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

we will make a new world

If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does. Jonathan Safran Foer

Ugly Earring, this photo of you is too beautiful, which explains

why I've seen it all over the web

let us have lunch, katya

For the next few months, I didn't write anything new. And then I returned to write two quick drafts by the following summer. It must have been around this time that I pasted in my journal a portion of a review by James Wood: the critic had narrated a story by Chekhov about an actress, Katya, who has discovered that she has no talent. She asks an older family friend for help and advice: "Tell me, what am I to do?" The man tells her he doesn't know what to do. And then, he says at last, "Let us have lunch, Katya."

Rereading the essay "How to Write a Novel" by Amitava Kumar
Photo via Bakerby

reprise

Les Poppys.

Roberto Bolaño, for instance, wanted to be a spy

Monica Maristain: Have you shed one tear about the widespread criticism you’ve drawn from your enemies?

Roberto Bolaño: Lots and lots. Every time I read that someone has spoken badly of me I begin to cry, I drag myself across the floor, I scratch myself, I stop writing indefinitely, I lose my appetite, I smoke less, I engage in sport, I go for walks on the edge of the sea, which by the way is less than 30 meters from my house and I ask the seagulls, whose ancestors ate the fish who ate Ulysses: Why me? Why? I’ve done you no harm.

Paper Cuts via Maud Newton
Key to the Meaning of Colours via Scout Minami

taking time to make time

Dusty Springfield. And the Golden Goose Pony Boot.

woolgathering & miscellany

This from Woolgathering and some others here and here.

1. dancing in the kitchen all night with my friends
2. girls on motorcycles
3. stories that fit on one page and novels so skinny they can be used as bookmarks
4. falling asleep in the tent
5. brazilian girls who want to teach me to samba
6. writing and revising and revising and revising
7. eating bagels and cream cheese and thinly sliced red onions with the goddaughter
8. doing anything at all with the goddaughter
9. when my friends sell their books (vanessa, you're next)
10. and reruns of Nurse Jackie

Visit Woolgathering's 10, they're pretty awesome. And I'll add Look Mom to that list.

Photo: "Michelle" by Jennilee Marigomen in 01 Magazine via Jen

a roomless door

I walked past a house
I walked past a house I heard weeping
I walked past my father's house I heard weeping
It sounded like a roomless door, a piano's 89th key

- Jane Hirshfield, via The San Francisco Panorama
Painting, Besetztes Haus, 1989, Gerhard Richter

august is a wicked month

"My mother was an amazing, powerful woman, but she was also lost." Edna O'Brien in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal, October 2006. Via The San Francisco Panorama.

nikki giovanni

“We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.” NG (Home sick today watching The Black List, Volume 1 and the amazing Suzan-Lori Parks talking about the amazing Nikki Giovanni.)

to act

"To be hopefull in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory." Howard Zinn.

danny and the deep blue sea

"This play is dedicated to everyone in the Bronx who punched me or kissed me, and to everyone whom I punched or kissed." Dedication in John Patrick Shanley's Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, An Apache Dance

Image: Little Joy via Horse Hunting

mix tape

Jolie Holland via Bona Drag mix tape

what one says

"I stop talking about it. There's no need to talk about it, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does." Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

Wrapped Coast, 1968-69 by Christo and Jeanne-Claude via Grey

smoking cigarettes and watching captain kangaroo

In Kime Buzzelli's bunny shirt.

like a sailor knows the open sea

Erie Basin

everything that rises

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention. Flannery O'Connor

Maya Villiger in Jak and Jil also here

the goddaughter and I

love Bang Bang.

twilight of the superheroes

"It's broadening. You meet people in your family you'd never happen to run into otherwise." Deborah Eisenberg

Photo: Stil in Berlin

the arrangement

"Composition is the arrangement of unequal things." Richard Ford quoting John Ruskin in NYT

Untitled 1957, Clyfford Still at SFMOMA

rhyming action

White Dr. Martens for the goddaughter. APC for me.

seeing what happens

Making art is a lot about just seeing what happens if you put some energy into something.

Kiki Smith, Blue Girl, 1998

cut off

Genius cut off boots from Ascot Friday. A nod to this Golden Goose

Scout Holiday

Scout Holiday's Wish List is my wish list. 2008 too.

clamoring storm

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. Vladimir Nabokov

Syoin kajii via gotsalviento via Pour Porter

mislaid

Make a list of all the lovers you've ever had.

Warren Lasher
Ed "Rubberhead" Catapano
Charles Deats or Keats
Alfonse

Tuck it in your pocket. Leave it lying around, conspicuously. Somehow you lose it. Make "mislaid" jokes to yourself. Make another list.

- Lorrie Moore, from "Self Help"
Illustration by Wendy MacNaughton

novels do not get easier to write

Miss Mazure's face was wildly askew. Every feature went its own way, and her nose was a large distraction

- All Souls by Christine Schutt
Image: The Ugly Earring

where art happens

The goddaughter at San Francisco Institute of Art.

you forget what you want to remember

"When I grasped that some of the most complex, almost otherworldly fiction of the postwar era was composed on such a simple, functional, frail-looking machine, it conferred a sort of talismanic quality to Cormac's typewriter," Glenn Horowitz told the New York Times. "It's as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss army knife." NYT via Guardian.

if I thought you would, I'd never leave

A bit of an obsession with ERIE BASIN | tumblr
Mittens and this artist, Jazmin Berkha, at even*cleveland
Pour Porter via Karey M's (Mackin Ink & T. Ruffles) favorites
grijs always
This bear embrace
The folks at Backyard Bill
Every bag Nivaldo de Lima ever made
And something joyful about forty-sixth at grace

Solar System Quilt circa 1876 via ERIE BASIN | tumblr via Look Mom
(Now Voyager would love this quilt)

the matter

"I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is." Nabokov

Photo: Larry Bercow

what writers wear

Of course clothes are more fun if you leave the house once in a while.

Charlotte Rampling, Paris 2009 by Albrecht Fuchs via Horse Hunting

Ara Peterson: Turns Into Stone

At Ratio 3 (since I missed him at MACRO).

unless you feel

There is absolutely no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel that you must write that book, or else go mad, or die. Robertson Davies

Lyell Fall 2006