February 2012
11 posts
2 tags
“We do not truly speak except at a distance. There is no word not severed.”
– Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (via proustitute)
2 tags
5 tags
“Imagine walking into a place, say a mega-chain copy shop in a strip mall. It’s...”
– John Jeremiah Sullivan, on David Foster Wallace (via sometimesagreatnotion)
3 tags
“An angle of light. Believe in it.”
– Ana Božičević, from “Death, Is All” (via proustitute)
2 tags
“‘Words and things’ is the entirely serious title of a problem.”
– Michel Foucault (via allbecause)
4 tags
3 tags
4 tags
“You start with your own body
then move outward, but not too far.
Never try to...”
– “How to be Happy: Another Memo to Myself,” Stephen Dunn (via clavicola)
4 tags
“I couldn’t name it, the sweet
sadness welling up in me for weeks.
So I...”
– Dorianne Laux, “After Twelve Days of Rain” (via grammatolatry)
4 tags
“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know’.”
– Wislawa Szymborska, from her Nobel Prize acceptance speech (via kateoplis)
3 tags
“The proximity of distance.”
– Anna Kamienska, from “In That Great River,” trans. Clare Cavanagh (via proustitute)
January 2012
22 posts
2 tags
3 tags
“I will show that there is no speech without a response, even if speech meets...”
– Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (via proustitute)
5 tags
“There is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of...”
– William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (via thegirlandherbooks)
3 tags
“love’s function is to fabricate unknownness”
– e. e. cummings, from 100 Selected Poems (via proustitute)
3 tags
“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in...”
– Ezra Pound (via wordpainting)
5 tags
“I wish that I had spoken only of it all.”
– Gertrude Stein, from “Stanzas in Meditation” (via proustitute)
4 tags
“People come through the gateway, people in streams and clusters, in mass...”
– Don Delillo. [There are many things that need to be said about The Names. This will have to do for now.] (via allbecause)
2 tags
3 tags
5 tags
“There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow...”
– Annie Dillard, from Holy the Firm (via petitchou)
5 tags
“What is this desire that nothing can change or deflect when everything changes?...”
– Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII, trans. Russell Grigg (via proustitute)
2 tags
“My silences are immaculate.”
– Roberto Bolaño, from By Night in Chile (via aubade)
7 tags
“My confession is acknowledged between the palms of my hands.”
– Péter Nádas, Love, trans. Imre Goldstein (via proustitute)
6 tags
“To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was.’ It...”
– Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940)
4 tags
2 tags
“Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.”
– Jean Cocteau (1889-1930, France) [via artchipel] (via rerylikes)
2 tags
5 tags
“Do write me. I feel annoyingly out of date on you.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
(via nomoreundead)
2 tags
3 tags
“Basically there are only prayers. Whether one paints or mows, already in the...”
– Rainer Marie Rilke. (via carpentrix)
7 tags
New Year's Day
The rain this morning falls on the last of the snow and will wash it away. I can smell the grass again, and the torn leaves being eased down into the mud. The few loves I’ve been allowed to keep are still sleeping on the West Coast. Here in Virginia I walk across the fields with only a few young cows for company. Big-boned and shy, they are like girls I remember from junior high, who...
December 2011
12 posts
6 tags
Still Falling for Her
The phlox in the jar is softening, from the sphere of it a blossom flutters, and the whole sagging thing makes me think of my mother’s flesh, when she was elderly, and it was wilting, keeping its prettiness in its old-fangled gentleness. It’s as if I’m falling in love, again, with my mother, through the gallowsglass of my own oncoming elderliness, as if, now that she has been gone from the...
2 tags
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
– Thomas Merton (Thank you, libraryland)
2 tags
“Love is distinct from desire… Because its aim is not satisfaction, but being.”
– Jacques Lacan, Seminar I, trans. John Forrester (via proustitute)
2 tags
“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature...”
– Søren Kierkegaard (via bardsandsages)
6 tags
“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves...”
– Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (via weelittleactress)
2 tags
“Never be serious for too long.”
– Dr. Stanley Hughes (via imasuperlame)
9 tags
Robert Hass, "A Story about the Body"
The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she mused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her...
5 tags
“Beginnings are brutal, like this accident
of stars colliding, mute explosions...”
– Each Sound, Dorianne Laux
(via grammatolatry)
5 tags
Jacques Réda, "The Letter Scale"
One of the objects I’ve treasured most in my life Is this letter scale which, long ago, you gave me. I was an active correspondent at the time, Even sending lots of letters overseas. While still enjoying the pleasure of going to the post, I now had another: assessing exactly, in advance, At my counter, the cost of packets and envelopes, To which, price list in hand, I stuck my stamps. I use it...
5 tags
“Would lightning do? Would a new watch?
There aren’t going to be any plums, red...”
– “Sonnet” by Rick Barot (via clavicola)
4 tags
“The half-stripped trees
struck by a wind together,
bending all,
the leaves...”
– William Carlos Williams, “Approach of Winter” (via proustitute)
1 tag
poetbabble:
You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.
-Joan Didion
November 2011
39 posts
4 tags
Brutal
Brutal to give
the prisoner a window—
a blue sky glimpse—
as if an afterlife
existed. Brutal
for you to parade
in a body
in the same
room where I dream you.
Andrea Cohen
1 tag
“The immense space suddenly becomes vacant: then illuminated.”
– Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 2 February 1940 (via proustitute)
6 tags
5 tags
[We Watched Ravens...]
rabbit-light:
We watched ravens ransack the truck-stop trashcans, plastic blowing across the blacktop out onto the desert, catching on fence-wire, blooms of styrofoam in the tumbleweed. As long as we were not speaking, I wouldn’t hear what I was afraid you’d say. I wouldn’t say the words I’d be sorry for. Doesn’t the wind need to rest? A motley sparrow turned his working, calico eye to...
7 tags
Rebecca Solnit: Ms. Civil Society v. Mr.... →
Regardless of some things, probably the best thing I’ve read so far on the Occupy Movement.