December 21, 2005

• For the feast of
  St. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

  The Diamond
  as Big as
  the Monster

  From Fitzgerald’s The Diamond as Big as the Ritz:

      “Now,” said John eagerly, “turn out your pocket and let’s
  see what jewels you brought along. If you made a good selection
  we three ought to live comfortably all the rest of our lives.”
       Obediently Kismine put her hand in her pocket and tossed two
  handfuls of glittering stones before him.
      “Not so bad,” cried John, enthusiastically. “They aren’t
  very big, but– Hello!” His expression changed as he held one of
  them up to the declining sun. “Why, these aren’t diamonds!
  There’s something the matter!”
      “By golly!” exclaimed Kismine, with a startled look. “What
  an idiot I am!”
      “Why, these are rhinestones!” cried John.

  From The Hawkline Monster, by Richard Brautigan:
   
      “What are we going to do now?” Susan Hawkline said, surveying the lake that had once been their house.
      Cameron counted the diamonds in his hand. 
  There were thirty-five diamonds and they were all that was left of the
  Hawkline Monster.
      “We’ll think of something,” Cameron said.
  
  

  
  Related material:

  “A disciple of Ezra Pound, he adapts to the short
  story the ideogrammatic method of The Cantos, where a grammar of
  images, emblems, and symbols replaces that of logical sequence. This
  grammar allows for the grafting of particulars into a congeries of
  implied relation without subordination. In contrast to postmodernists,
  Davenport does not omit causal connection and linear narrative
  continuity for the sake of an aleatory play of signification but in
  order to intimate by combinational logic kinships and correspondences
  among eras, ideas and forces.”

  – When Novelists Become Cubists:
      The Prose Ideograms of Guy Davenport,
      by Andre Furlani

  “T.S. Eliot’s experiments in
  ideogrammatic method are equally germane to Davenport, who shares with
  the poet an avant-garde aesthetic and a conservative temperament.  Davenport’s text reverberates with echoes of Four Quartets.”

  – Andre Furlani

  “At the still point,
    there the dance is.”

  –  T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets,
  quoted in the epigraph to
  the chapter on automorphism groups
  in Parallelisms of Complete Designs,
  by Peter J. Cameron,
  published when Cameron was at
  Merton College, Oxford.

  “As Gatsby closed the door of
  ‘the Merton College Library’
  I could have sworn I
  heard
  the owl-eyed man
  break into ghostly laughter.”

  – F. Scott Fitzgerald

  • 4:07 pm
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