May 2012
4 posts
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” - Emily Dickinson
“In a certain light,” Miranda said, “you can see anything at all.”
-thomas mcguane, from Ninety-two in the Shade
March 2012
2 posts
“My Life At Home During Banking Hours” - David Berman
For a solid month I tried
to think of something new to say about rivers
I called the newspaper to find out
how many horses were left on earth,
and numbly watched mosquitoes swarm
over a pile of high-heeled shoes
while my colleagues hunted in the corners.
At least I was not in the line of work
that had me spending most of my...
Blue Yodel of the Desperado by Frank Stanford
After Pier Paolo Pasolini
I went to New York to leave you
Flowers of blood and light
In the Picture Shows I dreamed
Of your birthmark in the shape of a pistol
There you were alone and asleep
In your bed like a lake
And your Father watched over you
And his land
As always you slept naked
With the window wide open
The down on the small...
The Emperor Of Ice-Cream - Wallace Stevens
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal.
Lacking the...
February 2012
4 posts
“You always have to look.” - Philip Marlowe
January 2012
11 posts
it’s not so much that expectation always leads to disappointment. it’s just that things don’t ever go the way we plan them, and our expectations make us miss all the accidental gold.
“The Only Animal” - Franz Wright
The only animal that commits suicide went for a walk in the park, basked on a hard bench in the first star, traveled to the edge of space in an armchair while company quietly talked and abruptly returned, the room empty. The only animal that cries that takes off its clothes and reports to the mirror, the one and only animal that brushes its own...
“Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.”
― Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks
“The women were blank, shining areas with photographs of sad girls floating in them.” - denis johnson
Nothing good gets away | Letters of Note →
continentalop:
When John Steinbeck’s oldest son fell in love, he asked his dad for advice, which was given:
And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.
This just wonderful. Read the whole thing.
[via Brain Pickings]
“Similarly, in 1919, Philippe Soupault went into any number of impossible buildings to ask the concierge whether Philippe Soupault did in fact live there. He would not have been surprised, I suspect, by an affirmative reply. He would have gone and knocked on his door.”
“And yet I am living. I have even discovered that I care about life. The more I have sometimes found reasons for putting an end to it the more I have caught myself admiring some random square of parquet floor: it was really like silk, like the silk that would have been as beautiful as water. I liked this lucid pain, as though the entire universal drama of it had then passed through me and I...
Mahler in New York - Joseph Fasano Now when I go out, the wind pulls me into the grave. I go out to part the hair of a child I left behind. and he pushes his face into my cuffs, to smell the wind. If I carry my father with me, it is the way a horse carries autumn in its mane. If I remember my brother, it is as if a buck knelt down in a room I was in. I kneel, and the wind kneels down in me. What...
So I just finished this book Venus Drive by Sam Lipsyte. At first I hated it. Deeply, sincerely hated it. Because the writing was perfect, the short clipped beauty of any of Gordon Lish’s disciples, and the people were vile, and the stories tapered off into nothing. Usually those are all reasons I would like a book, but for some reason this time it felt wrong. Maybe like Lipsyte took a...
December 2011
3 posts
I suppose if there was ever a night to have a few extra glasses of wine, it’s Christmas. I mean, after all, that’s what Christ’s first miracle was, right? The best wine for last, when the guests had already drunk their fill. The extra bathtub full of celebration, because the king had come, and nobody even knew it yet. That’s my excuse anyhow.
Because it’s always a...
“it was always life intense i was after, life as its own comment when drawn well enough, never much else.” - barry hannah
If anyone tells you fire is light,
Pay no attention.
When two thieves meet they need no introduction:
They recognize each other without question.
- Mu-mon
November 2011
18 posts
“…there’s W.C. Fields, who read an analysis of how he juggled. he couldn’t juggle for six years afterward. he’d never known that was how it was done. he’d just thrown up the balls and juggled.” - eudora welty
“here’s what it is: when i listened to his music, i didn’t feel like a loser. i felt like a character in an epic poem about losers. you felt like there was possibility. that here is a guy who grew up like you grew up and had the same feeling of “i bet if i just fucking get in the car and drive, there will be an opportunity for something different and better— an...
“Children understand that Once upon a time refers not only—not even primarily—to the past, but to the impalpable regions of the present, the deeper places inside us, where princes and dragons, wizards and talking birds, impassable roads, impossible tasks, and happy endings have always existed, alive and bursting with psychic power.”
—Stephen Mitchell, from The Frog Prince
8. Lord, make me a flying squirrel or a flying Holy Roller. No, if I’m going to fly, make me a painted bunting, Lord. Make me Sister Lou’s grackle cackle and hair weirdly beautiful. Lord, make me a fat pocketbook pearly in the St. Francis River or an alligator gar in the Cache, Lord, and name me Black Blade. Come on, I dare you, make me an Ozark hellbender. Make me the fragrance of a...
“…And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very...
“For heaven ghostly is as nigh down as up, and up as down: behind as before, before as behind, on one side as other. Insomuch, that whoso had a true desire for to be at heaven, then that same time he were in heaven ghostly. For the high and the next way thither is run by desires, and not by paces of feet.”
- the cloud of unknowing
“Most of what Mitchell read in college hadn’t conveyed Wisdom with a capital W. But this Russian fable did. It was true abut people in general and it was true about Mitchell in particular. What were he and his friends doing, really, other than hanging from a branch, sticking their tongues out to catch the sweetness? He thought about the people he knew, with their excellent young...
“The spirit dances, comes and goes. But the soul
is nailed to us like lentils and fatty bacon lodged
under the ribs. What lasted is what the soul ate.
The way a child knows the world by putting it
part by part into his mouth. As I tried to gnaw
my way into the Lord, working to put my heart
against that heart. Lying in the wheat at night,
letting the rain after all the dry months have...
“The Singing Knives” by Frank Stanford The dogs woke me up I looked out the window Jimmy ran down the road With the knife in his mouth He was naked And the moon Was a dead man floating down the river He jumped on the Gypsy’s pony He rode through camp I could see the dust There was the saddlebag full of knives He was crazy When Jimmy cut a throat The eyes rolled back in the head Like they was...
October 2011
11 posts
people hatin the good words. that’s okay. they still have good magic to me.
here’s my favorite poem ever. not sure why it is exactly, except that it’s lovely. you should read it out loud to yourself, so you can hear it. it has a sort of music to it that makes it true. i do believe that.
“The Song of Wandering Aengus” - W. B. Yeats
I went out to the hazel wood, ...
Watchy’all, i kinda hate the doors, but this is exquisite. jim morrison looks like he fell out of a stained glass window. i can’t even imagine seeing this on tv.
dork.
So I had to do a reading the other night. Something of my own, a quick ten pages on a stage in front of seventy-five people. It was terrifying. I chose something funny, which was a risk, because if the first joke doesn’t land (the second line in this particular piece), then I’m screwed for the duration. As it went, however, this reading was a success. A hell of a success, in fact.
I...
“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was...
Emily Dickinson describing herself in a letter: “I am small, like the wren, and my hair is bold, like the chestnut bur, and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves.”
what a genius babe. jeez.
I’ve probably posted this about a dozen times, but it’s my favorite, and it’s that time of year again.
“Each year, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch that he thinks is the most sincere. He’s gotta pick this one. He’s got to. I don’t see how a pumpkin patch can be more sincere than this one. You can look around and there’s not a...
