"This sampler includes a range of repeating patterns suitable for the decoration of linen, and also a figure of a woman or girl alongside the maker's name, perhaps a self-portrait." https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O70232/sampler-piccolomini-gullia/

Presumed self-portrait next to the name GIULIA PICCOLOMINI https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O70232/sampler-piccolomini-gullia/

Early 17th-century Italian sampler, signed in stitch by one Giulia Piccolomini, next to a self-portrait (?) (Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

“There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself. All together form the one grand palimpsest of the world.“

John Muir (b. 21 April 1838), out of _A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf_ (1916, out of journal entries made c. 1867 during a walk, Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico, through Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida):

Melville, in a letter, called _Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land_ (1876) a “metrical affair, a pilgramage or what not, of several thousand lines, eminently adapted for unpopularity . . . it may intimidate or allure.”

“Eminently adapted for unpopularity”: a phrase serviceable as creed.

Several blah days with intermittent bouts of reading, kamikaze-style—my (mostly) avid bookish zeroing-in inevitably ended by snore-powered naps. (A perfectly asinine way to talk—& likely the result of the book in question, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), with its slapstick cartoonery.)

Lovely! Reminds me of radis au beurre and white wine in your apartment outside Geneva after an afternoon of making mixtapes together circa God knows when . . . sometime well before the turn of the century.

I’ll have to take a look, or possibly another look. About “aesthetic kith and kin“: isn’t it _all_ available to us? One reason I mock the little literary groupuscules is, how they seek to limit one’s reach. I’m a sentence by sentence reader, and adjudger, no matter whose.

I read a number of Doctorow’s books, but can’t at the moment recall if I read that one or not.

Re: another little turd of a vice-president, I’ve lately been ensconced in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), “about” the Rosenberg executions in 1953, with alternate chapters narrated by L.T. veep Dick Nixon. I keep wondering if you’ve read it, Rachel.

“There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity.“

Empty Teignmouth notice board with sprayed graffiti horses running amidst white field interspersed with old rusted staples and outlines of removed posters

The typographical eye. Melville, in a 1949 letter to Evert Duyckinck, is finally “reading Shakspeare”:

“It is an edition in glorious great type, every letter whereof is a soldier, & the top of every ‘t‘ like a musket barrel.”

In a 1929 letter to Thomas McGreevy, Samuel Beckett (b. 13 April 1906)—ever expert at the brilliant stinger—records reading François Mauriac’s _Le Désert de l’amour_ (1925), “which I most decidedly do not like”: “A patient tenuous snivel that one longs to see projected noisily into a handkerchief.”

from archives / Kochi

Thanks, Robert!

Thank you, Kim!

Hard to fathom how James Schuyler (d. 12 April 1991) could be gone now 35 years. Here’s a piece I wrote—out, in a rather more mannerist version—of the final issue of John Tranter’s Jacket. I never met the man. Bless the big, breezy, long-lined marvels, bless the perfect skinny specifics, bless him.

Francis Bacon, “Self Portrait,” 1971

Painter Francis Bacon talking to David Sylvester in 1962, with a “Self Portrait” dated 1971. (Somewhere Marianne Moore repeats the philosopher _Sir_ Francis Bacon’s line: “There is no excellent beauty, that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”)

At the Botanical Gardens, the GoatHead people snubbed the Great Wildebeest.
The GoatHead people are worthless.

“Here is Cervantes, a failed writer in his late 50’s, who has come to that fateful pass when failure is just that, defeat, or by some mysterious dispensation reverses itself and confers a freedom all its own.”

And here’s Lemann’s (pragmatic, more sanguine) reworking of Percy’s remark:

Read Nancy Lemann’s _Malaise_ (2002). I like how she drops unattributed quoted material into the doings. Here’s Walker Percy—mentor of sorts to Lemann; if her books remind me of any, it’s Percy’s _The Moviegoer_ (1961)—in a squib for a 1985 New York Times Book Review piece on “famous first lines”:

I just skimmed the beginning of her statement, so don't really know the intricacies of the matter, but somehow I was reminded of how I got within about 20 pages of finishing The Last Samurai and just bagged it, resolutely fed up. Didn't like her, didn't like her book. Not a proud moment.

A. R. Ammons’s “Hymn”—found in _Expressions of Sea Level_ (1964). The usual Ammonsesque bout of easygoing pantheism seeming terribly precious today when so much else seems “chasmal to my ant-soul”:

And, too: how the gist of Beckett’s lines out of “Worstward Ho” (1983)—“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”—might conceivably be traced back to Melville.

Revisiting lines out of Melville’s famed 1850 quasi-manifesto “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” ascribed in its original as being “by a Virginian Spending July in Vermont.” To note: how William Carlos Williams, some 100 years later, saw the need to continue to call for the rejection of “a foreign model.”

Sad to hear of Glen Baxter's passing. A remarkable genius of the non sequitur. This is the pencil drawing he did for the cover of my 1977 poetry selection Fast Asleep from Z Press. I wanted a cross between a cheap detective novel and a tawdry sex paperback. Glen's illustration did not disappoint.

Out of the Portuguese fictioneer Gonçalo M. Tavares’s _The Neighborhood_ (2012), translated by Roopanjali Roy, a piece called “The Window.” Tiny vignettes of a comic “philosophical” bent concerning some of “the Misters”—Valéry, Calvino, Juarroz, Henri (Michaux), Kraus, and Walser.

So-called naive painting - a man on a ladder in the center tending a bald tree, its boughs and those of other trees form an irregular gray-black gridding over a bright blue-white background of the sky. In the background below him a shack and a house with red roof, furtheron other trees - a poplar with early-spring yellow green leaves, a fir behind the house. Colour selectoin is plain on first sight and simple, but in reality rather subtle. Gouache

Klara Maria Fehrle-Menrad (1885 - 1955)
'Obstbaumpflege'
ca. 1925

Simon Palmer, Modest Margaret, watercolor, with ink and gouache.

Passing the shore of Minumé where they gather
The beautiful seaweed,
My boat has approached
Cape Nujima of drooping summer grass.

.

The sea must be calm on Kehi Bay
For I see fishermen’s boats
Crowding out
Like so many cut reeds.

-Hitomaro,
Manyōshū,
(Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai)