May 2011
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April 2011
6 posts
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MERGE: this Tumblr account will now merge with my... →
I hope you all will follow that one now, as I will be posting all the art/poetry/etc. to that account from now on.
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Literary History: Oscar Wilde
(via The Writer’s Almanac)
On this day in 1895, Oscar Wilde was arrested in room 118 of the Cadogan Hotel in London. He was arrested for “gross indecency” for sodomy.
The day before he had lost a libel case he’d brought against his lover’s father, John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry. The Marquess had called Wilde a sodomite, and Wilde wanted to...
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Why I'm Here | Jacqueline Berger
Because my mother was on a date with a man in the band, and my father, thinking she was alone, asked her to dance. And because, years earlier, my father dug a foxhole but his buddy sick with the flu, asked him for it, so he dug another for himself. In the night the first hole was shelled. I’m here because my mother was twenty-seven and in the ’50s that was old to still be...
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Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help... →
Wallace seemed always to be trying to erase the distance between himself and others in order to understand them better, and trying visibly to make himself understood—always asking questions, demanding to know more details. He owned his own weaknesses willingly and in the gentlest, most inclusive manner. Also he talked a lot about the role of good fiction, which, he opined more than once, is about...
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March 2011
14 posts
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Religious Consolation | John Updike
One size fits all. The shape or coloration of the god or high heaven matters less than that there is one, somehow, somewhere, hearing the hasty prayer and chalking up the mite the widow brings to the temple, A child alone with horrid verities cries out for there to be a limit, a warm wall whose stones give back an answer, however faint. Strange, the extravagance of it—who needs those...
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I Cannot | Anna Swirszczynska
I envy you. Every moment
You can leave me.
I cannot
leave myself.
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cassiemclean:
You are the rubber and I am the glue, which is the only reason I’m nice to any of you.
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“Hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once...”
– Tom Robbins
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Crystallization (love) →
Crystallization is a concept, developed in 1822 by the French writer Stendhal, which describes the process, or mental metamorphosis, in which unattractive characteristics of a new love are transformed into perceptual diamonds of shimmering beauty; according to a quotation by Stendhal: What I call ‘crystallization’ is the operation of the mind that draws from all that presents itself...
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Antilamentation | Dorianne Laux
Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark, in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot, the one you beat to the punch line, the door or the one who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones that crimped your toes,...
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February 2011
18 posts
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WatchDevendra Banhart - Don’t Look Back in Anger (Oasis cover)
Cooooool music video!
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It Doesn't Get Much Better Than This | Nicole...
I want to be a lost poem in a stranger’s coat pocket that conveys the importance of you To assure you of my desires To assure you of my dreams. I want all the possibilities of you in writing. I want to give you your reflection. I want your eyes on me. I want to travel in the lightness with you And stay there And I want everything before you to follow us Like a trail behind me. I want never to say...
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Stories of the Person I Call Myself: For too long. →
cassiemclean:
It’s hard to believe there’s a whole world of people out there that don’t know about you. They can look at you and look past you. I would be any one of them, with their hurt and their heartache, their vain longing, desire, resentment of others’ blissful ignorance to what (to who) makes it so. I wouldn’t tell them about you, they wouldn’t care. About the details of you, your looks...
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The Blind Old Man | Robert Bly
I don’t know why so much sweetness hovers around us. Nor why the wind blows the curtains in the afternoons, Nor why the earth mutters so much about its children. We’ll never know why the snow falls through the night, Nor how the heron stretches her long legs, Nor why we feel so abandoned in the morning. We have never understood how birds manage to fly, Nor who the genius is who makes...
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For You, Friend | Ted Kooser
this Valentine’s Day, I intend to stand for as long as I can on a kitchen stool and hold back the hands of the clock, so that wherever you are, you may walk even more lightly in your loveliness; so that the weak, mid-February sun (whose chill I will feel from the face of the clock) cannot in any way lessen the lights in your hair, and the wind (whose subtle insistence I will feel ...
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Advice | Langston Hughes
Folks, I’m telling you Birthing is hard and dying is mean - so get yourself a little loving in between
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“I wonder whether the world’s really there when I’m not narrating it.”
– John Barth in The Paris Review
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Trees | Hermann Hesse, Excerpt from Wandering
For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots...
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The Cosmic Joke | Charles Bukowski
men and women finally break. men and women deliberately abandon their loved ones in madhouses sedated or electrified until they die. cats kill cats at 3 a.m. in the morning chewing off the front legs and opening the throat leaving stiffened fur and still forms for any collector of garbage and life past gone. so many wish to be kind and understanding so many wish to act educated and knowing so...
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Love's Not the Way to Treat a Friend | Richard...
Love’s not the way to treat a friend. I wouldn’t wish that on you. I don’t want to see your eyes forgotten on a rainy day, lost in the endless purse of those who can remember nothing.
Love’s not the way to treat a friend. I don’t want to see you end up that way with your body being poured like wounded marble into the architecture of those who make bridges out of crippled birds.
Love’s...
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January 2011
26 posts
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Sleeping On The Wing | Frank O'Hara
Perhaps it is to avoid some great sadness, as in a Restoration tragedy the hero cries "Sleep! O for a long sound sleep and so forget it!" that one flies, soaring above the shoreless city, veering upward from the pavement as a pigeon does when a car honks or a door slams, the door of dreams, life perpetuated in parti-colored loves and beautiful lies all in different languages. Fear drops...
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Song of the Fucked Duck | Marge Piercy
In using there are always two. The manipulator dances with a partner who cons herself. There are lies that glow so brightly we consent to give a finger and then an arm to let them burn. I was dazzled by the crowd where everyone called my name. Now I stand outside the funhouse exit, down the slide reading my guidebook of Marx in Esperanto and if I don’t know anymore which way means forward...
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“He said, “Come to the Edge.”
I said, “I can’t, I’m afraid.”
He said, “Come to...”
– Guillaume Apollinaire
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Rilo Kiley - I Never
Never, never, never, never ...