“I do not insist upon knowing.”
—
André Breton, Nadja
via invisiblestories:::aperfectcommotionJuly 2011
What is REAL, ANYWAY?
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
hey Simon, was great to meet you at Meet the Presses!
Amanda of AngelHousePress
It was a blast meeting you too, Amanda!
AngelHousePress, obviously, was one of the other collectives who came out that day. They’ve collected an incredible list of contributers. It would be worth your time to inspect their site!
Meanwhile, this the last press-related post I’ll be making straight from this tumblr because there’s a website for all this nonsense now. There we are!
“Well, now; don’t you see it yet? Why I have got a priceless treasure, that I found his morning, in rummaging in old Hevelius’s shop, the Jew.”
“Magnificent!” I replied, with a good imitation of enthusiasm.
What was the good of all this fuss about an old quarto, bound in rough calf, a yellow, faded volume, with a ragged seal depending from it?
But for all that there was no lull yet in the admiring exclamations of the Professor.
“See,” he went on, both asking the questions and supplying the answers. “Isn’t it a beauty? Yes; splendid! Did you ever see such a binding? Doesn’t the book open easily? Yes; it stops open anywhere. But does it shut equally well? Yes; for the binding and the leaves are flush, all in a straight line, and no gaps or openings anywhere. And look at its back, after seven hundred years. Why, Bozerian, Closs, or Purgold might have been proud of such a binding!”
While rapidly making these comments my uncle kept opening and shutting the old tome. I really could do no less than ask a question about its contents, although I did not feel the slightest interest.
“And what is the title of this marvelous work?” I asked with an affected eagerness which he must have been very blind not to see through.
“This work,” replied my uncle, firing up with renewed enthusiasm, “this work is the Heims Kringla of Snorre Turlleson, the most famous Icelandic author of the twelfth century! It is the chronicle of the Norwegian princes who ruled in Iceland.”
“Indeed;” I cried, keeping up wonderfully, “of course it is a German translation?”
“What!” sharply replied the Professor, “a translation! What should I do with a translation? This _is_ the Icelandic original, in the magnificent idiomatic vernacular, which is both rich and simple, and admits of an infinite variety of grammatical combinations and verbal modifications.”
“Like German.” I happily ventured.
“Yes,” replied my uncle, shrugging his shoulders; “but, in addition to all this, the Icelandic has three numbers like the Greek, and irregular declensions of nouns proper like the Latin.”
“Ah!” said I, a little moved out of my indifference; “and is the type good?”
“Type! What do you mean by talking of type, wretched Axel? Type! Do you take it for a printed book, you ignorant fool? It is a manuscript, a Runic manuscript.”
A true Zinester schools Axel, Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne.
Marooned
Wire
Wire “Marooned”
Hi Simon, How are you? Are you able to take a flight in a giant commercial bird this August for your cousin's wedding? Love your choice of reading material and theme of the month! lots of love, mom
As many of you know, my mother reads and enjoys my tumblr and when I’m too scatter-brained to respond to emails she messages me here. My cousin Shaun (who I did in fact get back to) is getting married. Props!
It has me thinking, naturally, about myself. I believe that when my mother was my age, I was alive and getting gum in my hair at restaurants and banging on the house piano until it carried no tune at all. Not really a household contributer by any stretch of the imagination. While I was doing that, Shaun was playing team sports and he had chums and stuff. Every time I see him, in fact, he demonstrates how a Frankson can actually have his act together, and is the first male Frankson to do so since the previous generation. Hopefully Shaun is blessed with a Simon-like demon child to balance out all this success and happiness.
Play
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach →
phil-can.com
This month my students are reading only bird things because this month that’s just what I’m all about.
“Years later Doyle’s thoughts on the matter would be proven right. The foundation of the Community since the 50s had been a ludicrous method of mutual verification-hoax-suicide. Every now and then some hunter would lose it and go public with bogus evidence and who among us had the audacity to disagree? Those hunters were lying. That’s the thing about those days, I guess. There was no real evidence, not for years and years. You don’t know how it broke my heart, but you couldn’t stop us from putting everything we had behind those guys because, well, we all still knew. Those things are out there. We never saw publicity like that again.”
—Bill Buckley, fictional sasquatch hunter.
It's Called Peekaboo Barn, Jordan. →
simonf.tumblr.com
WHAT ANIMAL IS IN THE BARN???
I am on alex’s tumblr so I can reblog this
MEET THE PRESSES Chapbook Market, July 9th →
meetthepresses.wordpress.com
Torontonians will find the Horse of Operation street team repping hand-bound copies of out-of-print works of genius plus original fiction and poetry as part of The Scream Literary Festival’s unFestival. Various unsold copies will inevitably wind up on random online stores all over the world the week following this one. So exciting!
Come, view this world.
See it as an ornate, festive carriage.
See how fools are entranced by their visions,
yet, for the wise there is no attachment.
…
Victory leads to hatred,
for the defeated suffer.
The peaceful live happily,
beyond victory and defeat.
We dwell happily,
free from anxiety;
like radiant beings
in celestial realms
we rejoice in delight.
- Buddha (Dhammapada). I’ve read a few different online translations of the Dhammapada without knowing which one is the preferred; many translations bring a powerful condescension that seems counter to the whole notion of renouncement. I don’t know who wrote the translation I’m quoting from but it does an alright job of not contradicting itself.
For me, all this stuff became far less quixotic through the endless interpretations of the Ajahns. I recommend Ajahn Sumedho.
