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TheFrenchBoy, 18
My ideal would be to present as a 50+ man. Would like to fast forward and celebrate my 57th birthday as a man with male pattern baldness, suited and totally representative of that age.

 

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neonfuckingrockwell, 19
Human abandonment slave.
Name Yeom Doo-hyun

All personal information including face and body are disclosed.
Anyone can meet yourself and take pics and videos.
I abandon and distribute the ownership of all my pics and videos and I will never stop it.
Disseminate and spread all my photographs and videos.

Comments

neonfuckingrockwell (Owner) – Jan 16, 2020
Clearly not me in the pic

 

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darthvader, 22
Equipment:

diving suit
kirby morgan bandmask and superlight 17b
finest rubber mask
studio gum mask
gas mask
air max 90 collection (100+ sneakers)
stunt skates
SEGUFIX

Comments

EvilMan – Jan 20, 2020
Kissing is his sexual energy “ON” button.

aminxl – Jan 18, 2020
clown

 

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eternal_abyss, 21
Hey, I have been getting into rimming a guys ass. It turns me into a cum fountain. I also have had some shit end up in my mouth while rimming a guy and would like to be taught to chew and embrace it rather than spit it out and not embrace it. But not if you look like Elton John.

I’d like to start with rimming ass and then work my way up from there. Ideally I would be fed bits of a guy’s fecal matter with some food or drink at first to start to get used to it and work my way up to being fed parts directly and then finally to eat full logs.

Comments

eternal_abyss (Owner) – Jan 8, 2020
Some old men who look like Elton John think they can buy young boys. Sad world. I am NOT for sale and I am (obviviously) NOT interested in old men that look like Elton John. Very sad that I have to say this.

 

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No1cares, 22
I kneel before you as a blank canvas for you to paint with piss and cum.

Comments

No1cares (Owner) – Jan 17, 2020
P.S. I’m not from Minecraft or I’m not pixelated in real life.

 

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MrAmbitious, 18
Hi there! I’m a young and rookie to all this and need some help. I’m 18 M, single, clean, virgin, kind of a Emo/femboy… ish? 😅 I am in my last year of high school and afterwards going to college to get into acting/theatre. I’m into BDSM, dungeons, bondage, assplay, piss, fucking, public, watersports, blood, scat, incest, vomit, kissing/making out, blackmail, human ashtray, burns, and basically everything. I have TONS of extremely filthy, nasty pics AND vids I need to share. They’re all solo tho since I’m a rookie… need someone else in them in charge of the using and topping bleeding and vomiting and struggling so forth… alright enough naughty talk, bye bye

Comments

MrAmbitious (Owner) – Jan 22, 2020
Hi, ha ha ha … fuck!!! I made this profile 5 years ago when I was an Emo drug addicted hedonist and I forgot all about it until today. I’ve changed and I’m a 23 year old car mechanic now, married (to a woman) with 2 sons. I’ll post a couple pix if anyone’s curious to see what became of me. Later, weirdos.

MrAmbitious (Owner) – July 18, 2015
Hurry as I will be taking a break for a couple of months in the new year to spend time on myself and do other things I like.

 

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ethan1654, 18
Hello, strange one but I have a bf who I love dearly but he is not into any kink.

I am looking for a daddy to train me up as if I was your son like in real life. Need you to spank me when I’m bad. Fuck me when I look good .. teach me stuff .. etc.

Punishments can be anything you want I guess. Spanking, cane, paddle, chores, no food, forbid me to see my bf.

Weird I know but if you can help that would be great kinda nervous about it too.

Comments

EatADick – Dec 30, 2019
I wanna skullfuck you. But have your shit together, I’m not a sugar daddy. Skullfuck (you with a good humble attitude) is my main interest. I’m too lazy to tie you up or such. Bonus points if you have a half a brain and other passions in life beside dick to talk about (though yea definitely be passionate about dick). If you play uke, banjo, or guitar and have pointers even more bonus points. Serious bonus points if you know a queer friendly hair/beard barber in Richmond or 25 mile radius. Went to same guy for years but can’t find one I like now. Kinda making me crazy.

LovePassedOutGuy – Dec 27, 2019
I have somnophilia. I like you. Would you willing to pass out for me and then have some chilled sex?

 

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snuffme, 18
Name says it all. It’s all I think about. Let’s make it happen.

Comments

Sniper – Jan 18, 2020
Sniper out for you if you still out for it. Just looking to snipe at you fast clean done.

imii – Jan 10, 2020
he was hot sexy and full of Guts .. 🤣

Anonymous – Jan 8, 2020
Chances are the snuff photos are fake, let’s face it. But I know the guy who wrote this profile peripherally. He is a dark fucker. I haven’t seen him around in a while. That is him in those photos. The look on his face in the bottom photo is very uncharacteristic of him and gives me the willies. Just saying. Hope not. Peace, out.

Anonymous – Jan 8, 2020
Fake! Disgusting!

Anonymous – Jan 8, 2020
snuffed, bratislava 28/12/19. 2 photo series, ltd ed, 10k each. 1st series, drugged, 18 poses, 6 nudes (top sample #1). 2nd series, dead, 21 poses, 8 nudes (bottom sample #2). contact “s-king” if you know where.

#1

#2

snuffme (Owner) – Nov 3, 2019
In a rush! So many looking to get snuffed above all these I’m ready now and have passport!

 

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Maxwell_Gunnxarsen, 18
no one is like my bro 🔝❤ find me the best one 🔝🔥❤

Comments

HughJanus – Jan 5, 2020
Roses are red
My life neato
Get nude
Hail Satan Despacito

EDDY-M – Jan 2, 2020
he haves a great ass hahaha besides handsome hahaha

 

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JackSpaced, 19
HMU if you too have rough sex with strangers as a coping mechanism for your loneliness/depression and know very well that it’s only a temporary physical distraction from a low internal state but continue to do it anyways. Anyone into needles 💉?

Comments

SadistBomberjacket – Jan 24, 2020
You’ll wear a bomberjacket, a hoodie and a tracksuit. I will punch you with boxing glove, kick your balls…
I’m not experienced… so be prepared for unexpected !
I’ll tie you to a punching bag, blindfold you and make you moan with each of my fist hitting you. Haven’t you ever dreamed of a guy taking care of you like that with a hood over your head so you cannot see your attacker?
I already have a boyfriend. It’s just not imaginable for me to do that things with my BF…
BE CAREFULL, from there it becomes weird !
I would love to play double dragon 2 on NES with you… both of us wearing a bomberjacket, hoodie and trackies… I used to play this game and it made me so horny to punch and to get punched… that would be so great to meet someone loving that too. I’ll probably never meet someone loving that, but if it’s the case for you and to prove it, tell me something about the game that you like !

 

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andthenyoufly, 19
I’m a small bottom with a genetic condition called fabry, and I play into this with my sexual preferences and how I act.

Fabry:

Pain: Full body or localized pain to the extremities (known as acroparesthesia) or gastrointestinal (GI) tract is common in patients with Fabry disease. This pain can increase over time. This acroparesthesia is believed to be related to the damage of peripheral nerve fibers that transmit pain. GI tract pain is likely caused by accumulation of lipids in the small vasculature of the GI tract which obstructs blood flow and causes pain.

Kidneys: Kidney complications are a common and serious effect of the disease; chronic kidney disease and kidney failure may worsen throughout life. End-stage kidney failure in those with Fabry disease typically occurs in the third decade of life, and is a common cause of death due to the disease.

Heart: Fabry disease can also affect the way in which the heart conducts electrical impulses, leading to both abnormally slow heart rhythms such as complete heart block, but also abnormally rapid heart rhythms such as ventricular tachycardia. These abnormal heart rhythms can cause blackouts, palpitations, or even sudden cardiac death.

Comments

andthenyoufly (Owner) – Jan 26, 2020
My cock is no longer functioning.

 

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Injun, 18
I am a Native American teenager
I am often seen as the foolish stupid beauty
and sure there is also something in the genes
Educated – somehow not
I am gay – maybe someday tranny or sissy
who knows
Born 11.3. 2001
look for a pedophile
no a partner
I’m 18 strictly speaking
nevertheless i am submissive
maybe something in the medical field
slutty me
I am sorry – that is it
I am not much of one to pour my heart
into my profile.

 

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Grimwood, 22
Aussie Goth jock into messed up
Ultimately you inside me but in a messed up way

Comments

Grimwood – Jan 13, 2020
No I am Bob.

Anonymous – Jan 13, 2020
He looks like an Andy.
I have a couple friends named Andy and they all have similarities in the face he shares.

reveriediverge – Jan 13, 2020
That’s because he is not a Bob

Anonymous – Jan 13, 2020
You do not look like a bob

Grimwood – Jan 13, 2020
No my names Bob.

Anonymous – Jan 13, 2020
So you aren’t a Andy?
Well fuck sad

Grimwood – Jan 13, 2020
Whaha oké fair enough.

Anonymous – Jan 13, 2020
No.
You just look like an Andy

Grimwood – Jan 13, 2020
Don’t tell me you mean Andy biersack.

Anonymous – Jan 13, 2020
You look like an Andy. Is your name Andy ?

 

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faggydollslut, 18
My little boyfriend is a good boy! He gets straight A’s in school, he’s very smart and everyone says he has SUCH a bright future. There is just one problem. Me. All I want him to be is a slutty, girly, bimbo, dolled up cumdump bottom for hung, aggressive men!

I keep him on a diet of high dosage Cialis, cocaine and poppers, and locked in chastity to make sure he’s always hyped up and horny as hell. Every day after school hours and on weekends I invite tops to turn him into a used up, sloppy, panting, sopping, stinky mess!

My preference is for guys with massive cocks and angry attitudes who know their way around an ass. But more modestly endowed guys are perfectly welcome too, provided you are sex crazed enough to know how to maximise its usage. No cock is too big and no fuck is too rough.

When I first hooked up with my boyfriend he was an asexual nerdy, dweeby kind of boy very much in denial about his sexuality, but, thanks to me, he has VERY VERY VERY much left that all behind for my dream life.

Comments

sman10 – Dec 31, 2019
you will never forget him .your thrustings to his butt will make you excited to the fullest. his wails will excite the maximum .his ass will cover all your excited penis.

Anonymous – Dec 26, 2019
This young man used to be a strange, ugly boy who took an instructional chess class with me on the weekends. I wish I had recognised him before we were in the middle of having filthy, messy sex because it made me feel nauseous.

faggydollslut (Owner) – Dec 12, 2019
I didn’t mention it because neither he nor I realised he liked being a toilet until you forced the issue, so thank you for the discovery!

fucking_mean – Dec 12, 2019
Not sure why he doesn’t mention this, but faggydollslut is very much a filthy pig! Obviously as that is not everyone’s cup of tea, he has many other non piggy kinks as he says. So pig filth and anything filthy. He absolutely loves scat. If you are looking for a teenage toilet, he’s your boy!

 

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boredwhore, 18
16 😒 I’m not too young you know 😂 link up 😊 maybe GAY 🤷🏽‍♂️

Comments

boredwhore – Jan 27, 2020
Give me your cerdit card 😍

43sleazybbffvers – Jan 27, 2020
i would love to spend time up to my armpit in your arse

 

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wantittoend, 18
just got dumped by my girlfriend. im such an asshole. need to be raped. i don’t hate old guy.

Comments

Toby – Jan 7, 2020
I would describe it as he is two books. One is big, bound in red leather, with weathered pages crammed with notes & scribbles in the margins. This book has a large gold capital “S” on the cover.
The other is journal sized, with a blue velvet cover, set with a silver cursive “g”. Its unmarked pages lined with silver are just waiting to be filled.

mdwesttorturer – Jan 1, 2020
If you play psychiatrist with him for a couple of hours and help him realise he’s a self-hating gay he is very obliging. The aftercare to rebuild his self esteem took another couple of hours and I was physically taxed from the rape by then so that was quite exhausting.

 

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be_planted, 20
Find someone planting me for days. Feed me and water me every day. When I’m planted, you can let me lick your feet, lick your shoes, use one or more false penis in and out of my mouth. Squat or sit and let me give you oral sex and lick your ass. You can humiliate me by urinating on my head, spitting, smoking ash, stepping on my head or face, and writing insulting words on my face etc. You can dig me out when you need me, like fuck my ass etc. When you’re done with me, you can plant me again.If you can come to me and plant me.

 

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Graffitiheart, 19
if you know me based on what I went to a month ago you don’t know me anymore, my evolution is constant, allow me to introduce myself again. at the moment I love Disney and also need to be wrapped head to toe in tape.

Comments

DollLocker – Dec 25, 2019
Meet the new him.

bigstickler – Nov 28, 2019

NormanS – Nov 28, 2019
No!!! Not his ass!!! Are you crazy?!! You had better be lying bigstickler you selfish piece of shit!!!!

bigstickler – Nov 27, 2019
heads up to guys here looking for any ass action with him soon last night i put some disney on the boob tube taped him up ‘n’ brutally caned his buttocks into bloody steaks

 

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EcstaticAntagonist, 18
Well my name is Sam and im a pup as you can probably tell. Ive not done anything with anyone irl so im a complete vergin and hoping to change that. Im looking for something long term and not just a one nighter as much as i want that so badly id much rather have a long term relationship going on. Im into all sorts of garbage. Well my biggst fantasys are a white guy fucking an asian girl in front of me then after watching you fuck her i clean your dick with my mouth.and then im houseboy for a boss that begins to sexually harass me and i threaten #metoo so you raope my ass and breed it until your balls are empty. Btw im incredibly cutejust thorght thats worth saying

Comments

masc6 – Jan 2, 2020
Pup-schmup. He’s just a piece of warm meat wearing a stupid mask. No need to be polite. After you fuck him, just empty a full bladder of warm piss down his throat through the mouth hole. That’s what I did. Woof.

handler99 – Dec 27, 2019
Look for pup who want act like a. Human maybe give up being dog be full human got a program for that that proven to work

EcstaticAntagonist (Owner) – Dec 15, 2019
I should say I’m also a furry and pornstar wannabe. I have different accounts on twitter for furry and pup.
As furry I’m called Fenix the Fox and Eclipse the Hussy. I have two fursuits that can use for sex.
As pup, I’m Pup Hex.
I do love to making porn videos.
On this site, I’m called myself EcstaticAntagonist so can have pup, furry, sub etc of me all in one account.
Richton is my username for Xbox and PlayStation. Richie is my real name. So RichstarX would be my porn name I guess :3

 

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Boqueteirinho, 24
sem frescuras para levar socada na garganta

 

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stupidmonkeyboy, 20
Hi I’m Felix but you can call me whatever. I was born and raised in Allentown Pennsylvania. I’m puertorican. I enjoy watching horror movies and horror tv shows. I love Harry Potter. I love to read books. I enjoy playing video games and board games. I’m very shy and have social anxiety. I’m more of a stay at home person. I love dogs and cats. My favorite food is Pizza.

I’m looking for an older dominant master between the ages of 35-70, must be 5’10 or taller, body type doesn’t matter to me, your dick size must be 6 inches or bigger. Must want a master/slave relationship with me. Must give me a weekly allowance. Have sex 6-10 times a day. Must want me to live with them. Must live in Pennsylvania. Must be weird kinda.

Comments

stupidmonkeyboy (Owner) – Jan 23, 2020
Ok Cash and Go is also possible.

Ibadlyneededyou – Jan 16, 2020
His grandma is 56 years old and in perfect health.

stupidmonkeyboy (Owner) – Jan 14, 2020
I forgot to mention that I am right now helping out my grandma so I meant once she is gone.

 

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lostboy, 18
Yes I am 18 and yes I have ID!

I am looking for somone to look after me 🙂 Sometimes I need guidance, sometimes I need love, somtimes I deserve to suffer.

Sadistic guys intrigue me a lot.. looking for dating and long term not that into sessions I want to build trust with the right guy 🙂 if you enjoy inflicting extreme pain we could definitely get along!

Comments

lostboy (Owner) – Jan 11, 2020
Hello thanks for checking my page out.

DontBeADick – Jan 11, 2020
Whoever made this fakest ever profile is pure evil.

 

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EmptySpace, 19
My thing is heavy breath control, and I like being strangled out. I also like being beatdown and knocked out with a punch to the head once in a while. I would love to make amateur videos to upload to pornhub (pm for the ones I do have up).

My ex did this sort of thing with me but he wasn’t really that into it and I felt like I was telling him what to do to me, I don’t want that, I want to be strangled by a sadistic men who know what they’re doing

I love the idea of being strangled by a couple or being a couple’s roommate with a neck they like to choke out all the time. I have been strangled out once by one man while his boyfriend punched me in the face and it was transcendent.

I can’t host because I live with my parents and I can’t drive due to anxiety.

Comments

EmptySpace (Owner) – Jan 14, 2020
I may like being choked but sea turtles don’t… pick up your fucking trash!

EmptySpace (Owner) – Jan 8, 2020
DM me for sex only? go to hell.

 

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NamelessMusician420, 21
I’m Sam, 21 experienced musically gifted bi sub based in High Wycombe. I’m a singer-songwriter-guitarist, have a master but we both see other people and frequently talk about breaking up. I am open to everything that spares the good looking aspect of my face and my arms/hands and the more forced and aggressive the better. I have never been close to using my safe word. Can you make me say it? My safe word is “Harder”(; Connected dudes who can get my demo to A&R guys at big labels get a FastPass or label heads who can straight up sign me front of the line.

Comments

NamelessMusician420 (Owner) – Jan 10, 2020
I would consider myself a pain bottom, since I am into being victimised in bed, but I like to be in control of my life. I am planning on being very successful in the music business to push my art into the public and to bring in money.

The problem with my current master is he’s addicted to my cum. He makes me jerk off in his mouth several times a day. I’m flattered in a way, but it drains my creative energy.

So, I would be looking for a horny violent master who can beat me appropriately and not allow me to cum by jerking off – ever again. In contrast to my artistic (business) life, I want to be condemned to eternal hornyness without relief.

lovealwayswin – Jan 10, 2020
So were you to break up with your current master, what would you look for in a new master?

NamelessMusician420 (Owner) – Jan 9, 2020
Thank you for asking. Much older people always compare my music to Leonard Cohen and sometimes Nick Drake. People less older than me have described it as The Cure gone acoustic.

lovealwayswin – Jan 9, 2020
what’s your music like?

 

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iamboysocute, 18
I’m into cute homophobic bullies around 19 yo. <3

Comments

iamboysocute (Owner) – Dec 29, 2019
Buy me dinner first….just kidding beat me stupid

UHaveToSuffer – Dec 29, 2019
I will be honest here, I’m really messed up. If you pick me I’ll throw you violently around my bedroom until you’re bruised and scratched up and exhausted and your brain is mush and then I’ll probably rape you and then maybe fall in love with you but I’m not sure so don’t count on that.

 

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AsylumSeeker, 23
I want to become your permanent sex-slave. Like until I die. I will serve you day and night. My purpose in life will be to make you cum as often as possible per day.

To give you an idea who I am, here are some non-sex activities I like:
– Theme Parks (Either highly themed like Disneyland or extreme adrenaline rushes like the roller coasters at Cedar Point. I love all of them.)
– Adrenaline / Speed / Extreme or insane Activities: I like all kinds of exciting experiences. Let it be a bungee jumping, a parachute jump from an aircraft, an insane roller coaster or a survival training in the wild. Those kinds of excitements let me feel “alive”.
– Adventures: Camping, Hiking, Outdoors, Explorations and so on
– Bruce Springsteen
– Financial Markets / Investing strategies

As a general note: I am gay, because I like “real” dudes, not sissies who whine because of dirty nails. If you contact me, you should be aware that I am not changing my way of life because of your sissyness. The only possibility to change my life is to sever me from the rest of human existence.

My age limit is my age + 10 years. I think a relationship with a larger age gap is just not working out long term due to the generation gap (I was going to say it goes both ways, but I would fuck a 13 year old in a heartbeat)

Comments

Anonymous – Jan 16, 2020
Please run in front of a steam roller pedo. Can only give you a better body or even better jump in front of a train!

 

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0bug, 19
I am a skinny white boy in Texas who self-identifies as a field nigger slave. I want a MASSA who will let me sleep in the big house and worship HIM. I only accept raw SUPERIOR SEED. In my mind I am a muscular black buck with big pectitties that lives to service WHITE MEN. Please let me be of service, MASSAS.

Comments

Anonymous – Jan 4, 2020
Rare type of meat

 

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UnicornPie, 18
Well I’m Ryan I’m an 18 year old senior at Merritt Island High School. I may not look like it but trust me I am. And I’m looking for someone who can stretch me out. I love my ass eaten and my dick suck but I mainly love me the toy. I would also love to be toyed by multiple toys. I love having my butt stuffed with toys. I love being fucked by my dog. I’m very freaky.

Comments

track – Jan 18, 2020
His favorite position is crying on the bathroom floor. Not a joke.

 

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Devilslikepopper, 24
I used to be a escort who insisted on condom use. Now I’m a anything goes whore who is turned on by POZ cock and wants a poz conversion, idk y.

I have no place, either you have one or in the car. If you have a place things can go rougher. I used to rent it 300$ a hour, now I’m a depraved pig.

I’m pouting in my picture, but I’m not being serious about it. I’m more of a frown photo guy.

Comments

Shane – Jan 14, 2020
Join my cult. We are already over 6 teens. Please join my cult (so that we can continue to grow). All horny boys up to 24 are allowed to join the group!!! No matter if you are looking for sex, paid sex, sugardaddy daddy, master, or just friends. Join my cult if you are a horny young boy looking to fuck because fucking is cool 😁 😁

gelo0804 – Jan 7, 2020
be careful dont loose who u are.. u are funky..

Sgtgrumblez – Dec 20, 2019
I paid through the nose to screw him when he was escorting and it was so-so but after retiring he’s shed what conservatism he had to maintain to protect the merchandise and really “lets ‘er rip”, especially sexually (in a slut bottom “let ‘er rip” kinda way)!

 

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twinksarevalid, 19
With a sweet smile on my lips I will drag you into my bizarre realm of perversions and will push you to your limits – step by step. Every glance, every touch will let you deep-dive into a great new undiscovered world of the senses. Follow my lead and yearlong experience to turn your most inner hidden deviance into vivid reality.

I just love to play with you and to leave you absolutely clueless about what you are going to do to me next. I will make my new position as your obedient toy sound so enticing to you, there will be no escape. My presence will leave you totally bound – not only by my words, with your attention fixed on my radiant erotic charisma.

 

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WillidoIT, 19
Shy, shameful, fearful, lured into a situation I can’t get out of, put in a situation I can’t back out of, MUST discover my hidden, unspeakable nature

Comments

A_D_7 – Jan 14, 2020
No use in explaining things when it will just fall on deaf ears. Just keep making your work because it’s really thought provoking and has also been interesting to observe the reactions.

WillidoIT (Owner) – Jan 13, 2020
I don’t think I owe you or anyone here my art statement for the project, and little it matters if you consider it such or not, but I can assure you I’m not trying to trick or lie to anyone.

demonesque – Jan 13, 2020
Are you challenging us to ignore our erections long enough to speculate about why you “killed yourself” and get “the feels” as you Emos like to say?

SexyMan9511 – Jan 12, 2020
His photos are cringe.

Bi_guy_27 – Jan 12, 2020
I have no problem that he is trying to do this “Art Project” but why the fuck come to this place to do it instead of a more Art friendly platform? Its clear he is an egotistic, attention seeking child using an excuse.

tightholefiller99 – Jan 9, 2020
don’t bother trying to snag him. he won’t put out. his profile is an art project. he explained it to me but i didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about.

DanInKansas – Dec 27, 2019
Leg hair says 26

HumanDecay666 – Dec 27, 2019
I can’t tell if you’re 13 or 26

 

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PocketRunt, 20
For quite a while, I’ve been what you’d call a “plausible macrophile”. I have a weakness for tall guys, and love realistic size differences. However, being a macrophile, I still entertain the idea of shrinking or being shrunk by others, hence I wear clothes that are very too large for me. I’m quite short, 5’2″ but wish I was a bit shorter so more people would be taller than me.

I’ve long fantasized about a sort of dystopic society where society has split into two classes: Men (males over 6′ tall) and human pets (males my height or shorter). For clarification, a human pet doesn’t behave or function like any sort of animal–they still live a human life, but are simply regarded as something to be owned, and kept under the control of the superior Men. They receive what’s left over from the Men, so to speak. They’re paid less, their careers don’t go as far, there are areas of society closed off to them, walked about society on leashes by their Men, and so on.

The reason for this is that seeing the vast size of a Man brings out these sorts of feelings. If I’m around chin-high or lower to a Man, it hits me rather hard psychologically. To find a tall and/or big fellow to explore such a world, quite frankly, would be an honor, and I’d be happy and honored to just be a part of it.

Comments

pjbcc – Jan 3, 2020
all he knows is eat mcdonalds charge his phone, twerk, buttsex, eat hot chip and lie.

 

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TheWhimperer, 20
I have fantasies where I want to be forced to have extreme pain and torture like being burned with cigarettes. Let’s make a horror movie.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Shane Christmass, Hi, Shane. I had never heard of ‘Bananas In Pyjamas’ before I made that post, but I gather it being here is a ‘hell freezes over’ kind of deal. ** David Ehrenstein, Yep. ** Sypha, Hi, James. Just give every post on your blog, no matter what it is, a salacious headline. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. One wonders, of course, what exactly this is all going to lead to on almost every front. Nothing good no matter what, it seems safe to assume. Come back, Scotland. ** Steve Erickson, Well, in a world where Britney and Timberlake and even Bieber have become legacy artists, and she seems a bunch more talented than them, anything is possible. No news on the US publisher front yet, no. Grr. Whoever has the rights to ‘Haxan’ if anyone does, sure seems to be into make as much buck as possible from that thing. Its iterations are becoming countless. ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien. Oh, no. Oh, Damien, I’m so saddened and so unspeakably sorry to hear that. Of course I remember Jonathan from his presence here. Words just completely fail. And he was so young. Yes, you need to stay yourself and strong and forge ahead and not feel disloyal or wrongheaded in wanting/needing to continue and to make the best of who you are and what you have as a person and artist. How you feel right now, being unable to imagine yourself so powerfully attached to anyone else, is the truth, but it’s a strange thing how truth evolves, and let it. The dead don’t want loyalty. They’re way beyond that. So, no, it doesn’t sound weird. God, I’m so, so sorry, man. I’ll look for a post like you described and restore it for him when I do, yes, of course. I hope you get through this devastating time as painlessly as possible, and know your future is huge, even if you can’t believe that right now, even if you think it’s terrible of you to believe that right now. Please let me know how you’re doing, okay. Lots of love from me. ** Armando, Hey there! Great to see you, man! I’m good enough. You? Yesterday, and every day of late and seemingly for the foreseeable future, was/is suckage incarnate over there in the USA, and it’s not so great for us outside either, yes. May we all consolidate our powers into a single power and destroy him and those who do his bidding. ** Right. Of course the month’s final day brings out the month’s slave cull as per always. See you on Monday.

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‘“Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its maker’s attention, it fails,” Guy Mattison Davenport Jr., Ph.D. ’61, once advised. “This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding.” The author, artist, and professor lived up to his own advice, producing works both deeply edifying and unclassifiable: nearly 50 books of fiction, essays, commentary, poetry, and translations. The arts, for him, were an attempt to explain the nature of things rather than, as science does, the “mechanics of everything.” In this sense, he considered himself a teacher foremost, and his writings “an extension of the classroom.”

‘He often joked that he had only 13 to 18 readers, but he also asserted he didn’t write “for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.” By one account, he traded mail—often including drawings and paintings—with more than 2,300 people, including John Updike, Cormac McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, and Dorothy Parker. Many who sought out his work considered him one of the greatest prose stylists of his generation. Erik Reece, a former student and friend, recalled experimental writer Donald Barthelme once greeting Davenport at an award ceremony with “I read you in hardback.”

‘The South Carolina-born Davenport, the son of a Railway Express shipping agent and a Baptist housewife, wrote that ambition was “unknown” to his family and his “childhood was far from bookish,” but his restless, singular mind emerged early. He left high school in tenth grade, heading north to attend Duke as a “desperately poor” undergraduate, “romantically and self-indulgently lonely,” focused on English and classics. Nevertheless, he landed a Rhodes scholarship—and would publish the first Oxford thesis on James Joyce.

‘Two years of military service and a teaching stint at Washington University intervened before he began a doctorate at Harvard, studying under literary critic Harry Levin and serving as a teaching assistant for poet Archibald MacLeish. In a 2002 Paris Review interview, Davenport recalled how Levin’s seminar on Melville greatly influenced his own thoughts on “iconography”—“how to read images in a text—that literature is as pictorial as painting or sculpture.” Otherwise, he said, he “learned early on that what I wanted to know wasn’t what I was being taught.”

‘Ezra Pound perhaps inspired him most. They met in the 1950s, while the poet was incarcerated for treason and Davenport, working on an article about Pound, wrote to him. Pound invited Davenport to visit, and they corresponded until Pound’s death. They didn’t share political beliefs, but Davenport wrote his dissertation on the poet’s Cantos and once said the best interpretation of his own work was that he was trying to do in prose what Pound did in poetry: make “ideographs.” He was enchanted by the idea that Pound and his contemporaries modernized the arts not by creating something new from scratch, but by bringing something ancient up to date: James Joyce reworking the Odyssey, for instance, or Picasso recasting African masks. Davenport’s aesthetics were akin. He called his writing style primitive and routinely referred to his stories as “assemblages”: collage-like vignettes where a page was “a texture of images” that he used to construct prose from his knowledge of philosophy, natural history, archaeology, and other subjects. “Art,” he once wrote, “is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world.”

‘In 1963, Davenport settled in at the University of Kentucky and taught English until winning a MacArthur fellowship in 1990. In class, his student Paul Prather recalled, if an essay they were reading mentioned a bar of soap, “Davenport would stop in mid-sentence and launch into a 10-minute soliloquy on the significance of soap: its origins in the ancient world, how rarely various kings and queens of English history bathed, when the habit of daily baths caught on, the changes in soap’s ingredients over the centuries. Then, seamlessly, he’d resume reading.” On a broader level, Davenport often declared that the purpose of imaginative reading was “precisely to suspend one’s mind in the workings of another sensibility.”

‘When it came to fiction, the usually precocious writer bloomed late. Tatlin!, his first collection, appeared in his forties. Some of the stories blurred the line between fact and fiction: “The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag,” for instance, has Nixon chatting with Mao Tse-tung; Leonardo da Vinci tinkering with a bicycle; and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas visiting Assisi. His nonfiction roamed as freely: one celebrated essay, “The Geography of the Imagination,” connects, among other things, Helen of Troy to Edgar Allan Poe, Gnosticism to Pinocchio, and an Athenian mime to Mark Twain.

‘Davenport wasn’t a political writer but had a radical idealistic streak: he was a devotee of the French utopian philosopher Charles Fourier, who believed the suppression of desire ruined civilization. In compiling his final book, The Death of Picasso, Davenport drew largely from his stories reflecting Fourier’s ideas. Characters in several of them seek ways to invent their lives as they see fit, just as he sought to do with his imagination. Indeed, for Davenport, the imagination was that vital key for unlocking the best bits of humanity. “For without desire, the imagination would atrophy,” he wrote in the essay “Eros, His Intelligence.” “And without imagination, the mind itself would atrophy, preferring regularity to turbulence, habit to risk, prejudice to reason, sameness to variety.”’ — Eric Allen Been

 

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Letter

 

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Further

 

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Extras

Guy Davenport and James Laughlin – Selected Letters – Book Review

The printing and binding of Guy Davenport’s ‘Wo Es War, Soll Ich Werden’

 

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Interview

 

Bernard Hoepffner: A number of people in America, and some in other countries, are captivated by your short fictions and essays. I believe George Steiner wrote that you and William Gass were two of the most important contemporary writers in the States. How would you situate yourself in American (and other) literature?

Guy Davenport: As a minor prose stylist.

When you say you consider yourself as a «minor prose stylist», what difference do you make between a minor and a major writer?

Harold Bloom the Yale critic has changed major and minor to strong and weak. The terms should not apply to the author but to individual works. Many writers (e.g. Melville) wrote both major and minor works. A major work takes its art to a high perfection and is usually innovative (Dante and Shakespeare would be the great examples here). More importantly, the theme of a major work must be universal and time-defying. «Of inexhaustible interest,» said Pound.

Minor writers may have charm, a polished finish, and a kind of eccentric attraction. Thomas Love Peacock, Colette, Simenon, Michael Gilbert – fine fellows and impeccable stylists, but when compared to Tolstoy, Cervantes, Balzac, or Proust, minor. I would place Poe and Borges among the minors, splendid as they are. They are narrow. A Martian could not learn about human nature from either of them.

I am a minor writer because I deal in mere frissons and adventitious insights, and with things peripheral. Very few people are interested in what late Greek antiquity looked like to a traveller («The Antiquities of Elis») or what aeroplanes looked like to Kafka.

Do you say this because you usually write very short texts, and have never written a novel?

I’m not a novelist. Paul Klee was not a muralist. My ambition is to write as little as possible, in the smallest possible space.

All my discrete paragraphing is to force the reader to read. Most narrative prose can be read by running one’s eye down the page. If I’ve worked one hour on a sentence, I want the reader to pay attention to it. I hope there’s a web of symbols and themes running through all the stories.

Let us say that there are some readers who do not feel you as «minor» (although I heard Michael Hamburger say that «minor» writers are as important as «major» writers) who would you see as a «major» writer working in a context close to yours?

The major writers in whose shadows I grow my mushrooms are Osip Mandelstam, Donald Barthelme, Robert Walser, and Walter Savage Landor.

Your thesis was on Ezra Pound, and I suppose that you read classics and modern literature, how come your first published works (correct me if I’m wrong) were illustrations? And did you study drawing? How do you now share your time between painting-drawing and writing?

My first thesis, at Oxford, was on Ulysses; the second, on Pound, was at Harvard. I don’t know whether my first publication was drawing or writing, or where the bibliography formally begins. When I was twelve I published a daily newspaper, hectographed, The Franklin Street News (Anderson, South Carolina). It concerned itself with visits, birthdays, the birth of kittens and puppies. In Junior High School (grades seven and eight) I wrote and drew for the local city newspaper, and drew a series of sketches of old houses, with their histories.

I studied drawing and painting at Anderson College when I was in grammar school (private tuition. Clarence Brown, the biographer and translator of Osip Mandelstam, was also a pupil in these classes. A lifelong friend, he is now Professor of Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages at Princeton).

You once told me that you never sent your work to publishers but waited for them to approach you. How did you publish your first book?

My first book, The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz, was commissioned by Beacon Press, Boston. Tatlin! was the manuscript I sent to Scribner’s when they asked for a book on eroticism in Greek poetry. The only book I have sent off in search of a publisher was Da Vinci’s Bicycle. Scribner’s turned it down, as Tatlin! had sold so poorly (despite having more reviews than any book Scribner’s had published in a decade). While it was being looked at by Knopf and Athenaeum, Johns Hopkins accepted it, sight unseen, for their Fiction and Poetry Series.

Could we have a few details about your meetings with Pound and Zukofsky?

I met Pound in 1952, at St Elizabeths [no apostrophe] Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Washington. I was writing an article for the English Institute on Pound and Frobenius, and had written him asking about certain details. He invited me to visit him. I did. I saw him regularly, once or twice a year, until his release. I visited him in Rapallo in 1963 (as recounted in the story «Ithaka» in Da Vinci’s Bicycle).

Louis and Celia Zukofsky came to Lexington for a week in 1964, to participate in a seminar I was conducting. We corresponded thereafter until his death.

Did you also know Basil Bunting?

Did not meet Bunting.

What do you think of him as a poet? As an English poet (this because it seems to me that Bunting and David Jones – and Thom Gunn, but I believe he’s Americanized by now – are some of the few poets of interest in Britain in the last forty years – but I’m no specialist)?

I admire Bunting, but am not certain what he’s writing about. David Jones is a very great poet. Thom Gunn is a fine poet. His innovations come from tradition rather than nowhere.

How important are constraints (if any) you might give yourself in your writing; I’m here referring specifically to a text such as «On Some Lines of Virgil» where the paragraphs appear to have a specific length? Have you been using constraints such as those which were created for poetry when writing prose (there is, in your writing, a density that comes close to poetry)?

Constraints is not exactly the word. A style has its rules. I have used isometric paragraphs as a formal device exactly like the paragraph itself. Prose narrative has units (the chapter, areas of dialogue). Architecture may be behind much of this – «stanza» means «room». Each of my texts has its own architecture, as it has its own narrative rhythm.

By «constraint» you mean rules, order, formal devices. As in «O Gadgo Niglo», where there are no commas. Prose in blocks («Apple and Pears», «Tombeau de Charles Fourier»). Decasyllabic dialogue in «We Often Think of Lenin…», numbered and titled sections.

If not constraints in a formal sense, are there any constraints such as frame of mind, position, colour of pencil, type of typewriter, direction you are facing, etc.?

I have no superstitions about the act of writing.

Could you develop the expression «necessary fiction,» which you once used to describe your short stories; are you always aiming at reaching the tightest prose? (This description of your writing was told me by William S. Wilson.)

«Necessary fiction» means merely that if I am writing about an historical figure (Vladimir Tatlin, Kafka, Walser, Pausanias, C. Musonius Rufus) I supply weather, rooms, samovars, Greek dust, Italian waiters, and so on, not in the historical record but plausible. It does NOT mean that I give fictional accounts.

Prose: one writes, or is written. (Barthes’s great subject: that our phrases exist so extensively that an author merely arranges them).

I approach writing with the sense that my words must be chosen and arranged with care, as we live in a world of abused and meaningless words. I think it can be said that I write in order to use words in my way, for certain effects, rather than for any programmatic purpose (psychology, drama, politics, thematics).

What I write about is therefore all but gratuitous. I have enough sense of anecdote to make a narrative. But the narrative is the stage.

The prime use of words is for imagery: my writing is drawing.

Gerard Manley Hopkins said that if he could live long enough he could find a use in a poem for every word of English. Good writers can make words mean what they want them to. Henry James, for instance, works with the tones (and overtones) of ordinary words, controlling them with idioms. His style is completely colloquial, like Hawthorne’s.

I couldn’t write a novel: I’d use up all the words I would have for it by Chapter 3, and couldn’t go on.

You said you wrote two theses, one on Ulysses, one on Ezra Pound, you did not mention Greek literature. When I introduced your writing to the readers of the first issue of La Main de Singe, I mentioned Herakleitos and the fact that you were more interested in pre- than post-Socratic writers; you translated Herakleitos and Diogenes, Sappho, Herondas and a few others, you are preparing a new edition of all your translations. What are these writers, philosophers to you, the time they lived; also Holland and Scandinavia, Charles Fourier and various other themes, like flying for example, that keep cropping up in your writings? Or am I simply trying to say that, like in Borges’s short story, after a life drawing mountains, horses, etc. the artist discovers he has only drawn his face?

The Praesokratiker. I like the archaic, the dawn of things, before betrayals and downstream mud. Practically everything is hopeful at birth. The great enterprise of Confucius and Mencius was to discover and annotate a much earlier morality. I like Fourier, and the Dutch, and the Scandinavians because they are brave critics of civilization. Civilization can be lost in ten minutes, as in Germany.

Insofar as writing is essential to civilization, I am interested in how writing cooperates with other elements of civilization.

Talk about lugubrious and pompous!

Self-portraits: Hugh Kenner once pointed out that my Walser is one. Butler = professor.

What are the reasons behind your choosing a specific historical figure? Why Tatlin?

I chose Tatlin because very little was known about him, and because he seemed to me to be the archetypical victim of authoritarianism. I could also use the parallel form in Russian writing for my form (Shklovsky, Mandelstam as models).

Why Walser?

Walser is a prose Tatlin.

What are the links between your reading and your writing?

My reading is, I suppose, my chief source of material. Practically every story has a textual ancestor, but never quite alone. «On Some Lines…» is from Montaigne (with my translating his Latin and Greek examples of sexuality into action) + Bordes + a visit to Bordeaux (2 weeks) + Tati + a French sculpture of a legless boy with dog in a Beckett wheelchair that I saw at the Musée de la Ville de Paris + inventions (the uncle in the wall), and so on.

Another question would be about the use of the eye. Or the Anglo-Saxon attitude, clear in Darwin, in Doughty, Howells, Whitman, Bishop, Zukofsky, W.C. Williams, Davenport, Ronald Johnson and so many others, which implies detailed description of what is or was, letting the reader react in the way the writer did, or wants the reader to; attitude very different to the French, for example (I know the dangers of generalizing), who seem to have a preordained theory which they then apply. Induction and deduction in short. With the exception of a few writers like Fabre, the French do not seem to have produced many writers who can simply describe. What do you feel about my wooly ideas here?

L’oeil. This translates into imagery. Here I am guided by films and painters as well as texts. Max Ernst and Tchelitchev are constant guides. «O Gadgo Niglo» is a film by Bergman.

Joseph Cornell’s boxes.

Balthus.

«Christ Preaching…» is a painting by Stanley Spencer made of a collage of elements: Dufy, Mallarmé, et d’autres choses. (All the stories in Eclogues have a shepherd, and in this story He is invisible except in disguised outlines and Spencerian theology, though the story ends in a baptism.)

Fouriers’s imagery of the hordes and bands (already appropriated by Proust) I take to be some of the finest poetry in French writing of the nineteenth century. Also his verbal coinages. His psychology was vastly prophetic. I’ve had to add to his concerns Coubertin (play as sport: Fourier thought play would be absorbed into work) and the machine (he «invented» the steam locomotive, but had no notion of the airplane, not did he incorporate the hot-air balloon).

The art of description in English owes much to Flaubert (via Joyce and Pound). Théophile Gautier, RIMBAUD. (Looking for phrases from Rimbaud in my prose would render a neat little harvest, for scholars with nothing better to do.)

There’s a poem («Mosella») of Ausonius’s imbedded in «Wo es war…» translated into prose. A poem of Rimbaud’s ditto in «On Some Lines». Also bits of Cocteau here and there.

None of this is to the point, as all art is worth only the spirit of the artist. There is ultimately, no text, only the author (Bon jour, M. Derrida!). All 4 gospels are logically and even grammatically incoherent, but their spirit shines through with great brilliance. You have the advantage of the word esprit, which includes intelligence, wit, and spiritus. We dropped the old English ghost (except in Holy Ghost), which, like Geist, might have served us. A work of art is alive. That’s what art means. Inert matter (paint, words, stone) made kinetic.

No giver can know the value of the gift to the recipient. Hence the impossibility of the giver to assess, or comment on, the gift. The writer literally cannot know what he has written, just as no friend can know what his friendship means.

A reader completes a work of art. It is something «in between», a medium.

Why do you think French readers are taking so long to accept your writings?

I have always been doubtful of the French and their willingness to look at my pages. My American innocence is not refractable through the Gallic prism.

 

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Book

Guy Davenport The Guy Davenport Reader
Counterpoint Press

‘Modernism spawned the greatest explosion of art, architecture, literature, painting, music, and dance of any era since the Renaissance. In its long unfolding, from Yeats, Pound and Eliot to Picasso and Matisse, from Diaghilev and Balanchine to Cunningham and Stravinsky and Cage, the work of Modernism has provided the cultural vocabulary of our time.

‘One of the last pure Modernists, Guy Davenport was perhaps the finest stylist and most protean craftsman of his generation. Publishing more than two dozen books of fiction, essays, poetry and translations over a career of more than forty years, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1990. In poetry and prose, Davenport drew upon the most archaic and the most modern of influences to create what he called “assemblages”—lush experiments that often defy classification. Woven throughout is a radical and coherent philosophy of desire, design and human happiness. But never before has Davenport’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translations been collected together in one compendium. Eight years after his death, The Guy Davenport Reader offers the first true introduction to the far-ranging work of this neglected genius.’ — Counterpoint

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Excerpts

Pergolesi’s Dog

Some dozen years ago, in the middle of one of those conversations which are apt one minute to be about Proust’s asthma and the next about the size of chocolate bars in these depraved times, Stan Brakhage, the most advanced guard of filmmakers, asked me if I knew anything about Pergolesi’s dog.

Not a thing, I answered confidently, adding that I didn’t know he had one. What was there about Pergolesi’s dog to know? There, he replied, is the mystery. Just before this conversation, Brakhage had been shooting a film under the direction of Joseph Cornell, the eccentric artist who assembled choice objects in shallow box frames to achieve a hauntingly wonderful, partly surrealistic, partly homemade American kind of art. He lived all his adult life, more or less a recluse, on Utopia Parkway in Flushing, New York, sifting through his boxes of clippings and oddments to find the magic combination of things-a celluloid parrot from Woolworth’s, a star map, a clay pipe, a Greek postage stamp-to arrange in a shadow box.

He also made collages and what you could call sculpture, such as dolls in a bed of twigs; and films. For the films he needed a cameraman: thus Brakhage’s presence on Utopia Parkway. The two got along beautifully, two geniuses inventing a strange poetry of images (Victorian gingerbread fretwork, fan lights, somber rooms with melancholy windows). Brakhage was fascinated by the shy, erudite Cornell whose hobbies ran to vast dossiers on French ballerinas of the last century, the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, and the bric-a-brac of all ages and continents.

In one of their talks Pergolesi’s dog came up. Brakhage asked what the significance might be of the Italian composer’s pet. Cornell bristled. He threw up his hands in profound shock. What! Not know Pergolesi’s dog! He had assumed, he said with some frost and disappointment, that he was conversing with a man of culture and sophistication. If Mr. Brakhage could not command an allusion like Pergolesi’s dog, would he have the goodness to leave forthwith, and not come back?

Brakhage left. So ended the collaboration of the Republic’s most poetic filmmaker and one of its most imaginative artists. The loss is enormous, and it was Pergolesi’s dog who caused the rift.

I did the best I could to help Brakhage find this elusive and important dog. He himself had asked everybody in the country who he thought might know. I asked. The people we asked, they in turn asked others. Biographies and histories were of no help. No one knew anything about a dog belonging to, or in the society of, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. For ten years I asked likely people, and when my path crossed Brakhage’s I would shake my head, and he would shake his: no d. of P. yet found.

We never considered that Cornell was as ignorant of Pergolesi’s dog as we. In Samuel Butler II’s Notebooks there is this instructive entry: ‘Zeffirino Carestia, a sculptor, told me we had a great sculptor in England named Simpson. I demurred, and asked about his work. It seemed he had made a monument to Nelson in Westminster Abbey. Of course I saw he meant Stevens, who made a monument to Wellington in St. Paul’s. I cross-questioned him and found I was right.’

We are never so certain of our knowledge as when we’re dead wrong. The assurance with which Chaucer included Alcibiades in a list of beautiful women and with which Keats embedded the wrong discoverer of the Pacific in an immortal sonnet should be a lesson to us all.

Ignorance achieves wonders. The current Encyclopaedia Britannica informs us that Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle is a novel (it is a book of essays), that Eudora Welty wrote Clock without Hands (by Carson McCullers), and that the photograph of Jules Verne accompanying the entry about him is of a Yellow-Headed Titmouse (Auriparus flaviceps). The New York Review of Books once referred to The Petrarch Papers of Dickens and a nodding proofreader for the TLS once let Margery Allingham create a detective named Albert Camus.

Vagueness has vernacular charm. A footnote in a Shaker hymnal identifies George Washington as one of our first presidents.

Cornell when he had his tizzy about Pergolesi’s dog was beyond vagueness and into the certainty of the dead wrong. Sooner or later I was bound to luck onto the right person, who, as it turned out, was wise to Cornell’s wayward-ness with bits of trivia. This was John Bernard Myers, art critic and dealer. What Cornell meant, he felt sure, was Borgese’s dog. I looked as blank as Brakhage had on the previous, fatal occasion. What! Not know Borgese’s dog!

Elisabeth Mann Borgese, daughter of Thomas, professor of political science at Dalhousie University, the distinguished ecologist and conservationist, had trained a dog in the 1940s to type answers to questions on a special machine that fitted its paws. The success of this undertaking is still dubious in scientific circles, but the spectacle it made at the keyboard of its machine stuck in Joseph Cornell’s mind as one of the events of the century, and he supposed that all well-informed people were familiar with it. La Borgese’s accomplished beast’s habit of typing BAD DOG when it had flubbed a right answer had brought tears to his eyes. He had a dossier of clippings about all this, and despite its sea-change in his transforming imagination, had no qualms about dismissing people tediously ignorant of such wonderful things.

 

Tough Buttons

A few months ago Gertrude Stein was at a Lexington, Kentucky, bookstore, promoting her latest. I learned this by overhearing one sorority sweetheart shouting to another on campus: “It was fab seeing her in person! I mean, you know, Gertrude Stein!”

It was Gloria Steinem at the bookstore, but what other American writer, forty-seven years dead, can claim a place in the sparse learning of the intrepidly illiterate? Gertrude Stein is firmly wedged in the American mind, together with Alice Babette Toklas. Her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus (between the Boulevard Raspail and the Luxembourg Gardens) is an echo of the eighteenth century. There, in a room as famous as any in our time, hung with Picassos, Cézannes, Matisses, and Derains, one might encounter Hemingway, Lipchitz, or Sherwood Anderson. Even Ezra Pound (he broke a chair, and was never invited again).

She is a vivid figure in the history of art, of writing, of the two world wars, of music, of popular culture, and of academic folklore. Yale printed all of her posthumous writing, six volumes of them. Periodically there are compendia, like this one, published in the thin hope that somebody will read her. Random House has kept a Selected Writings in print for decades. The general opinion is that The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) is charming, that Three Lives (1908) is significant, that her operas (scores by Virgil Thomson) are great fun, but that the large part of her copious works is unreadable. It takes heroic effort to make one’s way through the thousand pages of The Making of Americans, and conscientious students who have read A Long Gay Book and Stanzas in Meditation and How to Write should be issued a medal by the American Academy.

The century will end with our having to admit that we have learned how to read some, but not all, of its writing. Joyce and Pound demanded a redefinition of the act of reading. It is still not clear what Gertrude Stein was trying to do. Where we can understand her, she repays attention in great measure. We can specify fairly accurately what of hers we can and can’t read, and to what degree her pages make sense. At one extreme is the easy, flexible style of the Autobiography, and at the other the “Cubist” nonsense of repetitions and agrammatical phrases of A Long Gay Book (whose title does not mean what you think). In between, we have the epic echolalia and logorrhea of The Making of Americans, and the plays and operas, which always make a kind of sense. We can understand The Mother of Us All in the same way that we understand Mother Goose and Edward Lear (and shall we add Wallace Stevens?). (cont.)

 

Master Taxonomist

Medicine in eighteenth-century Sweden had not yet caught up with that of Hippocrates (died 485 B.C.). Linnaeus once put two teenage virgins in bed with a sick old man (as per 1 Kings 1:3 and 15), though he did suspect that microscopic “mites” were the carriers of disease, anticipating Pasteur by a century. But he believed in the phoenix and unicorns, and that swallows wintered at the bottom of ponds.

He doubted the biblical account of the universe, as well as other parts of Scripture. He went to church out of a sense of duty to propriety, he and his dog. When he was ill, the dog went in his stead, leaving (like his master) as the sermon droned into its second tedious hour.

Linnaeus the man is harder to get into focus than his crackpot science. A recent discovery of his travel diary in Lapland shows that a segment of his famous journey to the Saami is fiction. He deferred his marriage until age twenty-eight, after a four-year-long engagement. The wife was something of a termagant and shrew. His emotional life centered around his students whom he called his apostles. He sent them on far-flung expeditions to bring back botanical and zoological specimens. Nothing was excluded from his curiosity: he had Peter Kalm write his doctoral thesis on the American birch-bark canoe. He wrote a prodigious number of books. (cont.)

 

On Balthus

Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw” (which now that we have Balthus seems Balthusian) is a skirmish on the border between the inner worlds of child and adult. James follows with symbols the serious misunderstanding between the interiority of the two realms…

…..
Modern French writing has been interested in childhood and adolescence in a way that American and English writing has not. The French see not an innocent but an experienced mind in the child. [Henry de] Montherlant treats children as an endangered species needing protection from parents.

…..
Gide’s understanding runs parallel, except that he makes allowance for the transformation to maturity. The child in Alain-Fournier, Proust, Colette, Cocteau inhabits a realm imaginatively animated with a genius very like that of the artist. Children live in their minds.

…..
Baudelaire saw genius as childhood sustained and perfected. There is a sense among the French that adulthood is a falling away from the intelligence of children. We in the United States contrast child and adult as we contrast ignorance and knowledge, innocence and experience.

…..
We do not give our children credit for having arrived at anything. They have no driver’s license, no money, no sexual emotions (and are forbidden them), no real sports they can play, no power. Balthus’ children are as complacent as cats and as accomplished in stillness.

 

On Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark

Appalachian America has kept in the archaic courtesy of its speech and in the still uncompromised meanness of its ethnic jealousies an inviolable identity unmatched anywhere else in the United States. It is our Balkans. Appalachian speechways, uncorrupted by slang and impervious to innovation, put at the novelist’s disposal a timeless epic diction; and the wildness of Appalachia exhibits for him a range of seasoned and ingrained depravities the ancient universality of which allows a tragic terror more sobering than any the portrayer of sophisticated agonies can hope for.

There is a strange awfulness about Appalachia that quickens the imagination. Its traditions are unconscious and deep in the bone. It still believes in fate. The Calvinist still walks there in Bunyanesque starkness. The world is an allegory and no violence however sickening is ever quite unexpected in the course of a day. It bears its poverty with Celtic dignity and looks at life with the Celtic disbelief in its permanence. And in the Tennessee novelist Cormac McCarthy it has found a new storyteller to depict the darkness of its heart and its futile defiance of its luck.

Mr. McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper, won the William Faulkner Foundation Award three years ago. This, his second, is even finer. Though it pays its homage to Faulkner’s rhetoric and imagery, it is not a Faulknerian novel. It is much leaner, closer in pace and spareness of line to the Gothic masters Gertrud Le Fort and her disciple Isak Dinesen, and lacks Faulkner’s sociological dimension. Mr. McCarthy is unashamedly an allegorist. His responsibility as a storyteller includes believing with his characters in the devil, or at least in the absolute destructiveness of evil. As in Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale,” the moral symmetry of which is thoroughly Appalachian, you can hear mortality whetting its scythe behind every line. (cont.)

 

On Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein before he came to philosophy was a mathematician, an architect, a sculptor, a mechanical engineer, a grade-school teacher, a soldier, and an aviator. He could have followed any of these careers doubtless with brilliant success; just before he came to Cambridge (they gave him a doctorate at the door) he was strongly inclined to “be an aeronaut.” Every account of his strange life indicates that he tried to teach. He did not dine with the faculty, as the faculty in all its grandeur always dines in academic gowns, black shoes, and neck tie. Wittgenstein was forever tieless and wore a suede jacket that opened and closed with that marvelous invention: the zipper; and his shoes were brown. He held his lectures in his rooms, in the continental manner. As there was no furniture except an army cot, a folding chair, a safe (for the Zettel), and a card table, the students brought their own chairs. Philosophy classrooms in our century have frequently been as dramatic as stages: Santayana, Samuel Alexander, Bergson — men of passionate articulateness whose lectures fell on their students like wind and rain. But Wittgenstein, huddled in silence on his chair, stammered quietly from time to time. He was committed to absolute honesty. Nothing — nothing at all — was to escape analysis. He had nothing up his sleeve; he had nothing to teach. The world was an absolute puzzle, a great lump of opaque pig iron. Can we think about the lump? What is thought? What is the meaning of can, can we, of can we think? What is the meaning of we? If we answer these questions on Monday, are the answers valid on Tuesday? If I answer them at all, do I think the answer, believe the answer, know the answer, or imagine the answer?

It was apparently not of the least interest to Wittgenstein that Plato had answered certain questions that philosophers need to ask, or that Kant or Mencius had answered them. He sometimes liked other philosophers’ questions; he seems never to have paid any attention to their answers. Truth was stubborn; Wittgenstein was stubborn; and neither faced the other down. We have to look back to the stoic Musonius to find another man so nakedly himself, so pig-headedly single-minded. He actually taught for very little of his life. He was forever going off into the Norwegian forests, to Russia, to the west of Ireland where — and this is all we know of these solitudes — he taught the Connemara birds to come and sit in his hands. He mastered no convention other than speech, wearing clothes, and — grudgingly and with complaint — the symbols of mathematics. The daily chores of our life were wonders to him, and when he participated in them they became as strange as housekeeping among the Bantu. …

Wittgenstein did not argue; he merely thought himself into subtler and deeper problems The record which three of his students have made of his lectures and conversations at Cambridge discloses a man tragically honest and wonderfully, astoundingly absurd. In every memoir of him we meet a man we are hungry to know more about, for even if his every sentence remains opaque to us, it is clear that the archaic transparency of his thought is like nothing that philosophy has seen for thousands of years. It is also clear that he was trying to be wise and to make others wise. He lived in the world, and for the world. He came to believe that a normal, honest human being could not be a professor. It is the academy that gave him his reputation of impenetrable abstruseness; never has a man deserved a reputation less. Disciples who came to him expecting to find a man of incredibly deep learning found a man who saw mankind held together by suffering alone, and he invariably advised them to be as kind as possible to others. He read, like all inquisitive men, to multiply his experiences. He read Tolstoy (always getting bogged down) and the Gospels and bales of detective stories. He shook his head over Freud. When he died, he was reading Black Beauty. His last words were: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”
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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I still have the Lou Reed pic/flexi disc somewhere, I think. My one exchange with Nico at the Pyramid went like this: Nico (very strung out, sweating, a mess): ‘Do you have any heroin?’ Me: ‘No.’ Nico: ‘Do you knew where I can get some?’ Me: ‘No, sorry.’  Jim Fouratt, who’d brought her and Ari there to try to score heroin for her, was running around asking people if they had any, and he did eventually get her some, and they left. Everyone, Should you be interested in seeing a ‘partial reconstruction of Jerry Lewis’ never-released “The Day the Clown Cried” (1972) about 28 minutes of it in German with English subtitles’, Mr. Ehrenstein has hooked you up. Here. ** Misanthrope, I need a turntable too. I’ve been saying that to myself for years. Cool re: your novel progress, natch! ** _Black_Acrylic, I love picture discs too. Have a big bunch back in LA. And I don’t even mind that they tend to make their recordings sound crackly and squashed. Nice looking Ciccolina disc there. ** Jeff J, Thank you, Jeff. And especially happy that the Zulueta post was useful. Well, I must admit I’m glad JC don’t sound like the Oh Sees. Nothing against them, mind you. And I didn’t really think you guys would go in that direction. I must have been insufficiently caffeined. Yeah, Davis’s ‘Essays’ book is the gift that just keeps on giving. What an incredible trove. I do like Rae Armantrout’s work, yes. Mm, I tend to suggest the ‘Selected’ in situations like this, as an intro to help figure out if you’re more into a certain era or not. Hers is called ‘Partly’. I did do a post on Pierre Jean Jouve way back. It’s among the dead. I’ll look to restore it. I think it might’ve been a spotlight on the book Lydia translated,  but I’m not sure. ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien! Good to see you, pal. Wow, your novel’s being published! Holy shit, man, that’s really great news! A year lag time is pretty standard. It can take even longer, so that’s not too bad, and this coming summer is virtually in sight already. Hm, yeah, maybe queer transgressive lit will make a comeback. Centrist gay lit sure is making a big comeback (Garth Greenwell, Ocean Vuong, Alexander Chee, etc.), and rebellion seems likely. My new novel has French and German publishers so far. The US thing is taking for-fucking-ever for reasons too complicated to explain, but I’m really, really hoping that its US home will be cemented really soon. No release dates. Probably 2021 sometime. Yes, it’s my ‘autobiographical’ novel. Comparatively at least. Take care, sir, and, again, huge congrats re: your novel! ** Toniok, Hi! That sounds productive and pleasurable, cool! I … don’t think I know Mariana Enriquez’s work unless I’m forgetting. I’ll find out. Thanks. Little Walter is great! I haven’t his name in ages. Huh. Enjoy the concert. I’m hitting a three-night long Sunn0))) concert this weekend. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi. I couldn’t get into that first link. Its source might be blocked in Europe. Happens a lot. But I’ll watch the vid imminently. I saw a trailer for that new Jodorowsky in the theater the other week, and I have to say it looked so awful that I’ve been swearing off seeing the movie ever since. Not sure if I can take it. Although I do seem to have ended up seeing his more recent films eventually, for better and/or worse. ** Steve Erickson, Feel a lot better. I hope you are already. ** Okay. Are you guys familiars of the wonderful work of Guy Davenport? If not, if so, may I recommend you peruse today’s spotlit collection of his selected writings? See you tomorrow.