Showing posts with label Montaigne. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Montaigne. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

middle of night things

What a joy is a middle of night rising: this time, I had some of that cloudy sake and those seaweed thinner than thin crunchy wafers -- these with brown sugar taste -- that melt instantly on your tongue, like the Japanese flowers that blossom instantly in the water. Very Proust. Trying to translate Yves Bonnefoy's writing on his wander through the Louvre in something of his style --how I wish I could. Having tried over the years with various of his superbly elusive poems and writings on art, this time I'd like it to work.
Of course, life keeps seeping in: recommendations here and there, readings of chapters in dissertations, reviewing books you think should be noticed, or swatting through a book you were excited about, and then it got long. Alas, this happened with How to Live, the one about Montaigne, wonderfully conceived, but exuding length, and most recently, with A Man of Misconceptions, about the incredible Athanasius Kircher.  Incredible he was, but it doesn't have the holding power that we all wish our writings and musings would have.. A feeble wish, but a real one. 

Sunday, March 25, 2012

the piling up

so what do you do when your books are already occupying the radiator that might some year have to go back on, and then they spill and then you might take one or two out and they spill really over and you are reading 5 at a time and not finishing any because you want to get back to the other one you just didn't finish, so now I am in the middle or somewhere or other in:
Benita Eisler: Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe and then in my office I have the letters from them: The Faraway One or something like that
Christopher Benfey about the Hummingbirds and Heade and Dickinson, wonderful book
and How to Live: or a Life of Montaigne : witty and grand and brava for Sarah Bakewell
and the de Botton How Proust can Change Your Life (well, maybe he doesn't, but it's a great title) which I read before
and The Swerve, of course, keep almost finishing, but it's like dessert



and then proofreading La Proie s'ombre by Gherasim Luca that I translated, on and on, i burnt the cookies I was making for
what used to be tomorrow night but I see that if it readily is 4:36 am it is tonight