Walser walking

Speaking to the superintendent or inspector of taxes, the story’s narrator defends his habit of walking:

“Without walking and the contemplation of nature which is connected with it, without this equally delicious and instructive, equally refreshing and constantly admonishing search, I deem myself lost, and indeed am lost. With the utmost attention and love the man who walks must study and observe every smallest living thing, be it a child, a dog, a fly, a butterfly, a sparrow, a worm, a flower, a man, a house, a tree, a hedge, a snail, a mouse, a cloud, a hill, a leaf, or no more than a paltry discarded scrap of paper on which, perhaps, a dear good child at school has written his first clumsy letters.

“The highest and lowest, most serious as well as most hilarious things are to him equally beloved, beautiful, and valuable.”

Robert Walser, The Walk, trans. Christopher Middleton with Susan Bernofsky (New York: New Directions, 2012).

Robert Walser loved to walk. He died while walking on December 25, 1956.

Other Walser posts
Microscripts : “The most unimportant things” : On automobiles : On reading : On stationery stores : On staying small : On youth

Glen Campbell’s last song

“I’m still here but yet I’m gone”: Glen Campbell’s “I’m Not Gonna Miss You” is a powerful song. To my mind it belongs in the company of the Beach Boys’ “’Til I Die” and Johnny Cash’s recording of Trent Reznor’s “Hurt”: existential statements, all.

Water towers of New York

The photographer Ronnie Farley on New York water towers: “They’re the only natural looking thing in the skyline.” There’s a story at WNYC’s Studio 360. And here’s a portfolio of Farley‘s water-tower photographs. Of the two water-tank manufacturers mentioned in the WNYC story, one has a website (with vertigo-inducing photographs); the other has a website coming soon.

[No hampers around these water towers.]

“The damned desire of having”

A striking phrase from Rolfe Humphries’s 1955 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “the damned desire of having.” The phrase ends a catalogue of new arrivals from the Iron Age: “trickery and slyness, plotting, swindling, / Violence and the damned desire of having.” In Latin, book one, line 131, it goes like this: “amor sceleratus habendi ,” the polluted, profaned, defiled love of having.

I love the Humphries translation of the poem. His Lucretius is somewhere on my (imaginary) to-read list.

Other Ovid posts
In the palace of Rumor : Ovid’s Polyphemus : Raymond Carver and Ovid

Scenic wallpaper

Cooper Hewitt’s Object of the Day, yesterday: mid-twentieth-century scenic wallpaper, manufactured by the J. C. Eisenhart Wall Paper Co., Hanover, Pennsylvania. Imagining a wall of this stuff makes me think of the problem of infinite regress. It’s rivers and trees, all the way down. And across.

You can subscribe to Cooper Hewitt’s Object of the Day and get all kinds of interesting objects through the mail.

Domestic comedy

“‘. . . the wine-dark fleece.’ Was that one mine?”

“No, that was mine.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Not all fleeces are golden.]

Mark Trail arrows

[Mark Trail, October 14, 15, 16, 17, 2014.]

Mark is back from Africa and just back from fishing with Rusty. He has asked neighbor Mitch Wilson to come over. Mark to Mitch: “I’m aware of your expertise with a longbow.” What are you trying to say, Mark? A weirdly sexualized archery contest follows: Mitch shoots (THIP), Cherry shoots (THUP), Mark shoots (THK), and Mitch splits Mark’s arrow. That's the sound of SHUK. Oh SHUK.

I like this panel from the October 15 strip. Cherry’s is-it-a-smile-or-is-it-a-grimace suggests that her real calling was a career in Grade-B noir. Careful, Mitch. And Mark.


Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Edgar who?

From Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (1977), the first of three volumes recounting the writer’s 1933–1934 walk across Europe. Here Leigh Fermor is visiting a Benedictine monastery, Göttweig Abbey, in the company of a shoemaker named Paul:

He led me along an upper cloister to see an Irish monk of immense age and great charm. His words are all lost, but I can still hear his soft West of Ireland voice. Except for his long Edgar Wallace cigarette holder, our host could have sat for a picture of St. Jerome.

Edgar Wallace (1875–1932) was a writer of immense output. Today he may be best known as the writer of the first draft of the screenplay for King Kong (1933). Wallace appeared on the cover of the April 15, 1929 issue of Time, cigarette holder in hand and mouth.


[Image from Time Cover Search.]

The image of St. Jerome with a cigarette holder is best left to the individual imagination.

Related posts
From A Time of Gifts : One word from A Time of Gifts : Leigh Fermor’s Brueghel : Leigh Fermor’s eye

[Monks smoke?!]

“Objects on which to lavish attention”

Susan Sontag, in “The Aesthetics of Silence” (Styles of Radical Will, 1969):

In one of its aspects, art is a technique for focusing attention, for teaching skills of attention. (While the whole of the human environment might be so described — as a pedagogic instrument — this description particularly applies to works of art.) The history of the arts is tantamount to the discovery and the formulation of a repertory of objects on which to lavish attention.

Back in grad school, I put these sentences on the syllabus for my freshman lit and comp class. Some nerve. I was an optimistic kid. Still am.

A universal question

“I love the idea that somehow this is the universal question, the thing that unites us”: Where do birds go when it rains? (xkcd).