February 2012
2 posts
dallasclayton:
DAILY The hardest trick to learn is how to be relaxed and happy while you are grinding away at the job that will eventually afford you the luxury of being relaxed and happy.
January 2012
20 posts
Isn’t she one of the most harrowing victims of the plan of bringing up our girls in the double bondage of expediency and unreality, corrupting their bodies with luxury and their brains with sentiment, and leaving them to reconcile the two as best they can, or lose their souls in the attempt?
Edith Wharton/ The Fruit of the Tree
Poem at Thirty The rich little kids across the street twist their swings in knots. Near me, on the porch, wasps jazz old nesting tunes and don't get wild over human sweat. This is the first summer of my middle life. I ought to be content. The mindless harsh process of history; with its diverse murders and starvations, its whippings, humiliations, child-tyrants, and beasts, I don't care for or...
Anemones and Lilac in a Blue Vase, Redon
My name is Etah, he said, with an h at the end. Understood, I said. And you are Father Urrutia Lacroix. The very same, I said. Beside me, Mr. Raef was smiling and nodding without a word. Urrutia is a Basque name, isn’t it? It is indeed, I said. Lacroix, of course, is French. Mr Raef and I nodded in time. Do you know where the name Etah comes from? I have no idea, I said. Take a guess,...
“The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the...
I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I’ll never see a tree at all.
-Ogden Nash
The Cuckoo Calls from the Bamboo Grove The cuckoo calls from the bamboo grove. Cherry blossoms litter the path. A girl walks under the full moon, Trailing her silk skirts in the grass. - Anonymous (Six Dynasties) (Translated by Kenneth Rexroth)
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO LINKY You are three O joy to be three! All around Linky Smiles and trees and sunbeams Jump and sing and twirl Sweet boy with the curls Joy to the garbage truck and the train The pirate’s story and the tractor’s crane Joy to Mommy, Daddy, and Oscar-baby And hot dogs, ice-cream, and the potty! You are three, what a great thing to be! All around Linky is a world Bursting with...
Beach at Scheveningen in Calm Weather, 1882/ Van Gogh
Orpheus leading Eurydice from the Underworld, 1861/ Corot
The most famous story in which Orpheus figures is that of his wife Eurydice (sometimes referred to as Euridice and also known as Agricope). While walking among her people, the Cicones, in tall grass at her wedding, Eurydice was set upon by a satyr. In her efforts to escape the satyr, Eurydice fell into a nest of vipers and she...
Rue de village, Auvers-sur-Oise, 1873/ Pissarro
Every branch of mine which does not bear fruit, He takes away. And every one which bears fruit, He prunes that it may bear more fruit. John 15:2 (via Jen)
What I want & have as my aim is infernally difficult to achieve, and yet I don’t think I am raising my sights too high. I want to do drawings that will touch some people… What I want to express, in both figure and landscape, isn’t anything sentimental or melancholy, but deep anguish. In short, I want to get to the point where people say of my work: that man feels deeply,...
Gray Room Although you sit in a room that is gray, Except for the silver Of the straw-paper, … And pick At your pale white gown; Or lift one of the green beads Of your necklace, To let it fall; Or gaze at your green fan Printed with the red branches of a red willow; Or, with one finger, Move the leaf in the bowl- The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia Beside...
Some 2012 resolutions:
Be kind
Avoid judgement, especially on myself
Eat less meat
Scale back sweatpants, spruce up appearance/spruce up mind
Be humble
Say good morning
Be happy for others
Avoid texting as a real means of communication, call instead
Play the piano in the morning
No lingering on bad thoughts, no rolling around in bed brooding
Believe in self
Seek out animal friends
...
Doctor Reefy was a tall man who had worn one suit of clothes for ten years. It was frayed at the sleeves and little holes had appeared at the knees and elbows. In the office he wore also a linen duster with huge pockets into which he continually stuffed scraps of paper. After some weeks the scraps of paper became little hard round balls, and when the pockets were filled he dumped them out...
Paris Review interview with Isak Dinesen in 1956: DINESEN I live on the North Sea, halfway between Copenhagen and Elsinore. INTERVIEWER Perhaps halfway between Shiraz and Atlantis? DINESEN … Halfway between that island in The Tempest and wherever I am. (Waiter takes order; luncheon is served.) DINESEN I’ll have a cigarette now. Do you mind if we just stay here for a while? I hate to...
December 2011
1 post
If I was to call the magazine editor who used to invite me to his fancy canyon house parties, and ask him directly why he stopped inviting me over- Is it because you didn’t like my shoes? Was I too nervous/obviously green? Not an heiress? Overall pretty illegitimate?- what would he say? I am curious about his disappearance because it makes me question whether I was “interesting” enough, and it’s...
November 2011
3 posts
I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait
without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing;...
October 2011
3 posts
The Door When she came suddenly in It seemed the door could never close again, Nor even did she close it-she, she- The room lay open to a visiting sea Which no door could restrain. Yet when at last she smiled, tilting her head To take her leave of me, Where she had smiled, instead There was a dark door closing endlessly, The waves receded. Robert Graves
Liszt, young and old
September 2011
4 posts
tulips/ stanley ave./ 2007
i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay great happening illimitably earth) how should tasting touching hearing...
August 2011
3 posts
letter to mary karr, from her sister, after the publication of karr’s memoir, the liar’s club
Fear of the Future by John Koethe In the end one simply withdraws From others and time, one's own time, Becoming an imaginary Everyman Inhabiting a few rooms, personifying The urge to tend one's garden, A character of no strong attachments Who made nothing happen, and to whom Nothing ever actually happened—a fictitious Man whose life was over from the start, Like a diary or a daybook whose poems...
June 2011
4 posts
Still I said I will find what is lowly and put the roots of my identity down there: each day I'll wake up and find the lowly nearby, a handy focus and reminder, a ready measure of my significance, the voice by which I would be heard, the wills, the kinds of selfishness I could freely adopt as my own: but though I have looked everywhere, I can find nothing to give myself to: everything is...
In View of the Fact The people of my time are passing away: my wife is baking for a funeral, a 60-year-old who died suddenly, when the phone rings, and it's Ruth we care so much about in intensive care: it was once weddings that came so thick and fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo: now, it's this that and the other and somebody else gone or on the brink: well, we never thought we...
May 2011
8 posts
sixteen
December 30
At 1:30 in the morning a fart
smells like a marriage between
an avocado and a fish head.
I have to get out of bed
to write this down without
my glasses on.
-Richard Brautigan
About the Party I loved seeing you the other night (and I think everyone noticed!) which was the first time I’m estimating since the Oak Street Psychic Fair when I first saw your ears as the two beautiful pink wheels they are and your powerful boyfriend unnecessarily claimed that I only spread unhappiness with my harmonica playing. People see each other all the time and they can’t...
If back in the day it was standard procedure for a man to, say, open the car door for a woman, and nowadays this kind of thing would be way too nice to believe, what was the way too nice to believe thing that men did back in the day?
dallasclayton:
SLUMBER PARTY Your life was once so care free that you combined sleeping and partying into a single event.
She may be weary/ Women do get weary/ Wearing the same shabby dress/ And when she’s weary/ Try a little tenderness
You know she’s waiting/ Just anticipating things she may never possess/ While she’s without them/ Try a little tenderness
It’s not just sentimental/ She has her grief and care/ And a word that’s soft and gentle/ Makes it easier to bear
You...
April 2011
4 posts
