A Brittle Town's Sleep.

"You’ve seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you..."

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 21:20:17 -0600

““You’ve seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it’s an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?””

- John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday

"A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a..."

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 20:01:18 -0600

““A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid any more.””

- John Steinbeck, East of Eden

"I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us,..."

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 18:40:44 -0600

“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too — in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof (old terms for weaving cloth) of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite changes we might impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story.”

- John Steinbeck, East of Eden

"I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave,..."

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 17:20:31 -0600

““I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again.”

- Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

"Finding is losing something else. I think about, perhaps even mourn, what I lost to find this"

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 16:01:14 -0600

““Finding is losing something else.
I think about, perhaps even mourn,
what I lost to find this””

- Richard Brautigan, Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork

"Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never..."

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 14:40:18 -0600

“Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists of jolts and shocks, many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are destined to produce one Shock, which does…The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph…Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.”

- André Breton, Nadja

"He’s feeling a pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It’s a condition of the..."

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 13:20:34 -0600

“He’s feeling a pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It’s a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to the generality, to a community of anxiety. The habit’s grown stronger these past two years; a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes. […] Everyone fears it, but there’s also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self-punishment and a blasphemous curiosity. Just as the hospitals have their crisis plans, so the television networks stand ready to deliver, and their audiences wait. Bigger, grosser next time. Please don’t let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as it’s happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know.”

- Ian McEwan, Saturday

"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers,..."

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 22:40:44 -0600

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is “I desire you,” and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure.”

- Roland Barthes, A Lovers’ Discourse: Fragments

"He strips me away to my last nakedness, that underskin of mauve, pearlized satin, like a skinned..."

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 21:20:35 -0600

“He strips me away to my last nakedness, that underskin of mauve, pearlized satin, like a skinned rabbit; then dresses me again in an embrace so lucid and encompasing that it might be made of water. And shakes over me dead leaves as into the stream I have become.”

- Angela Carter, The Erl-King

Giant Saint Everything

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 20:01:15 -0600

There were days I wanted out.
But then You would go and do things
like dive into the Vancouver ocean,
big brilliant cliché poem that You are,
water rolling off Your back
as You swam toward a sunset
that hung like a sacred recipe painted
all the way around Your holy head.

And then there were the ways You watched me
moving back into my cave where the wheels turn,
same wheels that drove You off.
I should have told You
before talking in terms of Forever
that any given day wears me out and works me sour,
that there are nights when the sky is so clear
I stand obnoxious underneath it
begging for the stars to shoot at me
just so I can feel at Home.

by Buddy Wakefield, from Live for a Living

"Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are."

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 18:40:39 -0600

“Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are.”

- André Breton

"Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the..."

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 17:20:34 -0600

“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt”

- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

"This is how the entire course of life can be changed – by doing nothing. On Chesil beach he could..."

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 16:01:17 -0600

“This is how the entire course of life can be changed – by doing nothing. On Chesil beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back. Instead, he stood in cold and righteous silence in the summer’s dusk, watching her hurry along the shore, the sound of her difficult progress lost to the breaking of small waves, until she was blurred, receding against the immense straight road of shingle gleaming in the pallid light”

- Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

"The truth of the matter is that—by an exorbitant paradox—I never stop believing that I am loved. I..."

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 14:40:27 -0600

“The truth of the matter is that—by an exorbitant paradox—I never stop believing that I am loved. I hallucinate what I desire. Each wound proceeds less from a doubt than from a betrayal: for only the one who loves can betray, only the one who believes himself loved can be jealous: that the other, episodically, should fail in his being, which is to love me—that is the origin of all my woes. A delirium, however, does not exist unless one wakens from it(there are only retrospective deliriums): one day, I realize what has happened to me: I thought I was suffering from not being loved, and yet it is because I thought I was loved that I was suffering; I lived in the complication of supposing myself simultaneously loved and abandoned. Anyone hearing my intimate language would have had to exclaim, as of a difficult child: But after all, what does he want?”

- Roland Barthes, A Lovers’ Discourse: Fragments

Gee, You're so Beautiful That It's Starting to Rain

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 13:20:32 -0600

Oh, Marcia,
I want your long blonde beauty
to be taught in high school,
so kids will learn that God
lives like music in the skin
and sounds like a sunshine harpsicord.
I want high school report cards
to look like this:

Playing with Gentle Glass Things
A

Computer Magic
A

Writing Letters to Those You Love
A

Finding out about Fish
A

Marcia’s Long Blonde Beauty
A+!

- Richard Brautigan, from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster

"Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is,..."

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 22:40:17 -0600

““Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.””

- Leo Tolstoy

We Were Emergencies

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 22:18:34 -0600

from Gentleman Practice by Buddy Wakefield

We can stick anything into the fog
and make it look like a ghost
but tonight
let us not become tragedies.
We are not funeral homes
with propane tanks in our windows,
lookin’ like cemeteries.
Cemeteries are just the Earth’s way of not letting go.
Let go.

Tonight
let’s turn our silly wrists so far backwards
the razor blades in our pencil tips
can’t get a good angle on all that beauty inside.
Step into this
with your airplane parts.
Move forward
and repeat after me with your heart:

“I no longer need you to fuck me as hard as I hated myself.”

Make love to me
like you know I am better
than the worst thing I ever did.
Go slow.
I’m new to this.
But I have seen nearly every city from a rooftop
without jumping.
I have realized

that the moon
did not have to be full for us to love it,
that we are not tragedies
stranded here beneath it,
that if my heart
really broke
every time I fell from love
I’d be able to offer you confetti by now.

But hearts don’t break,
y’all,
they bruise and get better.
We were never tragedies.
We were emergencies.
You call 9 – 1 – 1.
Tell them I’m having a fantastic time.

"Let us suppose that I have wept, on account of some incident of which the other has not even become..."

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 19:44:19 -0500

“Let us suppose that I have wept, on account of some incident of which the other has not even become aware (to weep is part of the normal activity of the amorous body), and that, so this cannot be seen, I put on dark glasses to mask my swollen eyes (a fine example of denial: to darken the sight in order not to be seen). The intention of this gesture is a calculated one: I want to keep the moral advantage of stoicism, of “dignity” (I take myself for Clotilde de Vaux), and at the same time, contradictorily, I want to provoke the tender question (”But what’s the matter with you?”); I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby I gamble, I take a risk: for it is always possible that the other will simply ask no question whatever about these unaccustomed glasses; that the other will see, in the fact, no sign.”

- Roland Barthes, A Lovers’ Discourse: Fragments

"She was breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the weight of beings, the insane or static life, the..."

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 19:34:34 -0500

““She was breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the weight of beings, the insane or static life, the long anguish of living or dying. After so many years running from fear, fleeing crazily, uselessly, she was finally coming to a halt. At the same time she seemed to be recovering her roots, and the sap rose anew in her body, which was no longer trembling. Pressing her whole belly against the parapet, leaning toward the wheeling sky, she was only waiting for her pounding heart to settle down, and for the silence to form in her. The last constellations of stars fell in bunches a little lower on the horizon of the desert, and stood motionless. Then, with an unbearable sweetness, the waters of the night began to fill her, submerging the cold, rising gradually to the center of her being, and overflowing wave upon wave to her moaning mouth. A moment later, the whole sky stretched out above her as she lay with her back against the cold earth.””

- Albert Camus, The Adulterous Woman

"You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are..."

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:01:00 -0500

““You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.””

- Louise Erdich