asfaltics

  The typewriter has six lines of a poem on ruach. Dust on the piano.   ₁   as if the words, like leaves, like dust stumbled against a break in the pavement, congress of weeds and shadow.   ₂   after a pause spent in puttering about   ₃ puttering in mud with his head down we enter the area he calls the cropped meadow.   ₄   “puttering” and drawing.   ₅ as much about concrete as about the woods.   ₆ He drew a few lines to indicate the streets   and it looked like the branch of a tree with names standing out in the twigs. The writing on it had muddled for him.   ₇   He stared out of the window and appeared to be watching the clouds above the trees.   Sometimes he closed his eyes.   ₈

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sources :

1 Julius Horwitz. “The Voices,” in The City (1953) : 184-196 (185) / more at putterings 604 Abstract painting has given dignity to people’s puttering with colors. / 190 2 2901a 20250204 3 Helen Van Valkenburgh. “The Little Grey Car.” The Black Cat 21:3 (December 1915) : 32-37 (34) / more at putterings 619 4 Hatsy Shields. “In the Garden / Plots and Plans” (on Ken Druse his garden). House Beautiful : 141:5 (May 1999) : 68, (86), 89 / more at putterings 618 5 Steven W. Naifeh. Jackson Pollock : An American Saga (1989) : 819 / more at putterings 602 6 Susan Glaspell. Ambrose Holt and Family (1931) : 27 borrowable at archive.org : link 7 Anne Ryan. “The Darkest Leaf.” Botteghe Oscure 22 (1958) : 272-306 / paragraphs 34 and 31 transcription at asfaltics 2953_ryan-darkest-leaf.htm 8 Robert Seethaler. The Last Movement (2020; Charlotte Collins, trans., 2026) : 43

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The aphasic patient, with his involuntary use of ready-made sentences unadapted to what he wants to express...   ₉

9 Th(éophile) Alajouanine. “Aphasia and Artistic Realization,” Brain 71:3 (September 1948) : 229-241 (230) archive.org : link  

9378 (5×3, “mono” gray) . reading, asides . 20260527  

too stilled in his thoughts, too cryptic with age. drifting in sleep was all that was left. too old to think things out, to weed his thoughts   the senses’ darkest leaf, least understood, least accounted for

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  Streaked grey walls, end of hope; A broken down car, a man puttering; Mud everywhere.   ₁ morass of indecision a puttering with things just about done.   ₂   Tar Sands were known, some puttering with extraction processes, but for the most part it was ‘miles and miles of just miles and miles.’   ₃ miles of hills away   ₄   moved to imitate the puttering mud rhymes and spells and orders timed to   ₅   (shadows) of intention.   ₆ In the last minutes of light the last puttering ends   ₄

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sources :

1 “Auto Camp,” by Jack Parsons, January, ’31 in The Guard and Tackle Annual, “Published by the Associated Students of The Stockton High School” (Stockton, California; June 1931) : 48 / more at putterings 611 2 Lynde C. Steckle, Problems of Human Adjustment (1949; Revised edition, 1957) : 57, 367 / more at putterings 612 3 Peter Larkin, “Science and the North : An Essay on Aspirations,” in Northern Transitions Vol. II, Second National Workshop on People, Resources and the Environment North of 60°. Robert F. Keith and Janet B. Wright, eds. (Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, Ottawa, Ont., 1978) : 119-127 (120) / more at putterings 615 4 Teri Lynn Imus, “The Home Place” in Plains Song Review 1 (1999) : 58-60 / more at putterings 616 5 Dorothy Dunnett, To Lie with Lions; vol. 6 of the eight-volume series The House of Niccolò : (1996) : 58-60 / more at putterings 617 6 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar; edited by Rush Rhees, translated by Anthony Kenny (1974) : 146 “But when we step outside intention, they are mere patches on a canvas, without life and of no interest to us. When we intend, we exist among the pictures (shadows) of intention, as well as with real things.”  

bookplate adhesive trace, inside front cover (detail) : link

...Each kind of grain or bean, even each variety of the same kind, cooks up a little differently. My mother worked on a project trying to discover the perfect method for cooking rice when she was in college. She found that rice varies so much the best method was to watch the rice cook. That’s almost my method in a nutshell: watch what you’re doing. Taste what you’re cooking to see if it’s done and tender; and add more water as it’s needed.

  she enjoys puttering around the house with minor repairs and is a whiz at plumbing  ₁ puttering, painting, puppets, performing and infinite variety of off duty occupations   ₂ Low Budget. Woodsy country living.   $14,750 plus some puttering & painting   ₃ puttering, painting, exchanging jokes... writing copious letters   ₄ dropped the pencil he’d been puttering with, and said “A man’s got to eat.”   ₅   Soup is a puttering affair.   ₆

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sources :

1 Anne Gisonny on “A ‘Real’ Heroine,” in chapter “Category Romance Mini-Course,” in Kathryn Falk, ed., How to Write a Romance and Get It Published : With intimate advice from the world’s most popular romantic writers (1983; Signet revised edition 1990) : 182-196 (191) / more at putterings 601 2 Rod Young, “Punch’s Mailbox,” in Puppetry Journal 9:1 (July-August 1957) : 28 / more at putterings 605 3 “Homes For Sale / Marin County,” in the (San Rafael, California) Independent-Journal (March 11, 1966) : 24 / more at putterings 606 4 Ed Kiester, “Canada’s Chester Ronning : One Man’s Attempt to Bring Peace to Vietnam” in the Parade supplement, (Long Beach, California) Independent Press-Telegram (Sunday, June 6, 1967) : 21-22 / more at putterings 607 5 Samuel Hopkins Adams, The Clarion; illustrations by W. D. Stevens (1914) : 124 / more at putterings 610 6 Wings of Life : Vegetarian Cookery by Julie Jordan (1976) : 139 / more at putterings 614  

9342, 9364 . reading, asides . 20260508, 20260515

This did not think itself in words.

  So trees produced oxygen in the form of words.   ₁

he drew a few lines to indicate the streets and it looked like the branch of a tree with names standing out on the twigs.   ₂ a forest of interesting, nitpicking names   ₁

when one considers the picture more closely that a something of incoherent and flimsy obtrudes. The roads run nowhither   ₃

and the words give out their scent, and ripple like leaves, and chequer us with light and shadow   ₄

a something of shadow, Es un algo de sombra   ₅

scarcely clear enough to be called ideas. They had something to do with fragrance and colour and sound, but almost nothing to do with words   ₆

the darkest leaf of her whole life-tree, the senses’ darkest leaf, least understood, least accounted for   ₂

tears flow from the uselessness of words   ₁

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sources

1 three leaves, from Murray Bail, Eucalyptus (1998) 2 Anne Ryan. “The Darkest Leaf.” Botteghe Oscure 22 (1958) : 272-306 / paragraph 34 : more 3 William D. McKay on the painter J. C. Wintour, in his The Scottish School of Painting (London, 1906) : 311 / more 4 Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill,” in The Criterion, vol. 4 (January 1926) : 32-45 hathitrust : link 5 ex Julia de Burgos, “Es un algo de sombra,” (It is a something of shadow), in Song of the Simple Truth : obra completa poética : the complete poems. Compiled and translated by Jack Agueros (Curbstone Press, 1996) : 172-175 more 6 Willa Sibert Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915) : 299-300 Harvard copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link

                                          puttering around the kitchen   ₁   unironed                                 puttering about his little garden and among   ₂                         puttering and sputtering about some inconsequential                 method   ₃   hustling puttering sputtering         snappy every pain seems to start   ₄ midday clouds of nothing   ₁

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sources :

1 “Still Life,” the first of three Ciné-poèmes (“Shine-poēmu sanpen”) by Kawaji Ryūkō, in Aishō 4, no. 12 (1929), 10–11. translated by Andrew Pasquale Campana in his Poetry Across Media in 20th-Century Japan (Harvard dissertation, 2018) : 38-39 / more at putterings 600 2 Susan M. Griffith, “Uncle Simon’s Turkey,” in The Christian Herald (New York; November 27, 1907) : 1013, 1027 / more at putterings 599 3 A. E. Winship, LL.D., Danger Signals for Teachers (Chicago, 1919) : 187 / more at putterings 598 4 Frank Kraft, M.D., “The Therapeutics of Diarrhea” (conclusion), in The American Homeopathist 22:2 (New York; January 16, 1896) : 27-32 (31) / more at putterings 597  

  But one fragment lodged on his coat-sleeve; and he saw on it the word “eternity”   ₁ a fragment of the Orient amid the surrounding influences   ₂ it corresponded exactly, and the half-lines on the fragment   ₃   the fragment of the “old song”   ₄ a carved fragment washed bare   ₅ the celebrated fragment   ₆ a fragment of rosso antico susceptible   ₇ though charred and burned around the edges, the fragment still legible   ₈   There was no catastrophe. A fragment was still standing   ₉ a round, common-looking fragment, with a hole in it   ₁₀ In this fragment of inspired history, a miracle.   ₁₁

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image, deteriorating front flyleaf, and every instance of “fragment” within volume 17 of The Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times (1894) Tisch (Tufts U) Library copy/scan, Boston Library Consortium, via archive.org : link

  And this again leads us to a thought or two on what   ₁ neither solid, liquid, nor aëriform; a something of extreme tenuity; imponderable the characters of materiality and the whole was immersed in a vessel of water, and kept there for fourteen days   ₂   a something of dread and wonder, and a something of dismay, and a something, too, it must be confessed, of what might be called the sublime in hydraulics   ₃ as though there was a something of — we need not cite examples; sketches and first thoughts are of no small value at times —   how much has been lost of this in the more finished and completed picture. It is thus well to look back sometimes.   ₁

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sources

1 “Royal Academy Speculations,” The Builder (London, July 31, 1880) : 131-132 / more 2 “On the Supposed Identity of the Agent Concerned in the Phaenomena of Ordinary Electricity, Voltaic Electricity, Electro-magnetisim, Magneto-electricity, and Thermo-electricity.” By M. Donovan, in The Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science (Fourth Series; February 1852) : 117-127 (121) / more 3 Isaac Taylor, “Personal Recollections, 1. The Cornish Coast Sixty Years Ago,” in Good Words for 1864 (London, 1864) : 8-19 (14) / more

aside — re: a shipwreck along the Cornish coast — an unfortunate Indiaman of 1400 tons, being “country-built, from Bombay [and having taken] a complement of its hands from the native maritime class.”

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₁

puttering by the sink, cleaning up some — an odd thing to do, something that could wait   ₂   All her life   she had been hurrying and sputtering, as if she had been born behind time and had been trying to catch up.   Now   ₃   enough time for puttering; enough thin books of   ₄

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sources :

1 photograph, found in 32 pieces, Market Basket parking lot (Somerville, Massachusetts, ca 2000) 2 W. B. Pescosolido, “Mother,” in Indiana Review (Fall 1993) / more at putterings 594 3 Willa Sibert Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915) : 299 / more at putterings 596 4 ex portrait of Robert Frost, in Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant her Fire Under the Andes : A Group of North American Portraits (1927) : 288 / more at putterings 595