Untitled

If your Nerve, deny you—

go above your Nerve.

Emily Dickinson

Los Angeles 9

Not the best literature from the past 200 years.
Not the most important novels,
Not the books that most changed history but a list of:

The books that taught me how to calm down and love.

The books that taught me about style and living.

The books that made me feel like a creep for daring to write another sentence.

The books that changed my artistic eye.

The books that remind me what is fun about life.

I’m pretty sure it is a poem:

Ruth Benedict Patterns of Culture

Edward Tufte Envisioning Information

Mark Auge Non-Places

Joseph Mitchell Joe Gould’s Secret

Werner Herzog Of Walking on Ice

Huston Smith The World’s Religions

Patrick Leigh Fermor A Time of Gifts

Gregory Bouillier The Mystery Guest

Cesar Aira Ghosts

Yevgeny Zamyatin We

Maggie Nelson Jane A Murder  and The Art of Cruelty

Lydia Davis, The Collected Works

Laurence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet—Justine, Balthzar, Mount Olive, Clea

Laszlo Krasnahoraki’s The Melancholy of Resistance

Toni Morrison A Mercy

Robert Walser Microscripts

Alexander Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo

Albert Cossery  The Jokers

James Joyce The Dubliners

Andrew Moore Detroit Disassembled

Robert Frank The Americans

Lee Friedlander Self-Portrait

Walker Evans Many Are Called

Graham Roumieu, Bigfoot: I Not Dead  and  Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir

Legs McNeil  Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

Tennessee Williams 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays

Sarah Ruhl Eurydice

Pema Chodron The Places That Scare You

Maira Kalman, all titles

Diana Vreeland D.V

Billy Collins Sailing Alone Around the Room

ee cummings 73 Poems

Michael Ondaatje  The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

And

Charles Simic Dime Store Alchemy

Los Angeles 8

 

Living here, one is lucky, because your friends will say things like this: “What? I'm in such a routine...I go to my studio. If I’m not there I’m at home or in Pakistan.”

Hazmat Bravery

Los Angeles 7

list of words looked up while reading one long short story...one I knew and forgot, which is worse than not knowing, one that I should know because it is roughly the same in Italian, the rest I had to try hard to remember because they are important and I was sleepy:

fenestral
lugubrious
susurration
frictive
puissance
nacre
gelid

and looking at the side column created next to them I caught sight of another poem that only my ignorance led me to discover:

window
sorrow
whisper
"thh"
power
mother of pearl
frost

Los Angeles 6

write things down quickly after they happen:

otherwise 

years later you’ll forget that two little piles of rocks existed in your shoes

the day you slipped into a dusty nightmarish San Gabriel ravine and had to be pulled out


and you didn't stop to remove them until you got back to the trailhead...right up against darkness

Know Your Heroes: Laszlo Krasznahorkai

The Melancholy of Resistance

"Because there would be something worth seeing then, something worth discovering—he knocked three times as was his custom—since he would then be granted a vision of that incorruptible order, under whose aegis a boundless and beautiful power comprehended in one harmonious whole the dry land and the sea, the walkers and the sailors, heaven and earth, water and air and all those who lived in mutual dependence, whose life was just opening out or already flying by; he would see that birth and death were only two tremendous moments in an eternal waking, and his face would glow with  amazement as he understood this; he would feel—gently he grasped the copper handle of the door—the warmth of the mountains, woods, rivers and valleys, would finally understand that the unbreakable ties that bound him to the world were not imprisoning chains and condemnation but a kind of clinging to an indestructible sense that he had a home; and he would discover the enormous joys of mutuality which embraced and animated everything: rain, wind, sun and snow, the flight of a bird, the taste of fruit, the scent of grass; and he would suspect that his anxieties and bitterness were merely cumbersome ballast required by the live roots of his past and the rising airship of his certain future, and , then—he started opening the door—he would finally know that our every moment is passed in a procession across dawns and day’s-ends of the orbiting earth, across successive waves of winter and summer, threading the planets and the stars. Suitcase in hand, he stepped into the room and stood there blinking in the light."