your eyes never noticed

Because the typewriter forces me to start all over again once I’m finished. With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can’t get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It’s an incredibly tedious process. You’ve finished your book, and now you have to spend several weeks engaged in the purely mechanical job of transcribing what you’ve already written. It’s bad for your neck, bad for your back, and even if you can type twenty or thirty pages a day, the finished pages pile up with excruciating slowness. That’s the moment when I always wish I’d switched to a computer, and yet every time I push myself through this final stage of a book, I wind up discovering how essential it is. Typing allows me to experience the book in a new way, to plunge into the flow of the narrative and feel how it functions as a whole. I call it “reading with my fingers,” and it’s amazing how many errors your fingers will find that your eyes never noticed. Repetitions, awkward constructions, choppy rhythms. It never fails. I think I’m finished with the book and then I begin to type it up and I realize there’s more work to be done. Paul Auster in the Paris Review

Charles Sheeler: Pennsylvania Farmhouse , 1922

Vintage gelatin silver print via Ugly Earring

just one of the reasons

I love The Guardian.

Artwork from It's a Book, by Lane Smith

with its smell of sleep

And the funny part, he suddenly realized, the funny part was that he meant it. Looking at her now in the lamplight, this small, rumpled, foolish woman, he knew he had told the truth. Because God damn it, she was alive, wasn't she? Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

Franz Kline, LeHigh V Span, 1959-60

i wear workshirts to the opera

I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--

you can't plan on the heart, but

the better part of it, my poetry, is open

From, "My Heart," Frank O'hara

Photo via Convoy

it's not the person,

it's the player.

Amazing new work, "The Market Street Chess Players in their own Words," by Wendy MacNaughton at the Rumpus.

muttnik

our house

sentimental, this.

Room: Roman and Williams via defgrip

stop a man from falling

I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity. Paul Auster, Moon Palace

Photo "Sorry for the Hell (odes to love)" by Tea K.H. via I Know