and it's only noon

Do you think I'm wonderful? she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of a petrified maple. No, he said. Why? Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it's only noon. You couldn't be something that hundreds of others are. Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

Photo: Grace Hartigan with her painting from Life Magazine via all the mountains

the more she thought

"The more she thought / The more she thought" from "The Kiss" by Sam Riviere

Photos from Sartorialist and One Trip Pass

i didn't even know to want

Max Farago via Horse Hunting.

even when

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. Junot Diaz

Pratt Ex Libris Collection via Hollister Hovey

an ambitious project collapsing

"The point isn't A. or the Stone Temple Pilots, or Michael Miller. The point is to write you have to feel. You can't fake it. You can't pretend to love someone the day after they die and write a memoir about it." Stephen Elliott in the Daily Rumpus (do you get the Daily Rumpus?)

James R. Murphy's La Guardia students with their string figures via An Ambitious Project Collapsing. More here.

I used to think (some kind of sacred)

“I used to think I couldn’t write without a scotch and a cigarette and one of the scariest things about quitting one then the other was the idea that I wouldn’t be able to write. Well, I quit and I write. That’s more about addiction than about writing. Then I thought I couldn’t write without my dog nearby, but my dog passed away and I still write. One day this summer I wrote in a room full of people in bathing suits cooking bacon. Not for long, though. How to get out of bed and get my coffee without waking up too much before I start writing is a big deal for me. I don’t like to eat until I’m incredibly hungry when I’m writing. I don’t write with music, but I don’t mind ambient sound. I like to be near a window with not a lot going on outside. My current study has a window that is completely filled with hedge and sometimes birds poke around in it. Perfect.

I don’t write every day. I wait until I can’t bear it and then I write, or I write because I can’t wait to write, or I write because there are nuts I want to crack. I was a kid who made ice cream last. I don’t believe in letting writing time be agony. I don’t believe in letting insomnia get me, either. I get up or I take a pill, no thrashing around. The bed needs to be a beautiful place, and the desk does, too. If writing is some kind of agony, I should get over myself and do something nice for the neighborhood. I do ritualize everything, though. I need to because of whatever kind of brain I have. So whatever my writing situation is, I ritualize it, I’m just learning that I can make a ritual out of anything, and it’s not the ritual so much as the ritualizing: making some kind of rhythm in a way that makes something some kind of sacred.” Lucy Corin in American Short Fiction blog. Lucy has a new site.

Photo of J. Morgan Puett's home by Phil Mansfield for NYT

a mercy

"And Florens, poor Florens, she was completely smitten." A Mercy, Toni Morrison (for Clara)

Photo from Kissssing, a Love Blog from Porter Hovey

in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,

our friend the poet comes into my room
where I've been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,

From "Twenty-one Love Poems," Adrienne Rich

Photo: Elizabeth Weinberg, Of Recklessness and Water

an abstract beatitude

From NYT: "In Ms. Martin's case, this was a kind of abstract beatitude: floating disembodied fields and hazes of color and light, which upon closer examination are triggered by surprisingly mundane causes...

The combination of simplicity and optical snap..."

Photo: Agnes Martin
On view at SFMOMA, the Fisher Collection
Also, no digital image of her work could do it justice

winsome

"...win some or learn some" I'm Yours, Jason Mraz

Photo: Arktip, Serena Mitnik-Miller