Staying small

“To be small and to stay small”: words to live by for the protagonist of Robert Walser’s 1909 novel Jakob von Gunten.

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“‘Big paintings sell and they fill space,’ he says, without a trace of disdain. ‘That's not my style. I’m trying to compose in an area I can defend’”: the photomontagist John O’Reilly, quoted in a 1995 New York Times article.

The Walser sentence is from Christopher Middleton’s translation (New York: New York Review Books, 1999). I’ve had the O’Reilly passage saved in a notebook for years. The Times article notes that O’Reilly’s then-recent works measured 5" x 3 3/4".

[Caution: Some of the O’Reilly works available from the link are NSFW.]

Robert Walser, Microscripts

The Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878–1956) at some point abandoned pen for pencil and began to write in a tiny, nearly indecipherable script on small scraps of paper — business cards, calendar pages, envelopes. Microscripts presents a selection of these works in English translation, accompanied by the German originals and photographs of the manuscripts.

Reading these works for the first time, I think of Laurence Sterne, Franz Kafka, and Max Jacob, but Walser resembles only himself. His prose seems to veer between disarming plainness and parodic eloquence. To borrow Jacob’s terminology, Walser’s work has “style” and is “situated”:

[O]ne recognizes that a work has style if it gives the sensation of being self-enclosed; one recognizes that it’s situated by the little shock that one gets from it or again from the margin which surrounds it, from the special atmosphere where it moves.

Here are two small samples of Walser’s work. From “The Prodigal Son”:

Being happy, after all, surmounts and surpasses all frailty and strength. Happiness is the shakiest of things and yet also the most solid.

And from “Schnapps”:

What a lovely, thrilling impression a cinematic schnapps scene of excellent quality made one day upon my spectating imagination.

A marvelously handsome young ethicist spoke enlighteningly with the populace, calling on it with ingenious eloquence to turn its back on schnapps once and for all. As he combated this intoxicant, however, he was himself paying tribute to it, distinguishing himself in the consumption of that very thing he was abjuring with spark-emitting zeal, and when asked why he was participating in the practice of that which he was at such pains to avoid or eradicate in principle, he replied that he was most convincing as an orator when in his cups, and that he found this contradiction enchanting.

Here too a lady made her appearance on the scene, his betrothed to be precise, who addressed these words to the one whom in general she worshipped:

“Cut out the boozing!”

Never shall I forget the kind expression with which she framed her so earnest request.

And with this, my possibly somewhat unusual essay that nonetheless strives to fulfill in so far as possible the demands made by delicacy while at the same time aiming at solidity —containing as it does some words of warning — can no doubt be deemed to have come to an end.

The New Yorker has a slideshow of Walser microscripts.

[Both passages from Microscripts, trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New Directions / Christine Burgin, 2010). The Max Jacob passage is from the 1916 preface to The Dice Cup, trans. Zack Rogow, in The Dice Cup: Selected Prose Poems (New York: Sun, 1979).]

John Ashbery’s “The Skaters” online

Now online at Text/works: a “critical and genetic digital edition” of John Ashbery’s poem “The Skaters”: text, drafts, annotations, index.

Related reading
All John Ashbery posts (Pinboard)

Items from their catalogue

Here’s a nifty PDF catalogue from Profiles in History: Rare Books & Manuscripts, Auction 55. Among the items in the catalogue: an archive of John Ashbery works ($40,000–$60,000) an Ernest Hemingway typewriter ($60,000–$80,000), and a letter from Titanic survivor Elizabeth Nye ($12,000–$15,000).

[In 2005, the same Hemingway typewriter sold for $100,000.]

Ernest Borgnine reads

Ernest Borgnine reads Marcus Pfister’s The Rainbow Fish. Just lovely.

Orange Crate Art is a Borgnine-friendly site. One of my favorite posts imagines Marty Piletti’s life after Marty.

Thank you, Rachel, for pointing the rest of our fambly to this clip.

[I wish I’d known about The Rainbow Fish before deciding to slog through Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.]

“Give her a little Rimbaud”

Tod says that Buz’s date expects hair tonic and muscles. So he gives Buz a tip:

“Be the intellectual. Change of pace. She’ll never see it coming. It’ll dazzle her. Tell her you’re an existentialist.”

“That’s a tip?”

“Well, that’s very stylish. She’ll love it.”

“Well, supposing she asks me what it is?”

“Tell her you don’t talk about; you live it. And give her a little Rimbaud.”

And Tod begins to recite:

“I know the lightning-opened skies, waterspouts,
Eddies and surfs; I know the night,
And dawn arisen like a colony of doves,
And sometimes I have seen what men have thought
    they saw!

I’ve seen the low sun, fearful with mystic signs,
Lighting with far flung violet arms,
Like actors in an ancient tragedy,
The fluted waters shivering far away.

I’ve dreamed green nights of dazzling” —

And that’s as far as he gets. Because it’s time for a fistfight, with angry David Janssen.

This moment of poetry comes from the Route 66 episode “One Tiger to a Hill” (September 21, 1962). Tod is reciting from Louise Varèse’s translation of “Le Bateau ivre” [The drunken boat], which appears in the 1961 New Directions paperback A Season in Hell / The Drunken Boat.

The best touch: Tod pronounces Rimbaud as Rimbo (rhymes with limbo).

Related reading
All Route 66 posts (Pinboard)

[In my house, it is the summer of Route 66.]

Father’s Day

[Photograph by Louise Leddy. July 21, 1957.]

The T-shirt was once a standard piece of outerwear for men, always blazing white, always tucked in, equally at home at a cookout, on a handball court, in a park.

James Leddy, my dad, is closing in on eighty-five. I still see this same smile in his face. Happy Father’s Day to him, and to all fathers.

Bloomsday and Father’s Day (2)

[From the “Circe” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).]

The scene: Bella Cohen’s brothel. Drunk, abandoned by his friends, Stephen Dedalus has insulted the king, and an English soldier has punched him in the face. Leopold Bloom, who knows Stephen's father Simon, has been following Stephen at a distance and comes to his aid. As Bloom assumes a fatherly role, he sees an apparition of his son Rudolph (Rudy), who died in infancy eleven years ago. Bloom : Stephen :: Odysseus : Telemachus. Father and son. This is one of my favorite passages in Ulysses.

Stephen is murmuring bits of William Butler Yeats’s poem “Who Goes with Fergus?” Bloom’s misunderstanding — “Ferguson, I think I caught. A girl. Some girl.” — is charming and quintessentially Bloomian.

Previous Bloomsday posts
2007 (S, M, P )
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (“Bloom, waterlover”)
2011 (“the creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)

Bloomsday and Father’s Day (1)

[From the “Calypso” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).]

“There is a young student comes here some evenings named Bannon his cousins or something are big swells”: dig the run-on sentence. Milly Bloom is her mother Molly’s daughter. But it’s her father Leopold who gets a letter. Molly : Poldy :: Milly : Papli.

The song “Seaside Girls” runs through Ulysses. The song’s writer: Harry B. Norris, not Molly’s “suitor” Blazes Boylan or any other Boylan.

Previous Bloomsday posts
2007 (S, M, P )
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (“Bloom, waterlover”)
2011 (“the creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)

A last-minute Father’s Day gift idea

It occurs to me to offer a suggestion: the Tweezerman Nail Clipper Set (about $9). Here’s a review. I’ve had a Tweezerman set for several weeks now, and I always look forward to using it, even if trimming one’s nails is a reminder of mortality.

Nicholson Baker has a wonderful essay about the nail clipper and its appeal to us men, “Clip Art.” Any dad would be thrilled to get a Tweezerman set tomorrow.

[About nails and mortality: I learned that in college.]