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Waiting in Denver
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Denver
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On Re-Reading The Fall of the House of Usher in Preparation for Attending the Ballet
There is something about a story like this that begs for interpretation. And running alongside that, when reading Poe, there is the temptation to read past the deep purple of its prose, as though that were an encumbrance, an idiosyncratic, stylistic authorial tic. In any case, Usher employs the usual Poeian devices: live burial, Doppelgänger, “madness,” alcohol as a calmative, and the blurred lines between “history” and “romance.”
When I resisted the urge to read the way I learned in college, however, and allowed myself to approach the story on its own terms, I cannot say I understood it but I did enjoy it. It was more like reading poetry than reading prose. (Do we read poetry differently from the way we read prose? I mean there are the obvious differences in the forms, but I wonder whether there the brain functions differently reading or, actually, listening to poetry as opposed to prose. Ideally in my proposed schema, reading poetry engages the part of the brain that hears music.)
In any case, rather than say Usher is “about depression” — I wonder whether Poe was himself self-medicating his bipolar brain — I prefer to say it reminds me of Keats. The story is not accountable to anyone or anything. Poe defies accountability.
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Blown Rose
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Ice Cubes
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Indecent
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Mint Tea
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Stairwell
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Birthday Bowl
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Not Pepperoni This Time
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Pisgah
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Blue Cheese, Mangoes, & Diet Coke
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Ambrosia
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This does not make coffee.
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Pepperoni Forever
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Once in a While
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Working
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Do I dare eat a nectarine?
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Sy’s Again
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Sy’s Pizza … sigh.
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Thamyris, the Singer Without Memory
where the Muses encountering Thamyris the Thracian stopped him from singing as he came from Oichalia and Oichalian Eurytos; for he boasted that he would prevail, if the very Muses, daughters of Zeus who holds the aegis, were singing against him, and these in their anger struck him maimed, and the voice of wonder they took away, and made him a singer without memory;
The Iliad of Homer Richard Martin and Richmond Lattimore
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Closed Arena
It’s interesting listening to stories in a closed arena while priests stand in the aisles with guns. Twice I saw them shoot a Writer. As soon as it happened, people began to check on their pocket phones for what was acceptable to say and what was not, while the blood ran to the platform edge and down the front of the stage.
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Cacao
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Stand Up
“Her hands moved … then made that familiar gesture — the sign that he was supposed to stand up. But he did not want to stand up, he did not want to stand up ever again. He stood up anyway. Life, he thought, is a stupid invention.”
— from “Lost Paradise: A Novel” by Cees Nooteboom
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Impedimenta
And who told you, “It is your function to walk unimpeded”? What I have been telling you is that the only unimpeded thing is the motivation. Wherever there is a need for the body and the body’s cooperation, you have heard long ago that none of it is your own. from How to Be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life (Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers) by Epictetus, Anthony Long
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