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“Deep Time and Dark Spaces: Robert Macfarlane’s Underland” by S.N. Kirby
Under the earth is a world far stranger and far more mystical than our humdrum life here up top. Robert Macfarlane’s latest book, detailing these mysterious underground places, serves as part field guide and magic handbook for us surface dwellers. Underland weaves together a narrative of not just the earth and its underworld, but of the history, the present, and the future of mankind. This is not a book for the claustrophobic.
From the start, Macfarlane directly says that this was a book he intended to be less about humans and more about the mysteries below the earth;
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“The Art of Music” by David Shapiro
You were practicing the early art of memory.
You would bestow twenty per cent of your attention on me
Then shut your eyes. From time to time since the invention of print
The phrase “elephant debt” would force itself to your lips.Only one thing exists: the universe.
The others by definition cannot; how rigid out theory is.
Without the flavor of paint however force seems useless.
Needless to say the stage was set, but what followed?Together we will sing in octaves. And the hairy bushes
And bleeding hearts develop like twining vines. -
Excerpts from “The Cloud in Trousers” by Vladimir Mayakovsky (translated from the Russian by David Lehman)
The Cloud in Trousers
(From Part One)
Hey!
Gentlemen!
You who,
next to me,
are rank amateurs
in the realms
of sacrilege,
mischief,
and mayhem —
have you laid eyes on
the most terrifying thing
in the world –
my face
when I am totally calm,
cool and collected?I fear
my ego
isn’t big enough
for the rest of me
which
is struggling
to emerge
as a full-born youth
from a Madonna’s womb. -
Excerpt from “Morasses” by André Gide (translated from the French by Tadzio Koelb)
Translator’s introduction: In this chapter the narrator—who claims to be a writer, but never writes—has once again postponed work on his novel, Morasses, this time to attend a salon for men of letters at the home of his good friend Angèle. Gide used the scene as an opportunity to mock the literary world of his day. Readers can look for a caricature of Gide’s correspondent and sometime traveling companion Oscar Wilde, here given the name Valentin Knox.
Morasses
On the days she receives guests,
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“Of Trips, Of Fires,” by Edgar Rincón Luna, Translated by Toshiya Kamei
Of Trips, Of Fires“Only strangers travel owning everythingI have nowhere to go”Leonard CohenI drink a cup of coffee
you drink a cup of fire
behind our eyelids
two tears hit like rain
old photos go through the dust
a cemetery of ashes
a patio filled with our old cadavershave we really built this wasteland for us?
is the tattoo of sand on the skin ours? -
“The Rescue of the Seven Cities of Atlantis: A Diary of the Engineer’s Wife” (parts 2 & 3) by Alexander Chee
A Letter to Her Majesty in Restless Triumph
“There was no way to know of the success with which the myrtles would take to their new beds here. They bloom now, scent the air vigorously and the children pass along their rows, tempted to take whole boughs away. My queen, I miss the sound of your skirts in the halls of this home, and all our seven cities scattered now makes me weep to think of you there in Attilan, without me. I watch the mermen here, their huge tails scatter the waves to foam as they race each other out to where their whales wait for them,
