While Bird

'While Bird' is an anagram of 'Whil Bride' - the internet pseudonym of William McBride.| A While Bird is winged, and seemingly weightless, but, instead of soaring to limitless heights, it will dance and flit about just at the level of the treetops, looking down, checking back, bearing a quiet, melancholy patience. | This is my favourite website, and it changes according to my tastes.| These days you are likely to find here: Proust quotes, AU and US politicking notes, Burt Bacharach Feel Goods and the odd piece of patented Proesy. Other interests include: the ways in which theinternetchangeslives, quotes about hard work, and, of course, Sex and the Dead. Get in touch: will.bride[at]gmail.com
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Posts tagged lydia davis
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“Head, Heart” by Lydia Davis

Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.
Heart feels better, then.
But the words of the head do not remain long in the ears of the heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help heart. 

(via: hateshiploveship)

The New Yorker's Book Club's live chat with Lydia Davis 

A very neat, brisk exchange between Davis and her fans.

Lydia Davis interviewed on Bookworm, which is on KCRW 

An interview on Varieties of Disturbance. A quiet sort of interview during which Davis reads a number of stories.

How It Is Done, by Lydia Davis

There is a description in a child’s science book of the act of love that makes it all quite clear and helps when one begins to forget. It starts with affection between a man and a woman. The blood goes to their genitals as they kiss and caress each other, this swelling creates a desire in these parts to be touched further, the man’s penis becomes larger and quite stiff and the woman’s vagina moist and slippery. The penis can now be pushed into the woman’s vagina and the parts move “comfortably and pleasantly” together until the man and woman reach orgasm, “not necessarily at the same time.” The article ends, however, with a cautionary emendation of the opening statement about affection: nowadays many people make love, it says, who do not love each other, or even have any affection for each other, and whether or not this is a good thing we do not yet know.

“ Near the end of the book, Davis says she began by trying to write it in the third person. ‘Then a day came when I had used she for I so long that even the third person was too close to me and I needed another person, even farther away than the third person.’ By the time she puts it into the first person, the story has become so weathered by its evolution in the third that it chafes oddly with what is traditionally a fresh, sensitive and vulnerable pronoun. The effect is remarkable. ”

From The Rear-View Mirror, Michael Hofmann’s review of Lydia Davis’s The End of the Story, in the London Review of Books.

“ After an evening spent in my room in the company of a few people, a man stayed behind when the others left, and then stayed on. He was a kind and gentle man, I thought, and I thought it would be a comforting thing for me to be with him and also a pleasure, but it was not either pleasant or unpleasant, in the end, just something to watch and wait out. This was not the man I was used to, and when I touched this body I had not known before, each part of him was a shock to my hand, which had known a different shape for each part: his buttocks were smaller and flatter, his thighs bonier, and on and on—wherever my hand reached for something, it was not familiar.
This man gave me instructions, though gently, and I lay there thinking that it was beginning to seem like a distant, mechanical operation. There was so much glass in the way, I thought, as though I had my glasses on, there in bed, and were looking at it all too clearly, or as though I had a microscope and were looking at it all too closely, in too much detail, with too much science in it, or as though I were watching him come together with me behind the plate glass of a shop window, with fluorescent light on it all, or as though there were sheets of glass between us, between all the parts of our two bodies, between our two skins as they met, so that while I saw it all so clearly I could not feel anything at all, or if anything, only something smooth and cold.
There was no confusion of our bodies. I knew which arm was his and which mine, and which leg, and which shoulder. I did not lose track and kiss my own arm, or whatever came near my mouth. The smallest motion did not immediately lead to another motion. It was not endless, it did not go more and more deeply into my body and his body as though to go as far as possible from my mind, and his mind, so conscious, so unrelenting. It did not end while it was still in the middle.
He woke up early in the morning, and when I only wanted to go on sleeping, he lit a cigarette and lay there smoking while I lay there waiting for him to be done smoking. Then he put out the cigarette and went back to sleep, while I lay there awake.
Later in the morning, when I got up and he got up, I did not feel comfortable, I did not feel easy, walking back and forth through the room, talking to him, moving around him in the kitchen, passing him in the hallway. Every movement of mine was too deliberate, every remark too planned, while every response of his was also too deliberate, I thought, and I thought, missing what I had had, how it had been so much easier, but then thought again, and remembered that it had not really been very different walking around and trying to talk to him, there was the same feeling, often, of shining a bright light on each word because he was so silent and looked at me so intently. He smiled more often than he spoke, he laughed quickly and readily, most of the time, when he wasn’t angry at me, and he was almost never angry at first, though he was often hurt, probably, and he would now and then tell me he wished I would be silly with him. I was not silly, and I was not gentle. ”

From The End of the Story, by Lydia Davis

“ There was his invitation, once we were back in the café, my hesitation, his boldness, my misunderstanding, then the noise of his car, my fear, the coast at night, my town at night, my yard and the rosebush, the jade bushes and my fence, my house, my room, the metal chairs, our beer, our conversation, his misstatements of fact, his boldness again, and so forth. ”

From The End of the Story, by Lydia Davis.

Away From Home, by Lydia Davis

It has been so long since she used a metaphor!

Smoke, by Lydia Davis

Hummingbirds make explosions in the dying white flowers—not only the white flowers are dying but old women are falling from branches everywhere—in smoking pits outside the city, other dead things, too, are burning—and what can be done? Few people know. Dogs have been lost in more than one place, and their owners do not love the countryside anymore. No—old women have fallen and lie with their cancerous cheeks among the roots of oak trees. Everywhere, everywhere. And the earth is sprouting things we do not dare to look at. And the smoking pits have consumed other unnamable things, things we are glad to see go. The smoke, tall and thick as mountains, makes our landscape. There are no more mountains. Long ago they were gone, not even in the memory of our grandfathers. The cloud, low over our heads, is our sky. It has been a long age since anyone saw a sky, saw anything blue. The fog is our velvet, our armchair, our bed. The trees are purple in it. The candles of flowers are out now. The fog is soft, it has no claws, not yet. Our grandmothers’ purple teeth crave. They crave things we would not even recognize anymore, though our grandmothers remember—they cry out at a bridge. Too many things to name are gone and we are left with this clowning earth, these cynical trees—shadows, all, of themselves. And we, too, are beyond help. Some only are less cancerous than others, that is all, some have more left, of their bones, of their hair, of their organs. Who can find a way around the smoking pits, the greedy oaks? Who can find a path to take among the lost and dying dogs back to where the hummingbirds, though mad, still explode the flowers, flowers still though dying?

This Condition, by Lydia Davis.

In this condition: stirred not only by men but by women, fat and thin, naked and clothed; by teenagers and children in latency; by animals such as horses and dogs; by certain vegetables such as carrots, zucchinis, eggplants, and cucumbers; by fruits such as melons, grapefruits, and kiwis; by certain plant parts such as petals, sepals, stamens, and pistils; by the bare arm of a wooden chair, a round vase holding flowers, a little hot sunlight, a plate of pudding, a person entering a tunnel in the distance, a puddle of water, a hand alighting on a smooth stone, a hand alighting on a bare shoulder, a naked tree limb; by anything curved, bare, and shining, as the limb or bole of a tree; by any touch, as the touch of a stranger handling money; by anything round and freely hanging, as tassels on a curtain, chestnut burrs on a twig in spring, a wet tea bag on its string; by anything glowing, as a hot coal; anything soft or slow, as a cat rising from a chair; anything smooth and dry, as a stone, or warm and glistening; anything sliding, anything sliding back and forth; anything sliding in and out with an oiled surface, as certain machine parts; anything of a certain shape, like the state of Florida; anything pounding, anything stroking; anything bolt upright, anything horizontal and gaping, as a certain sea anemone; anything warm, anything wet, anything wet and red, anything turning red, as the sun at evening; anything wet and pink; anything long and straight with a blunt end, as a pestle; anything coming out of anything else, as a snail from its shell, as a snail’s horns from its head; anything opening; any stream of water running, any stream running, any stream spurting, any stream spouting; any cry, any soft cry, any grunt; anything going into anything else, as a hand searching in a purse; anything clutching, anything grasping; anything rising, anything tightening or filling, as a sail; anything dripping, anything hardening, anything softening.

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