Just baked this morning, despite the brutal heat (with assistance from AC-D2, the new air con robot on wheels)
All posts by sean
remora as object lesson
At 3 PM each day a digest of quarantined spam arrives. Fred Pryor continues to implore me to register for one year of unlimited training. Only $199. Also I continue to spam myself, which is always vaguely unsettling to see.
Listening to trigger music when of course the pin strikes the primer and sets off the charge. On the back side of today what builds up—where does it go—this effluvia of life. Not dissolving like powdered lemonade. Sitting here—being here—and not going there. A simple concept in theory.
Eschew the habits of the remora and be free of suffering. Enjoy without attachment. Sit.
These moments continue to pass by regardless of our presence in them.
Posted by sean on June 28, 2017
https://sd-stewart.com/2017/06/28/remora-as-object-lesson/
luxuriant leprosy of the vegetable kingdom
Soon began the glorious days of autumn particularly unmistakable in the melancholy curve that the sun, already noticeable lower over the horizon, drew across the sky in whose calm expanses, as though constantly swept by a wonderfully pure wind, its golden trace seemed to linger like a magnificent ship’s wake, and hardly had it turned its course toward the horizon than the moon, as though suspended to the beam of a celestial balance, appeared against the blue light of day with the ghostly glow of an unexpected star, whose malignant influence would now, of itself alone, explain the sudden, strange, and half-metallic alterations of the leaves of the forest whose surprising red and yellow brilliance burst out everywhere with the irrepressible vigour, the fulminating contagion of a luxuriant leprosy of the vegetable kingdom.
—Julien Gracq, The Castle of Argol (a most curious book, and one filled with what would become Gracq’s signature lush descriptions of Nature as a possibly supernatural force. In particular he seems to have a thing for forests…reading his forested prose turns hypnotic after a time. See also: A Balcony in the Forest.)
[Review here.]
Posted by sean on June 21, 2017
https://sd-stewart.com/2017/06/21/luxuriant-leprosy-of-the-vegetable-kingdom/
virginia woolf’s summer madness
The only thing in this world is music–music and books and one or two pictures. I am going to found a colony where there shall be no marrying–unless you happen to fall in love with a symphony of Beethoven–no human element at all, except what comes through Art–nothing but ideal peace and endless meditation. The whole of human beings grows too complicated, my only wonder is that we don’t fill more madhouses: the insane view of life has much to be said for it–perhaps its the sane one after all: and we, the sad sober respectable citizens really rave every moment of our lives and deserve to be shut up perpetually. My spring melancholy is developing these hot days into summer madness.
Source: The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume 1: 1888-1912 (from a letter dated April 23, 1901 to Emma Vaughan)
(thanks: lost fun zone)
Posted by sean on June 19, 2017
https://sd-stewart.com/2017/06/19/virginia-woolfs-summer-madness/
black vulture nestlings
Black Vulture nestlings at Center for Maryland Agriculture and Farm Park, Cockeysville, MD. © 2017 S. D. Stewart
Posted by sean on June 15, 2017
https://sd-stewart.com/2017/06/15/juvenile-black-vultures/
belated apology to the world
Back in November I wrote a post in which I apologized to the citizens of the world on behalf of the United States of America for foisting Donald J. Trump upon them. Well, now I am here once again to apologize, this time for the U.S. exit from The Paris Agreement. Even though this will probably end up being a largely symbolic move, it still speaks loudly with a voice not shared by many of us here in the United Sharply Divided States of America. So I would like to reassure all five or so of you from other countries who read this blog that many (most?) of us here do not support this action. And I suspect this will be the first of many addenda to that initial post…
Posted by sean on June 7, 2017
https://sd-stewart.com/2017/06/07/belated-apology-to-the-world/
‘Ethiopia/Lower Ground’ – Bill Laswell & Gigi
From the ROIR Dub Sessions
Posted by sean on June 6, 2017
https://sd-stewart.com/2017/06/06/ethiopialower-ground-bill-laswell-gigi/
100 Years of Leonora Carrington
As they rode along the edge, the brambles drew back their thorns like cats retracting their claws.
This was something to see: fifty black cats and as many yellow ones, and then her, and one couldn’t really be altogether sure that she was a human being. Her smell alone threw doubt on it—a mixture of spices and game, the stables, fur and grasses.
Riding a wheel, she took the worst roads, between precipices, across trees. Someone who’s never travelled on a wheel would think it difficult, but she was used to it.
Her name was Virginia Fur, she had a mane of hair yards long and enormous hands with dirty nails; yet the citizens of the mountain respected her and she too always showed a deference for their customs. True, the people up there were plants, animals, birds; otherwise things wouldn’t have been the same. Of course, she had to put up with being insulted by the cats at times, but she insulted them back just as loudly and in the same language. She, Virginia Fur, lived in a village long abandoned by human beings. Her house has holes all over, holes she’d pierced for the fig tree that grew in the kitchen.
—from ‘As They Rode Along the Edge’ by Leonora Carrington
This story is now available in The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington published in the USA by The Dorothy Project, and in The Debutante and Other Stories published in the UK by Silver Press. Both titles have been published as part of a 2017 centenary celebration of Carrington’s birth, which also includes the NYRB republication of her asylum memoir Down Below and her children’s book The Milk of Dreams, as well as Joanna Moorhead’s biography The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington.
For a breakdown of the differences between the two supposedly ‘complete’ collections of Carrington’s short stories, read ‘Hyenas, Horses, and Rabbits, Oh My!‘ by Selena Chambers at Weird Fiction Review. Over time Chambers will be reviewing each of Leonora’s stories found in the two collections, as well as evaluating the other books listed above.
There could hardly be a better time to be reading and appreciating Leonora Carrington!
(Click here to read my review of the out-of-print collection House of Fear, which includes a selection of her stories, the novella Little Francis, and the memoir Down Below, and here for my review of The Seventh Horse and Other Tales, which paired another batch of her stories with an abridged version of her novel The Stone Door).
Posted by sean on June 6, 2017
https://sd-stewart.com/2017/06/06/100-years-of-leonora-carrington/
terminal threshold
This morning the city smelled like smoke but you know it’s not the friendly campfire smoke, but the burning building smoke and maybe people are in danger, not roasting marshmallows and telling ghost stories but instead fighting for their lives as their home goes up in flames. Regardless I continue on my mission to walk the dog because he has his needs and I am here to help meet them. That is what I am to do at this very moment. Later on I have to wonder while reading the Sunday newspaper (subscribed to in a post-inauguration panic) what the terminal threshold is for learning the details of others’ suffering. What is that outer limit of knowledge regarding how hard it is for people to live their daily lives, beyond which there is no value in further absorption. For that is what comprises most of the news. It is a catalog of the world’s suffering accompanied by an explication of the delusions that fuel it. Sometimes I have to turn off the radio or let the papers pile up simply to give myself space and time to breathe. I know people are suffering and I want them to not suffer but there are only certain ways for me to help, and I’m not sure that one of those ways is to keep listening to and reading more and more of the details about how they are suffering and what this or that pundit thinks about why that suffering exists. After a certain point, possibly the terminal threshold, it feels like voyeurism and nothing more. It’s like the photo collection at work, full of countless portraits of the worst forms of human suffering, sometimes so extreme (usually during the annual contest when hundreds more pour in all at once) that I not so much become numb to their effects as want to hide under my desk, away from the screen, to rock back and forth muttering about my ever-waning faith in the possibility of peace and justice. But it’s this intercessory nature of the media that is the issue. I don’t need them prioritizing human suffering, categorizing it, interpreting it, and serving it up to me in bite-sized nuggets for me to swallow like a dry cracker with no water chaser. Rather, if you are suffering and want to talk about it or write it down I can listen or read as you share your pain in your own words, not those of an intermediary with some probable agenda, even as banal as needing to file a story in order to get paid. Thank you and have a good day.
Posted by sean on June 4, 2017
https://sd-stewart.com/2017/06/04/terminal-threshold/
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