All New York was demanding new men, and all the new forces, condensed into corporations, were demanding a new type of man,—a man with ten times the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type,—for whom they were ready to pay millions at sight. As one jolted over the pavements or read the last week’s newspapers, the new man seemed close at hand, for the old one had plainly reached the end of his strength, and his failure had become catastrophic. Every one saw it, and every municipal election shrieked chaos. A traveller in the highways of history looked out of the club window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue, and felt himself in Rome, under Diocletian, witnessing the anarchy, conscious of the compulsion, eager for the solution, but unable to conceive whence the next impulse was to come or how it was to act. The two-thousand-years failure of Christianity roared upward from Broadway, and no Constantine the Great was in sight.
81: Autumn Trilogy (Maple)
82: Pitch Black (lined)
The orange was just too jarring for me. Moving on after only a week. I’ll put it to some other use that doesn’t involve me carrying it with me everywhere.
I’m pleased that a strange old sonnet of mine has found a home in the newest issue of the excellent Wine Cellar Press.
And be sure to click over to the second page, to read another poem, A Found Fragment in your Firetorn Books, which was written following the prosody of Old English alliterative poetry.
Seventy-seven years ago today, one of the two men I was named after was murdered by the Nazis, his body left in the street with a sign reading TERRORIST pinned to his chest.
I’ve just finished writing two books. They’re very weird, and probably gibberish, but I suspect there’s perhaps — at most — fifteen people who might, briefly, find them curious or even somewhat bemusing. In other words: typical poetry manuscripts. Let’s see what happens next.
If we were to give the imagination its due in the philosophical systems of the universe, we should find, at their very source, an adjective. Indeed, to those who want to find the essence of a world philosophy, one could give the following advice — look for its adjective.
This morning, I went inside a bookstore for the first time since January 2020. I picked up part of an online order, I browsed, and I bought a few more books. It was almost normal.
And, of course, I grabbed a pinch of bookmarks.
(Original series here, with subsequent discoveries here.)
🔗 Building Ages in NL “A Dutch data engineer wanted to find out the age of the building his son lives in and ended up creating a map, visualising the age of all of the Netherlands’ 10 million or so buildings.” (via)
I was able to determine that my father was born in a house built in 1905.
I have to tell you: in theses lectures, I’m not going to be explaining my work or describing who I am as an artist. In fact, I don’t care if you know who I am.
I’ve never really tried to express myself through my work. It’s more about curiosity, about how things are, what they are.
Plus, I’ve really made an effort for most of my life to just get rid of the idea of being anyone at all.
