January 2010
112 posts
The Ineffable
I’m sitting here reading the paper, feeling warm and satisfied, basically content with my life and all I have achieved. Then I go up for a refill and suddenly realize how much happier I could be with the barista. Late thirties, hennaed hair, an ahnk or something tattooed on her ankle, a little silver ring in her nostril. There’s some mystery surrounding why she’s here, pouring...
Hazelton by Justin Vernon
Before Justin Vernon...
Mad Girl's Love Song
"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from...
J.D. Salinger, 91, Is Dead →
“What really knocks me out is a book, when you’re all done reading it, you wished the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” -Holden Caulfield
Serendipity
It was on this day in 1754 that the word “serendipity” was first coined. It’s defined by Merriam-Webster as “the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.” It was recently listed by a U.K. translation company as one of the English language’s 10 most difficult words to translate. Other words to make their list include...
Sufjan Stevens - The Perpetual Self, or...
Words of Wisdom
There are 5 areas of Music to work on for the rest of your life…. 1. Theory 2. Technique 3. Repertoire 4. Improvisation 5. Sight Reading
They all work together to help you perform and compose, which are the things that great musicians do.
- said to me by the incredible musician and my friend, Don Frio.
“I prefer to talk about the meaning in a story rather than the theme of a story....”
– Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners. Writing Short Stories.
A Postcard from the Volcano
by Wallace Stevens
Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill; And that in autumn, when the grapes Made sharp air sharper by their smell These had a being, breathing frost; And least will guess that with our bones We left much more, left what still is The look of things, left what we felt At what we saw. The spring clouds blow Above...
1 tag
“In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing...”
– Bertolt Brecht, “Motto” (1938)
“A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make you know yourself...”
– Gertrude Stein excerpted from the 1935 “Poetry and Grammar.” Depending on your perspective, see also lexical ambiguities or the value of voids.
The Ineffable
I’m sitting here reading the paper, feeling warm and satisfied, basically content with my life and all I have achieved. Then I go up for a refill and suddenly realize how much happier I could be with the barista. Late thirties, hennaed hair, an ahnk or something tattooed on her ankle, a little silver ring in her nostril. There’s some mystery surrounding why she’s here, pouring...
Some Final Words
I cannot leave you without saying this: the past is nothing, a nonmemory, a phantom, a soundproof closet in which Johann Strauss is composing another waltz no one can hear. It is a fabrication, best forgotten, a wellspring of sorrow that waters a field of bitter vegetation. Leave it behind. Take your head out of your hands and arise from the couch of melancholy where the window-light falls against...
Genesis and Catastrophe →
A very short, unnerving story by Roald Dahl. James and the Giant Peach was an aberration; he trafficked mostly in the adultsadworld.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep...
“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of...”
– Stephen King
Johannes Brahms - Symphony No. 3 in F, Op. 90 III....
3 tags
Insomnia
The moon in the bureau mirror looks out a million miles (and perhaps with pride, at herself, but she never, never smiles) far and away beyond sleep, or perhaps she’s a daytime sleeper. By the Universe deserted, she’d tell it to go to hell, and she’d find a body of water, or a mirror, on which to dwell. So wrap up care in a cobweb and drop it down the well into that world inverted where left is...
When Books Could Change Your Life: Why What We... →
“…Even as fully grown adults we remain secretly starved for guidance and instruction. Many of us are walking around with the uneasy feeling that we missed the first day of class and wondering if there are CliffNotes. Most people desperately want someone to tell them what life’s about, what people are for, what we’re supposed to do—how to be a human being. But serious...
No Direction Home
After a certain age, there's no one left to turn to. You've got to find Eurydice on your own, you've got To find the small crack between here and everywhere else all by yourself. How could it be otherwise? Everyone's gone away, the houses are all empty, And overcast starts to fill the sky like soiled insulation. ...
“When I put my hands on your body on your flesh I feel the history of that body. Not just the beginning of its forming in that distant lake but all the way beyond its ending. I feel the warmth and texture and simultaneously I see the flesh unwrap from the layers of fat and disappear. I see the fat disappear from the muscle. I see the muscle disappearing from around the organs and detaching iself...
Deer Tracks
Beautiful, sobbing high-geared fucking and then to lie silently like deer tracks in the freshly-fallen snow beside the one you love. That’s all.
- Richard Brautigan
“A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he...”
– Paul Valéry
“But the books you like must also be read with shudders and gasps… Literature,...”
– Vladimir Nabokov, in his rather critical lecture on Dostoevksy, arguing that while there is pleasure to be taken in dismantling mediocre literature it is just as necessary to interrogate and re-imagine one’s favorite works.
"I experienced pleasure in that state between two... →
-Mimerose Beaubrun, ‘In Dreaming’ via Haiti in Ink and Tears: A Literary Sampler
Today is a good day to remember that in Haiti, nobody ever really dies. The many thousands who’ve had the breath crushed out of their bodies in the earthquake, and the thousands more who will not physically survive the aftermath, will undergo instead a translation of state, according to the precepts of Haitian...
