February 2012
62 posts
bitter
tonight i came home, walked into my room to a neatly stacked pile of: chocolate doughnuts, a giant bag of kit kats, a giant bag of pistachios, a cute little crop top that says “paris nights, london mornings”, and a one hundred dollar bill with “we love you” written on it tucked inside a pretty little card
sometimes my mom gets me
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and then i got pulled over for “speeding” 7mph over the limit and passing the cop on the highway (bitch) and he let me go because it was my birthday
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“nothing is as completely there as it once was in childhood; everything you touch, including your inmost self, is more or less congealed from the moment you have achieved your ‘personality’ and what’s left is a ghostly hanging thread of self awareness and murky self regard, wrapped up in a wholly external existence.”
robert musil, the man without qualities, 1942
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“nothing has to stand out. sense, colour, composition, inner energy in action, all in ideal proportion. image is my language. it contains all the necessary information. if i need words they appear in my pictures. what is significant in life, in art? in life it is love; in art it is the inner energy in action. i am fascinated by theatre. therefore i “play” my paintings. every picture reveals...
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some feel rain by joanna klink
some feel rain. some feel the beetle startle in its ghost-part when the bark slips. some feel musk. asleep against each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there. when it falls apart, some feel the moondark air drop its motes to the patch-thick slopes of snow. tiny blinkings of ice from the oak, a boot-beat that comes and goes, the line of prayer you can follow...
there’s a sickly sweetness to the end of a day, the kind of scent i associate with bruised fruit or spilled perfumes or antique dresses, faint but omnipresent. i shake out my clothes, my sheets, the covers of my textbook, but it lingers, the softly rotting core of a sunset
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“there comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. and then you accept it. or you kill yourself. or you stop looking in mirrors.”
tennessee williams
there’s something feral about sirens, their keening wildness. i couldn’t see the truck but i could imagine it, a bloody tear in the seams of the darkened streets, a cacophony of flashing lights in schizophrenic symphony with muted night sounds, that slow glissando of moonlight. i wondered who they were coming for, those sirens. a fire, i supposed. close by? i wondered if i leaned out my window, if...
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“human beings are like rivers—the water in all of them, and at every point, is the same, and each of them narrow at one point and swift at others, wide at some points, calm at others, clear at some points, cold at others, muddy at some points, warm at others.”
leo tolstoy, resurrection, 1899
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“my heart is a dubious object at best, blotchy and treacherous.”
margaret atwood, cat’s eye, 1988
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finding it oddly difficult to function today
i feel strange
“(so i dream, falling off the edge of the earth at night when my bed floats suspended) embrace the entire world, i must go through the antics of the individual. i must start when you pluck at me with your children, your poems, your chilblains or whatever it is that you do and suffer. but i am not deluded. after all these callings hither and thither, these pluckings and searchings, i shall...
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“day is falling, the fire is dying, and i’ll soon have to stop writing, obliged by the cold to retract my hands. with the curtains drawn aside, i can make out the silence and the snow through the window panes. under a low sky, this infinite silence weighs on me and frightens me. it lies heavy like the intangible presence of bodies laid out in death.”
georges bataille, la haine de la...
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“it was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, i laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.”
albert camus, the stranger, 1942
“do you know what i was smiling at? you wrote down that you were a writer by profession. it sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism i had ever heard. when was writing ever your profession? it’s never been anything but your religion.”
j.d. salinger, seymour: an introduction, 1959
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preludes, part iii and iv by t.s. eliot
iii you tossed a blanket from the bed you lay upon your back, and waited; you dozed, and watched the night revealing the thousand sordid images of which your soul was constituted; they flickered against the ceiling. and when all the world came back and the light crept up between the shutters and you heard the sparrows in the gutters, you had such a...
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what i do on valentine’s day:
sit in the corner of a coffee shop alone and blog about sitting in the corner of a coffee shop alone
“sensuality does not wear a watch but she always gets to the essential places on time. she is adventurous and not particularly quiet. she was reprimanded in grade school because she couldn’t sit still all day long. she needs to move. she thinks with her body. even when she goes to the library to read emily dickinson or emily brontë, she starts reading out loud and swaying with the words, and...
“i’m never going to accomplish anything; that’s perfectly clear to me. i’m never going to be famous. my name will never be writ large on the roster of those who do things. i don’t do anything. not one single thing. i used to bite my nails, but i don’t even do that any more.”
dorothy parker, “the little hours” in here lies, 1939
“it was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.”
anthony burgess, a clockwork orange, 1962
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“it’s a sorry story you have there, a story of hopelessness and futility, a story in which there is literally nothing to be done. man is flawed, so he keeps on screwing up what should be paradise, and there’s nothing you can do about it. you don’t know how to live so as to stop screwing up paradise, and there’s nothing you can do about that. so there you are, rushing headlong toward...
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“my hands want to hide in your hair, slowly stroke the depth of your hair while we kiss with mouths full of flowers or fish, of living movements, of dark fragrance. and if we bite each other, the pain is sweet, and if we drown in a short and terrible surge of breath, that instant death is beauty. and there is a single saliva and a single flavour of ripe fruit, and i can feel you shiver...
“that poet she met… the night before argued that no matter how much of it one lost, in the midst of some profound confusion, one would revert to one’s mother tongue… what language, he asked looking pointedly into her eyes, did she love in?”
julia alvarez, how the garcía girls lost their accents, 2001
i look into his face and he looks back. i look into his eyes and they look back at mine. then they look down at my mouth so i look at his mouth and then back to his eyes, then backing up, at his whole face. i think, who? who are you? his head tilts to one side.
i say, “who are you?” “what do you mean?” “nothing.” i look at his eyes again, deeper. can’t tell who he is, what he thinks. “what?” he...