Ex Libris Kirkland

July 22, 2008: Peter Klappert on experimentation

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:08:00 +0000

"Experimentation should not be confused with mere dilettantism: the quest is serious, the stakes are mortal, the poet's desire must answer a desire in the reader."

- Klappert, from his course overview 80 Works, 1999.

July 12, 2008: Shakespeare on death

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 06:28:00 +0000

RICHARD:
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let's choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

CARLISLE:
My lord, wise men ne'er sit and wail their woes,
But presently prevent the ways to wail.

Shakes, King Richard II, 1595

July 10, 2008: Eliot, from The Waste Land

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:15:00 +0000

"After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience"

"These fragments I have shored against my ruin."

- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922

July 9, 2008: Eliot and exploring

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:13:00 +0000

"Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In the end is my beginning."

- T.S. Eliot, East Coker (Four Quartets), 1943

July 8, 2008: Eliot and time

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 04:10:00 +0000

"Time and the bell have buried the day"

- T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton (Four Quartets), 1943

July 6, 2008: Williams on Caesar

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:43:00 +0000

"'Caesar,' Considine answered, ' knew of it. I am sure he did. This man who had so many lovers, who could bear all hardships and use all comfort, who was not athlete or lover or general or statesman or writer, but only those because he was Caesar, who founded not a dynasty but a civilization, whose children we are, who dreamed of travelling to the sources of the Nile and sailed out to the strangeisland whither the Gallic boatmen rowed the souls of the dead, who was lord of all minds and natures, didn't he dream of other waters and set sail living for a land where the spirits of other men are but helplessly driven? Rule the world? He was the world; he mastered it; the power that is in it burned in him and he knew it; he was one with it.'"

- Williams, Shadows of Ecstasy, 1950

I love that man-of-the-world phrase, 'could bear all hardships and use all comfort.'

July 4, 2008: Richard II on impartiality

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:35:00 +0000

"Now, by my scepre's awe, I make a vow,
Such neighbour-nearness to our sacred blood
Should nothing privilege him, nor partialize
The unstooping firmness of my upright soul:
He is our subject, Mowbray, so art thou;
Free speech and fearless I to thee allow."

- Shakes, King Richard II, 1595.

July 2, 2008: Williams on belief and fanaticism

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:28:00 +0000

- "I only meant that I should like you to believe that Roger's quite serious, and a little unhappy."
- "Unhappy!" Philip exclaimed. "Roger!"
- "Certainly unhappy," Sir Bernard said. "He's fanatic enough to believe passionately and not sufficiently fanatical to believe that other people ought to believe."

- Williams, Shadows of Ecstasy, 1950

June 28, 2008: Gibbon on History and early persecutions

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:27:00 +0000

"History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution. It must, however, be acknowledged that the conduct of the emperors who appeared the least favourable to the primitive church is by no means so criminal as that of modern sovereigns who have employed the arm of violence and terror against the religious opinions of any part of their subjects."

- Gibbon, Decline & Fall vol II, 1781

June 25, 2008: Stevenson on an old pirate's piety

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 06:33:00 +0000

"Now, for instance, you wouldn't think I had had a pious mother - to look at me? . . . but I had - remarkable pious. And I was a civil, pious boy, and could rattle off my catechism that fast, as you couldn't tell one word from another. And here's what it come to, Jim, and it begun with church-farthen on the blessed grave-stones! That's what it begun with, but it went further'n that, and so my mother told me, and predicked the whole, she did, the pious woman!"

- Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, 1883

June 23, 2008: Waugh on Hints and Symbols

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:29:00 +0000

"Perhaps, I thought, while her words still hung in the air between us like a wisp of tobacco smoke - a thought to fade and vanish like smoke without a trace - perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; a hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us."

- Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945

June 22, 2008: Waugh on Social Uneasiness

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 17:28:00 +0000

"Even on that convivial evening I could feel my host emanating little magnetic waves of social uneasiness, creating, rather, a pool of general embarassment about himself in which he floated with loglike calm."

- Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945

June 21, 2008: Waugh on New York

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:23:00 +0000

"We lay in our twin beds, a yard or two distant, smoking. I looked at my watch; it was four o'clock, but neither of us was ready to sleep, for in that city there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy."

- Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945

June 20, 2008: Waugh on modern education

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:00:00 +0000

"But yesterday I got a regular eye-opener. The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed."

- Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945

June 19, 2008: Waugh describes a short vacation

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:57:00 +0000

"The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly--perhaps too sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless."

- Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945

June 15, 2008: Waugh on Sebastian's Family

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 19:50:00 +0000

"I'm not going to have you get mixed up with my family. They're so madly charming. All my life they've been taking things away from me. If they once got hold of you with their charm, they'd make you their friend, not mine, and I won't let them."

"'Light one for me, will you?'
It was the first time in my life that anyone had asked this of me, and as I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers, I caught a thin bat's squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me."

- Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945

June 10, 2008: Jiang Rong on the Rapacity of Man and Wolves

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:56:00 +0000

The author of Wolf Totem writes with this extemely odd voice, as if all characters from the book are reading from the same set of stern lecture notes:

"At that moment he sensed how rapacious and vain humans can be. There would have been nothing wrong with picking the biggest and strongest of the seven cubs. So why had they brought the entire litter home? He should never have taken Dorji and Gao Jianzhong along. But would he have only brought one cub back with him if they hadn't been there? Probably not. Bringing back the whole liter represented conquest, courage, reward, and glory; it won him the respect of others. Compared to that, those seven lives were like grains of sand."

"Chen too felt his emotions rise. 'Seeing those pelts up there reminds me of the Turkish flags gilded with wolf heads that ancient horsemen carried into battle, galloping across the grassland, wolf blood coursing through their veins, filled with the courage, ferocity, and wisdom they'd learned from those very wolves, to become conquerors of the world.'
'You know,' Zhang said, 'I now share your view that the wolf is a very complex subject, one that touches on many important issues.'"

- Jian Rong, Wolf Totem, 2004

June 7, 2008: Dede Korkut on Death

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 16:52:00 +0000

"When dark death comes, may he give you a fair passage."

- Dede Korkut (attributed), The Book of Dede Korkut, trans. Geoffrey Lewis, circa 1000.

June 6, 2008: Dede Korkut has some nice tricks

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 16:26:00 +0000

The tenth-century Orghuz Turks have a nice version of "to make a long story short:"

"The horse's hoof is fleet as the wind; the minstrel's tongue is swift as a bird."

And Dede Korkut also has this nice trick. In the middle of the story, characters frequently break into verse - but just before the poetry starts, the narrative voice does this little move:

"He took the boy and went to the boy's father, to whom he declaimed; let us see, my Khan, what he declaimed. "

Isn't that nice? Let us see, my Khan. The poetry, so improbable in real life, was going to break the narrative flow anyway. And so DK does it for us, reflexively turning your attention to the notion of storytelling. The complimentary address to the reader as 'My Khan,' is good, too.

- Dede Korkut (attributed), The Book of Dede Korkut, trans. Geoffrey Lewis, circa 1000.

May 31, 2008: Williams on the rage of controversy and belief

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Sat, 31 May 2008 16:41:00 +0000

"This is the ruinous nonsense of the mind,
that men come mightily to believe their causes,
because of their mere rage of controversy. . ."

- Charles Williams, Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury, from the Collected Plays of Charles Williams, 1963.

May 30, 2008: Williams reminds us that Heaven is dangerous

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:37:00 +0000

"ANNE. My neck is small: will the King have it cut?
He loved me--once.
CRANMER. Madam, repent, confess,
entreat; the King is gracious.
THE SKELETON. Heaven is gracious,
but few can can draw safe deductions on its method."

- Charles Williams, Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury, from the Collected Plays of Charles Williams, 1963.

May 29, 2008: Reading a little Chesterton on his Birthday

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:57:00 +0000

"To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, cakes, and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute."

- Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World, 1910

May 27, 2008: Kenney on The Judeo-Christian Tradition.

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Wed, 28 May 2008 06:55:00 +0000

"Of course they'd need an
Omnipotent god. Look whom
He'd have to pardon."

- Richard Kenney, 'The Judeo-Christian Tradition' from The One-Strand River, 2008.

May 27, 2008: Kenney gets cute

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Wed, 28 May 2008 06:51:00 +0000

". . . They live in a hell of marvels: fierce,
Fully automated joys.

The prowess of their engineers
Is justly fabled. They've leapt to the nearest
Lamps of night. Such chasms spanned!--
Too black for all but their blindest seers.

Their warrior class, insufficiently manned,
Is mad, responsive, and under command.
Their weapon of choice is the toggle switch.
Be watchful. They kill with either hand."

- Richard Kenney, 'Alaric Intelligence Memo' from The One-Strand River, 2008.

May 26, 2008: Kenney on modern aesthetics

noreply@blogger.com (matt kirkland) — Tue, 27 May 2008 06:36:00 +0000

". . .

Occasional volcanoes in the parlor, yawn. Arterial
Blood weeping the walls, rising above the ankles
Curdles in the drains and pupils. Ad nauseam! It kills
Sensation in the extremities. And don't come off all teary

On me, now. No more Thus Spake Zarathustra. No big titanium yurt
Over heaven. No more swoopy blue yondering wing-magics--
That's finished. We don't feel for thingamajigs
Anymore. Clear your desk. And tell the engineer he's fired."

- Richard Kenney, 'Aesthetics Update' from The One-Strand River, 2008.