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Joshua Corey

  • Home
  • Writings
  • Books
    • The Transcendental Circuit
    • Partisan of Things
    • Redrum Natura
    • The Barons
    • Beautiful Soul
    • The Arcadia Project
    • Severance Songs
    • Fourier Series
    • Selah
    • Chapbooks
  • Blog
  • Teaching
  • Contact
  • Proust for me remains a sort of gravity well, a planet that I’ve barely begun to explore.
    about 19 hours ago
  • Some seriously interesting finds at the books-by-the pound place today: Henry Raczymow’s very curious SWAN’S WAY, a… https://t.co/sKt0kCM8yQ
    about 19 hours ago
  • 100 Words: “The Dead” (1907-1914), by James Joyce https://t.co/j5BialXyBC
    about 2 days ago
  • Language as common sense—that is as amalgamation and meeting place for the five senses—a site for their further investigation.
    about 2 days ago
  • There’s a gentleman who waits with me on the outbound Davis Street Metra platform some mornings who is always readi… https://t.co/jojdXGYp53
    about 3 days ago
  • It’s incredible to me that this is the first time someone has been willing to go public with how Congress really wo… https://t.co/gtRDWmlQVD
    about 4 days ago
  • I moved to New Orleans back in the Nineties under the influence of this film. It wasn’t the worst idea I’ve ever ha… https://t.co/CRzXDR7qxP
    about 6 days ago
  • “The evening deepened in the avenue.” Even Joyce’s simplest sentences are beautiful.
    about 6 days ago
  • Teaching Joyce today and I am stoked. When all is said and done he is still my favorite author by a mile.
    about 6 days ago
  • RT @AOC: “Climate change is not a market glitch to be fixed through pricing... but part of a dire social crisis.” The GND R… https://t.co/qeVVOgtzca
    about a week ago
Transient

Night Flight to Berlin

June 06, 2014

Lufthansa airshow: the North Sea, pointed like an arrow toward Amsterdam over blue map water. While forty thousand feet beneath me the real pre-dawn sea roils and mutters. How we lose track of the sublime, how much we've surrendered--gratefully, thoughtlessly--to simulation.

Eliot should have said, Mankind cannot bear very much intimacy.

I remember it worried me a bit when I was a kid learning Beethoven was German. Because the Germans were bad guys, right?

Guten Morgen meine Damen und Herren. How beautiful the language is just to hear, with no comprehension, just glimmers, particles of meaning, like mica.

Ordinary lives in foreign languages.

Unexpected sun-flooded cuteness of Berlin, Charlottenburg, Winterfeldtplatz.

A cafe phrase, repeated and misheard, sounds uncannily like "Osama bin Laden."

Cigarettes! Smoked by people of an apparently affluent status now all but precluded from smoking in the U.S.

A falafel joint called Habibi. A bar called Slumberland (in English). Masha, a lounge or cafe, the word "cocktails" (again in English). Call. Amrit, an Indian restaurant. A wine shop and a candy store. 

In my mind, hanging in the air between me and all these people with their handsome indifferent faces, not all of them white, the word: Jude.

What we would have named our son, had we had a son.

Rosh Hashanah in Berlin. The Brandenburg Gate, the gates of prayer.

I didn't expect mosquitoes. Or the brick church at the other end of the 'platz. Brick churches are in America, not here.

The kind of tired that trickles into you from the neck up. Sinus tired.

Red candles on cafe tables.

The note that P. strikes in his conversation, that his friend Claudio Magris strikes in his writing, that I think my mother had: a note of high irony mixed with a passion for beauty not easily distinguished from ethical passion, moral passion. Saturnine, satirical, an impression of sorrow skirting bathos, a nostalgia for Europe and its junkheaps, a doomed desire to find some right relation to the broken frieze of the world. Melancholy sensuality. A profound bookishness and feeling for culture--a sense of oneself as passionate observer, very nearly a participant.

Flawless light and air, "Berlin Luft," indeed! Passed by beautiful stylish European men, dressed youthfully but with iron in their hair. Yellowing trees. Frischkäse.

But underneath it all a heaviness, the density of history. Yellow stars.

A river we trail our fingers in, bearing us out, leaving almost no trace.

 

 

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Cahiers de Corey

From 2003 to 2014 I maintained a blog on poetry, poetics, and other topics of interest--film, politics, academia. You can still read it:

http://joshcorey.blogspot.com/