vergilnowmodern

This one goes out to summer's fading day.

Par les soirs bleus d'été, j'irai dans les sentiers,
By the blue nights of summer, I'll travel the trails
Picoté par les blés, fouler l'herbe menue:
Tickled by wheat stalks, and treading slim grass:
Rêveur, j'en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds.
O dreamer, I'll feel the freshness at my feet
Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue.
I'll let the wind envelop my bare head.
Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien:
I will not speak, I will not think at all
Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'âme,
But in my soul a boundless love will grow,
Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,
And I'll be distant, far away, like a bohemian
Par la Nature, - heureux comme avec une femme.
Thanks to Nature, I'll be happy, as if a girl were with me.
-Rimbaud

WE GOT OUR MOD WE GOT OUR MOD
EVERYONE SING THE WE GOT OUR MOD SONG
WE GOT OUR MOD WE GOT OUR MOD
LUM DEE DUM DE DAH

To do List for the next month:
1.) Read every good author in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Sanskrit, and unintelligble drunken speak (frequent a long island bar, you'll see what a widespread language this is.)
2.) Discover the point of life, the crux of philosophy, the heart of art, the central turbine of fiction, poetry's scream and music's cry, or at least find a bar where they mix in some Plato with their baseball chatter.
3.) Sit at the edge of the long island sound staring out into the rippling sea water until the sound of the sea and the sound of my modern confusion blend together into a consimultaneous psalm of meaning.
4.) Drink my first Long island ice tea, drunkenfall off the barstool, and cackle from the floor.
5.) Read Dostoevsky until my brain hemorrages.
6.) Translate my required Greek poetry summer reading assignment into Ebonics and the lyrics of Kanye West's 2nd album into Latin verse.
7.) Listen to late Coltrane while tripping face and observing the full moon's slow descent into the sea.
8.) Finally learn to play the digeri-doo with competance.
9.) Detect peeps who dig rockerthinking in this neck of the high-real-estate-value woods.
10.) Gear up for the Happy Christmas tirade that my Senior Year will be.

la dirrita via era smarrita, ma vivo ancora, bene ed in modo bello.

I shall have to write this quickly. The town library of Sag Harbor Long Island where my grandmother's house is and where I'll be staying the next few weeks appends to the top right hand corner of its every public computer screen an admonitorial timer that counts down from 10 minutes and then chucks you out of the windows environment and away from whatever endevour you were working on. Sag Harbor's kind of cool though, it's a little seaside town that is quite literally a Harbor, with boats and fisherman and large nets and the whole bit. To walk down the main thoroughfare is to observe the curious double duty that a town is forced to work when attempting to simultaneously appease two wildly different contingencies, the folks who wish to keep the place the unassuming little 50s town it is, and those who are seeking to capitalize from the invasion of Lexus owners who have made the place a piece of very hot property value of late. It's rather like the Gt. Barrington conundrum but with seaspray substituted for Berkshire woods.
Ack! Getting chucked out on my digital ear. More to come.

Got a new pad in the center of town right across from Impoco's. If you see this, Chelsea, and are in town with that Radioshack gig, give me a call at 528-1969 (isn't that a cool number?) We'll chillax.

The streets of Buenos Aires
They are in me now.
Not the avid streets,
Made awkward by the crowd and bustle,
But the indifferent streets of the neighborhood
Almost invisible by force of habit,
Roads immortalized by shadow and sunset
And those further out
Free of pleasing trees
Out where the austere houses scarcely venture
Overwhelmed by immortal distances,
Losing themselves in the deep vision
Of sky and plain.
For the solitary man they are a promise
Because thousands of singular souls populate them
Unique before God and in time
And doubtlessly precious.
Around the west, the North and the South
The streets – they too are my country – unfold
Would that in the verses of which I treat
These flags would be present.


I am told this is Borges' first known poem. It reads far better in the Spanish than in my dim translation.

Ok, so, for a goodish bit of time I've been casting about in search of the all encompassing prose writer, the Crunk master flex of deft sentence, that writer whose prose is not only balenced, but electric, and incorrigibly musical, possessing a style so minutely intricate as to be able to encompass within itself every shade and nuance and potentiality of the mind. In deference to that panel of seeming know-everythings who stand atop their academic mountain bellowing the worth of a handful of Greek and Roman writers, I took my start there and dug into the prose of Rome and Greece in search of the mad shiznizzle. Julius Caesar, who wrote seven books of mercilessly stringent Latin on his fond memories of marching around ancient France killing people, is actually a exceptionally good writer of Latin. His sentences run on for pages at a time, but there is never a wasted word. But his subject matter is questionable, his vocabulary limited, and there never seems to emerge from his work anything in the way of art save for his consistantly artistic initiative to justify his bloody actions. Cicero, thought to be the premier orator of Rome, is cocky, and his prose overly elaborate, almost painfully so at times, because unlike Caesar, he doesn't marshal his words (in latin you can arrange your words in any order you like) into mind-breaking lingual back-flip-over-double-toe-loop whorls because it aids the understanding of the basic sentence intent, but because it amuses him, he thinks it makes him more thoroughly pimp. Well, Cicero, you are not pimp, and your mother smells of elderberries. Those are the two biggies as regards Latin prose, as for the remainder, Livy the historian is far too busy mickeymousing his prose line with cartoon pictorial effects to be taken seriously, Pliny's interest lies far more in his ideas than his rather white-bread style, Cato the elder is like a 13 year old who wants ice cream, Tacitus was born too late, and Petronius too early.
Plato is a character. When he writes I begin to wonder whether he came from Greece or Greece from him. I must say however that on the whole he achieves affects with his greek that are more clever and resourceful than inspired. He is definitely not the finest writer of Greek prose. That palm would probably have to go to Thucidides, who wrote as if the future of Athens were vitally dependent on his next word, and who put down long ribbons of powerful thorny early greek for the annotaters to ponder till time's end. Herodotus amuses me, he's like the Jerry springer of Hellenic discourse, dashing about from hill to dale, from Greece to Babylon to Egypt, in search of cool sensationalistic stories to pop into his history text. It's for this same reason that I hesitate to say great things of his writing, cool and fun though it was. His prose is as ADD as he was and the profundity-meter rarely rises above "DUDE! CHECK THIS OUT! AWESOME!" Demosthenes the Greek orator pisses me off when he tries to crunch every rhetorical device he has ever heard into a single page, something he does far far too often, he also is noteably lacking in word music for a professed public speaker. What Aristotle we have came not from Aristotle's pen but was scribbled down on dinner napkins by Aristotle's pupils right after dinner when the master was holding forth in his ever so certain manner and the pupils were too drunk to transcribe anything but random disconnected blippits of prose. To look to Aristotle's Metaphysics for guidance in the art of writing prose is like turning to Marilyn Manson for lessons in conventional living. Then you have the various rabble of professional speech writers and the like who bummed around old Athens willing to write anyone some goodily prose for a joint and a coke-a-cola. Of these, I'd probably have to anoint Isocrates as the king of the pack, but even so, Isoc is a wimp, and so goddamn artificial with his prose as to make Homer seek to end it all in the Attic sea.
Joyce is my favorite english prose stylist, as he is equally effective writing formal prose as he is the mad schitz-tastic modernism-is-falling stuff, and reaches effects that are rare when he combines these two styles into one, but then again Joyce was too much of burned-to-cinders catholicism refugee to ever come near certain avenues of the human experience, and he wore his mind's journey into madness on his literary sleeve, a gesture that fills his text with drama and needless woefulness in equal measure. Oscar Wilde has an understanding of prose that is as deep as the ocean, and his paradoxes, when piled on in rapid fire manner, draw one as if into a more zenful world, but he was too much of a dillitante to have anything of real value to say beyond his clever aphorisms. He was a wind up monkey, feed him a quarter and he'll make you feel square-minded, but he does not illuminate (much is he like Plato in that regard.) Dickens could write, and his rather latinic style of english was often molded quite well to the purposes of his nutty charicature filled novels, but Dickens was something of a pussy, and had no scream within him. He could occasionally be funny, but never could he tear the sky down in that way we require of our ideal prose-writer. Hemmingway was deep, and his prose original, but every line he wrote was persistantly terse in a way that seems to suggest he was more interested in rebelling against the so-called 'standard' english prose than in concieving of an ideal treatment for his wonderfully real insights.
Virginia Wolf manages to break down conventional lines of prose logic, but in the wake of that dissolution she has regrettably little to put in its place, and her attempts at charting the mind's interior nature are at best impotent, at worse muttonheaded disasters. Anyone who has yet to read P.G. Wodehouse is in for the literary shock of their lives. Here, perhaps above all the stringent bow-tie overserious academic jerkoff shitheads, is the Writer with a capital W of english. While the rest are exclaiming in french and banging their heads against their writing desks, he is leaning back in his leasurly fashion, sipping his brandy and soda and every five minutes or so turning to his type writer to compose a line that is not only a beacon to the art of careful prose, not only hair-torchingly funny, but just perfect, the right thing said in the right manner at just the right point in the development of his silly but meaningfully silly stories. My only criticism of Wodehouse is that his range of topic matter would not cover the head of a pin if you tugged at it, an endless parade of butlers bishops barons and hot-headed girls who crash their BMWs into national monuments.
The italian of Machiavelli glitters on the page, but in addition to being a writer of sharp prose he was also an asshole authority figure administrator in 17th century Italy and therefore wrote what he knew - being an asshole administrator: controlling people, subduing people, fucking with people. Reading him is like peering into the mind of a highly literary and Latinized George Bush Jr. Dante's prose (as evidenced in his la vita nuova) is really good Italian, but then Dante could do anything with words except reach outside his claustrophobic esthetical world consisting of God, the Devil, the Classics, and his embarrasingly over the top adoration of his girl Beatrice.
Flaubert's French prose is shibby enough to make me smile on a terrible day. He had an intuitive sense for not only the 'bon mot' but the 'bon phrase,' and all in his works rolls out smooth like an inevitable carpet of good fiction. He was too modern, this I will admit. And he almost dissapoints his talent with the way he seeks to affect a modern cry-cry-weep-weep thing he doesn't really feel. Apparently such fictional gestures were all the rage in the paris of his day and Flaubert was a natural people pleaser. Proust can be as deep as the buddha and shallow as a teen magazine depending on which page you catch him on. His breadth suffered greatly by his high-society living (Joyce said of him after they met in Paris "Proust could speak of nothing but dutchesses, whereas I was more concerned with their chambermaids.") One thing I love about him is the way that he writes perhaps the longest sentences in the history of the french literary tradition, and yet, instead of giving one the impression of a show-off, he actually quite assists his end of writing the nature of the mind with his long long run ons. His writing is comparable to the mind that simply will not stop running around and banging into walls and observing and comparing every aspect of everything around them and blending it all into an overwhelming fountainlike jumble of word intent.
None of these supposed experts of the pen are the real and genuine mustard, so far as I'm concerned. In fact, I see far more illuminating suggestions of literary truth in the discourse of my friends at Simon's Rock than I do on the dusty bookshelf. There, one day or another, will emerge the all encompassing book. Just you watch.

Un Mur a peine
Un signe de mur
Pose en couronne
Autour de moi.

A wall, barely
A symbol of a wall
Placed like a crown
Around me.

Je pourrais bouger
Sauter la haie de rosiers,
L'enlever comme une bague
Pressant mon coeur

I could move
Jump the rosehedge
Remove it like a ring
Pressed to my heart

Gagner l'univers
Qui fuit
Sans un cri.

Reach the Universe
which escapes
without a cry.

French Poetry from the 1940s and 50s is mad triptastic yo.

«Il decreto è stato approvato a larghissima maggioranza e questo riflette l'unità degli italiani nella lotta al terrorismo. E' il miglior incoraggiamento agli uomini impegnati per la nostra sicurezza».

Translation? Italy, after the bombings in London, is onboard with the whole Patriot-Act-We're-scared-so-we're-going-to-take-away-citizens'-rights-instead-of-actually-addressing-the-real-underlying-problem, esthetic, and is drafting up a new frightful bill quite like our Patriot Act madness. Oh geezum, now we've got not only a War on terror, but a goddamn 'lotta al terrorismo' as well. The whole of Europe is hopping onboard the Bush train to nowhere's land.

Doesn't have to happen though. I hopped on the Italian Yahoo chatrooms and ranted like a demogogue for the better part of an hour about how they have the power to rally and stop this nonsense. Must be stopped. Fear will only beget further geopolitical sketchyness.

Today I woke up on a sleeping bag on a field of grass. Jari Anne had left sometime in the night, as she is wont to do after those random monthly post-relationship hook-ups neither of us seem capable of avoiding. Not that I complain of free and meaningless hook-ups. Quite the opposite. But her manner is always buisness-like, as if she's striving to meet some quota of male attention and you are just another faceless vendor. The small churning stream beside my spot on the grass lulled me into a peace of early morning and I thought on her in contentment. She's a girl too patently insane to be anything but fascinating to the writer's mind, but, sadly, also too crazy to engage the strange obligatory charades of a relationship in anything resembling a sound manner. Let alone the fact that Keelan too is a mad hatter without with elaborate costume. Best not to combine two incendiaries. I lay there for a while taking in the slow yawning progress of the day. Around and above me an easy wind breathed round the low-hanging leaves and swept the grass to one inclination and then the opposite in a canon of artful randomness. The sky's clouds were thick gray and arranged in dense and spiraling congregations of portent and inscrutable meaning. To see them was to wonder what the Gods could mean by such a display. It certainly seemed as if something of a change or blessing or damnation or triumph or pyre hovered ahead. I looked to the wide lands for further elaboration and they showed me their warm dirt and dry fallen leaves which skittered on the wind across the rocky river's edge like pilgrims towards their mindlessness. Why is it the things of nature suggest everything but will affirm absolutely nothing?