E. H. GOMBRICH
E. H. Gombrich,
With aplomb which
Sets him apart,
Told The Story of Art.
Friday, March 31, 2017
Clerihew of a Worthy Brick
E. H. GOMBRICH
E. H. Gombrich,
With aplomb which
Sets him apart,
Told The Story of Art.
Daily Dose
From Les Miserables, Fantine, Book First -- A Just Man, by Victor Hugo, translated by Isobel Florence Hapgood
YES
"'Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this fact is recognized, -- that the human race has been treated harshly, but that it has progressed.'"
From Chapter IX
Thursday, March 30, 2017
Clerihew of the Credulous
REZA ASLAN
Reza Aslan
Always has on
His open face to all religion
One simple word, that being "pigeon."
Daily Dose
CONTEMPT
"His opponent's contempt for the love of literary form, he cried, only too plainly revealed a taste for the frenzied barbarism of certain epochs, but without such a love no true humanity was possible. or even conceivable, not now, not ever."
From A Good Soldier
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Clerihew of Theatrical Hubris
PETER BROOK
Peter Brook
Took a look
At the box-office data
And decided to mount The Mahabharata.
Daily Dose
From I Am Not Your Negro, by James Baldwin
ALWAYS
"I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life."
From page 56
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
Daily Dose
TRANSLATING, SOMETIMES
"I sometimes try to find an equivalent in English before I really understand the French. Then I realize that I don't understand the French, even after trying several times, and I cast my eye rather listlessly here and there within the paragraph hoping the meaning of it will fall into place by itself, which it sometimes does. But today it does not, and then my mind wanders."
From Thyroid Diary
Monday, March 27, 2017
Daily Dose
From Wizard of the Crow, by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
FOLDS
"In the folds of the skin on the Ruler's forehead and the light in his squinty eyes, the Wizard of the Crow detected intense anger."
From Book Three, Section Three, 13
Sunday, March 26, 2017
Daily Dose
EVERYONE
"Everyone swore that the food in Beijing and Chengdu would be different from what I'd had in the United States. 'It's more real,' they said, meaning, it turned out, that I could dislike it more authentically."
From #2 to Go
Saturday, March 25, 2017
Daily Dose
From Seven Men, by Max Beerbohm
UTTERLY
"He was utterly forgotten before any one, so far as I am aware, noticed he was no longer hanging around."
From Enoch Soames
Friday, March 24, 2017
Clerihew for the Inscrutable Argentine
Julio Cortazar,
Couldn't be more bizarre,
Nor could his work be less accessible
(My own opinion's... inexpressible.)
Daily Dose
From How It all Began, by Penelope Lively
SUCKED
"She felt that she was being sucked into things. The implication was that it was after all partly her fault. For heaven's sake!"
From Chapter Four
Thursday, March 23, 2017
Daily Dose
From Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
LONDON
“One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.”
From Part One
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
Daily Dose
LOVE
"Love has great capacity not only for illusion but also for forgetfulness."
From page 29
Tuesday, March 21, 2017
Clerihew of a Thorough Shit
Dr. Louis-Ferdinand Auguste Destouches, a.k.a., "Céline",
Was often vicious and never clean,
Anti-Semite and a collaborator,
A brilliant writer, but a better hater.
Daily Dose
ALL OF A SUDDEN
"All of a sudden you've become disgustingly old."
From page 194 this edition
Monday, March 20, 2017
Clerihew of Remembered Pleasure
Saw a boy with a book open on his knees.
Read the title: The Baron in the Trees.
Oh, to taste again what comes between, oh,
Italo Calvino!
Daily Dose
THINK
"If you think about it, reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing."
From Chapter Eight
Sunday, March 19, 2017
Daily Dose
STARTED
"I had started along a narrow channel beyond which events were piling up with multiplied density; I had only to seize them by the handful and throw them in the face of my competitor, who had never guessed their existence."
From How Much Shall We Bet?
Saturday, March 18, 2017
Clerihew for the Discarded Girdle
Grace Metalious
Would often bewail the fuss
Made by prudes over Peyton Place,
Suggesting they get screwed, cut up, unlace.
Daily Dose
LIKE
"Like Humpty Dumpty, we might argue, the author of Peyton Place did not fall; she was pushed."
From Epilogue, Memento Mori
Friday, March 17, 2017
Clerihew of an Irish Champ
ANNE ENRIGHT
Anne Enright's
Not shy of fights,
Though she prefers brave words to fists,
As would most short novelists.
Daily Dose
SO LONG
"I haven't written anything in so long, that I'm afraid that I will forget how to use the typewriter, if this keeps up."
From Letters, #81
Thursday, March 16, 2017
Clerihew of a Perfect Marriage
JANE BOWLES
Jane Bowles
Played many roles:
Writer, wife, bisexual lover,
It seems in all, Paul thought well of her.
Daily Dose
"Children have a Greek classicist's indifference to pity in fiction, and an enormous respect for fate."
From Books I Remember
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Clerihew of Class Aspirations
EVELYN WAUGH
Supreme bourgeois,
Was Evelyn Waugh;
Really more "moyenne" than "haute",
Though you'd never know it from what he wrote.
Daily Dose
From The Moon and Sixpence, by William Somerset Maugham
EMOTIONS
"The emotions common to most of us simply did not exist in him, and it was as absurd to blame him for not feeling them as for blaming the tiger because he is fierce and cruel."
From Chapter 30
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
Clerihew for a Bigamist
GIACOMO CASANOVA
Casanova
Asked Jehovah,
"Shall I have eternal life?"
God responded, "Ask the wife."
Daily Dose
From An Angry Letter in January and Other Poems, by Ama Ata Aidoo
For Bessie Head
To begin with
there’s the small problem of address:
calling you
by the only name some of us
knew you by,
hailing you by titles
you could not possibly
have cared for,
referring you to
strange and clouded
origins that eat into
our past our pain
like prize-winning cassava tubers in
abandoned harvest fields…
Some of us never ever met you.
And who would believe
that but those who know
the tragedies of our land
where
non-meetings,
visions unopening and other such
abortions are
every day reality?
To continue a
confession of sorts,
‘Miss Head’ will just not do
‘Bessie’ too familiar
Bessie Head,
your face swims into focus
through soft clouds of
cigarette smoke and from behind the
much much harder barriers erected by some
quite unbelievable
20th. century philosophy,
saying more of
your strength
than all the tales
would have us think.
For the moment,
we fear and
dare not accept that
given how things
are,
poetry almost becomes
dirges and
not much more.
But
we hold on to knowing
ourselves as daughters of
darklight women
who are so used to Life
– giving it
feeding it –
Death
was always
quite unwelcome;
– taking them by surprise –
an evil peevish brat
to be flattered,
cleaned
oiled
pomaded
over-dressed and perfumed…
We fear to remember:
fatigued as we are by so much
death and dying and
the need to bury and
to mourn.
Bessie Head:
such a fresh ancestress!
If you chance
on a rainy night
to visit,
if you chance
on a sunny day
to pass by,
look in to see
– how well we do
– how hard we fight
– how loud we scream
against the plots
– to kill our souls our bodies too
– to take our land, and
– feed us shit.
Come
benevolently,
Dear Fresh Spirit,
that rejoining
The Others,
you can tell them
now more than ever,
do we need
the support
the energy
to create
recreate and
celebrate…
nothing more
absolutely
nothing less.
Monday, March 13, 2017
Clerihew of a Thwarted Swiss
ROBERT WALSER
Robert Walser
Got an ulcer
Trying to do literary work
While earning his living as a little clerk.
Dailey Dose
From Martin Chuzzlewit, by Charles Dickens
THE WISDOM OF MRS. GAMP
"Rich folks may ride on camels, but it an't so easy for 'em to see out of
a needle's eye. That is my comfort, and I hope I knows it."