Streets, edible

Constantinople had a thousand churches and insuperable walls landward and seaward. On the main approach to the palace, only the perfume merchants were permitted their trade. — “Byzantium”

The housing bricks and paving stones, they said, could boil down into soup; the place was steeped in root, and leaf, and fruit. — Arcadia

Lemon peels crushed in the gutters of the streets scented the early mornings where he used to sing . . . — Gravity’s Rainbow

Things I know about wine

Four months into a day job polishing wineglasses (rarely filling them):

Champagne smells like burnt toast; Riesling, hot tar or gasoline. A certain dry Tokaj, on the nose: orange Gatorade. Wine can smell like violet candies, menthol cigarettes, jalapeños, and nail polish remover. It can taste like fresh-cut grass, beef jerky, and licking a chalkboard. 

People get weird about wine—self-deprecating jokes about how they don’t possibly know as much as you, or jockeying displays of expertise to impress their dates, or sudden strident displays of opinion. A seven-hundred-and-fifty milliliter bottle is, among other things, an agricultural product derived from grape juice; a good way to get liquored up with a friend; a luxury good, like a designer handbag; and an internationally-traded commodity, like pork bellies. 

Farmers planted vines on steep, rocky slopes because the land wasn’t good for anything else; wine was the lunchtime drink of peasants. Champagne only exists because the climate wasn’t right for straight-ahead wine, so they had to fuck with the process to make something drinkable. The village council of Chateauneuf-du-Pape, convinced that their vineyards were being raided by extraterrestials, passed a law in 1954 prohibiting the “flying overhead, landing, and taking off” of flying saucers or cigares volants (flying cigars). 

Malbec is overdone. Slovenia overperforms. Tannins do not get along with goat cheese. You can switch back to white after a bottle of red, why not? You feel acid at the hinge of your jaw, residual sugar on the tip of your tongue, tannins in your gums. The American oak barrels in which Rioja is traditionally aged make it smell like dill and coconut suntan lotion. A bowling-pin bottle shape called a ‘skittle’ takes its name from an English lawn game. 

Parataxis

At Bookforum, a review by Wayne Koestenbaum of Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait begins:

Parataxis is Édouard Levé’s best friend. Parataxis—also John Ashbery’s best friend—concerns the placement, side by side, of two sentences whose meanings don’t transparently connect. Parataxis, however, as concept, has leached its glories onto the landscape at large; any reader of contemporary culture is contaminated by paratactic energies, a stylistic phenomenon that Levé defends in his penultimate book, a work of unrepentantly naked yet stylistically errant autobiography, Autoportrait. He writes: “Raymond Poulidor is one of the least sexy names I know. I like salad mainly for the crunch and the vinaigrette.”

This paw-swiping gesture is nice: “any reader of contemporary culture is contaminated by paratactic energies.” Parataxis is, too, a good word for rendering the anonymous, deadpan syntactical purity of the Harper’s “Findings” section. (Of Harper’s two dominant flavors, the one I like best is not the prolix old-school progressive-polemical [Thomas Frank's "Easy Chair" columns, Rick MacArthur's distrust of the internet] but the hyper-distilled literary-bizarre ["Readings," the Weekly Review, Jim Shepard short stories]).

Last night I read this May’s delicious, oblique history of Byzantium by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi (subhead: “Their ears were uncircumcised”); a part of it is excerpted on the website. Imagine behind its paratactic compression a fanatically precise series of copyediting stress tests, a paragraph of fact-checking appended in pencil to every modifier . . . It reminds me, a little bit, of Calasso, but it’s funnier:

What were the laws and practices of the lawgivers? The Great Code of Theodosius forbade the impersonation of nuns by female mimes and the trampling of Jews by gentiles; the edicts of Leo VI permitted eunuchs to adopt; the Orthodox patriarchs anathematized the Manichaeans’ belief that all things fermented are alive.

The rulers of Byzantium were accustomed to blinding their rivals. With ornamental eye scoops, with daggers, with candelabras, kitchen knives, and tent pegs, with burning coals and boiling vinegar, with red-hot bowls held near the face and with bandages that left the eyes unharmed but were forbidden to be removed; sometimes it was sufficient merely to singe the eyelashes, for the victim to bellow and sigh like a lion as a trained executioner pantomimed the act. Sometimes cruelty was intended beyond the enucleation itself, as when the emperor Diogenes Romanus was deposed and “they permitted some unpracticed Jew to proceed in blinding the eyes” and “he lived several days in pain and exuding a bad odor.” In 797 the empress regnant Irene blinded her son Constantine VI and caused an eclipse that lasted seventeen days. Basil II blinded fifteen thousand Bulgarian soldiers, and every hundredth man he left with one eye to lead another ninety-nine, and when these men returned home to their king Samuel he looked upon them and died. Michael V blinded his uncle John the Master of Orphans. The iconoclasts blinded the eyes of the icons.

It was said that the city would fall when ships sailed by over dry land.

Streets

A city sidewalk by itself is nothing. It is an abstraction. It means something only in conjunction with the buildings and other uses that border it, or border other sidewalks very near it. The same might be said of streets, in the sense that they serve other purposes besides carrying wheeled traffic in their middles. Streets and their sidewalks, the main public places of a city, are its most vital organs. Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets. If a city’s streets look interesting, the city looks interesting; if they look dull, the city looks dull. — The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs

Todd Solondz: Sure. You know, when I was young and growing up in the suburbs, where there was nothing to excite me, no real culture or stimulation, no real adventure, I thought all the time about how one day I’d move here and my life would be like this. I’d live and work in Manhattan, and there’d always be something happening. And in the end, for me, it’s not so much about the theatre and the museums and galleries and so on. It’s about the streets, and the life of the streets, and the endless parade of different kinds of people, and how you can never get enough of it. It’s always there and you never grow tired of it, just going out and walking or sitting and watching it all.

Churchill, on a visit to a poor neighborhood in Manchester, saying, with his odd and signature mixture of real empathy and inherited condescension, “Fancy living in one of these streets—never seeing anything beautiful—never eating anything savoury—never saying anything clever! ” (The New Yorker)

The streets, despite the artillery strikes, were full of life: at the antitank barricades, children with paper helmets, perched on top of the obstacles, were waving wooden swords; I passed an old woman pushing strollers full of bricks and even, crossing the Tiergarten toward the zoo bunker, soldiers chasing a herd of mooing cows. At night it rained again; and the Reds, in turn, celebrated Lenin’s birthday with a brutal riot of artillery. — The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell

The children invented a game for themselves that involved hurling a stocking, which has been tightly packed with dust, through the air like a rocket, and as it falls it creates an entire cloud of dust. The youngsters play this game a lot, although it has been forbidden by the management. —Anonymous, Memorandum to Dep. Chairman of Moscow City Children’s Commission, re: Children’s Command, Barybino (1936) in Europe Central, William T. Vollmann

In Paris all was still turmoil. That very night, my father would hear artillery trains passing along the outer boulevards. No one could know if the explosions meant victory or defeat. “From the towers of Notre Dame you could see the heads of the Russian columns appearing, like the first undulations of a tidal wave on the beach.” So writes Chateaubriand and it is likely true, or most of it. — Parrot & Olivier in America, Peter Carey

They were now entering the centre of the city, an off-white grid of frozen canals and deserted avenues, lined with impressive Neoclassical & Art Nouveau buildings. In the twilight, their incongruous stuccoed, statue-haunted silhouettes, rising darker against the darkening horizon, gave the eerie impression that they had been cast down from the sky like palaces from another planet. You could not, by any stretch of the mind, imagine an architecture less adapted to its surroundings. An Ideal City punished and banished to the Far North for its marble hubris, it loomed titanic and mad . . . — Aurorarama, Jean-Christophe Voltat

Luanda was not dying the way our Polish cities died in the last war. There were no air raids, there was no “pacification,” no destruction of district after district. There were no cemeteries in the streets of the squares. The city was dying the way an oasis dies when the well runs dry . . . . Thanks to the abundance of wood that has collected here in Luanda, this dusty desert city nearly devoid of trees now smells like a flourishing forest. It’s as if the forest had suddenly taken root in the streets, the squares, and the plazas. [...] The building of the wooden city, the city of crates, goes on day after day, from dawn to twilight. Everyone works, soaked with rain, burned by the sun; even the millionaires, if they are physically fit, turn to the task. — Another Day of Life, Ryszard Kapusciński

 

Édouard Levé

When I look at a strawberry, I think of a tongue, when I lick one, of a kiss. I can see how drops of water could be torture. A burn on my tongue has a taste.

More.

Moby Dick on pomade

Certain I am, however, that a king’s head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery? . . . In common life we esteem but measly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule he can’t amount to much in his totality.

— Chapter 25

How to read

Things that teach you how to read them, according to the internet:

Joyce’s Ulysses
Ulysses by James Joyce
Joyce, Sebald
Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, J R, Infinite Jest
a diaphanous novel that reminds me of Blanchot
a certain kind of exemplary poem
poems, read carefully
no chart, book, article or person
all great books in any genre, but particularly Fashion Design Drawing Course
masterpieces
great works of art
Sherlock Holmes stories
Moby Dick in Pictures
every book you read
books that are assured and confident
a good experimental-form book
books that sit uncomfortably in their own era
Infinite Jest
Gravity’s Rainbow
great books, the truly great ones, but especially Infinite Jest
Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and other modernist works
innovative fiction, like Ulysses and Beloved
any good book
almost any book
science fiction, uniquely
the games Portal and Portal 2
the best kind of comic book
every book you read
any good book
every good book
all great books
Proust

Birthday

My newest age, going by the Harper’s Index: The number of moles on the average adult’s body (Dec ’88), and the number of fishing rods and tackle boxes that can be checked out of Georgia’s Tybee Island public library (Oct ’98). The estimated number of Cobra attack helicopters privately owned by Americans (April ’97). The maximum running speed (in miles per hour) of a wild turkey, and the average lifespan (in years) of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon (Nov ’90 & ’95). The number of days it takes an adult in Los Angeles to breathe in more air pollution than EPA guidelines recommend for a lifetime (Dec ’02), the estimated California black-market price, in dollars, of a state-issued handicapped parking permit (July ’91), and the minimum number of times that Frederick Douglass was beaten in what is now Donald Rumsfield’s vacation home (March ’06). The percentage of Americans who believe their presence at a sports event influences its outcome (Dec ’84). The average number of miles by which the magnetic North Pole moves each year (Dec ’02).

Yesterday I was only as old as the 1989 percentage of Iowans with lawn ornaments.

Lovecraftian

From 221 entries in a notebook kept by H.P. Lovecraft between 1919 and 1934. of “ideas, images, & quotations” for “possible future use in weird fiction.”

Race of immortal Pharaohs dwelling beneath pyramids in vast subterranean halls down black staircases.

Castaways on island eat unknown vegetation and become strangely transformed.

Rats multiply and exterminate first a single city and then all mankind. Increased size and intelligence.

Man visits museum of antiquities—asks that it accept a bas-relief he has just made—old and learned curator laughs and says he cannot accept anything so modern. Man says that “dreams are older than brooding Egypt or the contemplative Sphinx or garden-girdled Babylonia” and that he had fashioned the sculpture in his dreams. Curator bids him shew his product, and when he does so curator shews horror. Asks who the man may be. He tells modern name. “No—before that” says curator. Man does not remember except in dreams. Then curator offers high price, but man fears he means to destroy sculpture. Asks fabulous price—curator will consult directors. Add good development and describe nature of bas-relief.

Individual, by some strange process, retraces the path of evolution and becomes amphibious.

Someone or something cries in fright at sight of the rising moon, as if it were something strange.

Man forced to take shelter in strange house. Host has thick beard and dark glasses. Retires. In night guest rises and sees host’s clothes about—also mask which was the apparent face of whatever the host was. Flight.

Doors found mysteriously open and shut etc.—excite terror.

Wall paper cracks off in sinister shape—man dies of fright.

Ancient negro voodoo wizard in cabin in swamp—possesses white man.

Insects or other entities from space attack and penetrate a man’s head and cause him to remember alien and exotic things—possible displacement of personality.

Hideous secret society—widespread—horrible rites in caverns under familiar scenes—one’s own neighbour may belong.

Planets form’d of invisible matter.

Vampire dog.

Migration of lemmings—Atlantis.

Vampire visits man in ancestral abode—is his own father.

The walking dead—seemingly alive, but—.

Disturbing conviction that all life is only a deceptive dream with some dismal or sinister horror lurking behind.

Ancient (Roman? prehistoric?) stone bridge washed away by a (sudden and curious?) storm. Something liberated which had been sealed up in the masonry of years ago. Things happen.

An odd wound appears on a man’s hand suddenly and without apparent cause. Spreads. Consequences.

Bricolage, iii

They “found that illiterates had a ‘graphic-functional’ way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled. In naming colors, for example, literate people said ‘dark blue’ or ‘light yellow,’ but illiterates used metaphorical names like ‘liver,’ ‘peach,’ ‘decayed teeth,’ and ‘cotton in bloom.’”

Because I was born into ongoing falsehood,
I have had to learn to think in metaphors . . .
Richard Hoffman

Metaphor is the juxtaposition of disparate elements of the world in which an unsuspected commonality, an illuminating partial likeness, has been discovered, and the more unlikely the juxtaposition, the greater the consequent sensation of the unifying of the world; and so the range of a writer’s metaphor is a measure of the range of his cognition.

Anger is better, as pomegranates are. Andrea of Hungary [IV.v.33]

“An essay is like a glass of water. Dip a spoon into that glass of water and scoop some of it out and hold it over a hot frying pan so that a few drops fall & sizzle & quickly disappear. That’s a poem.”
The Anthologist

My father said, “When in doubt, castle.”

Catachresis: A metaphor that’s become part of common everyday speech & is no longer perceived as a metaphor (bottleneck, eye of a needle).
The Savage Detectives

“violet-flavoured nightmare”: Cheever, of Nabokov’s Pale Fire

“a tint between the colour of an old fence and that of a low cloud”:
Nabokov, of Chekhov’s prose

Da steht der Tod, ein bläucher Absud
And here stands death, a bluish distillate
in einer Tasse ohne Untersatz
in a cup without a saucer

These are the youths that thunder at a playhouse
and fight for bitten apples.
Henry VIII

The most popular fourteenth-century literary genre, sometimes composed in Old Uzbek, was epistolary poetry. Poems during this period took the form of love letters between nightingales and sheep, between opium and wine, between red and green . . .

“As you can see, madam, words are getting staler and staler… idiots have used them like so many wheelbarrows… loaded them up with all kinds of idiotic confessions, with all these ideas, each more stupid than the last… in short, with what people call messages.”

There are those who grow
gardens in their heads
paths lead from their hair
to sunny and white cities

it’s easy for them to write
they close their eyes
immediately schools of images
stream down from their foreheads

my imagination
is a piece of board
my sole instrument
is a wooden stick

I strike the board
it answers me
yes—yes
no—no . . .
Zbiginew Herbert

“One morning I knew, finally, that lists of examples wouldn’t do any longer, but examples were all that I had. In that country they speak prose. And not only do they speak it, they live it. They didn’t ban poetry — they still encourage it, officially — but they did get rid of the insides of things, the interiors that poetry once, in another era before the fall, referred to. In that sense, they are like us.”
The Soul Thief

“TULIP, drum, camel, ladybug,
glass-blowing, genial arrogance,
Rubens, purple, eroticism as gourmandise,
zamindary, the Caliphate of the Umayyads, Haroun al-Raschid.”
— from “Het Erewhonisch Schetsboek” in Apple and Pears, Guy Davenport