"Literary Archaeology" by Anna Clark
A great piece on a new-to-be-published work by Rukeyser (that sounds great) and on recovering lost/forgotten/maligned works!
Each language is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
—Jean Paul
I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.
I shall be a clinger to the outside of words all my life.
—Virginia Woolf, The Waves
For speech is self-expression and escapes itself.
—Hans-Georg Gadamer
When the Lights Shut Off: Kendrick Lamar and the Decline of the Black Blues Narrative by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah
The best write-up of a hip-hop album I’ve read in a very long time.
“Unlikely Materials” by Dean Young
Continued soggy in the personal today
although two strangers smiled at me,
one because I couldn’t open a plastic bag
either, the other because I stepped aside
as if I was holding the door for her
even though it was an automatic door.
The peaches, first of the season, were tiny
and powerful as baby rattlesnakes.
A branch had fallen on the driveway
by the time I got home like a friendly arm
over a shoulder so I sat in the car
listening to the rain try to find its melody,
not wanting to flunk my student for not
turning in his twenty pages of clouds
after promising he would. You’re singing
I said almost every class. Don’t forget
you’re singing. Even in the heart
of an artichoke, there’s probably a god.
Energy is stored in the tri-phosphate bond
then released when that bond is broken.
Is that why everything’s so difficult?
One big pearl, said the Buddha, then glanced
shyly around to make sure no one understood.
We know only that the spirit is not matter,
is not sap stilling in the veins
or even mist coalesced of the last breath,
sang Orpheus before being torn apart.
The Threepenny Review
Winter 2013
Joy by Zadie Smith
You should read this essay.
a fragment of something I’ve been thinking about
Last night, as we watched Hamlet in the quad on campus, ash slowly fell on all of us. It was coming from the forest fires nearby, over the mountains a little ways, and the smoke had been filling our valley all day, covering the sky, giving students and faculty headaches, turning the sunlight a strange orange or yellow as if someone had changed the aperture of the scene and we’d all walked unsuspectingly into a photograph now without any green.
The ash as it fell would sometimes fall in particles on someone’s sweater, or dog, or their blanket they’d laid in the grass. But, sometimes, the pieces of ash remained whole, still retained the shape of the leaves that they had been: a pine needle, the instep of an upward curve in a dry leaf still maintaining the vein lines and the shading it had held on the forest floor.
Ash fell on all of us, but when I tried to catch a piece as if it were a snowflake floating down it swung out and back, evading my hand.
Winter Wow. Missoula, MT. Peace to you.
Sufjan’s show last night was great. First show I’d been to in a while, and completely followed through on all of the Christmas Cheer and great older songs I was hoping for.
And this is where I live now!
Been working on some projects, have just a few days left of finals for my first semester of grad school, and then I’ll update you on what’s coming next, I’m sure. Trying to do some more writing for myself lately. Can’t wait to get back to work on some things after the next few days.
Good luck to you, and the beginnings of your winters! Hope they’re just as great as what’s happening in Missoula right now.
