Samuel Beckett (born April 13, 1906)
my loneliness I know it oh well I know it badly
I have the time is what I tell myself I have time
but what time famished bone the time of the dog
of a sky incessantly paling my grain of sky
of the climbing ray ocellate trembling
of microns of years of darkness—Samuel Beckett translated by Philip Nikolayev, Poetry, February 2008
Mister Chu:I love this photograph.
As so many do.
The right hand gripping.
The face of course in general,
but the nose and the ear,
two certainties, defiant almost.
In the slipstream.
Inevitable.
(via purveyor-of-fine-whines)
(via refs / .)
Oscar Sanmartin Vargas, El Faro de Alesia (via blackv)
“And we build a home. Word by word, sentence by sentence. We make stories, trace letters in the air, long into the night. We make.” Photograph by Anett Holmvik (via therestisbullshit)
Nicolas de Staël
Recreation of a painting by de Chirico. Someone know where this actually is?
(Source: eviscerateyoungcaptain, via robfunderburk)
Which brings me to those nutty commas, exemplified by Mr. Yagoda in a sentence about Lee Atwater from a piece by Jane Mayer in the double issue of Feb. 13 & 20, 2012: “Before Atwater died, of brain cancer, in 1991, he expressed regret …” Mr. Yagoda writes, “No other publication would put a comma after ‘died’ or ‘cancer.’ The New Yorker does so because otherwise (or so the thinking goes), the sentence would suggest that Atwater died multiple times and of multiple causes.”
“That is nutty, of course,” he adds. And he’s right. But I would argue that there is another reason to put those commas in that sentence. The point is that Atwater expressed regret before he died. What he died of and when he died of it are both details that the author provides only as an aside, to satisfy the reader’s curiosity. Cause and date of death are not essential to the meaning of the sentence. In fact, I might have been tempted to bury the obituary in parentheses, like a whisper: “Before Atwater died (of brain cancer, in 1991), he expressed regret …”
It would be too bad if we were to get so distracted by the punctuation that we failed to absorb the meaning of the words.
- As the keeper of the comma shaker here at The New Yorker, Mary Norris felt obliged to respond to the characterization of our house style regarding commas, in Ben Yagoda’s recent post for the New York Times blog (“Fanfare for the Comma Man”), as “nutty.” http://nyr.kr/J5Q6Es
