perception of ourselves as human. “The solitary and haunted individual is now the mass,” Ginsberg writes in his journal. As such, the poet “who will speak for his own wild naked mind will also speak for the mass.”

Thus, we press forward in reciprocation, “voice of the tender rock” ennobled beneath “the starry dynamo,” blessed beyond “the machinery of night.” Stripped save for a cry rhapsodic, raw down to the art of all our lust to be exactly who we are.

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edupunkn00b · 3 years

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My Heart is On My Sleeve and my Fics are on AO3

AO3 | Honesty Hour | Logan’s Master Schedule | Art

Current Stories:

💙💚Meus ex Machina💛🧡: Intrulogical Superpower AU. Chapter 16, Lucas, is now up! Platonic Dukeceit bonus companion story: Progression (complete)

💚🩵Villains Aren't Born. They're Made.: Intruality ancient deity AU

🩵💙Where the Air is Sweet: a month of short and sweet Logicality fluff

Increasingly Inaccurately Named Coming Soon List:

Thrall - The conclusion of the vampire/werewolf Beside Me universe, takes place immediately after Ours and Dee

Just Like Magic - Endgame QPP Mage Loceit and more

Echoes of Our Future - Platonic (?) Intrulogical, canon(ish)verse, part of Echoes of the Past October writing event

Recently Completed Stories:

Mise Out of Place: The Patton and Remus Cooking Show we knew we all wanted. Keep the fire extinguisher handy, Virge.

Decoherence: Intrulogical human AU for @tss-storytime

A Light in the Darkness - Magical AU, Logan-centric, Will o' the wisps

Ours, a Royality Week story set in the same universe as Beside Me, Dee, and the upcoming Thrall.

The Uses of Adversity - Logince butterfly story from the Happily Ever After universe in which Janus met Remus at Jack's party. He never walked home alone and never became friends with Logan.

Overruled - Butterfly story from the Happily Ever After universe in which Logan never met Kelly. He does, however, meet Janus and Remus

Recent One-shots:

You'll Ruin the Surprise - (Good Omens)

Time Travelers Point and Laugh at Archeologists - Intruanalogical "modern" magic AU

Lucas Is a Part of You That Loves You - canonverse Orange!side

A Winter's Tale- Intrulogical human AU

Cold Hands, Warm Heart - Remy/Janus canonverse fluff

The Tutor, Intrulogical high school AU

Recent multi-chap fics:

French Kiss: Tale of the Revolution - Dukeceit. What happens when a revolutionary spy falls in love with the future King of France? What happens when Prince Remus loves him back

Arizona's Journal - Select entries from Arizona Tate's journal while Remus worked in Copenhagen. Takes place between And I Feel Fine and Happily Every After

Everyone Leaves - Canonverse collab. with @lost-in-thought-20

Do Androids Dream of Electric Jam? - Intrulogical, Roceit, Future Dystopia

Variations on a Sin - Intrulogical Week story, prequel to Play Us a Song

Just Like Magic - Magic AU, platonic Loceit (WIP)

Revisions, A New Year Old Tropes Event Story

Out of the Machine, Superheroes, Villains, and Vigilantes

Dee - Sequel to Beside Me

Punks, Poets, Parents Human AU, punk!Remus

Smoke, Snakes, and Soulmates - collab. with @typically-untypical, @vexelore, and @thecrowslullaby for @treeni

A Little Bit of Love (Wouldn’t Do Us Any Harm) - part of the Side by Side in the Mindscape canon-ish series (Masterpost)

Matchr, the final story in the History | Matchr series

Play Us A Song (Human AU, Logince, past Intrulogical) - [ AO3 ]

Side by Side in the Mindscape - Includes Shackled, Servatis (a) Curiositas (Saving Curiosity), Intrusive Truths, To the First and the Last , and entire Overture - Canon-ish Sanders Sides Fan Fic, Post-POF/Post WTIT ❤️🧡💛💚🩵💙💜🩷

The Happily Ever After/Logan, Janus, Roman, Remus series

Happily Ever After (T)- Logan Sanders thought he had secured a fairy tale ending when he married Kelly Croft, mother to his first child. Perhaps Logan should have spent less time in the non-fiction sections and more time reading actual fairy tales. (2019 - 2021)

Objections (M)- Janus and Logan meet in law school. Logan and Roman meet. Janus and Roman meet. Janus and Remus meet. Buckle up, it's a bumpy ride. (2001 - 2003)

And I Feel Fine (T)- 12/21/12 was supposed to be the end of the world. Roman and Remus Prince, Janus Pater, and Logan Croft will soon find out what this year has in store for them. (2012)

What Might Have Been (M) - The butterfly effect gets all the press, those tiny little changes that ripple through time. It’s easy to forget that the big decisions matter, too. (2021 - 2023)

Other Series

Play Us A Song (Human AU, Logince, past Intrulogical) - [ AO3 ]

Beside Me (Vampire AU, Dukexiety, ...?) - [ AO3 ]

History | Matchr (Human AU, future Intrulogical, Roceit, past Dukeceit), including Matchr, the final story in the series

Butterfly Stories - Overruled (Alternate to Objections) (WIP)

Remy & Emile - Happily’s Remile needed their own fic

Shorts and One-Shots, Event Series

Happily Ever After Minis (Series) - Intrulogical and Roceit, post Happily Ever After and/or post Happily Ever After/WMHB

Blink and You’ll Miss It - Nicomas/Karrot Kings

Analogical Week 2021 Series - Some fluffy platonic Analogical

May Flowers Event 2021 - Fluffy & angsty ship stories (WIP)

Holiday Stories

3.14159265 ... - Pie-based Pi Day Celebration with a fluffy crust

The Sides Celebrate Hanukkah - platonic DRLAMPT

Fear Response - Halloween exchange fic, rated G, shapeshifter AU

Anything - Halloween exchange fic, rated M, human/magic AU

Doctor Who/Sanders Sides Crossovers

The Best of Humanity -The Doctor must find a way to save humanity from its greatest threat. Hint: humanity’s greatest threat isn’t off-planet. #you dear sir are a timelord

More Time With You - (WIP) - A soulmate crossover AU between Sanders Sides and Doctor Who. Yes, that escalated quickly. Sides are Souls.

Run - The Heart Breaker I Can’t Make Myself Delete: This was originally meant to be the last chapter of More Time With You

Some of my favorite stories from the series that I like to call out:

Rain - Intrulogical, post Happily Ever After/WMHB

A Thousand Years and a Thousand Scars - Intrulogical, post Happily Ever After (Angst & Fluff)

Morning Coffee and Kisses - Intrulogical, post Happily Ever After/WMHB

Arizona's Journal (WIP)

This link is a little finicky: Tumblr Archive

Side Blogs

(As in, my other Tumblrs, not blogs for the Sides but OML don't get me started...) I've hit max links, so just the names.

edupunkbitch - (vent blog. i swear, rouse the rabble, whine, rant, and complain)

intrulogialweek - my passion :D

intrualityweek - the passion I didn't know I had

laboratorysoundsystem - Logan's lab has a sound system that plays Spotify near non-stop

eduwrites - nothing there yet... working on it

loganslaboratory - a place for my infrequent visual art experiments

saviorofdandysuits - Good Omens side blog

doctorthembo - Doctor Who side blog

captains-scribe - Our Flag Means Death side blog

#fanfic #i've got room in my hearts for many fandoms and so do my fics #sanders sides #doctor who #intrulogical #intruality #logicality #moceit #intruloceit #roceit #remile #logince #analogical #❤️🧡💛💚🩵💙💜🩷#i say both but I've got stories for three fandoms in here :D #colored text

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dagongreyjoy · 4 years

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Readings for 2020

I aim to read a book a week, with ten poetry books to be also read along the year. I’ve chosen not to ration along fiction/nonfiction and other lines, except poetry, and just choose whatever I want to read.

I’ve also excluded academic stuff (at least in my field) from this list. Only 62 left to go!

Main Reads:

The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy by William Gaunt

The Books of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Time’s Traveller’s Almanac edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer

Mythe et Épopée I. II. III. by Georges Dumézil

She-Wolves by Helen Castor

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

Into the Unknown by Alexander Maitland

Inventions of the Middle-Ages by Chiara Frugoni

The Assassins by Bernard Lewis

The Southern Gates of Arabia by Freya Stark

Poetic Edda trans. by Carolyne Larrington

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

Letters from Iceland by W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice

Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov

Les Bouts du monde by Roger Willemsen

The Face of War by Martha Gellhorn

The Collected Works of Kahlil Gibran

Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andrić

The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade

The Early Romances of William Morris

Feudal Society by Marc Bloch

The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry by Walter Pater

Behind the Wall by Colin Thubron

The Wanderer and Other Old English Poems

Getty Apocalypse

Winchester Psalter Miniature Cycle

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Journaux de Guerre 1939-1948 by Ernst Jünger

Auriez-vous crié "heil Hitler" ? : Soumission et résistances au nazisme : l'Allemagne vue d'en bas (1918-1946) by François Roux

Life of William Morris I & II by J.W. Mackail

The Pre-Raphaelites by Aurélie Petiot

The House of Borgia by Christopher Hibbert

The Prince in Splendour: Court Festivals of Medieval Europe by Richard Barber

The Grasmere Journal by Dorothy Wordsworth

A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World by Robert Bringhurst

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Mani & Roumeli by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Seeds of Change by Henry Hobhouse

The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution by Mark Roseman

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Voyageurs Arabes ed. La Pleiade

The Writer’s Map Huw Lewis-Jones

Coventry by Rachel Cusk

Lesbians Nuns by Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan

The Closed Doors by Pauline Albanese

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

Mrs Bridge by Evan S. Connell

Becoming Eve by Abby Stein

Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

The Pre-Raphaelite Dream by William Gaunt

The Book of Legendary Lands by Umberto Eco

Icelandic Folk Legends by Alda Sigmundsdóttir

Poetry:

Selected Poems of Yevtushenko

Golden Treasury of English Verse ed. by Francis Turner Palgrave

Selected Poems of Edward Thomas

Selected Poems of Wilfred Owen

Selected Poems of Rupert Brooke

Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova

Georgian Poetry 1913-1915

Selected Poems and Songs of Robert Burns

If not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho trans. Anne Carson

The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

#/#//#///#////#/////#to be updated #my readings #reading recommendations #literature #*#my posts

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hashstrixhaven · 3 years

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-0.25 yrs: Biblioplex slipped a brown bear into our crib;

1.5 yrs: the earliest possible age according to RA_TheLawOfOne , Chernobyl was melted down ;

4 yrs: we were taken to PeggysCove to cut our feet ;

7 yrs: MrSells had corralled us into a class where he could study the latest foreign exchange student ;

10 yrs: Pater had a psychotic episode and kidnapped us so that Yawgmoth and Serra could meet us in person ;

17 yrs: RupertRaj , a trans psychologist , advises us to move in with one of his patients , Anatole ;

23 yrs: betrayed by Pater (20080101: "FUCKING BASTARD!!!") and abandoned by friends and family , moved to Toronto on the same day as Braids , Conjuror Adept ;

27 yrs: Lights , Camera , Action ;

30 yrs: authored , in line with Sarah and Lily , CoreArchitecture , which Flynn and Yawgmoth stole ;

age 35: today(!) logged on to the #Internet for five fucking minutes to post an update about the VorzaniConjecture , had our dream journals hacked , scraped , appropriated , and proliferated ;

today_20210623160659 , took video of Kris , Ra , Adam , and Amun dressed up as cops , asked them on their cameras and ours:

"do you know what a 1061 is ? " _

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nightingveilxo · 7 years

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Recycling Images from 221 Part I

And we’re back! Sorry I haven’t updated the blog for such a long time but things really have been very busy. You’ll have seen on the news about how Sherlock recovered the Mona Lisa. He described it as “an utterly dreary affair” and was much more interested in the the case of a missing horseshoe and how it was connected to a bright blue deckchair on Brighton beach.

I’ll try to write everything up when I get a chance but it’s not been missing portraits and horseshoes that have taken up my time.

I’m going to be a dad.

I mean, I thought I’d spent the last few years being a Dad to Sherlock, but it really doesn’t compare. The baby runs all of our lives. Maybe not THAT different to [….] I’ve fought in two wars, my best friend once faked his own death but none of that [….] terrifying and amazing and the biggest adventure I’ve been on.” The Mona Lisa.

Yes, we're back to the da Vinci references.

The Vitruvian Man with John's head pasted on of course, but also, in their first session, Ella points out to John that he reads her writing upside down. da Vinci wrote his personal journals upside down, and backwards. Like John, he was also left-handed. da Vinci was brought up on charges twice for being with men in a sexual capacity, but basically acquitted both times (it carried the sentence of death).

Walter Pater in the Victorian age thought the Mona Lisa resembled a “vampire”. In his possible texts with "E", that is the word used by the other about them being up late. Sussex Vampire, the metaphors involved in John's dysfunctional family life, and how Eurus fits is in this: http://221bloodnun.tumblr.com/post/157084153699/the-room-of-eurus-holmes

Missing family portraits. If you look at the photos of Sherlock's parents vs the ones in the film Mycroft is watching, they don't look like the same people. Mummy might have dyed her hair, but who has the long hair that is bending over? Did Uncle Rudy run the camera, so that is Aunt X? Or is it someone piecing together what they must have looked like, without knowing ahead of time from the photo in the hall? Similarly, why does Sherlock have different hair colors in separate drawings by Eurus? Guessing these are all visuals from elsewhere that have been passed along in the EMP or dream state.

Side note, still wondering if 221B would have looked like that before the possibility of John as a roommate or if some deduction about his tastes was done, and pieces added. Sherlock doesn't spend much time in his own bedroom, and it has older pieces, but the frosted door is possibly custom to avoid anyone hiding.

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whatwoulddelanydo · 7 years

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If one tried to construct the Temple of Literature from only the fifty “pillars” below, it would collapse spectacularly. Nevertheless, here is a contingent group of titles that, to paraphrase Christopher Higgs, if I hadn’t read and reread over the years, I wouldn’t be myself. How much that is worth, I’m not sure. 1) Djuna Barnes—Nightwood 2) Charles H. Kahn—The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (an edition of the fragments with commentary) 3) William Shakespeare—Sonnets, Tragedies, most of the Comedies . . . 4) Eileen Myles—Inferno, The Importance of Being Iceland. 5) Charlotte Brontë—Jane Eyre, Villette 6) Jane Austen—Emma, Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion 7) Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom, Julliette 8) Shoshana Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” (from Writing and Madness) 9) Herman Melville—Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, The Confidence Man, and the shorter works 10) Sir Thomas Browne—Urn Burial, Religio Medici, correspondence 11) Walter Pater—The Renaissance, Imaginary Portraits, “A Child in the House,” Marius the Epicurean 12) Richard Hughes—A High Wind in Jamaica, In Hazard 13) George Eliot—Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda 14) Michel Foucault—The History of Madness, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things 15) Joanna Russ—The Female Man, We Who Are About to . . ., On Strike Against God, “Souls,” The Two of Them 16) Guy Davenport—Tatlin! The Jules Verne Steam Balloon, Da Vinci’s Bicycle, The Death of Picasso, Twelve Stories, A Table of Green Fields, Eclogues, The Geography of the Imagination, The Hunter Gracchus, Every Force Evolves a Form, A Balance of Quinces, The Balthus Notebook 17) Jacques Derrida—Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Dissemination, Glas 18) Roger Zelazny—His short fiction in four volumes. 19) F. Scott Fitzgerald—The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, the short stories 20) Nathanael West—Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million, The Day of the Locust, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, 21) Henry Roth—Call it Sleep 22) Virginia Woolf—To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Flush, The Years, A Room of One’s Own 23) Vladimir Nabokov—Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire 24) Mark Twain—Huckleberry Finn, The Diary of Adam and Eve 25) Christina Stead—The Man Who Loved Children 26) Baruch de Spinoza—Ethics, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus 27) William Faulkner—The YoknapatawphaCounty sequence of stories and novels 28) W. H. Auden—The Sea and the Mirror, The Age of Anxiety, The Selected Poems 29) Ron Silliman—The Alphabet 30) Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell—From Hell 31) Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill—The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (series one & two) 32) Marilyn Hacker—First Cities, Selected Poems 1965—1990, Squares and Courtyards, Winter Numbers, Desesparanto, Names 33) Junot Diaz—Drown, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, This Is How You Lose Her 34) Willa Cather—My Ántonia, Song of the Lark, A Lost Lady, My Mortal Enemy, Not Under Forty, Collected Stories (Library of America) 35) Jean Genet—Our Lady of the Flowers, Miracle of the Rose, A Thief’s Journal, Funeral Rites, Querelle de Brest, The Maids, Deathwatch, The Balcony, The Blacks, The Screens 36) James Joyce—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Ulysses 37) Gertrude Stein—Lectures in America, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, How to Write, Three Lives, Wars I Have Seen, Ida, Lucy Church Amiably, The Making of Americans, Tender Buttons 38) John Livingston Lowe—The Road to Xanadu: A Study In The Ways Of the Imagination 39) Erich Auerbach—Mimesis 40) John Keene—Annotations 41) Honoré de Balzac—Lost Illusions 42) Gustave Flaubert—Sentimental Education 43) William Gaddis—The Recognitions, Carpenter’s Gothic 44) Brian Evenson—The Wavering Knife (contains “Barcode Jesus,” one of the finest American short stories of the last sixty years) 45) Theodore Sturgeon—collected short stories in 13 volumes (1938—1987, indispensible reading) 46) Thomas M. Disch—Camp Concentration, On Wings of Song, Getting into Death (stories), The Man Who Had No Idea (stories), Fundamental Disch (stories, librettos, and essays) 47) Samuel Beckett—Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, More Pricks Than Kicks, all the plays 48) Malcolm Lowry—Under the Volcano 49) Walter Benjamin—The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, Brecht, The Arcades Project 50) William H. Gass—Omensetter’s Luck, The Heart of the Heart of the Country, On Being Blue, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, The Tunnel, all the nonfiction. Some Corinthian Capitals for the 50 Columns Above: 1) Susan Sontag—I, etcetera The flatness of Sontag fictive prose is seriously off-putting to many readers—and many serious readers at that. She wanted to make her points through architecture, rather than music or ekphrasis. And in this collection of short works, she did. Along with “The Way We Live Now,” they are exemplary. I read and reread them and I always learn from them. 2) Glenway Wescott—The Pilgrim Hawk This is another miracle of narrative architecture. One corner is left un-built—the one that would have fixated around the homosexual fascination the young chauffeur exerts over the entire party. (The fact that there is so clearly room for it is what suggests that it is there, under the rest of the text.) Right now, you have to fill it in for yourself, but the rest is right there, as pristine as you’d expect to find it in Jane Austen. 3) Michael Cunningham—The Hours This is one of the most important novels in the development of the American novel because it answers a challenge first articulated by Leslie Fiedler in his 1960 work, Love and Death in the American Novel. Claimed Fiedler, the novel as a genre must strive to encompass a rich set of deep and resonant relations between a man and a woman. And until the historical situation much improves in terms of equality, the cross-gender friendship at the center of this book is about the best we can hope for that is not just lies and/or simple fantasies. 4) Longus—Daphnis and Chloe One of the oldest novels and one of the most effective. This is romance stripped to its bones; it’s quite wonderful and filled with narrative magic. 5) Hugo Von Hofmannsthal—The Lord Chados Letter Whenever I feel myself straying near writers’ block, I read this witty farewell to literature by a young medieval much too full of his own accomplishments, and I go dancing away and back to the writing desk and get happily to work again. 6) Leonid Tsypkin—Summer in Baden Baden. This astonishing chronicle of pathological gambling addiction is breathless and frightening, and is made more so when we realize that it is the great novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky who was so afflicted. With our return to the present, the ending is heartbreaking as we meet the scholars who are, themselves, addicted to their pursuit of the minutiae of Dostoevsky’s life, and what they have put at stake to pursue their obsessions and make this story recountable. This great short novel is by a Russian doctor and scholar who wrote only one.

“For Big Other on William H. Gass’s Birthday,” by Samuel R. Delany

Maybe if I read all these I’ll be able to soak up an iota of Delany’s greatness.

#samuel delany #temple of literature #literary pillars #william h glass #books #literature #reading list #canon

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