Texts

The Brick Moon

If from the surface of the earth, by a gigantic peashooter, you could shoot a pea upward from Greenwich, aimed northward as well as upward; if you drove it so fast and far that when its power of ascent was exhausted, and it began to fall, it should clear the earth, and pass outside the North Pole; if you had given it sufficient power to get it half round the earth without touching, that pea would clear the earth forever. It would continue to rotate above the North Pole, above the Feejee Island place, above the South Pole and Greenwich, forever, with the impulse with which it had first cleared our atmosphere and attraction. If only we could see that pea as it revolved in that convenient orbit, then we could measure the longitude from that, as soon as we knew how high the orbit was, as well as if it were the ring of Saturn.

"But a pea is so small!"

"Yes," said Q., "but we must make a large pea." Then we fell to work on plans for making the pea very large and very light. Large, -- that it might be seen far away by storm-tossed navigators: light, -- that it might be the easier blown four thousand and odd miles into the air; lest it should fall on the heads of the Greenlanders or the Patagonians; lest they should be injured and the world lose its new moon. But, of course, all this lath-and-plaster had to be given up. For the motion through the air would set fire to this moon just as it does to other aerolites, and all your lath-and-plaster would gather into a few white drops, which no Rosse telescope even could discern. "No," said Q. bravely, "at the least it must be very substantial. It must stand fire well, very well. Iron will not answer. It must be brick; we must have a Brick Moon."

-- The Brick Moon and Other Stories, by Everett Edward Hale

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The Most Dangerous Man in Publishing

Evergreen 51 (February 1968)

When talking about the major obscenity trials of the mid-19th century, Norman Mailer once said, "There's a wonderful moment when you go from oppression to freedom, there in the middle, when one's still oppressed but one's achieved the first freedoms. By the time you get over to complete freedom you begin to look back almost nostalgically on the days of oppression, because in those days you were ready to become a martyr, you had a sense of importance, you could take yourself seriously, and you were fighting the good fight."

There seemed to be some justice to this comment, and so I asked Rosset what he thought of it. He waved the question away. "That was Mailer! He would have been crazy in any time," he said. And then he launched into another story, about the time Mailer filmed a movie, "Maidenhead," in the Hamptons. Rosset picked up a small wooden block onto which a photograph of his East Hampton Quonset hut had been laminated, and told me about how Mailer had bit off a chunk of an actor's ear while filming at a nearby estate after the actor had gashed Mailer's head with a hammer. "What was his name? Tony?" he asked Myers. (Rip Torn was the answer.) Myers went over to a cabinet of old VHS tapes, took out "Maidenhead," and pulled off the cover. "What a terrible movie," she said, and smiled.

-- Louisa Thomas, "The Most Dangerous Man in Publishing," Newsweek, December 6, 2008.

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NASCAR Season Canceled

LOUDON, NH -- Shock, grief, and the overwhelming sense of loss that has swept the stock car racing community following the death by apparent suicide of writer David Foster Wallace has moved NASCAR to cancel the remainder of its 2008 season in respect for the acclaimed but troubled author of Infinite Jest, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. . . .

"I'm flooded with feelings of -- for lack of a better concept -- incongruity," said Jimmie Johnson, the driver of the #48 Lowe's Chevrolet who is known throughout racing for his habit of handing out copies of Wallace's novels to his fans. "David Foster Wallace could comprehend and articulate the sadness in a luxury cruise, a state fair, a presidential campaign, anything. But empathy, humanity, and compassion so strong as to be almost incoherent ran through that same sadness like connective tissue through muscle, affirming the value of the everyday, championing the banal yet true, acknowledging the ironic as it refused to give in to irony."

"And now he's gone," Johnson added. "He's taken himself away. We can't possibly race now."

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The Most Heroic Palindrome

Tin Can House, Silver Springs, MD

Star? Not I! . . . He too has a wee bagel still up to here held. . . .

Sample hot Edam in a pan. I’m a rotten digger – often garden I plan, I agreed; All agreed? Aye, bore ensign; I’d a veto – I did lose us site. Wool to hem us? No, cotton. Site pen in acacias or petals a last angel bee frets in. . . .

Vendor pays: I admire vendee, his pots net roe. Nine dames order an opal fan; I’ll ask cold log fire vendor to log igloo frost. . . . Cat? No, I’m a dog; I’m a sad loyal pet. . . .

Hot pages are in a mag, nor will I peer, familiar tat, so lewd . . .

Sam’s a name held in a flat, or, sir, bedsit. I wonder, is it illicit ore? No ties? A bit under? Retarded? Is 'owt amiss? I’m on pot; not so Cecil, a posh guy a hero met. A red date was not to last so Cecil sat. . . .

Part on rose? It’s a petal. Define metal: Tin is . . . (I gulp!) can! . . .

No, draw a pot now, do! Of wary rat in a six ton tub. . . .

Semitone, not a tone, radios emit; no, on tape; elsewhere it’s a tone. . . .

No, it is opposite. Yaks I rode wore hats, albeit on deity’s orders. Rats age more held in a trap, nip and I know it – set no cage now. . . .

Macaroni, rats, as a hoot, tie. I vomit on rats.

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Leni’s Franz Kafka Page

Franz Kafka, 1906

Every evening for the past week my neighbor in the adjoining room has come to wrestle with me. He was a stranger to me, even now I haven't yet spoken to him. We merely shout a few exclamations at one another, you can't call that "speaking." With a "well then" the struggle is begun; "scoundrel!" one of us sometimes groans under the grip of the other; "there" accompanies a surprise thrust; "stop!" means the end, yet the struggle always goes on a little while longer. As a rule, even when he is already at the door he leaps back again and gives me a push that sends me to the ground. From his room he then calls good night to me through the wall. If I wanted to give up this acquaintance once and for all I should have to give up my room, for bolting the door is of no avail. Once I had the door bolted because I wanted to read, but my neighbor hacked the door in two with an axe, and, since he can part with something only with the greatest difficulty once he has taken hold of it, I was even in danger of the axe.

I know how to accommodate myself to circumstances. Since he always comes to me at a certain hour, I take up some easy work beforehand which I can interrupt at once, should it be necessary. I straighten out a chest, for example, or copy something, or read some unimportant book. I have to arrange matters in this way—no sooner has he appeared in the door than I must drop everything, slam the chest to at once, drop the penholder, throw the book away, for it is only fighting that he wants, nothing else. If I feel particularly strong I tease him a little by first attempting to elude him. I crawl under the table, throw chairs under his feet, wink at him from the distance, though it is of course in bad taste to joke in this very one-sided way with a stranger. But usually our bodies close in battle at once. Apparently he is a student, studies all day, and wants some hasty exercise in the evening before he goes to bed. Well, in me he has a good opponent; accidents aside, I perhaps am the stronger and more skilful of the two. He, however, has more endurance.

-- Diary, May 27, 1914

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Likable Wilma

Eggshelland 2007

Likable Wilma
William Blake

Wilma, Wilma, in thy blouse,
Red-haired prehistoric spouse,
What immortal animator
Was thy slender waist’s creator?

When the Rubble clan moved in,
Was Betty jealous of thy skin,
Thy noble nose, thy dimpled knee?
Did he who penciled Fred draw thee?

Wilma, Wilma, burning bright, ye
Cartoon goddess Aphrodite,
Was it Hanna or Barbera
Made thee hot as some caldera?

-- Holy Tango of Literature

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Blakey Likes to Point a Moral at Times

Agnes Martin

Blakey likes to point a moral at times and that evening in the hotel -- our last in Santa Fe -- she outdoes herself. As I maunder on about the day, my mother and the odd vagaries of taste, she delivers an irresistible challenge: name ten female artists of the 20th century who are better than O’Keeffe and I will clean up all the dog and cat poo in the backyard for ever. I start off confidently enough: Agnes M. (natch), Popova, Goncharova, Sonia Delaunay, Hannah Höch, Eva Hesse, umm . . . Living artists aren’t permitted, or photographers, so, gosh, Louise Bourgeois and Imogen Cunningham and Berenice Abbott and Kiki Smith and Cecily Brown and Marlene Dumas and Ida Applebroog and scores of others get knocked out at a stroke. (Nicole Eisenman – please know I worship you!) Marie Laurencin seems far too feeble to mention; so too, I’m afraid, does Vanessa Bell. Gwen John? Not exactly a she-titan of the brush. Elaine de Kooning? The canonisation of wives has never seemed to me an effective feminist strategy. Dame Laura Knight? I love her, but does anyone else? Joan Mitchell? Marvellous but . . . uhhh . . . I peter out at Number Seven or Eight in a welter of anguish and indecision. If only Kandinsky or Andy Warhol had been a woman.

-- Terry Castle, "Travels with My Mom," London Review of Books 29, 16 (August 16, 2007).

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