yes, yes

What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes. Samuel Beckett

Rachel Comey Brogues at Creatures of Comfort via WikstenMade

puff

via Curious Pages. Also and unrelated: Summertime 1966, Giza, and ama.

an apache dance

CHARACTERS
ROBERTA: 31 years old. Blue jeans, a cheap dress-up blouse that's gotten ratty. She's physically depleted, with nervous bright eyes.
DANNY: 29 years old. Chinos and a pullover shirt. He's dark and powerful. He finds it difficult to meet Roberta's gaze.
About both characters: They are violent and battered, inarticulate and yearning to speak, dangerous and vulnerable.

A DEFINITION
An Apache Dance is a violent dance for two people, originated by the Parisian apaches. Parisian apaches are gangsters or ruffians.

STYLE
This play is emotionally real, but it does not take place in a realistic world. Only those scenic elements necessary to the action should be on stage. Only those areas that are played in should be lit.

Stage directions for Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, An Apache Dance
Photo from Hedi Slimane Diary

I cast toward her and drift back

I know a guy who knows a guy who caught a couple off the point. Way off the point. So far off he couldn't see the point anymore. He caught them using what works way out—the only thing that's ever worked that far out, according to the guy I know who knows the guy who knows.

From "Fishing Report" by Ben Jahn in Panorama.

Photo, 2008, Porter Hovey Polaroid Project

sometimes

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can. Ernest Hemingway

Photo via Miles Westwood's tumblr

perfect sunday morning

Writing and procrastinating by listening to Frank O'Hara reading "Having a Coke with You." Over and over. And thinking if I were to excerpt it here, I would choose this line

partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt

or

I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world

except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick

or

and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism

or maybe

it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience which is not going to go wasted on me

that is just what it isn't

You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn't. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth. Jean Rhys

Painting by Mark Rothko

how it is

Nothing matters but the writing. Samuel Beckett

Mark Under Breaking Wave by Wayne Levin

you won't be awake

It's so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won't be awake for another five hours, but I can't help feeling that we're sharing this clear and beautiful morning. Jonathan Safran Foer

Swimmers, Ironman Trialthalon by Wayne Levin via lost

what it is

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

David Foster Wallace

DFW's copy of DeLillo's Ratner's Star via this is sippey.com.

I was sentimental about many things

I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, “I’m going to pee…”; hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking, talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes, the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3am; being told you snore, hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce, but always carrying on, seeing it through…Charles Bukowski via Melancholia.

Painting, Alyson Fox

middlesex

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. - Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

Bracelet from Southwestern Jewelry

the violence of my imagination

I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps. Angela Carter

Image from mischief & manic via STNF

this morning

Listening to Orpheus by Franz Liszt in honor of the UE on her birthday.

surrender

they care not

"When I do come into contact with children, I find them a disconcertingly tough audience. They care not for blurb or kudos, literary allusion or postmodern antics. Instead, they study every inch of a thing and are bluntly honest about it." Shaun Tan

Photo from the astounding Wendy Ewald

a little away from you

Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you...they're a little away from you. Barry Hannah

Manuscript page from The Paris Review