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Notebook entry, Kyoto, 1967: Philip Whalen (Bancroft Library, U. of California)
24:VII:58 ...I write this in bed at 3:40 A.M. after a day of reading, almost continuous reading -- (re-reading Tristram Shandy) -- during which I kept promising myself “I will stop at the end of this chapter & try to begin writing again.” I didn’t actually stop until a few minutes ago.
I got into this pickle by starting a couple weeks ago with the notion that I must mend my prose style by perusing again the sedate pages of Johnson, the ironic epithets of Smollett, & the lively grace of Sterne. All that has resulted is an echoing of their sounds in my empty skull & bent reflections of their kinds of phraseology in current letters to my friends & in this place -- a dismal conclusion to my original plan. In addition (or in diminution, rather) I feel a great lapse of my inventive & authorial powers.
6/VII:65 In rage & panic, hungry, I sold half a dozen books for $2. I’ve eaten almost all of it: The Iliad, a contemporary verse translation with Wedgwood illustrations, THE DESERT MUSIC, JOURNEY TO LOVE, THE 100,000 SONGS (xlations from Milarepa), and a Dante illustrated by George Grosz...
Philip Whalen: from Notebooks (1957-1966), 2009
I got into this pickle by starting a couple weeks ago with the notion that I must mend my prose style by perusing again the sedate pages of Johnson, the ironic epithets of Smollett, & the lively grace of Sterne. All that has resulted is an echoing of their sounds in my empty skull & bent reflections of their kinds of phraseology in current letters to my friends & in this place -- a dismal conclusion to my original plan. In addition (or in diminution, rather) I feel a great lapse of my inventive & authorial powers.
6/VII:65 In rage & panic, hungry, I sold half a dozen books for $2. I’ve eaten almost all of it: The Iliad, a contemporary verse translation with Wedgwood illustrations, THE DESERT MUSIC, JOURNEY TO LOVE, THE 100,000 SONGS (xlations from Milarepa), and a Dante illustrated by George Grosz...
Philip Whalen: from Notebooks (1957-1966), 2009
Dear Tom,
Here is Philip [Whalen's] CLASSICS SHELF (condensed).
When Philip recently moved into a smaller room with better sunlight in the [Hartford Street, San Francisco] Zen Center, it was necessary to reduce his immense library into something more portable. In addition to all of his Buddhist books, he requested the following books be kept as his own portable collection:
Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems
Paperback of Emily Dickinson Collected
Lloyd Reynolds' books
Copies of his own books
Large Print Bible
Copies of Joanne Kyger's books
1 volume edition of Plato
Krazy Kat books
Mountains and Rivers Without End, Gary Snyder
Thomas C. Wolfe, The Story of a Novel
1986 Edited Copy of Finnegans Wake, Random House (confused maybe with printing of Ulysses)
All volumes of Stravinsky's Letters
Edith Sitwell's Collected
Robert Craft's book about Stravinsky
Archie and Mehitabel
Journal to Stella, Jonathan Swift
Collected Plays by W. B. Yeats
Selected Robinson Jeffers
Tristram Shandy
Annotated Wasteland in paperback
Humphrey Clinker
Old Collected Poems of W. Carlos Williams, 2 or 3 volumes
All books by Gertrude Stein: paperback of The Making of Americans, Narration, What Are Masterpieces?, Lectures in America
EE Cummings Collected
2 large volumes of Thoreau journal
-- Brit
Britton Pyland to TC, 17 October 2006
Here is Philip [Whalen's] CLASSICS SHELF (condensed).
When Philip recently moved into a smaller room with better sunlight in the [Hartford Street, San Francisco] Zen Center, it was necessary to reduce his immense library into something more portable. In addition to all of his Buddhist books, he requested the following books be kept as his own portable collection:
Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems
Paperback of Emily Dickinson Collected
Lloyd Reynolds' books
Copies of his own books
Large Print Bible
Copies of Joanne Kyger's books
1 volume edition of Plato
Krazy Kat books
Mountains and Rivers Without End, Gary Snyder
Thomas C. Wolfe, The Story of a Novel
1986 Edited Copy of Finnegans Wake, Random House (confused maybe with printing of Ulysses)
All volumes of Stravinsky's Letters
Edith Sitwell's Collected
Robert Craft's book about Stravinsky
Archie and Mehitabel
Journal to Stella, Jonathan Swift
Collected Plays by W. B. Yeats
Selected Robinson Jeffers
Tristram Shandy
Annotated Wasteland in paperback
Humphrey Clinker
Old Collected Poems of W. Carlos Williams, 2 or 3 volumes
All books by Gertrude Stein: paperback of The Making of Americans, Narration, What Are Masterpieces?, Lectures in America
EE Cummings Collected
2 large volumes of Thoreau journal
-- Brit
Britton Pyland to TC, 17 October 2006
Notebook entry, Kyoto, 18 October 1967: Philip Whalen (Bancroft Library, U. of California)
Pages from The Invention of the Letter: A Beastly Morality: Philip Whalen, 1967 (via Steve Silberman)
The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream -- he awoke and found it truth.
-- John Keats to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817
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