“The Queen of Spades” — Alexander Pushkin

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“The Queen of Spades” by Alexander Pushkin

I

There was a card party at the rooms of Narumov of the Horse Guards. The long winter night passed away imperceptibly, and it was five o’clock in the morning before the company sat down to supper. Those who had won, ate with a good appetite; the others sat staring absently at their empty plates. When the champagne appeared, however, the conversation became more animated, and all took a part in it.

“And how did you fare, Surin?” asked the host.

“Oh, I lost, as usual. I must confess that I am unlucky: I play mirandole, I always keep cool, I never allow anything to put me out, and yet I always lose!”

“And you did not once allow yourself to be tempted to back the red?…
Your firmness astonishes me.”

“But what do you think of Hermann?” said one of the guests, pointing to a young Engineer: “he has never had a card in his hand in his life, he has never in, his life laid a wager, and yet he sits here till five o’clock in the morning watching our play.”

“Play interests me very much,” said Hermann: “but I am not in the position to sacrifice the necessary in the hope of winning the superfluous.”

“Hermann is a German: he is economical—that is all!” observed Tomsky. “But if there is one person that I cannot understand, it is my grandmother, the Countess Anna Fedotovna.”

“How so?” inquired the guests.

“I cannot understand,” continued Tomsky, “how it is that my grandmother does not punt.”

“What is there remarkable about an old lady of eighty not punting?” said Narumov.

“Then you do not know the reason why?”

“No, really; haven’t the faintest idea.” Continue reading ““The Queen of Spades” — Alexander Pushkin” →

Convalescent (Note in Opal) — James McNeill Whistler

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Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Full Film)

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Eternal Return — Samuel Bak

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“ESP” (Live) — Matmos Covers The Buzzcocks

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“Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels” (Moby-Dick)

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“D’ye see him?” cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.

“In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that’s all. Helm there; steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely day again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon that world. Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; THAT’S tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that. And yet, I’ve sometimes thought my brain was very calm—frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is growing now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no, it’s like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow it; they whip it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!—it’s tainted. Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I’d crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, ’tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver thing—a nobler thing than THAT. Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There’s a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference! And yet, I say again, and swear it now, that there’s something all glorious and gracious in the wind. These warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the clear heavens blow straight on, in strong and steadfast, vigorous mildness; and veer not from their mark, however the baser currents of the sea may turn and tack, and mightiest Mississippies of the land swift and swerve about, uncertain where to go at last. And by the eternal Poles! these same Trades that so directly blow my good ship on; these Trades, or something like them—something so unchangeable, and full as strong, blow my keeled soul along! To it! Aloft there! What d’ye see?”

“Nothing, sir.”

From “The Chase—The Third Day,” Chapter 135 of Melville’s Moby-Dick.

 

“Bluebeard” — Edna St. Vincent Millay

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“Bluebeard” by Edna St. Vincent Millay—

This door you might not open, and you did;
So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed… Here is no treasure hid,
No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring
The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain
For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,
But only what you see… Look yet again—
An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.
Yet this alone out of my life I kept
Unto myself, lest any know me quite;
And you did so profane me when you crept
Unto the threshold of this room to-night
That I must never more behold your face.
This now is yours. I seek another place.

Nostalgia — Paco Pomet

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“The Blind Man” — Guy de Maupassant

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“The Blind Man” by Guy de Maupassant

How is it that the sunlight gives us such joy? Why does this radiance when it falls on the earth fill us with the joy of living? The whole sky is blue, the fields are green, the houses all white, and our enchanted eyes drink in those bright colors which bring delight to our souls. And then there springs up in our hearts a desire to dance, to run, to sing, a happy lightness of thought, a sort of enlarged tenderness; we feel a longing to embrace the sun.

The blind, as they sit in the doorways, impassive in their eternal darkness, remain as calm as ever in the midst of this fresh gaiety, and, not understanding what is taking place around them, they continually check their dogs as they attempt to play.

When, at the close of the day, they are returning home on the arm of a young brother or a little sister, if the child says: “It was a very fine day!” the other answers: “I could notice that it was fine. Loulou wouldn’t keep quiet.”

I knew one of these men whose life was one of the most cruel martyrdoms that could possibly be conceived.

He was a peasant, the son of a Norman farmer. As long as his father and mother lived, he was more or less taken care of; he suffered little save from his horrible infirmity; but as soon as the old people were gone, an atrocious life of misery commenced for him. Dependent on a sister of his, everybody in the farmhouse treated him as a beggar who is eating the bread of strangers. At every meal the very food he swallowed was made a subject of reproach against him; he was called a drone, a clown, and although his brother-in-law had taken possession of his portion of the inheritance, he was helped grudgingly to soup, getting just enough to save him from starving. Continue reading ““The Blind Man” — Guy de Maupassant” →

Bibliothèque — Maria Helena Vieira da Silva

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Alice — Jan Švankmajer (Full Film)

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Archduke Leopold’s Gallery — David Teniers the Younger

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“The golden age of rock was cut short by the success of the Beatles” — Henry Flynt

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For me, the golden age of rock was cut short by the success of the Beatles, which could be dated either 1964 or 1966.  UK artists had contributed important hits to the pop field—but the triumph of the Beatles formula shifted pop away from the breakthrough of the late Fifties.  The Beatles were essentially a music-hall “kid” act, limited to a four-square, discrete-pitch vocabulary.  (They knew American ethnic music only by rumor.)  They found and crystallized the segment with the best numbers—early teens who wanted something more bland than actual rock.  At this point, the regime of maximum sales backfired, as one might well have expected it to.

The “youth” craze of the Sixties became increasingly dubious (from flower power to Altamont), and the Beatles and their imitators morphed, leading their fans to a mystique of consumerist dissipation.  (Carnaby Street and “Yellow Submarine.”)  For me, the Beatles’ consummate song was “Revolution,” which begins “If you wanna make a revolution, count me out.”  It served as the anthem for all the mediocrities who responsed to the stresses of the late twentieth century by embracing institutional co-optation.

After the Beatles seized the market, white pop ceased to interest me except for the flukes.  When Bob Dylan added electric instruments and blues chops to his act for “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” that impelled me to my initial rock efforts of 1966 (with Walter De Maria on traps).  Given my political engagement, I had been waiting for an impetus to try songs with “revolution” lyrics.

In general, the ascendancy of the Beatles, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., ended ethnic-rock—the ethnic impulses reverted to the segmented R&B and C&W markets.  After the mid-Sixties, rock-pop no longer had ethnic chops—could I have been the only one who was musicological enough to realize that?  Rock-pop became uniformly loud in a way which was vulgar, mechanical, and bloated.  (There was no more of the profundity, and I mean profundity, of a Chuck Berry or of “Be-Bop-A-Lula.”)

From Henry Flynt’s essay “The Meaning of My Avant-Garde Hillbilly and Blues Music.”

 

Victim

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“I had not time to hate, because” — Emily Dickinson

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“Markheim” — Robert Louis Stevenson

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“Markheim” by Robert Louis Stevenson

“Yes,” said the dealer, “our windfalls are of various kinds. Some customers are ignorant, and then I touch a dividend on my superior knowledge. Some are dishonest,” and here he held up the candle, so that the light fell strongly on his visitor, “and in that case,” he continued, “I profit by my virtue.”

Markheim had but just entered from the daylight streets, and his eyes had not yet grown familiar with the mingled shine and darkness in the shop. At these pointed words, and before the near presence of the flame, he blinked painfully and looked aside.

The dealer chuckled. “You come to me on Christmas Day,” he resumed, “when you know that I am alone in my house, put up my shutters, and make a point of refusing business. Well, you will have to pay for that; you will have to pay for my loss of time, when I should be balancing my books; you will have to pay, besides, for a kind of manner that I remark in you to-day very strongly. I am the essence of discretion, and ask no awkward questions; but when a customer cannot look me in the eye, he has to pay for it.” The dealer once more chuckled; and then, changing to his usual business voice, though still with a note of irony, “You can give, as usual, a clear account of how you came into the possession of the object?” he continued. “Still your uncle’s cabinet? A remarkable collector, sir!”

And the little pale, round-shouldered dealer stood almost on tip- toe, looking over the top of his gold spectacles, and nodding his head with every mark of disbelief. Markheim returned his gaze with one of infinite pity, and a touch of horror.

“This time,” said he, “you are in error. I have not come to sell, but to buy. I have no curios to dispose of; my uncle’s cabinet is bare to the wainscot; even were it still intact, I have done well on the Stock Exchange, and should more likely add to it than otherwise, and my errand to-day is simplicity itself. I seek a Christmas present for a lady,” he continued, waxing more fluent as he struck into the speech he had prepared; “and certainly I owe you every excuse for thus disturbing you upon so small a matter. But the thing was neglected yesterday; I must produce my little compliment at dinner; and, as you very well know, a rich marriage is not a thing to be neglected.”

There followed a pause, during which the dealer seemed to weigh this statement incredulously. The ticking of many clocks among the curious lumber of the shop, and the faint rushing of the cabs in a near thoroughfare, filled up the interval of silence.

“Well, sir,” said the dealer, “be it so. You are an old customer after all; and if, as you say, you have the chance of a good marriage, far be it from me to be an obstacle. Here is a nice thing for a lady now,” he went on, “this hand glass—fifteenth century, warranted; comes from a good collection, too; but I reserve the name, in the interests of my customer, who was just like yourself, my dear sir, the nephew and sole heir of a remarkable collector.” Continue reading ““Markheim” — Robert Louis Stevenson” →

Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, Anna Ge — Nikolai Ge

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