Wednesday, December 26, 2012
Monday, December 17, 2012
"My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth."
"What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—"
-Hamlet
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Sam Riley, you may have done it again.
http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/ontheroad/
"They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn..."
"They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn..."
Monday, December 10, 2012
Minot, Evening
“Hope is a terrible thing, she said.
Is it?
Yes, it keep you living in another place, a place which doesn't exist. For some people it's better than where they are. For many it's a relief.
From life, she said.
A relief from life? Is that living?
Some people don't have a choice.
No and that's awful for them.
Hope is better than misery, he said.
Or despair.
Hope belongs in the same box as despair.
Hope is not so bad, he said.
At least despair has truth to it.”
30 Rock
Jack Donaghy: My mother is in town. She insist on traveling on Pearl Harbor day to, and I quote, "Show the Emperor we're not afraid."
Liz Lemon: I know she gets under your skin but you should appreciate this time with her. She's 87.
Jack: That's only 14 in demon years.
Since I don't really sleep anymore
I spend my nights watching film after film and reading (unassigned *gasp*) books.
Last night I reread Susan Minot's Evening and was struck, once again, by a book that for several years was a favorite. I hadn't picked it up in almost five years and the effect was a replica of the first time. It is an aching work of how longing, loss, and the heart intersect to destroy and rebuild a woman on her deathbed as she recalls her first, true, love. My copy of the book is riddled with notes of my own love that connected me viscerally to the text. Perhaps that's why I love it so much. Regardless, it's brilliant, extraordinarily moving, and within its pages is one of my favorite love scenes of any book, ever.
"She watched the wall of fog and felt his heart against her shoulder. The fog got inside ... Here, he said and pressed against her. I want to crush you."
“She was pulling a rope out of the water and knew it was coming to the end when the barnacles started to appear and they became more think and clustered. Then it was strangely peaceful and the sound was turned off. She stood at the bow of a ship. If only she could have stood this way above the water and really breathed and let the waves go by like pages being turned and watched everything more closely and chosen things more carefully then she might have been able to read the spirit within herself and would not have spent her life as if she were only halfway in it.
For a moment she felt an astonishing brilliance and heat and light and all of herself flared up and the vibration after sixty-five years was not weakened by time but more dense then suddenly it was as if the flame had caught the flimsiest piece of paper for it flickered up and flew into the air then quickly sank down withered into a thin cinder of ash which blew off, inconsequential. Her life had not been long enough for her to know the whole of herself, it had not been long enough or wide.”
Last night I reread Susan Minot's Evening and was struck, once again, by a book that for several years was a favorite. I hadn't picked it up in almost five years and the effect was a replica of the first time. It is an aching work of how longing, loss, and the heart intersect to destroy and rebuild a woman on her deathbed as she recalls her first, true, love. My copy of the book is riddled with notes of my own love that connected me viscerally to the text. Perhaps that's why I love it so much. Regardless, it's brilliant, extraordinarily moving, and within its pages is one of my favorite love scenes of any book, ever.
"She watched the wall of fog and felt his heart against her shoulder. The fog got inside ... Here, he said and pressed against her. I want to crush you."
“She was pulling a rope out of the water and knew it was coming to the end when the barnacles started to appear and they became more think and clustered. Then it was strangely peaceful and the sound was turned off. She stood at the bow of a ship. If only she could have stood this way above the water and really breathed and let the waves go by like pages being turned and watched everything more closely and chosen things more carefully then she might have been able to read the spirit within herself and would not have spent her life as if she were only halfway in it.
For a moment she felt an astonishing brilliance and heat and light and all of herself flared up and the vibration after sixty-five years was not weakened by time but more dense then suddenly it was as if the flame had caught the flimsiest piece of paper for it flickered up and flew into the air then quickly sank down withered into a thin cinder of ash which blew off, inconsequential. Her life had not been long enough for her to know the whole of herself, it had not been long enough or wide.”
Sunday, December 9, 2012
R. Haas
"There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river..."
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Proulx
“There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it."
"I cannot read what is in his eyes: if it is terror, then I have never seen terror"
“Much has been written of love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say.” -James Baldwin
Friday, December 7, 2012
My grief is deadly
"Sadly one Sunday, I waited and waited
With flowers in my arms, for the grief I'd created
I waited 'til dreams like my heart were all broken
The flowers were all dead and the words were unspoken
The grief that I knew was beyond all consoling
The beat of my heart was a bell that was tolling"
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Richard III
"I would they were, that I might die at once,
For now they kill me with a living death.
Those eyes of thine from mine have drawn salt tears,
Shamed their aspect with store of childish drops.
These eyes, which never shed remorseful tear—
No, when my father York and Edward wept
To hear the piteous moan that Rutland made
When black-faced Clifford shook his sword at him;
Nor when thy warlike father, like a child,
Told the sad story of my father’s death
And twenty times made pause to sob and weep,
That all the standers-by had wet their cheeks
Like trees bedashed with rain—in that sad time,
My manly eyes did scorn an humble tear;
And what these sorrows could not thence exhale
Thy beauty hath, and made them blind with weeping.
I never sued to friend, nor enemy;
My tongue could never learn sweet smoothing word.
But now thy beauty is proposed my fee,
My proud heart sues, and prompts my tongue to speak."
Dioramas Inspired by 19th-Century Women Novelists
http://m.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/11/dioramas-inspired-by-19th-century-women-novelists/265664/
Jane Eyre. Wuthering Heights. The Awakening. The Lifted Veil. "The Yellow Wallpaper." What these works have in common is, of course, that they're all pieces of fiction written by women authors in the 19th century. Undoubtedly as a result, they all share an explicit or latent fixation with the domestic sphere to which so many women were relegated at the time -- and with the psychological implications of that confinement.
These are the subjects of Julia Callon's Houses of Fiction, a series of photographed models that depict rooms from these novels, exploring both their sedate surfaces and their chaotic subtext. "The dichotomous representation of women -- mad or sane -- is crucial to represent in this series," Callon writes. "Therefore, each story is presented as a diptych: one image represents the passive, subservient woman, while the other represents 'madness.'" Below are selections from Houses of Fiction, which we spotted via Eyresses, and visit Callon's website for more of her work and information on how to purchase the photos.
Julia Callon, The Yellow Wallpaper
Julia Callon, Wuthering Heights
Julia Callon, Jane Eyre
"Then tears come, and like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up"
"It is a strange
world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and
troubles. And yet when King Laugh come, he make them
all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry
bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall, all
dance together to the music that he make with that
smileless mouth of him.
Ah, we men and women
are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different
ways. Then tears come, and like the rain on the ropes,
they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too
great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the
sunshine, and he ease off the strain again, and we bear to
go on with our labor, what it may be."
-Bram Stoker
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
"I live here on my knees"
In unfortunately more than one way, the aptly titled and much posted "Addiction" never looses its personal poignance.
Monday, December 3, 2012
My love's hair is autumn hair, there
the sun ripens.
My fingers harvest the dark
vegetable of her body.
In the morning I remove it
from my tongue and
sleep again.
Hair spills
through my dreams, sprouts
from my stomach, thickens my heart,
and tangles the brain. Hair ties the tongue dumb.
-Li Young-Lee
The Mills Brothers
"You always hurt the one you love
The one you shouldn't hurt at all
You always take the sweetest rose
And crush it 'till the petals fall
You always break the kindest heart
With a hasty word you can't recall, so
If I broke your heart last night
It's because I love you most of all."
The one you shouldn't hurt at all
You always take the sweetest rose
And crush it 'till the petals fall
You always break the kindest heart
With a hasty word you can't recall, so
If I broke your heart last night
It's because I love you most of all."
"Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity and ruin."
“Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings
have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead
calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the
soul both of hope and fear.”
Saturday, December 1, 2012
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