Passages I like from other writers, random stuff that interests me, great campsites, and the good bits of stories that I will [probably] never do anything else with. Is it easier to kill your darlings if there is a heaven for them to go?

Banner objects: On the right, in a black leather sheath, is an ulu (a traditional Inupiaq knife) my husband made for me, with a musk-ox handle. The skull is an empty bottle of Kah tequila, swiped from a tasting years ago. The tequila was a special batch made for "Los Ultimos Dios" in 2012, to honor the resetting of the Mayan calendar and hence, some feared, the end of the world. The candlestick is from my great-aunt's Victorian house, the house I've loved most in my life, which in its grace and over-abundance of space spoiled me for all future houses. Print is by ---, of Big Sur.  The bobbleheads were bought on the streets of Nogales, Mexico.  The books are some of the books that have shaped my life as a writer. 

February 28, 2021

Ada Bronowski — Dear Friend, You Must Change Your Life: The Letters of Great Thinkers

Bronowski’s introduction to Epicurus’s letter folds in bits of history, philosophy, and science with elegant, lively, rhythmic, and surprising prose. I would call her writing and her sensibility Davenportian*, if Guy Davenport were better known.

p.7 “Epicurus wrote over forty-five treatises and books of philosophy, themselves containing multitudinous volumes, for instance, a monumental work entitled On Nature composed of 37 books. They have all disappeared.”

But a letter to his mother survives, engraved in stone in what is now Turkey.

* Davenportian

Here is a paragraph from a paper I wrote for William Gass (Seminar on the Sentence, Washington University, 1994). Writing this, I channeled both Gass and Davenport, two writers I love. The final paper for the course was to analyze a single sentence. My sentence was from a story by Guy Davenport, “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier,” in the collection Da Vinci’s Bicycle:

Wasps fly backwards in figure eights from their paper nests memorizing

with complex eye and simple brain the map of colors and fragrances

by which they can know their way home again, in lefthand light that bounces

through righthand light, crisscross.

The sentence is a flight of figure eights, backwards from the nest on a long phrase explaining how the wasp navigates, which is by polarized light, described in the eight-word phrase which is itself a figure eight: light bouncing left, and right, and crossing. “Crisscross” is the wasp-waist of the eight. And wasps are eight-shaped, without their wings.