still life with woodpecker

Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free. Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins

Photo: Sartorialist

sleep deprivation and stories

via Jen.

parka porn

Because a girl needs a good parka.

let them take tea together

It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week. Ezra Pound

Photo by William Gedney

what had commas to do with it

When I first began writing I felt that writing should go on I still do feel that it should go on but when I first began writing I was completely possessed by the necessity that writing should go on and if writing should go on what had commas and semi-colons to do with it what had commas to do with it what had periods to do with it what had small letters and capitals to do with writing going on which was at the time the most profound need I had in connection with writing. Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America via RAR.

and these two

from the ugly earring:

And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life. Herman Hesse

and

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions. Rainer Maria Rilke

Photo: Marina Munoz in Jak & Jil

the arc of a moral universe

"The arc of moral universe is long,” said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., paraphrasing Theodore Parker, “but it bends towards justice." via Lesbian Dad

la pops

My papa is a distinguished sailor (second row, third from left).

origin of the eye tickle

Harry zeroed in on me with his mock, menacing stare. I started laughing.

"Why are you laughing?"

"Because it tickles."

"You can feel that?"

"Yes, certainly."

"Fascinating!"

From Just Kids (p. 113).

Anyone who loves Harry Smith

should read Just Kids immediately.

Photo by Allen Ginsberg

and your spirit and your clothes

I'd really like to live beside you, baby

I love your body and your spirit and your clothes

from "First We Take Manhattan" Leonard Cohen

Photo: Annie Hall

last night

M. and I saw Nicholas Nixon's The Brown Sisters at SFMOMA.

for grace, after a party

You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn’t
interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,

From "For Grace, After a Party" by Frank O'Hara via Books vs. Cigarettes. It's the line about the tirade against someone that doesn't interest me that gets me.

Photo by Mikael Kennedy via Horse Hunting

it's the telling

Writing isn’t just telling stories. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s telling everything at once. It’s the telling of a story, and the absence of a story. It’s telling a story through its absence. Practicalities, Marguerite Duras via le temps perdu (love this blog)

Bathers, David Park, 1954 on view at SFMOMA

variation on the word sleep

I would like to watch you sleeping,

which may not happen.

I would like to watch you, sleeping.

I would like to sleep with you,

to enter your sleep as its smooth dark wave

slides over my head

From Variations on the Word Sleep by Margaret Atwood

via the ugly earring

Photo by Vivian Maier

is not always loud and bright and crowded

Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place, but there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around. EL Konigsburg, From the Crazy Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

Photo by Vivian Maier via The Casual Optimist

you'll never turn the vinegar to jam

Cabaret

freedom

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways, everyday. David Foster Wallace in his speech at Kenyon College in 2005 via crankreport

Photo from Modern Lovers contest at UO

in the middle of a thing

It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing. Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore, Brooklyn, NY, 1953 via crankreport