Jonas David's Blog, page 6

i can and do judge books by their covers

I scan the shelves at used bookstores and I spot the gold among the trash based purely on the cover. Because while it’s not true that all good books have good covers, it seems to be true that good books don’t have that cover.

Or maybe it’s just that all my favorite books were written last century (or the one before) and so they stand out for that reason.

pick two books

that you’ve read. The number of people on earth who have also read those two books is surprisingly small. Add another book, and the number shrinks. Each book you add the number shrinks more than the last book, until at some point only you, out of all people on earth, have read that combination of books.

I wonder sometimes what is the smallest combination of books it would take to be unique.

The words written on your brain are written on yours alone…

Unless you only read Harry Potter, then you’ve got lots of company

I’ll brush off the dust now

I have let this blog grow stale. It sits here, drying out, gathering dust, forgotten, yet still getting it’s little trickle of views somehow. Why do I keep it? Why not.

I constantly ask myself why do I want to write? why? and I’ve still not got a clear answer. My words go into the void and the number of eyes they encounter (and whether that number ever surpasses zero) is unknown. But putting those words together does something for me, something positive for my insides. Some itch is scratched in my brain when I complete a sentence or paragraph or poem or prose. That must mean it’s worth doing. So here I go again on my own, down the only road I’ve ever known. Here will be words served up daily, in piles or in smatterings, thoughts or unthoughts, melodious or discordant.

Even this little scribbling here, has made me feel good… reason enough to write? Yes, but…

I am aware what the source of the good feeling is: an imagined reader. As I write, I imagine being read. By who? Who knows. Someone like me, perhaps. Or perhaps someone very unlike me but who, after reading me, is able to identify with me despite our differences.

Imagination, it seems, is important for writing in more ways than one.

un poema

I have been reading a lot of poetry lately, mostly focusing on Spanish language poets, because I am learning Spanish. I find poetry is easier to read than prose, maybe because I can focus on one line at a time, and the words are less crowded.

However, I’ve been surprised to find that so many of the results of my searches for the best Spanish language poets, have no easy to find translations into English. I suppose poetry is way less marketable than fiction, other than the most widely known names, so there is less reason in this capitalist world to put any effort into poetry translations.

Recently, I gave up looking exclusively for English, and bought a Spanish edition of some poems by Juan Ramón Jiménez to see if I could read them without the English translation right there for me.

It is slow going for many of them, but the first one I saw I understood right away, which was great encouragement. I’ll put it here:

Eres igual a ti,
y desigual, lo mismo
que los azules
del cielo.

Which I would write as:

You are just like you,
and different, the same
as the blues
of the sky.

I’m sure most of them won’t be that easy, but it was fun to see something and understand not just the words, but the meaning, right away.

I’ll post more favorites as I come across them, and maybe even try to translate some that I don’t understand right away.

There is an infinite world of books and poems out there. Look beyond your horizons, and see what you find…

quotes from books you haven’t read #6

“God was a mistake. I’ve long understood there is zero difference between me and a bug, or a bug and a river, or a river and a voice shouting above it. There’s no sense or meaning in anything. It’s nothing but a network of dependency under enormous fluctuating pressures. It’s only our imaginations, not our senses, that continually confront us with failure and the false belief that we can raise ourselves by our own bootstraps from the miserable pulp of decay. There’s no escaping that, stupid.”

-Satantango, by László Krasznahorkai

quotes from books you haven’t read #5

Waking up in Venice is unlike waking up in any other place. The day begins quietly. Only a stray shout here and there may break the calm, or the sound of a shutter being raised, or the wing-beat of the pigeons. How often, I thought to myself, had I lain thus in a hotel room, in Vienna or Frankfurt or Brussels, with my hands clasped under my head, listening not to the stillness, as in Venice, but to the roar of the traffic, with a mounting sense of panic. That, then, I thought on such occasions, is the new ocean. Ceaselessly, in great surges, the waves roll in over the length and breadth of our cities, rising higher and higher, breaking in a kind of frenzy when the roar reaches its peak and then discharging across the stones and the asphalt even as the next onrush is being released from where it was held by the traffic lights. For some time now I have been convinced that it is out of this din that the life is being born which will come after us and will spell our gradual destruction, just as we have been gradually destroying what was there long before us.

–Vertigo, by W.G. Sebald

quotes from books you haven’t read #4

Everything here loses its urgency. We’ve all become impassive, like statues unaware of the relentless accumulation of the dust of days. Instead of stretching, my notion of space hardens, contracts. Very quickly I get used to the idea that from now on we will be alone, trapped in a gigantic spider’s web that thickens around our heads. In this insignificant part of the universe we are happy to move about with pointless gestures, with patchwork dreams, with conversations often had only for the pleasure of hearing our own voices. Our bodies no longer have a mission to fulfill, except to inhale the maximum amount of oxygen for our sick lungs, to accustom our clogged ears to unimportant or absurd noises, like the fart or burp of a relaxed roommate, blissfully happy as a dog, and our eyes to see only the things that bother entering our line of sight. Boredom atrophies the imagination. I’m overcome ad nauseam by the banality of my thoughts. Thankfully, spasms grab hold of me. I’m like a wild horse imprisoned in a serene body where life beats despite the fear, despite the threat of one day being diluted like a common solution in the murderous hospital air.

-from ‘The Hospital,’ by Ahmed Bouanani, translated by Lara Vergnaud

quotes from books you haven’t read, #3

“The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain WHATSOEVER on his habitually slack attention.”

“THE FIRST PHASE of anyone’s writing always shows them doing something ‘like’ something they have heard or read. The majority of writers never pass that stage.”

–Ezra Pound in ‘The ABC of Reading’

Just now you still were, Bettina; I sense your presence. ...

Just now you still were, Bettina; I sense your presence. Does not the earth still bear your warmth? And do not the birds still leave a space for your voice? The dew is different, but the stars are still the stars of your nights. Or isn’t the whole world in fact yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love, and watched it burn and blaze, and secretly replaced it with another while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God when every morning you demanded a new world of Him, so that all the worlds He had made might have their turn. You thought it shabby to save them up or mend them; you used them up and held out your hands for more world, more. For your love was equal to anything.

How can it be that people are not still all talking about your love? What has happened since then that was more extraordinary? Whatever are they thinking of? You yourself were well aware of the value of your love, and spoke it aloud to your greatest of poets, that he might make it human; for as yet it was still elemental. But in writing to you, he persuaded people not to believe in it. Everyone has read those replies, and people place more credence in them, because the poet is more intelligible to them than Nature. But perhaps it will one day be seen that this marked the limit of his greatness. This woman in love was a challenge posed to him, and he was unequal to it.

—Rainer Maria Rilke on Bettine von Arnim (from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge)

When one goes forth at night, and has the eventide befor...

When one goes forth at night, and has the eventide before him, he sees still at the farthest end of the gloomy sky the last bright garment of a splendid day slowly moving downwards, – thus is it with me in my remembrance of thee.  Be the time ever so gloomy and mournful, I still know where my day has set.

Bettine von Arnim to Goethe, from Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child