(A bit delayed but still good!)
From AC:
I hope the next year is good for the world in all the usual ways but
for you specifically I hope:
a) you acquire some sort of fabulous maximalist garment
b) you discover that someone “cool” really likes your work
c) you discover an interesting but non-creepy secret about your house
I only heard of Gerald Murnane recently for the first time, by reading a long New York Times Magazine profile of him. I don’t know how I ended up there, as it was written in 2018, but I’m really quite glad I did: to be frank his literature doesn’t sound very interesting to me, but he’s a top shelf eccentric and everyone knows how picky I am about eccentrics. Only the best for me! Anyway, Murnane is sort of a hermit, so he mostly just sits around the town where he lives in remote Australia, tending bar and organizing his files and playing golf. But what Gerald Murnane does do isn’t nearly as interesting as what Gerald Murnane doesn’t do:
“I become confused, or even distressed, whenever I find myself among streets or roads that are not arranged in a rectangular grid. … I have watched few films during my lifetime and hardly any in recent years. … I cannot recall having gone voluntarily into any art gallery or museum or building said to be of historic interest. I have never worn sunglasses. I have never learned to swim. I have never voluntarily immersed myself in any sea or stream. … I have never touched any button or switch or working part of any computer or fax machine or mobile telephone. I have never learned to operate any sort of camera. … In 1979 I taught myself to type using the index finger of my right hand alone. Since then, I have composed all my fiction and other writing using the finger just mentioned and one or another of my three manual typewriters.”
What he doesn’t mention, but the profile writer does, is that Murnane has also never flown on an airplane and has “barely” traveled outside the province of Victoria in Australia. My hero!
A list of idioms, phrases or words in the Book of Job of uncertain meaning. (Some of these I’ve put into context––you’ll know they’re the uncertain ones because they are bolded.)
The Adversary answered the LORD
Skin for skin—all that a man has he will give up for his life.
May what blackens the day terrify it.
But the teeth of the king of beasts are broken.
And casts reproach on His angels,
May the hungry devour his harvest,
Carrying it off in baskets;
May the thirsty swallow their wealth
You will come to the grave in ripe old age,
That is why I spoke recklessly.
Does mallow juice have any flavor?
As I writhed in unsparing pains:
That I did not suppress my words against the Holy One.
A friend owes loyalty to one who fails,
Though he forsakes the fear of the Almighty;
They are dark with ice;
Snow obscures them;
How trenchant honest words are;
But what sort of reproof comes from you?
When I lie down, I think,
“When shall I rise?”
Night drags on,
Whose confidence is a thread of gossamer,
Whose trust is a spider’s web.
His roots are twined around a heap,
They take hold of a house of stones.
Who made the Bear and Orion,
Pleiades, and the chambers of the south wind;
It is something to be proud of to hunt me like a lion,
That You put my feet in the stocks
And watch all my ways,
Hemming in my footsteps?
Who can produce a clean thing out of an unclean one? No one!-
How your heart has carried you away,
How your eyes have failed you,
Troubles terrify him, anxiety overpowers him,
Like a king expecting a siege.
He will not be rich;
His wealth will not endure;
His produce shall not bend to the earth
He will never get away from the darkness;
Flames will sear his shoots;
He will pass away by the breath of His mouth.
He shuts off the view of His throne,
Spreading His cloud over it.
I persist in my righteousness and will not yield;
I shall be free of reproach as long as I live.
They open up a shaft far from where men live,
[In places] forgotten by wayfarers,
Destitute of men, far removed.
Of what use to me is the strength of their hands?
All their vigor is gone.
Driven out from society,
They are cried at like a thief.
They come as through a wide breach;
They roll in like raging billows.
With great effort I change clothing;
The neck of my tunic fits my waist.
Surely He would not strike at a ruin
If, in calamity, one cried out to Him.
But since now it does not seem so,
He vents his anger;
He does not realize that it may be long drawn out.
Will your limitless wealth avail you,
All your powerful efforts?
Its noise tells of Him.
The kindling of anger against iniquity.
He keeps turning events by His stratagems,
That they might accomplish all that He commands them
Throughout the inhabited earth,
Why your clothes become hot
When the land is becalmed by the south wind?
Shall one who should be disciplined complain against Shaddai?
He who arraigns God must respond.
Shall traders traffic in him?
Will he be divided up among merchants?
I will not be silent concerning him
Or the praise of his martial exploits.
Clubs are regarded as stubble;
He scoffs at the quivering javelin.
Bubble baths
Walks in the rain
Muscular calves
Escalators
Knuckles
Steamed clams (“obviously”)
Anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann and her cohort developed something called the Sensory Delight Scale, a kind of counterpart/complement to the Tellegen Absorption Scale, that measures “who is more able, by temperament and choice, to have vivid experiences of gods and spirits.” If you answer yes to all of these, you might be a mystic!
When I’m listening to music, I like to imagine the sounds taking shape and moving in the air around me.
When I finish reading a really powerful book, I find that the ordinary world around me seems oddly unfamiliar.
Sometimes I feel like my body is weightless, as if I’m floating, even when my feet are firmly on the ground.
I like to watch the shapes and movements that sunlight makes reflecting off the water.
Sometimes the world seems intensely present to me.
I like to think that the trees in a forest are talking with each other.
I have had a distinct sense of a watchful presence.
Sometimes when I am at a concert, I find that the music has ended a few seconds ago and everyone is clapping before I notice.
The sounds of different languages seem to be connected to different colors in my mind.
Sometimes I feel like the air is full of little bubbles of light.
Sometimes I feel like I can sense the passage of time almost tangibly.
When I hear the waves lap against the shore, I sometimes think of how much those waves might know.
I find joy in little things, like a newly opened flower.
Exquisite pleasure sometimes floods my senses.
I can get lost watching a spider lower itself on a thread.
Sometimes I feel the arms of the universe embrace me.
When I dance, I like to feel that my body is simply responding to the music.
Thoughts can have different colors for me.
My four-year-old son likes to play a game in the bathtub in which he pretends to be an ice cream man making ice cream and selling it to me. Here are some of the flavors he makes:
Yellow Fire
Blue Ocean
Salt White
White Cloud
Seaweed Green
Orange Setting Sun
Purple Rising Sun
Pink Grapefruit (this one is the most ordinary)
Mud Brown
I feel like I am forgetting some! My favorites I’ve tried so far are Orange Setting Sun, Salt White, and actually Seaweed Green is surprisingly good.
The foods the Israelites pined for in the desert after fleeing Egypt:
Meat
Cucumbers
Melons
Leeks
Onions
Garlic
Fish
The names/nicknames T.S. Eliot’s childhood friends:
Dago Parker
Chicken Gilbert
Doodle Page
Butch Wagner, Pat Sullivan
Snowball Wolfpert
Elephant-mouth Hellman
Gander Giesecke
Coming soon to a self-help-inflected Netflix documentary!
Jutpälvirsaippy (Finnish): A warm, fuzzy feeling induced by thinking of your nation’s robust social services
Zzxjoanw (Maori): A secondhand embarrassment one gets when watching foreign political leaders behave poorly
Voirepergne (French): The miraculous ability of some women to eat high fat diets and remain slim (alternative, archaic: the miraculous ability of some women to look stylish even when wearing rags, or, the miraculous ability of some women to somehow be pretty even when hideous)
Schnitzengruben (German): a friendliness that nevertheless grates or disgusts the recipient
卞工几と 日ヨ工几呂 (Japanese): the sense of mental well-being that comes from knowing one has the exactly ideal number of possessions
Kamelåså (Danish): a cozy aesthetic that should be easily achieved with purchases from large Scandinavian chain stores yet somehow looks stupid and cheap if you live outside the Arctic Circle
Dututebatti (Luxembourgish): a fluency with myriad languages, acquired early in life and seemingly with ease
쟁반 받쳐줄게요 (Korean): the ability to blend in to or be embraced by a wide variety of societies and cultures; alt. impeccable social skills (useful idiom: “polite tourist in a china shop”)
Schulleilis (Gaelic): a soft and universally pleasing tone of voice
Darajuiwolo (Yoruba): a combination of perseverance, strength, and optimism, all of which are readily understandable to English speakers, and yet none are able to harness the power of darajuiwolo without purchasing a book or listening to between six and eleven Ted talks on the subject
Every book the narrator of Want by Lynn Steger Strong references reading. This book got a lot of buzz but I hated it for many reasons that I’m more than happy to elaborate on if you would JUST GIVE ME THE CHANCE. I honestly feel like this reading list encapsulates some of my irritation: I’m super highbrow and super, super sad!
Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight
Gayl Jones, Corregidora
Imre Kertesz, Kaddish for an Unborn Child
Marguerite Duras, The Lover
Merce Rodoreda, The Time of the Doves
Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero
Claire Lispector, The Passion of G.H.
Henry Tree, Party Going
Dorothy West, The Living is Easy
Gerald Murnane, The Plains
Mariama Ba, So Long a Letter
Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time
Magda Szabo, The Door
Tom McCarthy, Remainder
Jean Rhys, D.H. Lawrence, Colm Toibin, Deborah Eisenberg, Iris Murdoch, Barbara Comyns, Penelope Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing, Jane Bowles, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf
Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac
Louise Erdrich, LaRose
Last summer, my kids and I were lucky enough to be invited to spend a few days at a friend’s family’s summer house, on a rather magical island in the Atlantic with a long, bright beach and a weird little petting zoo and a giant pond of salty water smack dab in the middle. The friend’s family had an excellent collection of vintage children’s books, including a few about Captain Pugwash, a rather inept pirate who gets his crew into all sorts of pickles (due to said ineptitude) and has to rely on his savvy but unacknowledged cabin boy, Tom, to save the day. I wish I could find an image of this one page which just depicts Pugwash dreaming about having a normal life and tending to a garden, but humans are idiots and therefore most of the stuff that comes up on Google Images is related to the not nearly as charmingly illustrated film, and not the books.
Anyway, apparently Pugwash has a number of funny sayings he uses when he’s miffed, which Wikipedia has helpfully compiled. Work this into your every day repertoire, folks.
“Dolloping doubloons/dolphins!”
“Coddling catfish!”
“Lolloping landlubbers!”
“Suffering seagulls!”
“Staggering stalactites!”
“Nautical nitwits!”
“Plundering porpoises!”
“Kipper me capstans!”
“Tottering turtles!”
“Dithering dogfish!”
“Scuttling cuttlefish!”
“Stuttering starfish!”
“Blistering barnacles!”
“Shuddering sharks!”
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