Lew Welch reminds us that while doing something utterly necessary and ordinary, we should pause for a moment and say aloud, So it has all come to this!

If, in so doing, you find yourself feeling a bit like the battle-weary Theoden on the walls of Helm’s Deep, and not just someone boiling water or folding laundry, this is not entirely a bad thing. The greatest battles of our lives are often fought in the trivial and quotidian muck.

And not in passivity, but in careful observance. We are both architect and resident. We are perp and victim. Attend! So it has come to this.

The Tracery of a Pattern

I am crawling slowly through Invisible Cities. It reads like so many prose poems, with each subchapter devoted to describing a different city. I am moving through it more like a collection of poetry than a novel. An odd, and uncommon, experience.

What’s more odd, though, is that I keep thinking of Richard Brautigan. A somnolence enshrouds Invisible Cities that reminds me of In Watermelon Sugar.

What would this world be like if Brautigan had fallen in with the Oulipians rather than the Beats?

Walter Ong, Orality & Literacy:

The personal diary is a very late literary form, in effect unknown until the seventeenth century… The kind of verbalized solipsistic reveries it implies are a product of consciousness as shaped by print culture. And for which self am I writing? Myself today? As I think I will be ten years from now? As I hope I will be? For myself as I imagine myself or hope others may imagine me? Questions such as this can and do fill diary writers with anxieties and often enough lead to discontinuation of diaries. The diarist can no longer live with his or her fiction.