Long Neck Village. Walling, 1859. Now LinoleumvilleandTravisville. IvOng Neck I'osl DlVice is nameil in the N. Y. State Manual for many years, but was
Long Neck Village. Walling, 1859. Now LinoleumvilleandTravisville. IvOng Neck I'osl DlVice is nameil in the N. Y. State Manual for many years, but was discon- tinued in 1S66. The devil often made his appearance on Long Neck during tlie early part of the century, but of 'ate the peo])le have become so nuich interested in the numerous books and newspapers that have fallen into their hands, that they have failed to note if he has been around. In old time, he was often seen skipping and running in the fine broa/l meadows in the neighborhood of Neck Creek, and would jump fences with the young and active farmers. Once and awhile, when the bars were exceptionally high, he would crawl under and thus try to deceive his honest playfellows. On one occasion two Staten Islanders were visiting over night in Railway, N. J., and after the lamp was out, the bed began to toss like a little boat in a great sea. First one siile would go up and then the other, and the men with difliculty prevented themselves from rolling onto the floor. The braver of the two whispered to his companion not to be afraid, that it was only the devil under the bed and he would soon get tired. Tliis proved to be the case, for in a short time he quit his pranks and left these temperate and .sober men to their peaceful slumbers.
Eerie mythologies and and odd scanning errors merge into an especially weird compendium of lost occult landscapes of New York City's weirdest borough. Specifically research for a film I made last year, but wonderful all around. I find Davis, a self-taught naturalist and historian, a very relatable figure here -- a scientist, I don't think he needed specifically believe any of the lore he acquired (the irony in his recounting is palpable) to love that it was out there or for it to deepen his walks across his island home. All stories are true (Carrington) and all landscapes generate their own specific tales and understandings (me)....more
An ode to the natural landscape and human intertwining with it, direct from 1890s Staten Island. Davis has a good poetic sense of rendering the islandAn ode to the natural landscape and human intertwining with it, direct from 1890s Staten Island. Davis has a good poetic sense of rendering the island he lived on in words but this isn't nearly as weird and wonderful as his later essentially mythological index Staten Island Names; Ye Olde Names and Nicknames. But regardless, I respect his eye for the proto-anthropocene: all the ways in which humans reshape the land, changing and being changed by it. He even lingers in the already-post-human spaces, wandering fallow fields and abandoned stone houses, poking through old letters lying in the dust of the long deserted attics. I can identify....more
Mid-19th-century romance/adventure/tragedy supposedly translated and summarized from old Italian manuscripts, which allows Stendhal some room as an inMid-19th-century romance/adventure/tragedy supposedly translated and summarized from old Italian manuscripts, which allows Stendhal some room as an intrusive narrator for commentary on the prevailing attitudes of the 16th century compared to 19th. Mostly pretty fun, and with an unforced sense of impending disaster as just inevitable rather than due to authorial machinations (and if blame is to be allocated, it seems mostly to go to family, rather than the characters themselves). Not really reaching, either, but then its minor Stendhal, even if the only of his that I've read....more
As recommended by Rene Daumal, various Surrealists, and others. The title story is actually less fully dream-like than expected, but actually more a pAs recommended by Rene Daumal, various Surrealists, and others. The title story is actually less fully dream-like than expected, but actually more a personal account of ones own descent into and intermittent recovery from insanity. In that sense, it does fit in well with various Surrealist's acounts of their own periods of delusion (Unica Zurn's The Man of Jasmine and Leonora Carrington's Down Below are key examples of this genre), while looking ahead to some of the oneiric accounts in fictions of the mid-century (Anna Kavan's 1948 Sleep Has His House or Doris Lessing's somehow more dated 1970s Briefing for a Descent Into Hell). All of which company should suggest that I'd love this, but I didn't find myself totally enthralled by its largely diaristic realism. As a truthful record of its times, it is good, but for that, we have the other, sometimes even better stories, and essays here full of pastoral detail and historical sense of place. Even Nerval's interests tend to endear me to him, as he seems to wander about Paris and its environs in a proto-derive or flaneur fashion, dwells upon the losses of urban development, and obsesses about Isis and the customs surrounding her in antiquity.
My concurrent reading of The Second Sex tends to color my readings of much else around it through it's sheer force and monolithic density (as it will for a while, give its near-endless 800 dense pages. In fact, de Beauvoir cites Nerval as belonging to the Bretonian tradition of gloryiging Women as the gateway natural wonder and inspiration, as one of the failed literary approaches to women, falling quite short of any authentic relationship. I'd say that Nerval actually fares a little better: his Aurelia may serve as guide to his dreamworld, but in an account of his own mounting madness, which rather turns the tables on Breton's exalting of Nadja, for instance. He's even acutely aware of the inherently problematic tendency to fall in love not with actual people but with his own images thereof. It's clear, even amidst his more rhapsodic passages, that this is his loss and he knowns it, not any failing of the women who move through his life and depart on to their own. So while Nerval may in some way illustrate the type of literary representation as de Beauvoir suggest, I was pleasantly surprised by the self-awareness by which he makes it rather more useful and interesting. ...more
I wish that the mourning reader may at least be able to say to himself: "One must give him his due. He has greatly stupefied me. What might he not hav
I wish that the mourning reader may at least be able to say to himself: "One must give him his due. He has greatly stupefied me. What might he not have done had he lived longer!
Dead, in fact, at 24, after having sufficiently stupefied readers of the late 1860s to have ensured his own obscurity, the Uruguayan-born Isidore Ducasse was resurrected by the Decadents, then the Surrealists, who found rare vision in his bizarre vignettes railing against god and mankind with a unique faculty for irrational analogy, black humored vitriol, and self-reflexive asides. (Of the latter: at one point, he agrees to go on with his story seeing that, despite his fears, he had not died during the exceedingly long preceding sentence. At another, he spends a solid two pages discussing how he will fail to say anything, first through the mechanics of closing one's lips tightly, then through a tangle of parodic philosophizing). At times a bit of a pure provocation, a puerile punk-goth gesture in the 19th-century mode, tempered with Baudelairian verbosity, but honestly those that held this up later were right to despite how (intentionally?) irritating it may be. There's just nothing else like it.
First of all I shall blow my nose, because I need to. And then, potently assisted by my hand, I shall again take up the pen holder that my fingers had let fall.