Posts in: OTD

Twenty Years

On March 3rd, 2003, this quote by Walter Ong was my first post on a long-dead Textpattern blog I installed at a long-gone domain:

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.

There were some lost years and there were some silent years, but I’ve always tried to have some sort of blog percolating quietly, like a sad little aquarium in the corner. Even if the fish died from time to time, there were at least a few snails working their methodical way along the glass, and a patient deep-sea diver gazing out impassively from behind its mossy visor, awaiting, like all of us, for a renaissance of wonder.

My wife and I met twenty-nine years ago today.

I was invited over to a friend’s apartment to meet her — and she ignored me the whole time. No hello, no eye contact. Absolutely nothing. She was utterly unapproachable. Instead, she spent the evening in the other room, forehead-to-forehead with her friend, discussing and analyzing a VHS tape of the modern dance concert she’d choreographed a few weeks earlier. And I could see instantly how smart, articulate, beautiful, and, most of all, strong she was.

Some stories belong to the breath, not to the pixel and keyboard. Some stories need the counterpoint of digressions and indignant amendments, of interruptions to refill the wine glass or the bread bowl, or to choose more music, album by album. They need the bustle and patience of a long evening, the wood and steel rhythms of a well-provisioned table.

So: to hear the rest of the story, you’ll need to be seated across from us, favorite beverage at your elbow, and all the time in the world. And perhaps a story or two for us in exchange.

Seventy-eight years ago today, one of the two men I was named after was murdered by the Nazis. His body was left on a street corner in Apeldoorn, along with six others. A sign reading Terrorist was pinned to their chests.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow:

In one of these streets, in the morning fog, plastered over two slippery cobblestones, is a scrap of newspaper headline, with a wirephoto of a giant white cock, dangling in the sky straight downward out of a white pubic bush. The letters

MB DRO
ROSHI

appear above with the logo of some occupation newspaper, a grinning glamour girl riding astraddle the cannon of a tank, steel penis with slotted serpent head, 3rd Armored treads ’n’ triangle on a sweater rippling across her tits. The white image has the same coherence, the hey-lookit-me smugness, as the Cross does. It is not only a sudden white genital onset in the sky — it is also, perhaps, a Tree…

“Says I to myself” should be the motto of my journal. It is fatal to the writer to be too much possessed by his thought. Things must lie a little remote to be described.

—Thoreau, Journal, 11 Nov 1851

Happy 205th, Henry.