we will make a new world

If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does. Jonathan Safran Foer

Ugly Earring, this photo of you is too beautiful, which explains

why I've seen it all over the web

let us have lunch, katya

For the next few months, I didn't write anything new. And then I returned to write two quick drafts by the following summer. It must have been around this time that I pasted in my journal a portion of a review by James Wood: the critic had narrated a story by Chekhov about an actress, Katya, who has discovered that she has no talent. She asks an older family friend for help and advice: "Tell me, what am I to do?" The man tells her he doesn't know what to do. And then, he says at last, "Let us have lunch, Katya."

Rereading the essay "How to Write a Novel" by Amitava Kumar
Photo via Bakerby

reprise

Les Poppys.

Roberto Bolaño, for instance, wanted to be a spy

Monica Maristain: Have you shed one tear about the widespread criticism you’ve drawn from your enemies?

Roberto Bolaño: Lots and lots. Every time I read that someone has spoken badly of me I begin to cry, I drag myself across the floor, I scratch myself, I stop writing indefinitely, I lose my appetite, I smoke less, I engage in sport, I go for walks on the edge of the sea, which by the way is less than 30 meters from my house and I ask the seagulls, whose ancestors ate the fish who ate Ulysses: Why me? Why? I’ve done you no harm.

Paper Cuts via Maud Newton
Key to the Meaning of Colours via Scout Minami

taking time to make time

Dusty Springfield. And the Golden Goose Pony Boot.

woolgathering & miscellany

This from Woolgathering and some others here and here.

1. dancing in the kitchen all night with my friends
2. girls on motorcycles
3. stories that fit on one page and novels so skinny they can be used as bookmarks
4. falling asleep in the tent
5. brazilian girls who want to teach me to samba
6. writing and revising and revising and revising
7. eating bagels and cream cheese and thinly sliced red onions with the goddaughter
8. doing anything at all with the goddaughter
9. when my friends sell their books (vanessa, you're next)
10. and reruns of Nurse Jackie

Visit Woolgathering's 10, they're pretty awesome. And I'll add Look Mom to that list.

Photo: "Michelle" by Jennilee Marigomen in 01 Magazine via Jen

a roomless door

I walked past a house
I walked past a house I heard weeping
I walked past my father's house I heard weeping
It sounded like a roomless door, a piano's 89th key

- Jane Hirshfield, via The San Francisco Panorama
Painting, Besetztes Haus, 1989, Gerhard Richter

august is a wicked month

"My mother was an amazing, powerful woman, but she was also lost." Edna O'Brien in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal, October 2006. Via The San Francisco Panorama.

nikki giovanni

“We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.” NG (Home sick today watching The Black List, Volume 1 and the amazing Suzan-Lori Parks talking about the amazing Nikki Giovanni.)