Tagged: read

His desire sprouted eyes

It may have been the stranger’s perambulatory appearance that acted upon his imagination or some other physical or psychological influence coming into play, but much to his surprise he grew aware of a strange expansion of his inner being, a kind of restive anxiety, a fervent youthful craving for faraway places, a feeling so vivid, so new or else so long outgrown and forgotten that he came to a standstill—hands behind his back, eyes on the ground, rooted to the spot—examined the nature and purport of the feeling.

It was wanderlust, pure and simple, yet it had come upon him like a seizure and grown into a passion—no, more, an hallucination. His desire sprouted eyes, his imagination, as yet unstilled from its morning labors, conjured forth the earth’s manifold wonders and horrors in his attempt to visualize them: he saw.

THOMAS MANN, Death in Venice trans. Michael Henry Heim with an introduction by Michael Cunningham [HarperCollins].

WILL AITKEN on Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of the classic at TIFF’s Books on Film series, tonight.

Photo: [via]

“Exhilarated.”

To 19-year-old me, Ginsberg was beautiful—and I don’t mean just “spiritually” beautiful, but physically beautiful, with all the burden of living visible in his lopsided face.

At his readings that summer—always crowded with the lanky, fresh-faced boys he enjoyed talking to in bed afterward—he seemed obsessed with mortality and ordinariness, which intruded even into the bragging doggerel he wrote about the sweet guys who made him feel young again: “I taught love to breathe/ mindful of death.”

STEVE SILBERMAN, from Ginsberg’s Failure. Longshot Magazine, Issue 2.

Photo: source unknown

“Moby Dick can be read as the world’s best how-to book.”*

“To this day, I’m not sure that I am in possession of substantially greater self-knowledge than someone who has never been inside a therapist’s office. What I do know, aside from the fact that the unconscious plays strange tricks and that the past stalks the present in ways we can’t begin to imagine, is a certain language ["therapy-speak"], a certain style of thinking [not moving] that, in its capacity for reframing your life story, becomes — how should I put this? — addictive.”

Most “therapies” are corrective/punitive merely focused on what’s “wrong”/”fixing” you (or, worse still, somehow “magically” visualizing your way to fortune). There’s no “recovery,” and precious little movement/change, you’re still stuck with the idée fixe of yourself. You will find—pleasure yourself—all the more, reading. “What are you reading?” (and steer clear of the onerous “self-help” crap).

Then again, I may just be “addicted” to good reads.

Alberto Manguel postulates, “But the best guides, I believe, are the reader’s whims—trust in pleasure and faith in haphazardness—which sometimes leads us into a makeshift state of grace, allowing us to spin gold out of flax.”

Photos: Random Guy, doortoriver/Ruthanne Reid on flickr [click images to enlarge]

*Robert Pinsky

See the world





If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest—in all its ardour and paradoxes—then our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside the constraints of work and of the struggle for survival. Yet rarely are they considered to present philosophical problems—that is, issues requiring thought beyond the practical. We are inundated with advice on where to travel to, but we little of why and how we should go, even thought the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial, and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia, or ‘human flourishing’.

ALAIN DE BOTTON, The Art of Travel
Buy from Amazon

I remember once being asked how I decide where I’d like to travel and without a beat replied, “Where the boys are.” Even knowing me, he thought I was joking.

When friends ask if they can bring me back anything from their various travels, I always make a modest request that they take a few pics (knowing my ‘type’) so I can see just what the boys look like over there. To my/our joy, most are delighted upon return to show me what they’ve discovered.

Photo: Bello_bello_bello_48

Solo





Losing that hour
this weekend past

things do matter

life was either/or
not neither

now,

where was I?

little keeps me
here, I look

for things to
grasp to hold you
know—Things!

not to lose my
place

(if I don’t notice, will anyone?)

thank goodness for that little plastic cup
with the lid that fits so nicely

Lunch.


JEFF KIRBY


Above: detail from The Burial of Atala by Anne-Louis Girodet