Mostly quotations. Curated by Semi since back when my VCR (yes) was blinking twelve.
Sunday, December 20, 2020
Phillip Larkin
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
Tuesday, December 08, 2020
David Byrne, “This Must Be the Place”
Sing into my mouth
Out of all those kinds of people
You got a face with a view
Sunday, December 06, 2020
Suzanne Moore
Joan Didion, “On Self Respect”
Friday, November 20, 2020
Sharon Olds, "35/10"
silken hair before the mirror
I see the gray gleaming on my head,
the silver-haired servant behind her. Why is it
just as we begin to go
they begin to arrive, the fold in my neck
clarifying as the fine bones of her
hips sharpen? As my skin shows
its dry pitting, she opens like a small
pale flower on the tip of a cactus;
as my last chances to bear a child
are falling through my body, the duds among them,
her full purse of eggs, gold and
firm as hard-boiled yolks, is about
to snap its clasp. I brush her tangled
fragrant hair at bedtime. It's an old
story—the oldest we have on our planet—
the story of replacement.
Roxane Gay, NYT Op Ed
Tuesday, November 17, 2020
Laurie Moore, "People Like That Are the Only People Here"
How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, after- ward, presses her mouth upon the traveler's mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon return'ing make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye's instructions, is neces- sarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That's where the narrator comes in.
Monday, November 09, 2020
John Armstrong, John Aikin (1804). “The Art of Preserving Health”
Rumi, "The Divers Clothes Lying Empty on the Beach"
in a field at dawn. You are yourself
the animal we hunt when you come with us on the hunt.
You're in your body like a plant is solid in the ground,
yet you're wind. You're the diver's clothes
lying empty on the beach. You're the fish.
...
Sunday, November 08, 2020
Joan Didion, "On Keeping a Notebook"
Saturday, September 12, 2020
Billy Colllin, "Momento Mori"
what a mayfly I am,
what a soap bubble floating over the children's party.
Monday, August 24, 2020
Thursday, July 16, 2020
Sunday, July 05, 2020
Dionne Brand, July 2020
This we fear — this we know — that all of our thoughts will be rushed into editorial pages, used up in committee meetings; all the rich imaginings of activists and thinkers who urge us to live otherwise may be disappeared, modified into reform and inclusion, equity, diversity and palliation.
But I hear what they say and many others do as well, "Look we should never live the way we lived before; our lives need not be framed by the purely extractive, based on nothing but capital." Everything is up in the air, all narratives for the moment have been blown open — the statues are falling — all the metrics are off, if only briefly.