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Valerius De Saedeleer (Belgian, 1867-1946), Jour nuageux d'été [Cloudy summer day], c.1921. Canvas, 84 x 95 cm.

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Roberto Bolaño’s board games by Patti Smith.

“Looking up from the hole I was perceptually burning, I spotted Ernest talking to Jesús, who seemed extremely agitated. Ernest rested his hand on his friend’s shoulder and Jesús calmed, crossed himself and abruptly left. Ernest sat down and filled me in. Jesús and the blonde were heading to the Greyhound station in downtown Los Angeles, two days and nineteen hours on a bus to Miami, then a rent-a-car to St. Petersburg.

—Jesús seemed out of sorts.

—Muriel has a lot of luggage.

The blonde had a name.

—Did you return her lashes? I asked.

—A gull swooped down and took them, most likely they’re part of a nest.

I avoided his gaze, so as not to catch him in a lie. In my mind’s eye, I could see them quite plainly, without the slightest effort, wrapped in the same blob of tissue atop an old bureau beneath a painting of a lighthouse engulfed in badly executed mist. I noticed the book he’d set on the table, Pascal’s Arithmetical Triangle.

—Are you reading that? I asked.

—You don’t read books like this, you absorb them.

It made perfect sense to me, and I was certain he had a whole line of regressions planned, if only to divert me from the subject of bonfires, but I impulsively threw out my own line, just to shift the angles.

—You know, I was in Blanes some years back.

He looked at me quizzically: obviously he couldn’t sense where I was going with this.

—Blanes?

— Yeah. It’s a sixties-style beach town in Catalonia where Bolaño lived till his death. It’s where he wrote 2666.

Ernest was suddenly very serious. His love of Roberto Bolaño was something one could almost touch.

—It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like for him, racing toward the finish line. He mastered the capacity that few can attain, like Faulkner or Proust or Stephen King, the ability to write and think simultaneously. The daily practice, he called it.

—The daily practice, I repeated.

—He laid it out in the opening pages of The Third Reich. Have you read it?

—I stopped reading midway, it made me uneasy.

—Why? he said, leaning in. What did you think was going to happen?

—I don’t know, something bad, something bred of a misunderstanding about to go out of control, like in The Prince and the Pauper.

—You’re talking dread.

—Yes, I suppose.

He glanced at my open notebook.

—Does your writing evoke that thing? That uneasiness?

—No. Except for maybe a comic uneasiness.

—The Third Reich. It’s just the name of a board game. He was obsessed with them. A game is just a game.

—Yeah, I guess. You know, I have seen his games.

Ernest lit up like a pinball machine when everything goes the player’s way.

—You have seen them? Bolaño’s games!

—Yes, when I was in Blanes, I visited his family. The games were on a shelf in a closet. I took a photograph of them, though maybe I shouldn’t have.

—Can I see the picture? he asked.

— Sure, I said. You can have it, but it may take me a while to find it.

He picked up his book, the one with a red and yellow cover heralding the triangle. He said he had somewhere to go, somewhere important. He wrote an address on the back of a napkin. We agreed to meet the following afternoon.

—And don’t forget the picture.

Te Mana Café Voltaire Street. two o’clock. I folded the napkin and motioned for another coffee. Unfortunately, I had impulsively promised to give the picture to him in spite of the fact it was somewhere in Manhattan and I hadn’t the slightest notion where I had put it, what book I may have slipped it into, or what archival box I may have tossed it in, among hundreds of inconsequential shots. Black-and-white Polaroids of streets and architecture and the façades of hotels I thought I would always remember yet now were impossible to identify.

I didn’t tell Ernest, but in truth, I’d had a sick feeling having accidently encountered Bolaño’s games. Not bad sick but time-fracture sick. The closet shelf had contained a world of energy, the concentration once invested in those stacks of games still potent, manifesting as a hyper-objectified sense, observing every move I made.”

—from Year of the Monkey, by Patti Smith

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Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, annotated by Patti Smith.

From her website: http://www.pattismith.net/coffeebreak_bolano1.html

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John Brunsdon, Salthouse

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A scenic and snowy day on campus. The Gossard Memorial Library and South Hall Dormitory are pictured here, now replaced by Bishop Library and Neidig-Garber Science Center.

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Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard travelled across the US and Canada for The New York Times Magazine.

Looking out from the coast of Newfoundland over the frozen-over ocean, he imagines the Vikings who had once arrived here.

Here, a small group of Nordic people had lived a thousand years ago. They brought livestock with them, and various tools. They must have lived just as they had back home, hunting, foraging and gathering wood throughout the summer, all in preparation for the hardships of winter.

And yet they were a long way from home, far, far out in the unknown.

The world must have appeared very different to them, I thought. It must have seemed completely open, limitless, uncertain. They sailed west and came to desolate Greenland, with its enormous glaciers, where none of their people had ever been before. They sailed even farther west, without knowing what they would encounter, and landed here.

Were they afraid?

They must have been. Building structures like the ones at home, living in exactly the same manner, must also have been a way to master their fear of the unknown, not to be overwhelmed by it, a way to make the unfamiliar seem familiar.

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“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape. ” ― William S. Burroughs

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シティーズ・オブ・ザ・レッド・ナイト ウィリアム・S・バロウズ、飯田隆昭・訳 思潮社 装訂＝芦澤泰偉

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In Xanadu did Kublai Khan A stately Pleasure-Dome decree, Where Alph, the sacred river ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers was girdled ’round, And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But, oh! That deep, romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill, athwart a cedarn cover: A savage place! As holy and enchanted As e’er beneath the waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her Demon Lover! And from this chasm with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this Earth in fast, thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced, Amid whose swift, half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail; And ��midst these dancing rocks at once and ever, It flung up momently the sacred river! Five miles meandering with ever a mazy motion, Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean. And ‘mid this tumult, Kublai heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the Dome of Pleasure Floated midway on the waves, Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device: A sunny Pleasure-Dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such deep delight ‘twould win me That with music loud and long, I would build that dome within the air! That sunny dome, those caves of ice, And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry: “Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle ’round him thrice, And close your eyes in holy dread: For he on honeydew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise!”

-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who supposedly had the poem come to him in an opium dream, tried to write it down feverishly upon waking, and then couldn’t remember the rest of it when William Blake knocked on his door to tell him they should get drunk. 

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Bushwick Houses playground

Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY 2018.

Yashica T4 Super | Fuji Velvia 100

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Happy 85th, Don DeLillo.

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Marshall McLuhan’s annotated copy of William S. Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch.