December 2011
1 post
5 tags
“Soft stockings coddle them by day and nail-bossed leather shoes buttress them,...”
– “Toenails” — Dreamtigers, Jorge Luis Borges
Although, it is a myth that the nails and hair continue to grow after death.
November 2011
3 posts
How can something die if it is nurtured, daily. The clover did. (What was its secret?) Was it a jarring death, in that jar? Did it hurt? Emptied out, no scars mar these smooth glass curves, where I am ready for reuse.
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“Epithalamion? Not too long back
I was being ironic about “wives.”...”
– Marilyn Hacker, “On Marriage” — Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons
September 2011
5 posts
2 tags
Remember when I knotted us in narrative, knitted us an atmosphere out of those cruel letters. Letters spelling words one after another, forcing lines, forcing action and the passage of time. I bent them, made them chase each others’ tails in what I thought was a protective ouroboros we could be safe within.
Keep them up there, in the far off sky. The world revolves, while we stay...
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August 2011
10 posts
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“‘We had quickly discovered our common love of the instrument,’ Miles...”
– Thomas Pynchon, Against The Day
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I would like someone to write me a love song that rhymes “baby” with “trajectory”.
“I obey the body’s loudest voices without question, which tends to involve a...”
– Joanna Newsom
A few days ago, some people between two to three feet high travelled through my room in an escape from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Alas! Quite a number turned to look behind them, as expressly forbidden by God, and promptly turned into pillars of clothes. And that, friends, is why my room looks like this.
It was there for a moment, I’d swear it: a perfect face formed for less than a second by the vegetables in my soup. An unrepeatable event, a slip of the tongue, a too obvious message from the guardians of metaphor.
It’s only defense mechanisms that have us seeing faces in facelessness.
Soup is soup is soup.
1 tag
What's in a name
Once, when I was a kid, I signed a note left for my mother with the name Ray, intending the name as my new handle. Ray is homonymous with the first syllable of my first name, Raelene, and its gender ambiguity, along with its being the name of my godfather, made it preferable to what I felt was the awkwardness of Rae. Not that I fully understood gender ambiguity at age eight; I was just a tomboy...
July 2011
14 posts
1 tag
Watch232 years ago, a British scientist named Charles Blagden conducted an experiment to see how much heat a person can take. He designed a room and heated it initially to 211 degrees Fahrenheit—one degree below the temperature water boils at—and had three Englishmen sit in it. Over time, the temperature was increased, and its effect on the subjects recorded. These subjects also included a...
“Regular readers of this column will know the theory that willpower is a...”
– Are the ‘psychic costs’ of resisting temptation heavier if you’re poor?
David Foster Wallace on The Next Real Literary... →
“The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness...
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“A psychologist at a girl’s college asked the members of his class to compliment...”
– W. Lambert Gardiner, Psychology: A Story of a Search, 1970
(via)
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“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are...”
– Gary Provost (via writingadvice)
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Do you want a guide to meeting men? Here it is anyway. Hang out at Northcote Plaza with wet hair, no makeup, and a raging head cold complete with facial tissue rash on upper lip. The gentleman making odd lip smacking sounds as he slowly drove past and stared at me, his elbow hanging out the window and eyebrows raised, was the most charming of my would-be suitors.
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June 2011
12 posts
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Amelia Santiago is an artist living in Portland who makes felted pet portraits sculpted in wool. This gallery of photos from clients is currently my happy place on the internet.
“The only motherfucker I know is from the story of Oedipus.”
– Lawrence Leung, Choose Your Own Adventure
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Stop deliberately destroying your own memories.... →
Filed under: complete asininity. Read if you need to practise rolling your eyes.
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May 2011
33 posts
2 tags
Beware the swear word or cop a fine - ABC News... →
This is why we can’t have satire anymore. A few people have always got to ruin things for the rest of us.
“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness...”
– David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (via fishingboatproceeds)
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“She looked at me a moment as though I had said something that shocked her. Then...”
– - Graham Greene, The Comedians
A reminder to us all, especially to those of us who spend our lives in books.