in the midst of all their shortcoming

When I hear myself praising a book these days, the things I seem to be really appreciating is a fearlessness when it comes to compassion and sincerity, as well as a willingness to examine questions of faith (and by that I neither mean, not exclude, questions of religion.) In other words, I have reached an age where I am no longer at all impressed with the snide, the cold, the condescending, unless it is paired or mitigated by the opposite, the hopeful in the face of all odds, the reaching after the ineffable, the love. My favorite book this year so far is George Saunder’s The Tenth of December, because for all its razor sharp social commentary, for all the ways he shows us to ourselves with a devastatingly relentless and honest eye, he brings this wave of compassion and love behind that critique. No characters seem more in need of love than the characters in The Tenth of December, and he loves them unconditionally, in the midst of all their shortcoming, all their flaws. Pam Houston in Tracking Wonder

Photo: Martin Parr, The Last Resort (Merceyside), 1983-1986 via Old Chum

a private river

The best memoirs—like This Boy’s Life, or Crazy Brave [by Joy Harjo], for instance—bring you through a private river of storytelling that joins a major ocean of human struggle and joy. Lidia Yuknavitch. From The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Scarboro and Lidia Yuknavitch by Roxane Gay. 

Photo: Untitled, Dayton, Ohio 2013 by Joey Bolender via oldtimefriend

closer to the reason

What made Madeleine sit up in bed was something closer to the reason she read books in the first place and had always loved them. Here was a sign that she wasn’t alone. Here was an articulation of what she had been so far mutely feeling. In bed on a Friday night, wearing sweatpants, her hair tied back, her glasses smudged, and eating peanut butter from the jar, Madeleine was in a state of extreme solitude. The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides

Home of Brian W. Ferry on Sight Unseen via Lena Corwin

how you got from sixteen to here

Sometimes you’re 23 and standing in the kitchen of your house making breakfast and brewing coffee and listening to music that for some reason is really getting to your heart. You’re just standing there thinking about going to work and picking up your dry cleaning. And also more exciting things like books you’re reading and trips you plan on taking and relationships that are springing into existence. Or fading from your memory, which is far less exciting. And suddenly you just don’t feel at home in your skin or in your house and you just want home but “Mom’s” probably wouldn’t feel like home anymore either. There used to be the comfort of a number in your phone and ears that listened everyday and arms that were never for anyone else. But just to calm you down when you started feeling trapped in a five-minute period where nostalgia is too much and thoughts of this person you are feel foreign. When you realize that you’ll never be this young again but this is the first time you’ve ever been this old. When you can’t remember how you got from sixteen to here and all the same feel like sixteen is just as much of a stranger to you now. The song is over. The coffee’s done. You’re going to breathe in and out. You’re going to be fine in about five minutes. The Winter of the Air via Old Time Friend

Photo by victoriahhhh

on creating suspense

The right structure and the right question is: “How do you make your family hungry?” from A Simple Way to Create Suspense by Lee Child in NYT via Jessica Stanley. 

Photo by Leslie Williamson (Pic of the Day 12.18.12) 

you once overheard me say that I liked it

Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem

Here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriage

might work: Because you wear pink but write poems

about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell

at your keys when you lose them, and laugh,

loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol,

gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials

from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming.

You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents

of what you packed were written inside the boxes.

Because you think swans are overrated.

Because you drove me to the train station. You drove me

to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence.

Because you underline everything you read, and circle

the things you think are important, and put stars next

to the things you think I should think are important,

and write notes in the margins about all the people

you’re mad at and my name almost never appears there.

Because you make that pork recipe you found

in the Frida Khalo Cookbook. Because when you read

that essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thing

except the part where Rilke says love means to deny the self

and to be consumed in flames. Because when the lights

are off, the curtains drawn, and an additional sheet is nailed

over the windows, you still believe someone outside

can see you. And one day five summers ago,

when you couldn’t put gas in your car, when your fridge

was so empty—not even leftovers or condiments—

there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew,

which you paid for with your last damn dime

because you once overheard me say that I liked it.

by Matthew Olzmann from
Rattle #31, Summer 2009  via oh (for M)
Photo: 10:59 by Brian Ferry of the blue hour 

eight free hours in portland

Fuller's Coffee Shop, P:ear, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Pearl Bakery, Blue Sky Gallery, Charles A. Hartmann Fine Art, Powell's, Alder & Company, Canoe, Frances May, Ace Hotel, Kenny & Zukes and Broadway Books.

Photo: Corey Arnold, Sunset Hall, 2009 on view at Charles A. Hartman Fine Art

god knows it has nothing to do with the heart

You say that everything is very simple and interesting
it makes me feel very wistful, like reading a great

                                      Russian novel does

from Yesterday Down at the Canal, Frank O'Hara, 1961

Photo: Caitlin Mociun via all the mountains

her voice from that concord

I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov via Jeffrey Eugenides in the NYT

Photo: Elizabeth Weinberg, Late Summer September 2012

then go write

Break your deadlines, default on your due dates, wander in the streets, go to the movies, eat lavishly, fornicate, blaspheme, bless a street urchin, browbeat a civil servant, and when you’re done with these things, if you feel excited by what you’ve seen and heard, then go write. Rick Moody via Top Ten Books 

Photo by Elizabeth Weinberg

she wanted

You will hear thunder and remember me
And think: she wanted storms.

Anna Akhmatova via the Ugly Earring

Photo: couple on the subway, 1946 by Stanley Kubrick

the texture of her family

She was just beginning to speak in short sentences. She was at the juncture in her babyhood when it was possible she knew everything worth knowing. She understood the texture of her family; she understood territory and rage and love, although she couldn't say much more than ball and moo, I want, pretty girl, and bad dog. From A Map of the World, Jane Hamilton

Photo: Linda McCartney 1982 via DOMAHOKA

meeting, never to meet again

Within ten seconds
I knew I wanted to kiss your eyelids.
This is why I kept staring
Past you, as if to a cold horizon.
You were not boring me, as you thought.
I was looking to where you stood

From Within Ten Seconds by John Fowles on The Saturday Poem
Photo: Ferry Ride, Maine by More & Co. 

there are ravens on the roof

There are ravens on the roof
of both places.
Perhaps they are the same ravens.

I can’t tell.
If Roni Horn were here
she’d say ravens

are like water,
they are wildly constant.
They are a sign of Iceland.

from "Wildly Constant," Anne Carson

Photo: we are in love by fuck you very much

in the center of it

Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable... The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it. Marie Howe

Photo: the Kitchen of the Lisa, July 2012 by Jonathan Levitt

and so on

I may be stating the obvious here, but in my house, as a general rule, we sleep in the bedroom, wash up in the bathroom, cook food in the kitchen and so on. As with most rules there are exceptions of course. On special occasions we get to have cookies and juice in bed; on very special occasions, I get to take a nap on the living room couch. From House Party by Alix Browne in Apartamento #09

Photo: Elizabeth Weinberg

on the starboard hand

But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Moby Dick

Photo: Renee Lilley, Dead Horse Bay, Brooklyn NY, January 2012 by Elizabeth Weinberg

high delight

I love you to pieces, distraction, etc. Franny and Zooey, JD Salinger

Photo: Jessica Barensfel and Simon Howell on Freunde von Freunden

leitmotif

The leitmotif is constant change. Nina Yashar in W Magazine.

Photo: The Sartorialist

ama

Nina Poppe via Horse Hunting