maybe I’ll watercolor a while

October 28, 2018October 28, 2018 by Tom DeMott

the new pastels grind softly
chalk breaks colors against the raw page
the green and reds scrape deep and lambent
they should be hanging from a tree
the greys and browns are wooden dirt
(who needs to be an artiste?)
I bought half sticks
since full were so expensive
(halbe Stifte/ demi batons/ messi pastelli/ medias barras,
eighteen of them and oh, a non-market array)
had second thought cause no free shipping in the holiday
season…but then, and when, I opened up the box
their powder had seeped through to the other side of the
foam protection…how did it snowfall there?
twas a perished line from each chroma
spread chimeral on the black airy sponge
goo lah lah!

They kept me some fine company
last night with an unfinished symphony,
these crumbly sticks are so alive,
Oriole says I should not use them
since I reported a soup lungy head cold
loomed on my horizon,
but these dusty sticks are so alive disintegrating
I want to smoke them, put my tongue on the half break,
arrange them in a bowl
but
maybe I’ll watercolor a while

have to do something………………….the fake US corporations just got their taxes cut in half and a free ride for their offshore collusion, they going to cut up my dry Utah spires and my wolf wet Alaska and landfill them with coal dust and crude, they gutting Obamacare’s most social obligation, kids wont eat breakfast or learn much until mid-day, their eyes to be unchecked between kindergarten and eighth grade, old folks will have their end even more opiated, and the cops gonnah rise again to perfect their stat-hidden stop-and-frisks in
Harlem and Washington Heights
……………………………………………………….and on to gentry conflict Bushwick evict
agitate and organize…

maybe I’ll watercolor a while, or tinkle These Foolish Things

(Dec. 20, 2017)

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“Laurie Stone’s Streaming Now is a book of journal-like entries, scraps of critical pieces, bits of memoir, and it is a delight. She calls these fragments postcards, which is charming and accurate up to a point, but the writing is better than any postcard you ever got unless you got one from Laurie Stone and she wrote it really small so all the wit and all the passing contemplations could fit. She writes about life during COVID, at home with ‘the man I live with’; about old friends and glancing love affairs; about books and films and television shows, with a deeply appealing combination of spitfire skepticism and a constant openness to pleasure and joy. One is reminded in multiple ways during the reading that Stone came of age and was politically, intellectually and emotionally shaped by the struggles and commitments of second wave feminism, and we’re further reminded that for feminists like Stone the movement was not only about rights, and not at all about protections for women, but about freedom for women, a much more dangerous thing, for women and for society at large. Freedom is a long lost idea. It had a specific erotic push and was battled back as eroticism always is. Autocracies are always puritanical. Everything about Stone’s writing is oriented toward freedom and much of her linguistic and literary sensibility specifically evokes erotic and intellectual freedom–the very sound of the sentences, their surprises, the quick adoption of new positions in relation to the thing looked at and engaged with. So, one recognizes that a simple seeming book of pensées is really the exploration of a distinct and valuable cultural point of view. We are lucky to have it.” –Vince Passaro, author of the novels Crazy Sorrow, and Violence, Nudity, Adult Content

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Expeditions to Kafka
Selected Essays
Stanley Corngold (Author)

In this new volume of Kafka studies, which is addressed to both beginning readers of Kafka as well as Kafka scholars, Stanley Corngold discusses Kafka’s work in a variety of novel perspectives, including Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther; Nietzsche’s conception of aphoristic form; bureaucratic organization; accident and risk; the logic of possession and inheritance; and myth, among others.Even as Corngold explores Kafka’s work across different fields and tangents, he does so in vivid, readable prose, free of jargon, and with an eye to Kafka’s ongoing relevance to the concerns of his day and ours. Taken together these linked essays reveal Kafka in his astonishing many-sidedness.

Read an extract here.

Published	Aug 10 2023
Format	Ebook (PDF)
Edition	1st
Extent	336
ISBN	9798765100448
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Reviews

With superb erudition and his inimitable flair, Stanley Corngold’s Expeditions offer a magisterial guide through the intricate and ambiguous terrain of Kafka’s texts. Insights abound, providing a comprehensive and consistently profound investigation that strikes the perfect balance between drawing interpretive conclusions and maintaining hermeneutic openness-a culminating accomplishment by Kafka’s most inspired and most inspiring reader.

John T. Hamilton, William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA

You are not being introduced to Kafka – you fall into his stories as you fall into a trap, the bait emerging in the interstices between his words and your mind. That said, Corngold’s Expeditions are by far the best introduction to Kafka I have seen. He invites you to join him on his ventures into Continent Kafka, and he inspires you to stray off from his expeditions on your own terms, and risk.

Benno Wagner, Professor in German Studies, Siegen University, Germany

Stanley Corngold has been reading, reflecting, and commenting on Kafka and his writings for more than half a century. He has become our most penetrating and luminous guide to Kafka’s labyrinthine world. These essays, the distillate of a lifetime, manage both to reveal and to preserve the mystery of Kafka’s genius.

Robert Norton, Professor of German, University of Notre Dame, USA