muguet > Recent Status Updates

“We just had to hold the broom in front of us, like a witch who is ready to mount her broomstick to ride to the Blocksberg, and the animals scattered and took to flight in the desired direction.

They were all afraid of the broom: the fowl, the dogs, the cats, all the animals except the goats, who even went so far as to nibble at the broom straw.”

“I chauffeured, and Winnetou had the job of keeping the four goats off my neck.

The little Saanens put their forelegs on Winnetou's shoulders and nibbled at her hair. Heidi licked my neck and ears as though they were a block of salt. The goats' behavior and the tickling sent Winnetou and me into foolish, tortured giggles.”

Best chapter ever, The Pet Animals

“…afterwards I promised myself never to become attached to or to love another animal.
I succeeded in remaining true to this vow for quite a while. Then in America animals began to besiege me, to force themselves upon me, and to lay claim to ownership by me without my being able to defend myself against them.
A cat was the first.”

“In this snow-loneliness I heard the comforting sounds of the morning. I heard Zuck get up, I heard him lay the fire and go into the kitchen to make breakfast.. I heard the rattle of dishes, smelled the hot, poured, slowly dripped coffee and began to feel warm, protected, and safe.”

“The twelve-foot-long wooden table, a refectory table from a Swabian monastery, became our dining room table. He, the Owner, brought us beautifully turned church benches, discarded from his Catholic church, which went splendidly with our monastery table.”

The new home described in heart warming detail

Favorite poem so far: #12, Crowds

Reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s, An Unwritten Novel: a narrator fantasizing about the life of a fellow passenger on a train, stringing out a story solely based on their own ego and assumptions, eventually smashed

“..that sainted prostitution of the soul which gives itself whole, poetry and charity, to the unforeseen revealed, to the unknown materialized.”

“Multitude, solitude: equivalent terms for the active and prolific poet. The man unable to people his solitude does not know how to be alone in a crowd.”

“He who easily embraces the crowd knows feverish joys, for ever denied the egoist, entombed in his vault, and denied the idler, walled in like a mollusc. He purloins every profession, makes his own every delight, every misfortune he encounters.”

Favorite poem so far, #12, Crowds

Reminded me a lot of Virginia Woolf’s An Unwritten Novel, about how readily we shift our perspective to fantasize how another might live, to great error and self serving.

As always: Baudelaire is a combination of relatable, wondrous, and extra egotistic

‘So, at last, I am allowed to sink into a bath of shadows! First, lock the door. I sense that these two turns of the key will deepen my solitude and reinforce the barricades which keep me apart from the world.’

“Who has not, in bouts of ambition, dreamt this miracle, a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple and choppy enough to accommodate the lyrical movement of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the bump and lurch of con-sciousness?”

so good, so visceral, i’m so happy to pick up Baudelaire again!

“A wave of yet more tender joy escaped from his heart and went coursing in warm flood along his arteries. Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illumined his memory. He longed to recall to her those moments... For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul or hers.”

For some reason, I’m not completely sure why, ‘A Mother’ has become my favorite story/moment so far. Surrounding a four day show, the story itself rises and falls like an orchestral piece. The community, the confrontations, and the frustration felt by the main character is so well written it feels like my own plight!

“Captain Sinico encouraged his visits, thinking that his daughter’s hand was in question. He had dismissed his wife so sincerely from his gallery of pleasures that he did not suspect that anyone else would take an interest in her.”

“Her eyes, which were grey with a shade of green through them, had a habit of glancing upwards when she spoke with anyone, which made her look like a little perverse madonna.”

“I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.”

“Our happiness had not come too late. I was not young anymore. I was not shy. I was not afraid.
I would fight for Maxim. I would lie and perjure and swear, I would blaspheme and pray.”

“From our town to theirs, the world changed entirely. We had the flat sandy beach, and one long curved cliff above it. They had the rocky shoreline, the waves always crashing, the tree branches bent low and hard by winds we didn't get.”

“Then my grandmother closed her eyes, and I saw she was surrendering all over again to motherhood, that condition as big and unbeatable as the sky at night, the black dome of it jammed full of beauty, stars, and trouble.”

“So it was a bad night. But this morning the room is white and silvery shadows roll across the ceiling”

“She is so brown and lovely, the sun rim blending into lighter colours at her neck and wrists. The edge of the pillow in her mouth, her hip a mountain further down the bed..”

“On the nail above the bed the black holster and gun is coiled like a snake, glinting also in the early morning white.”

“One morning woke up
Charlie was cooking
and we ate not talking
but sniffing wind
wind so fine
it was like drinking ether

we sat hands round knees
heads leaned back taking lover wind
in us sniffing and sniffing
getting high on the way
it crashed into our nostrils”

“One of the cages had a huge owl. It was vast. All I could see were its eyes — at least 8” apart. The next morning however, it turned out to be two owls, both blind in one eye.”

Such silly, interesting little details

“Tilts back to fall black hair swivelling off her shattering the pillow
Billy she says
the tall gawky body spitting electric
off the sheets…
this is the first time
bite into her side leave
a string of teeth marks
she hooks in two and covers me
my hand locked
her body nearly breaking off my fingers
pivoting like machines in final speed

later my hands cracked in love juice…”

“The reason they had tolerated, even loved the work, they will tell themselves, is because the repetitiveness provided a counterbalance to the limitless growth and broad horizons of the rest of their days. Now, they will realize, nothing remains but the work.”

“Later on they would fall asleep breathing in each other’s smell, whispering little jokes, sweet nothings, plans for the next day. But really what they were saying was a prayer, a silent and strangely solemn prayer for things to remain exactly as they were.”

“These tales have Leonora's unique tone of voice, at once naive and perverse, comic and lethal, with the deadpan innocence of the masters of the macabre.”
Marina Warner intro

“So when this mattress flared up around the sailor, in his Viking's funeral: the stored, coded years of uselessness, early death, self-harrowing, the sure decay of hope, the set of all men who had slept on it, whatever their lives had been, would truly cease to be, forever, when the mattress burned.”

loving oedipa’s verve rn

“The time in between had been whiled away with …. and hearing the plot of The Courier's Tragedy, by Richard Wharfinger, related near to unintelligible by eight memories unlooping progressively into regions as strange to map as their rising coils and clouds of pot smoke.”

“What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain.”