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regicidal-optimism · 6 months

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the handgun is no longer sexy || a las nevadas quackbur web weave

#quackbur #dsmpshipping #c!quackity #c!wilbur #c!quackbur #web weaving #grace dot art #love blood and rhetoric #the human heart is hungry gorge #continue in tempo ignoring conductor #imaginary gardens with real toads

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doloresdisparue · 11 months

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If in Marianne Moore’s famous formulation “Poetry is imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” Lolita offers the reader one of the most jaw-droppingly intricate and pleasurable of gardens with the understanding that its negotiation will necessitate an encounter with some of the very ugliest toads.

Jim Shepard - Lolita and the Empathetic Imagination

#jim shepard #lolita #lolita novel #vladimir nabokov

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elegantzombielite · 1 year

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"Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads."

Marianne Moore, poet (15 November 1887-1972)

#athoughtfortoday #marianne moore #poetry #imagination #banality

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dk-thrive · 8 months

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I had mistaken a fit of algorithmic exuberance for the truth.

“Hello Charlotte,” I said to the awaiting terminal. I sat down at the machine and pulled up yesterday’s work. It was not good. Let me be transparent: it was abysmal. It was empty, bottomless, abysmal, from the same root as “abyss.” Good poetry is at least, at most, (at last), genuine. It is a bridge across that abyss. Imaginary gardens with real toads in them—we can try, we can hope. But set aside even that. Set aside “good poetry.” Settle for poetry that is made of real thoughts, actual weather—poetry that does not shatter at the first touch of a miniature hammer. The preceding day’s work was a collection of glass cathedrals. I reread it with alarm. Turns of phrase I had mistaken for beautiful, which I now found unintelligible. Charlotte had simply surprised me: I would propose a line, a portion of a line, and what the system spat back upended my expectations. I had been seduced by this surprise. I had mistaken a fit of algorithmic exuberance for the truth. [...]

The system’s panache with lists, the way it could take a few words and extrapolate, no longer had its mesmeric effect on me. Yesterday, Charlotte’s creations had seemed handsome—or better yet, new—casting the world in a strange light. Now I saw their incoherence. Instead of understanding the meaning of words, the software presumably relied on frequency: the likelihood of any one word appearing next to any other.[...]

Nor did it mean anything at all, not really—it was all empty coincidence, a gray grey, a talent that seems … Here, then, was the problem. Not merely the emptiness of these emissions, but the boundlessness of human beings’ capacity to interpret, to make meaning from. I could draw substance from any line I read, no matter how hollow its intention. I was so easily deceived, as all of us are. I wondered how much of what I had published in my life was a deception.

— Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born: A Novel (Astra House, September 5, 2023)

#sean michaels #algorithms #a.i.#artificial intelligence #poetry #poem #writing #human

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thenightlymirror · 8 months

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Stephen King exhaustively goes into every conceivable idea of who The Other might be in mid-80's society. He begins humbly with completing the system of German Idealism and talking about the Ground. Gets right into those chthonic gods of the unconscious and the most fundamental Id. And it's just the smell of a basement, the poetic ineffable fear. Then he brings it to the level of society. Derry has lynched a gay man. He starts with queer character as an androgynous clown, and then goes into the history of the town's gay bar, the couple before the murder. Flips it over. Humanizes them.

Whether or not King is a homophobe sort of depends on where you are in the book. It just occurred to me that the empathetic scenes about Adrian Mellon could have been written as an afterthought and placed in the beginning to offset the rest. Imagine It without that murder. You have the bum harassing Eddie for a blow job. Stan unable to climax, unable to father a child. You have the most psychopathic, disturbing character in the entire book: Patrick Hockstetter, who one-up's the previously most-evil character by asking to blow him. What else would the most evil child in Derry want to do? And then there is the revelation that Pennywise the Clown is a woman. Which is a twist, how?

There is a kind of point to that twist. Unrelated to the homophobia.

I feel like the more information we get about Pennywise, the more abstract the character actually becomes. I kept thinking about the (awful) interventions of birds over and over again in the book, and I had the strange thought, "What if birds were all really aliens that flew here from somewhere else? We see them as conventional animals, but they're from beyond." And wondered if these were the first clues that Pennywise was an alien.

100% Correct.

First, there is It the Underneath. And then there is The Transcendental It. And they are the same Other.

See, there is a great thing that King does, where there are a few purely intuitive leaps toward the climax of the book. First, they build a smoke hole and draw blue matchsticks to see who has to guard the bunker. The burnt matchstick disappears, and Beverly goes in with the rest of the boys. When Richie and Mike are cheeching the bunker, they go back in time to the Ago, which anyone who has been catastrophically stoned and found themselves with the profound feeling of being back in personally-ancient time understands. When they see It's spaceship, it's described as being like a burning match head with electricity and blue bullwhips coming out of it.

The burnt blue matchstick disappeared, went back in time, and fell out of the sky as It's interstellar ark.

Does that make sense? No, but it's suggested.

Also, after the Ritual of Chud and the description of (the dead lights) and the boundary of the cosmos made out of an infinity of imaginary stakes manifested by eons of impossible children fighting impossible vampires, in the unmentionable scene which is also the whole point of the book, does Beverly get pregnant? No. It gets pregnant. And who has to kill the babies? Ben. But. What's one of the main coincidences between all the Losers? They didn't have kids. But they did. That's all on purpose. They got It pregnant.

I have no idea what this means.

In the unmentionable scene, sex is described as the absolute negation of (the dead lights). "They break through into the lifelight together." The tunnel to It becomes the wormhole connection between the innermost, hitting the back walls of the outermost. So to speak.

It's possible that Stephen King is just accidentally inventing dialectics while trying to describe some kind of Yin and Yang of the imagination. Like when in interviews he references Marianne Moore's description of poetry as "imaginary gardens with real toads in them". He's both using this as a rule of thumb for how to write horror sincerely, powerfully, insightfully, but it's also a meditation on imagination itself. Horror and utopian joy mirror each other strangely.

It occurs to me that bird is also a stupid slang word for girl, and the implication might also be that Beverly is herself an avatar of It. But I want to make it clear I hate this theory and it annoys me that I thought of it.

I love Ben. I strongly identified with him when I saw the made for TV movie as a kid. His character gets totally sidelined towards the end. Stan gets sidelined for the entire fucking book. Mike is there and isolated from the group almost the entire story, but I suppose in mirroring ways.

It could be a really cool book entirely about the horror of racism in America. It practically is. And it is COMPLETELY insane that every adaptation of the book so far has just decided to forego all of that, all of Mike, the whole deepest point of It, the middle points, where society is It. The amazing chapter that introduces the adult Beverly through her abusive husband's eyes and she is It. The terrifying chapter about Stan and his wife, where her body is It.

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of It's."

I think the strange empty romance of Bill and Bev, which is dumped for no reason at the end so she and Ben can be happy ever after, is also on purpose. There were the mere agents of cosmic designs, and they served their purpose. So suck it up.

I've barely mentioned Eddie or Richie. Eddie's scene where he confronts his mother is at that second apex of the book where there's a bunch of great chapters. Richie is so fucking annoying haha. Does racism have to save the day every time? He is also the only character that seems to have been influenced at all by the counterculture of the 60's.

King said that the inspiration for the story was walking over a bridge, and imagining the troll underneath from Billy Goats Gruff. King imagines memory as a precarious bridge between adulthood and the land of childhood/the past. We don't see under that bridge at all, to the 60's and 70's, except through Richie's rock and roll, suggestions of college radicalism. The hallucinations of It have a deep shadow, which is any familiarity with alternatives to established society. That might just be Stephen King. But there's the murdered union men. The "commies" mentioned by Georgie in the first chapter. Bev's feminist friend. I guess the focus on Blacks in the 20's and gays in the 80's is sort of more illuminating that the usual weight given to white navel-gazing in the 60's and 70's.

But the main aim of the book seems to be a classic modernist one. It's about memory. It's about the powerful presence of forgetting, especially. Forgetting has a spooky omnipresence in life, ordinary life, American life. You really can't address it honestly without addressing it's unconscious. Which is why so much of the book resonates, despite not being able to tell exactly why.

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byneddiedingo · 1 year

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Antoine Bourseiller and Corinne Marchand in Cléo From 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962) Cast: Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bourseiller, Dominique Davray, Dorothée Blanck, Michel Legrand, José Luis de Vilallonga, Loye Payen, Lucienne Marchand, Serge Korber. Screenplay: Agnès Varda. Cinematography: Paul Bonis, Alain Levent, Jean Rabier. Production design: Jean-François Adam. Film editing: Pascale Laverrière, Janine Verneau. Music: Michel Legrand. Has any director ever so successfully combined the keen editorial eye of the documentary filmmaker with the storytelling gifts of the creator of fictional films as Agnès Varda? From the beginning, with the vivid setting of the small Mediterranean fishing community of La Pointe Courte (1955) serving as background and correlative for the troubles of a married couple, Varda has known how to reverse Marianne Moore's formula of "imaginary gardens with real toads in them" and tell stories about imaginary people in real places. The real place in Cléo From 5 to 7 is the city of Paris, where Varda continually finds ways to enhance her slice-of-life story of pop-singer Cléo, waiting out the results of a medical test that she is sure will doom her to death from cancer. When her protagonist leaves the sanctuary of her apartment and wanders the streets of the city, Varda continually finds little bits of memento mori to insert into the frame, such as the Pompes Funèbres sign on a mortician's place of business that we glimpse from the windows of the bus in which Cléo is riding. It's not done with a heavy hand, but rather with a slyly macabre irony, for Cléo is as much a target of Varda's wry humor as she is an object of concern. We glimpse her vanity and frivolity and superstition while we also feel sympathy with her anxiety and fear of death.

#Cléo From 5 to 7 #Agnès Varda #Corinne Marchand #Antoint Bourseiller

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chrisjarmick · 1 year

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NaPoWriMo National Poetry Writing Month Prompts for Days 25 to 30 - April 25- 30, 2023

“Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.” – Marianne Moore In a moment your latest batch of prompts to inspire and challenge — but first: This Saturday….independent bookstores begin their celebration. BookTree is Kirkland is part of this. Thank YOU for supporting indie bookstores near you!!! The 2023 Independent Bookstore Day begins on April 29. This year once again…

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#Chris Jarmick #Jarmick #NaPoWriMo #National Poetry Month #Poem a day #poetry #poetry is everything #Writing #writing exercises #writing prompts

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isavedyouthewaltz · 1 year

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Fictions Inside Fiction

I just finished reading The Beginners by Anne Serre, one of my favorite contemporary authors. Her voice (in English translation from the French original) is this otherworldly mix of contemplative and mundane. She writes so beautifully of the obviousness of so much of life while capturing the consternation and enigma these simplicities can so often be—always seem to ask both “Is that all there is?” and “Why is it so complicated?” about life.

In The Beginners the main character, Anna Lore, meets a man who she falls in love with. Throughout the work it is references that he reminds her of somebody from a book—but she cannot remember which book. It is always on the tip of her tongue and when she finally remembers she realizes that, no, it was not actually that book he reminded her of.

He becomes, in a way, a walking fiction to her.

But he is not the only one. In there passion they share books with each other, as lovers are wont to do:

“ Week after week, favorite books are dispatched from her bookshelves in Sorge, where she continues to live, to Bordeaux. The moment his work is done and he has left the center where he has spent the day investigating crimes, Thomas goes home to read, astonished to discover the good it does him. Piotr Sengel and Alexandre Ider do him a world of good. Tommaso Ordoli falls wide of the mark. (It's strange, she would have thought Ordoli perfect for the job. Apparently not.) With Effie Karane or Marie des Fossés, the bleeding stops at the very first sentence.“

All of these names are forgeries. There is no Tommaso Ordoli or Marie des Fossés.

The book, set in France in 2002, does not need this lie and it is so beautiful.

This is not like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Fitzpatrick’s War, or House of Leaves which are built around fictional citations. This book’s direct fictions really only extend so far as a fake village and a fake employer (an art magazine). The rest of the story is built to be a story about very normal people whose lives are like real toads inside imaginary gardens with real toads in them. But here, where authors so often love the chance to share some of their favorites (looking at you, F. Scott Fitzgerald) Serre breaks from that and invents, totally unnecessarily, a host of writers. It becomes almost a challenger to the reader of ‘literary’ fiction: So, you want realism? How far are you willing to go before it breaks your genre?

At the same time it accomplishes the same thing that a nineteenth century author who lists a date as “18—” or a name as the “Count of —”. It does not matter how many fictions there are inside another fiction. If we can accept these real toads, why not expand the imaginary garden by another square foot or two, by another plot of lilacs.

#anne serre #genre #literary fiction #literature #the beginners

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scholarsacademy-us · 1 year

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"Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads." - Marianne Moore, American - Poet (1887 - 1972) #scholars #scholarsacademy #martialarts #scholarkata #kickboxing (at Scholars Academy) https://www.instagram.com/p/Ck_nXBepO50/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#scholars #scholarsacademy #martialarts #scholarkata #kickboxing

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artbookdap · 2 years

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THE biography. Peter Schjeldahl reviews Hans Janssen's "audacious," unlikely to be supplanted, 464-page Mondrian biography, out now from @ridinghousebooks in association with @kunstmuseum.nl⁠ ⁠ "Style for him, from first to last, served a quest to manifest soul-deep spirituality as a demonstrable fact of life. His aim, he said, was not to create masterpieces, though he did that, too. It was 'to find things out.' He reduced painting’s uses and procedures, the whats and the hows, to a rock-bottom why.…⁠ ⁠ 'Piet Mondrian: A Life' "is the first thorough Mondrian biography since the 1950s to be published in English (translated, from the Dutch, by Sue McDonnell) and unlikely to be supplanted. It is audacious in structure. Janssen, who died last year, at the age of 67, drew on his profound knowledge to dispense with strict chronology and to write not only about his subject’s prodigious mind and eye but also from within them. He openly employs devices of fiction to parse intellectual insights and emotional states and, now and then, to cobble together imagined conversations between Mondrian and some of his significant contemporaries, with lines taken verbatim either from Mondrian’s own writings and letters or from the diaries, letters, or recollections of others, such as the American sculptor Alexander Calder. The readerly effect is a bit uncanny, recalling Marianne Moore’s definition of poetry as 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them.'"⁠ ⁠ Read the full review via linkinbio.⁠ ⁠ @avante.art #mondrian #mondrianalife #mondrianbiography #pietmondrian https://www.instagram.com/p/CjAvwDKMfBB/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#mondrian #mondrianalife #mondrianbiography #pietmondrian

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orangerosebush · 3 years

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Poetry

by Marianne Moore - 1887-1972

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in

it after all, a place for the genuine.

Hands that can grasp, eyes

that can dilate, hair that can rise

if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are

useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the

same thing may be said for all of us—that we

do not admire what

we cannot understand. The bat,

holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under

a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base—

ball fan, the statistician—case after case

could be cited did

one wish it; nor is it valid

to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction

however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,

nor till the autocrats among us can be

“literalists of

the imagination”—above

insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have

it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—

the raw material of poetry in

all its rawness, and

that which is on the other hand,

genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

#words #quotes #imaginary gardens with real toads in them :)

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regicidal-optimism · 16 days

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the art of assembling and exercising power || on quackity and ladders to the top

made for @marrow-and-bone for the @mcytrecursive exchange

#quackity #c!quackity #dsmp #grace dot art #the human heart is hungry gorge #imaginary gardens with real toads

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darflores · 3 years

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A Poetry Handbook (1994), Mary Oliver

#everyone say it with me!!!#oh to be a real toad in an imaginary garden

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possum-boi · 5 years

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*hands u a toad*

....more toad.

*hands u a toad*

*hands u

#gonlincore #goblin culture #toadcore #toad #imaginary garden with real toads

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charmedchaos12 · 4 years

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Breathless

“I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.”― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

In these dreams, I write in colors I’ve always known for in my very breath flows shades of indigo that at times catch, leaving me breathless searching, always searching for…

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#dverse poets #Imaginary Garden With Real Toads #Poem #Poetry

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writinginnorthnorfolk · 5 years

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Still

as a cat watching a butterfly or a falling leaf after a restless night of heat twisted in the sweaty sheet until the sky cracked and light crept under my half- closed eyelids now I am still as the leaves and the grass held by morning coolness

Kim M. Russell, 25th July 2019

Delacroix, The Unmade Bed, 1827 – image found on Pinterest

My response to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads Sanaa’s Challenge:…

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#I Like For You To Be Still #Imaginary Garden with Real Toads #Pablo Neruda #Sanaa&039;s challenge

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