The Artful Sentence

In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment. For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time.

-- Jhumpa Lahiri at The New York Times

I empathize. I sometimes feel as though my true art-object is not the poem or the novel, but the artfully crafted sentence or three. That is why I post a lot of quotes, which is for me a sort of collection of favored sentences.

Indeed, when I am feeling most brain-dead, as though I cannot have more than a couple of dozen brain cells firing up when I am trying to think, I sometimes consider reducing my blog to captured sentences, the way a butterfly collector catches butterflies, and I would only supply a few sentences of my own in order to give readers a context, so that the isolated sentences are not deprived of their force.

Writing this out, I feel the temptation acutely. It would make for a simpler blogging strategy: just collecting sentences from my reading and posting them, along with images that I come across and which capture my fancy. Maybe later, when absolutely all the fun has seeped away from this increasingly doleful enterprise. I suppose I am pretty close to doing this anyway.

The Artful Sentence

In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment. For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time.

-- Jhumpa Lahiri at The New York Times

I empathize. I sometimes feel as though my true art-object is not the poem or the novel, but the artfully crafted sentence or three. That is why I post a lot of quotes, which is for me a sort of collection of favored sentences.

Indeed, when I am feeling most brain-dead, as though I cannot have more than a couple of dozen brain cells firing up when I am trying to think, I sometimes consider reducing my blog to captured sentences, the way a butterfly collector catches butterflies, and I would only supply a few sentences of my own in order to give readers a context, so that the isolated sentences are not deprived of their force.

Writing this out, I feel the temptation acutely. It would make for a simpler blogging strategy: just collecting sentences from my reading and posting them, along with images that I come across and which capture my fancy. Maybe later, when absolutely all the fun has seeped away from this increasingly doleful enterprise. I suppose I am pretty close to doing this anyway.

Roller Girl

Courtney Stodden goes rollerskating with the hubby. I don't think I ever covered this minor celebrity story. Courtney was the teen bride, of pehaps sixteen years of age, to a fifty-something actor. Even though I never got around to mentioning it, the story always did catch my fancy, if you can imagine.


(Source: ONTD)

Roller Girl

Courtney Stodden goes rollerskating with the hubby. I don't think I ever covered this minor celebrity story. Courtney was the teen bride, of pehaps sixteen years of age, to a fifty-something actor. Even though I never got around to mentioning it, the story always did catch my fancy, if you can imagine.


(Source: ONTD)

Casanova

“I was born for the sex opposite to mine. I have always loved it and done all that I could to make myself loved by it.”

-- Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt (1725-1798)

Alas, middle-age also seemed to take a serious toll on him and his love life. Age is a merciless tyrant.

His massive memoir sold for ten-million dollars in 2010, and it is expected to go online. Hence the renewed interest in the man, the legend.

It's a more interesting story than I knew, but I only knew the cliche:

“He would have been surprised to discover that he is remembered first as a great lover,” says Tom Vitelli, a leading American Casanovist, who contributes regularly to the international scholarly journal devoted to the writer, L’Intermédiaire des Casanovistes. “Sex was part of his story, but it was incidental to his real literary aims. He only presented his love life because it gave a window onto human nature.”

I see that a very affordable edition of the unexpurgated memoir is available for the Kindle. It might make an interesting companion to Sylvia Plath's journals in my book-blogging.

Casanova

“I was born for the sex opposite to mine. I have always loved it and done all that I could to make myself loved by it.”

-- Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt (1725-1798)

Alas, middle-age also seemed to take a serious toll on him and his love life. Age is a merciless tyrant.

His massive memoir sold for ten-million dollars in 2010, and it is expected to go online. Hence the renewed interest in the man, the legend.

It's a more interesting story than I knew, but I only knew the cliche:

“He would have been surprised to discover that he is remembered first as a great lover,” says Tom Vitelli, a leading American Casanovist, who contributes regularly to the international scholarly journal devoted to the writer, L’Intermédiaire des Casanovistes. “Sex was part of his story, but it was incidental to his real literary aims. He only presented his love life because it gave a window onto human nature.”

I see that a very affordable edition of the unexpurgated memoir is available for the Kindle. It might make an interesting companion to Sylvia Plath's journals in my book-blogging.

My Kind of Girl

My Kind of Girl

Casanova

Yes, I will be doing Casanova’s memoirs, after all.

Since I often get stuck on a book post when it comes to my novels and poetry, and since it is very easy to take a passage from diaries, I think I will use Plath and Casanova to help with the slack. Which means we may be seeing quite a few entries from them, perhaps a couple a day, taking turns between these two memoirists. Unless and until it looks unattractive to me.

_ _ _

The memoirs of Casanova, though they have enjoyed the popularity of a bad reputation, have never had justice done to them by serious students of literature, of life, and of history.

[...]

They tell the story of a man who loved life passionately for its own sake: one to whom woman was, indeed, the most important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world was indifferent.

-- Arthur Symons, preface to "The Complete Memoirs of Casanova (Unexpurgated Edition)"

Casanova

Yes, I will be doing Casanova’s memoirs, after all.

Since I often get stuck on a book post when it comes to my novels and poetry, and since it is very easy to take a passage from diaries, I think I will use Plath and Casanova to help with the slack. Which means we may be seeing quite a few entries from them, perhaps a couple a day, taking turns between these two memoirists. Unless and until it looks unattractive to me.

_ _ _

The memoirs of Casanova, though they have enjoyed the popularity of a bad reputation, have never had justice done to them by serious students of literature, of life, and of history.

[...]

They tell the story of a man who loved life passionately for its own sake: one to whom woman was, indeed, the most important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world was indifferent.

-- Arthur Symons, preface to "The Complete Memoirs of Casanova (Unexpurgated Edition)"

Premium Elite Citizen Card

Michael Lind laments the increasing pace of plutocraticization.

_ _ _

The other day at Bergstrom Airport in Austin, Texas, I witnessed a striking manifestation of the new American plutocracy. Along with getting a photo at the Department of Motor Vehicles and sitting in a jury pool, standing in line at airport security with a mob of other people, miserable though it is, remains one of the few examples of civic equality in our increasingly oligarchic republic. Much airport security, of course, is theater, designed to provide alibis for bureaucrats and politicians in the event of a terrorist attack. But while we can debate what a rational airport security system would look like, no rational system would discriminate among passengers on the basis of ability to pay.

That is what makes the policy of Delta Airlines so shockingly un-American. In Austin, Delta had not one but two lines that fed into the Transportation Security Administration checkpoint area. One line was mixed race, mixed class and mixed age. The other line was usually empty. Now and then a white, middle-aged man would appear in the second line and the first line would be halted as he went directly into the TSA checkpoint.

[...]

Very well then. Why don’t we just make the new class-based discrimination official? Instead of leaving it to airlines and other corporations to construct the new apartheid piecemeal and informally, let the government issue a Premium Elite Citizen Card, valid for multiple purposes. For the right price, a price carefully calculated to be unaffordable by the majority of Americans, those willing and able to pay would be allowed to cut in line, not only at airports, but everywhere: at taxi stands, movie theaters, restaurants. All they would have to do is flash their Premium Elite Citizen Card to force the rabble to step aside and make way. The degeneration of America’s democracy into a banana republic would be complete, once the Land of the Free became the Land of the Free Points With Membership.

-- Michael Lind at Salon.com

_ _ _

Bah, it's all I can do to afford bus fare.

Premium Elite Citizen Card

Michael Lind laments the increasing pace of plutocraticization.

_ _ _

The other day at Bergstrom Airport in Austin, Texas, I witnessed a striking manifestation of the new American plutocracy. Along with getting a photo at the Department of Motor Vehicles and sitting in a jury pool, standing in line at airport security with a mob of other people, miserable though it is, remains one of the few examples of civic equality in our increasingly oligarchic republic. Much airport security, of course, is theater, designed to provide alibis for bureaucrats and politicians in the event of a terrorist attack. But while we can debate what a rational airport security system would look like, no rational system would discriminate among passengers on the basis of ability to pay.

That is what makes the policy of Delta Airlines so shockingly un-American. In Austin, Delta had not one but two lines that fed into the Transportation Security Administration checkpoint area. One line was mixed race, mixed class and mixed age. The other line was usually empty. Now and then a white, middle-aged man would appear in the second line and the first line would be halted as he went directly into the TSA checkpoint.

[...]

Very well then. Why don’t we just make the new class-based discrimination official? Instead of leaving it to airlines and other corporations to construct the new apartheid piecemeal and informally, let the government issue a Premium Elite Citizen Card, valid for multiple purposes. For the right price, a price carefully calculated to be unaffordable by the majority of Americans, those willing and able to pay would be allowed to cut in line, not only at airports, but everywhere: at taxi stands, movie theaters, restaurants. All they would have to do is flash their Premium Elite Citizen Card to force the rabble to step aside and make way. The degeneration of America’s democracy into a banana republic would be complete, once the Land of the Free became the Land of the Free Points With Membership.

-- Michael Lind at Salon.com

_ _ _

Bah, it's all I can do to afford bus fare.