Selected Readings

This week was too distracting to bring together into a single point. I picked up a book by the poet Anselm Hollo and found some excerpts from his journal which he characterized as his common books. Common books are compilations from one’s reading, conversations and from remarks overheard. So I decided this might be a way to bridge the gap until next week.

From The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, by Norman M. Klein, an odd work of critique and theory centered on the rise and fall of Los Angeles:

“Even the topologies and tropes used to describe the “place” where memory s stored in the brain imply erasure. Over the centuries, this “place” has been imagined as a waxen tablet, an electrical trace, a cluster sparking on a network, a library made of eroding fabric, a mental theater with painted doors. In practically every version, the site is “built” from a highly malleable substance, or moves along a very slippery trail. Memories tend to efface easily, or lose track.

Most of all, they distract: if one memory happens to resemble another one of these will be inhibited; in other words, distorted or simply “Misplace.” When a memory is recalled like a car part frm storage, there is no scientific certainty as to how to put it back, probably not as it was. Certainly the packing is disturbed. Therefore short-term memory means just that. Over 70 percent decays within the hour generally. Long-term memory – events and ideas – vanish even more elaborately, inside yet another practical but imaginary construct, the unconscious, where forgetting and dream theory apparently meet, as parallel systems of displacement and condensation, or as language evaporating as it speaks.”

From Maori Art: History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory, by Ranagihiroa Panoho:

    “If the ancestors’ eyes what might we see, if their hands what might we touch, if their ears, what might we hear? Whakarongo ki te tai. E tangi haere ana. ‘Listen to the tide, lamenting as it flows on.’ Words radiate a ring path, skimming thin, slicing obsidian smooth – a face. Like the tohunga 'spiritual expert’ scanning the pools of Te Waiariki – have you ever tried to read water? Can you feel their thinking about movement, sound, rhythm, light, space, distance, surface and … silence?”

From The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams:

As love
            that is
each day upon the twig
            which may die

           So springs your love
fresh up
           lusty for the sun
the bird’s companion---

[The shape of Williams stanzas mimics the profile of a bird perched on a branch turning from one direction to another.]