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February 1    Russo's Dreck

When I posted those cute passages below I had still been under the impression that Russo was a writer and I was still in thrall to the seductive way his prose can seem to be as smooth as butter.

Further into the book I became more skeptical and doubtful.  Finally I gave up about sixty pages from the end.  The book is terrible, terrible and awful.  Russo has a knack for spinning the sort of sit-com, lifetime-movie schlock that fills our screens and books.  Not a writer at all, Russo rather is exactly what in the old days we called a real hack.

Jennie Yabroff nails it in a piece she published on The Daily Beast in 2009/08/04:  "His stock in trade is a sort of fuzzy, golly-gee novel that critics invariably describe as "warm" and "big hearted."  Russo's books are like big-pawed puppies, jumping onto your lap and panting in your face, begging you to embrace them just as they purport to embrace all of human kind."

February 7, 2012   We Need a Word

Patrick Armstrong sent this query the other day & it is a good one:

*goodness: I want a word that describes the success of a poetic word/lines/stanza (it's beauty, truth, music, cleverness, etc. all at once).  "Goodness" is not the word--aletheia doesn't quite work.  Le mot jus is too little.  It should probably be greek (to kalo?) or german or castillian.  Can you come up with the word?

February 7, 2012  We Need a Word For - 2 -

We also need a word for the sort of reading coincidence that just happened to me.  Earlier today I read some more of Deleuze's The Fold and caught an interesting passage that I did not quite understand.  Just now, a few hours later, I picked up Pessoa's Disquiet and within two pages he talks exactly about the notion Deleuze had been talking about.

Passage A from Deleuze:

I possess a clear and distinguished zone of expression because I have primitive singularities, ideal virtual events to which I am destined.  From this moment deduction unwinds:  I have a body because I have a clear and distinguished zone of expression.  In fact, that which I express clearly, the moment having come, will concern my body, and will act most directly on my body, surroundings, circumstances, and environment.  Caesar is the spiritual monad who clearly expresses the crossing of the Rubicon.  He thus has a body that the flowing waters, a given flow of water, will eventually be soaking.  But up to this point, when perception has become the perception of an object, everything can be easily inverted.  I can recover ordinary language, or the habitual and empirical order of resemblance:  I have a clear or privileged zone of expression because I have a body.  What I clearly express is what happens to my body.

Passage B from Pessoa

It is so difficult to describe the feeling one has when one feels that one really does exist and that the soul is a real entity, that I do not know what human words I can use to define it.  I don't know if I'm really as feverish as I feel or if instead I have finally recovered from the fever of slumbering through life.  Yes, I am like a traveller who suddenly finds himself in a strange town, with no idea of how he got there and I'm reminded of cases of amnesiacs who, losing all memory of their past lives, for a long time live as other people.  For many years--from the time I was born and became a conscious being--I too was someone else and now I wake up suddenly to find myself standing in the middle of the bridge, looking out over the river, knowing more positively now than at any moment before that I exist.  But I do not know the city, the streets are new to me and the sickness incurable.  So, leaning on the bridge, I wait for the truth to pass so that I can regain my null and fictitious, intelligent and natural self.

It lasted only a moment and has passed now.  I notice the furniture around me, the design on the old wallpaper, the sun through the dusty panes.  For a moment I saw the truth.  For a moment I was, consciously, what great men are throughout their lives.  I recall their actions and their words and I wonder if they too were tempted by and succumbed to the Demon Reality.  To know nothing about oneself is to live.  To know a little about oneself is to think.  To know oneself precipitately, as I did in that moment of pure enlightenment, is suddenly to grasp Leibniz's notion of the dominant monad, the magic password to the soul.  A sudden light scorches and consumes everything.  It strips us naked even of our selves.

Passage C ?

The mention by Deleuze of the word zone reminds me that yesterday I read Killian Fox's review in the Observer of Geoff Dyer's new book called Zona.  It is a Dyer-esque meditation on the classic film by Andrei Tarkovsky called Stalker.  I guess I will have to read Dyer's book after all to see if he mentions Pessoa or Deleuze or Leibniz.

February 8, 2012   Pessoa

In my haste the other day to type up the passage from Pessoa, I left off the best part.  He has just had a moment of pure enlightenment and relates it to Leibniz’s idea of the dominant monad.  “It strips us naked even of our selves.”

And then he adds: (it was on the next page on my Kindle)

"It was only a moment but I saw myself.  Now I cannot even say what I was.  And, after it all, I just feel sleepy because, though I don’t really know why, I suspect that the meaning of it all is simply to sleep."