May 2013
3 posts
1 tag
Having sailed for many days and many nights, I realized that the West has no end, but moves along with us, we can follow it as long as we like without ever reaching it.
{Antonio Tabucchi, The Woman of Porto Pim}
1 tag
2 tags
April 2013
5 posts
2 tags
“[In the margin and underlined:] ‘It’s a question of being alone, in writing.’ V...”
– Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh
(via sketchofthepast)
2 tags
“There are some things a place will not tell you, as if it conspires with its...”
– {Philip Hoare, Leviathan or, The Whale}
2 tags
March 2013
15 posts
2 tags
I am also really scared of crosswind gusts. “You don’t have to arrive,” the instructor said, bitterly, when I must have seemed to concentrate too gravely, on a windy day. “You’re just supposed to land.”
{Renata Adler, Speedboat}
2 tags
1 tag
March is a month in which everything thaws or it doesn’t; the year is nearly half over or it’s not nearly half over yet; it comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb or it doesn’t; it comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion or it does neither, or both; Julius Caesar was killed or he wasn’t; someone drove the snakes out of Ireland or they didn’t; it’s...
2 tags
2 tags
1 tag
On Nantucket
New England is these words, the kind that simultaneously offer innate comfort in their rhythm and require the formation of the alphabet’s most forceful letters. Nantucket. Angela Carter wrote of New England: these names like meals of stones. Nantucket. The word itself is an island, an obtrusive rock, a sturdy presence, a decision. Nantucket. A forceful aunt comes to mind, one you’d...
2 tags
{Linda Vachon}
***
But March, forgive me —
And all those hills you left for me to Hue —
There was no Purple suitable —
You took it all with you —
{Emily Dickinson}
1 tag
Walking north, Basho “came to imagine his travels as conversations between a ghost and a ghost-to-be.”
{invisiblestories, No. 117}
3 tags
2 tags
“I stand on the shores of America and make my cry into the dark. Yours is the...”
– {Joseph Conrad}
A Poem For Children With Thoughts On Death
is a great title. (1782)
3 tags
2 tags
February 2013
20 posts
1 tag
“It hung on the salty wind like a scrap of tune from a hymnal, a hymn about...”
– {Joy Williams, The Changeling}
3 tags
3 tags
February almost March bites the cold. Take down a book, wind pours in…
{Lorine Niedecker}
(Via mythologyofblue)
“I was often afraid in those days, more than a little sometimes: afraid that...”
– {Keith Waldrop, Light While There is Light}
1 tag
Returning from Tahoe
As I recall hearing it the first time, five or so people drowned in Lake Tahoe in the late nineteenth century, and it wasn’t until decades later that one frigid morning they drifted fully intact to the surface, dressed in what was already anachronistic clothing and looking decidedly not of this world for, by all appearances, having died the day before. I’ve been told that the icy...
2 tags
“I’ve read many stories of revenants and apparitions, but my ghosts merely...”
– Keith Waldrop, Light While There is Light (from S.)
1 tag
“Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which...”
– {Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting}
2 tags
1 tag
1 tag
Ideal Ruin →
…in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent. {Didion}
2 tags
On Hiding
I preferred to remain all alone so I could occupy myself with my pillows. For the ridges of my pillows were familiar ground at a time when hills and mountains did not yet have much to say to me. I was in collusion with the powers that arose from these ridges. Hence, I sometimes arranged things so that a cave opened up in this mountain wall. I crawled inside; I drew the covers over my head and...
1 tag
1 tag
“It was given to me, in the nineteenth century,
to spend a lifetime on this...”
– {Lydia Davis, Our Village, adapted from the memoir of the same name by Sidney Brooks ca. 1867-1877}
1 tag
1 tag
2 tags
January 2013
15 posts
Six Things Art is Not
The arts are not destined, as history is, to organize forgetfulness. Nor to give meaning to meaning’s Other. Nor the besmirch and swallow up the bygone days of the earth. Nor here and now to abolish time’s Elsewhere. Nor to proscribe that languages that predate all natural languages. Nor to wall up the Open.
{Pascal Quignard, The Roving Shadows}
3 tags
“Oh that the lyric mood of the winter — its intense spiritual exaltation...”
– January 26th, 1940
{Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, edited by Leonard Woolf.}
2 tags
“Was not poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”
– {Virginia Woolf, Orlando}
(via sketchofthepast)
3 tags
1 tag
