I had just hung up from talking to you

I had just hung up from talking to you

and we had been so immersed in the difficulty

you were facing, and forgive me,

I was thinking that as long as we kept talking,

you in your car in the parking lot of the boys’ school

as the afternoon deepened into early evening,

and me in the study, all the books around

that had been sources of beauty to us,

as long as we stayed in the conversation

padded with history like the floor of the pine forest,

as long as I thought out loud, made a joke

at my own expense, you would be harbored in that exchange,

but the boys were leaving the track

and after we hung up I looked out the window

to see the top of the bare January trees spotlit to silvery red,

massive but made from the thinnest

twigs at the ends of the branches at the ends of the limbs

they were waving and shining in a light

like no other and left only to them.

By Jessica Greenbaum in Poetry via ? 

Photo: La Garconne

of romance, vanished european cities, long-dead ballerinas

Around 1964, Cornell, himself sixty, was looking to try sketching from a live model. The thirty-five-year-old Kusama, an admirer of his, was sent over to pose. There is a strong possibility that this was the first time Cornell had ever seen a naked woman. As Deborah Solomon notes in her biography, the sketches he did that day look as if his hand “was trembling.” From "Alchemy of Inspiration" by Jessica Lott in the Art21 blog.

Photo: Yayoi Kusama and Joseph Cornell c. 1971

cross off and move on

Adela, Bernice, and Charna, the youngest—all gone for a long time now, blurred into a flock sailing through memory, their long, thin legs streaming out beneath the fluffy domes of their mangy fur coats, their great beaky noses pointing the way. From "Cross Off and Move On" by Deborah Eisenberg, full story on NYRB

Painting: Confrontation 1 (1988) by Gerhard Richter, via Tate

some love for a truman

Some love for a hound dog puppy from M Dash and Animal Madness. Thank you so much. 

Photo: Truman all doped up after surgery

it happens with every book

So what happened?

I got two years into the novel and got completely stymied and felt like it was an utter flop. I wanted to put it aside but my wife talked me out of it. She said she cared too much about these characters and wanted to find out what became of them. I had to start all over again, keeping the characters but reinventing the story completely and leaving behind almost every element with the exception of the birth that goes wrong – that was the only significant element that I preserved.

You've had this experience before…
It happens with every book now, I hate to say. I abandoned my second novel completely. Writing Kavalier & Clay, I had several moments of utter collapse. Same with The Yiddish Policemen's Union. I'm obviously just not very good at this. Michael Chabon in conversation with The Guardian

Photo: Katherine Wolkoff via Cup of Jo

san francisco when you're in love

Below are several of M. and my favorite date night walks:

Takeout from Out the Door eaten on the benches outside the Ferry Building, watching the ferries go in and out. Followed by a walk up the Filbert Steps to North Beach, a quick viewing of the murals in Coit Tower (smash a penny), a stop in City Lights Books and then cocktails at Cafe Zoetrope. 

Walk to the top of Bernal Hill. Walk back down. Stop at Red Hill Books on the way to Wild Side West.

Flora Grubb for coffee. 

Cocktails at Mint 54.

Lunch at Darwin followed by a walk to SFMOMA. 

A visit to Headlands Center for the Arts followed by doing nothing at all on Rodeo Beach (aka Fort Cronkite)

A little shopping at Mollusk Surf Shop followed by the General Store. A meal at Outerlands and then canoodling on the beach.

A visit with Emmett and Deanna at Inside Modern and then cocktails and song at Martuni's. 

Happy hour tacos at Pancho Villa followed by window shopping up Valencia Street (Monument, Paxton Gate, Shoe Biz, 826 Valencia, The Curiosity Shoppe), a peek into Clarion Alley, a loop around Dolores Park and then pizza at the counter at Delfina's. 

Photo: our favorite bartender, Maura

inside modern in hayes valley

The wildly gracious Deanna and Emmett of Inside Modern in Hayes Valley donated a George Nelson Bubble Lamp to Truman the hound dog puppy's fundraiser. The Truman has some very stylish friends.

PS: I got my beautiful writing desk there when I started my book

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

love, friendship and solidarity

Another element of my memoir — the stupendous importance of love, friendship and solidarity — has been made immensely more vivid to me by recent experience. I can’t hope to convey the full effect of the embraces and avowals, but I can perhaps offer a crumb of counsel. If there is anybody known to you who might benefit from a letter or a visit, do noton any account postpone the writing or the making of it. The difference made will almost certainly be more than you have calculated. Christopher Hitchens (from Hitch-22) as quoted in NYT

Photo: New York in the 80's by Steven Siegel via Miss Moss

the friday mixtape

A Brazilian mixtape over at Little Paper Planes by my best friend, Clarita.

Painting: Alfredo Volpi 

sometimes

Sometimes I see a photo like this and think, I should just clear our my reader and read 3 blogs. And then I start counting them and it's way more than three.

Photo: Vic

this is truman

Our rescued hound dog. He almost died. We're having a fundraiser in San Francisco on Friday, September 14th to help pay his medical bills. Join us?

it has been

Lighting new cigarettes,
pouring more
drinks.

It has been a beautiful fight.
Still
is.

from Bukowski via Books vs. Cigarettes

Ouda Wyoming Knit Sweater via Welcome Back Oldtimer

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

fat and salt

Favorite places to eat in SF? ...Commonwealth, Delfina, Delfina Pizzeria, Flour and Water, Bar Tartine, Range, Zuni Cafe, Outerlands, and Kappou Gomi.  Leif with Ashley Rose Helvey

Photo: Mussel, salicornia, beach weeds, wildflowers 
(all foraged from Laird's Landing) by ARH

our have more plan

Adrienne and Jay of Vallejo's Food Rescue are growing kids, raising vegetables, building family and community, while playing records, facing cancer and being grateful. You can follow along at Muddy Feet Farms, Food Rescue, Muddy Feet Memoirs and deyoung deconstructed.

Photo: Adrienne and Jay via Northbay Uprising

cultural afterlives

"...I've alway been interested in those narratives that we choose to tell again and again..." Dr. Hila Shachar in The Tuesday Interview.

Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Literary Classics by Dr. Hila Shachar

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

jack holmes & his friend

Cover to cover. Started in the backyard and finished, just now, on this warm afternoon. A wildly satisfying novel.

Photo by my love

the wide river of rain

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say 'one chooses' with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who—when he has been seriously noted at all—has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft to begin just there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand, plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, 'Speak to him: he hasnt seen you yet. Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

Painting: "Imogen Grey" 2011 by Suzy Barnard

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

and in one wash

I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own. I pick it up, exile that I am, like the purple ‘lucky stones’ I used to collect with a white ring all the way round, or the shell of a blue mussel with its rainbowy angel’s fingernail interior; and in one wash of memory the colors deepen and gleam, the early world draws breath. Sylvia Plath via Le Projet D'Amour

Photo: Romy Schneider and Alain Delon

also?

Parties.

like the wind

Chariots of Fire.

every family

If every family chooses someone to punish, I was the one chosen by mine. Mr. Harding, for instance. When he came to lunch, Ma always put him next to me. Why me? I wanted to know. Why not Miranda, she's a freak herself? Every night Miranda woke up screaming that the Germans were coming for her over a wall. War I kept telling her, it's war, not wall! But Ma just told me to keep my oar out of it, Miranda had a fixation, she said, and anyway, what would I know about the war, I hadn't even been born until it was over. So it was hopeless. Every Sunday I was stuck next to Mr. Harding, and every night Miranda was allowed to go on screaming until Ma came down the passage with the DDT. From The Servants' Quarters by Lynn Freed

Photo: Wilhelm von Gloeden c. 1895 
via my dear friend Deanna Marrujo

down by the roller coaster

Sweet sweet baby I'll never let you go. The Drums

Wayne Thiebaud, Four Cupcakes, 1971

(For my love )

wish list

This blouse. This photograph. This necklace.
Oh, and this blouse too.

Photo: Art & Science front tuck braid at Creatures of Comfort

you are tired (I think)

You are tired,

(I think)
Of the always puzzle of living and doing;
And so am I.

Come with me, then,
And we'll leave it far and far away—
(Only you and I, understand!)

You have played,
(I think)
And broke the toys you were fondest of,
And are a little tired now;
Tired of things that break, and—
Just tired.
So am I.

But I come with a dream in my eyes tonight,
And knock with a rose at the hopeless gate of your heart—
Open to me!
For I will show you the places Nobody knows,
And, if you like,
The perfect places of Sleep.

Ah, come with me!
I'll blow you that wonderful bubble, the moon,
That floats forever and a day;
I'll sing you the jacinth song
Of the probable stars;
I will attempt the unstartled steppes of dream,
Until I find the Only Flower,
Which shall keep (I think) your little heart
While the moon comes out of the sea.

e.e. cummings 

via Nearness of Distance
Photo Ernst Haas circa 1960 via inspiriacoh

whatever impossible beauty

And my nation was there. We were there: a loose association of lost causes and would-be scribblers, heart-broken artists and more- and less-happily out-of-work actors. We were from everywhere else and hadn’t fitted in. We probably still didn’t, but we were at home amongst ourselves. We talked nonsense and made cups of coffee last all afternoon in little cafes on St Martin’s Lane. We blagged free tickets for whatever we could get: exhibitions, concerts, readings, plays. We walked under blue spring skies between the big wedding cake buildings of South Ken, or down by the river, or along the King’s Road where there’d be more elongated coffees in the Farmer’s Market, or the Chelsea Bun, or Picasso’s. A blend of awkwardness and self-harm and self-obsession and a lack of proper jobs meant we were all holding out for what we wanted, whatever impossible beauty that might turn out to be. From "That Whole London Thing," A.L. Kennedy in Granta

Photo: my desk at Headlands Center for the Arts

the jumble of words

Finishing a novel is always linked with shame—or rather, the lack of it. There's a moment when I realize I'm no longer ashamed of the jumble of words I've produced, that the embarrassment of having written a mishmash of ideas subsides and I'm no longer terrified of The Public reading it. This is when I begin to think of my manuscript as a novel. I never know when this is going to happen; during the writing of the manuscript, it sometimes feels as if that moment of clarity is never going to arrive, that the novel will never arise from the manuscript's fuzziness of thought and expression. I have friends who read the manuscript in its final stages, and this helps lessen the acute awkwardness of having to go public with my work: the comments give my work a kind of validity, a right to exist. Tash Aw in Daniel Alarcon's The Secret Miracle

Photo: Visiting Acrosanti from Gravel & Gold via Ready for the House

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

they were stars

At first they had difficulties with the camera. Instead of framing someone's face, as they intended, they often photographed his knees or feet. There were no windows in the mountain huts where they slept, and they had rarely seen television, so the idea of "framing"was utterly foreign to them: they had never seen their surrounding through anything. I asked them to carry a piece of paper with a hole in it and look through it at everything they came upon. Within a couple of weeks the problem of using the viewfinder was solved.  Wendy Ewald in the introduction to Magic Eyes; Scenes from an Andean Girlhood

an uncertain chimera

All right, but it's an unpleasant one. Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an uncertain chimera shimmering from behind a veil. You must not wait, loiter, dilly-dally. You must force your way painfully through. And then, but only then, the thing will go on its own power, it will hold the reins, and you need do nothing but hang on.

Cynthia Ozick in the Guardian

Photo: Johanna Burke in Freunde von Freunden

straight is the gate

What are your other inspirations? 
Aside from literary friendships and books and writing? I can admit to no others. Strait is the gate.

Cynthia Ozick in the Guardian

Margaret Kilgallen, Untitled, c. 2000 via SF Weekly

high delight

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

Photo: Jessica Barensfel and Simon Howell on Freunde von Freunden

freaks and geeks

I love everything about Rookie and everything about this.

it's complicated, of course

I've been thinking about writing, how we create from life. It's complicated, of course. Stephen Elliott in today's Daily Rumpus.

Painting: Narangkar Glover, Shangri-La Girls School: A Thousand Stairs, 2010

leitmotif

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

Photo: The Sartorialist

ama

Nina Poppe via Horse Hunting

luck - is not chance

As an artist so much of one does is based on faith - in a belief that exceed or ignores society's interest. Roni Horn in a 2006 Keynote to the Graduating Class of the Iceland Academy of Arts

Roni Horn, Still Water (The River Thames for Example), 1999

uses for boys

And here's the cover, designed by Elsie Lyons at St. Martin's Press with photography by Tess Kongteattikul. I love Tess's work which reminds me of another favorite photographer, Olivia Bee. More about the book (January 2013) here and here.

of something was happening

...and our memories of the story are action-based; it burns in our mind as a shining scene with silverware and spilled wine, but the percentage of action lines might be really low. So the goal might be to cut out as much action as you can but keep the image-burn effect of something was happening. Ben Jahn

Photo: Memory Lake by We are Bandits

for books I like

Two close friends blurbed my first novel. I am forever in their debt, and I found the whole process a bit humiliating. No strangers were willing to blurb me on the strength of the book itself, and my editor asked many people, far and wide. The whole thing made me feel jaundiced and annoyed.

My later books were beautifully blurbed by a several generous fellow writers I barely knew—people I now adore and feel indebted to, although I still barely know them.

I happily, freely offer and write blurbs for everyone I know or sort of know or who know people I know, and even people I don't know if I like their books, which, come to think of it, disproves my assumption that all blurbs are personal. I write blurbs for books I like and people I like. Kate Christensen in an interview with The Awl

Painting: The Lantern Parade by Thomas Cooper Gotch via Books vs. Cigarettes

others who possess this urge

Simon likes to record things that do not officially exist, did not happen, and cannot be seen. Others who possess this urge generally write fiction. Simon sets out to photograph the impossible and the forbidden: posing the unjustly convicted at the scene of crimes they never committed for “The Innocents,” her breakout show at MoMA PS1 in 2003; capturing the braille edition of Playboy magazine, the CIA’s art collection, and a repository of nuclear waste in “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar,” her 2007 one-woman show at the Whitney Museum of American Art; and documenting every prohibited ­curiosity, counterfeit handbag, and drug confiscated from passenger luggage at JFK Airport in the space of five sleepless days and nights for “Contraband,” exhibited at Manhattan’s Lever House in 2010. Taryn Simon in W Magazine

Photo of the artist by Rineke Dijkstra for W Magazine

sometimes

Everything must not be fussed over. Sometimes a flat-footed sentence is what serves, so you don’t get all writerly: “He opened the door.” There, it’s open. Amy Hempel, the Art of Fiction, No. 176 in the Paris Review

Photo: wall of my studio at Headlands

but at least we try

One is prepared for friendship, not for friends. And sometimes not even for friendship, but at least we try: usually we flail in the darkness, a darkness that`s not foreign to us, a darkness that comes from inside us and meshes with a purely external reality, with the darkness of certain gestures, certain shadows that we once thought were familiar and that in fact are as strange as a dinosaur.

Sometimes that`s what a friend is: the distant shape of a dinosaur crossing a swamp, a dinosaur that we can`t grab or call or warn of anything. Friends are strange: they disappear. They`re very strange: sometimes, after many years, they turn up again and although most have nothing to say to us anymore, some do, and they say it. Excerpt from "Friends are strange", in Between Parentheses by Roberto Bolaño. New Directions. 2011.p.135 via Sparks and Kicks

Shirt: Margaret Howell at Creatures of Comfort

or do i want to be you?

First this:

There is this German word,Lohmaunsheit, which describes a certain ambivalent kind of affection one may feel with particular others, be the acquaintanceship friendly or romantic - do I want to be with you, or do I want to be you? At its core it is the instinct that longs for being an entity, a closed circuit, that recognizes oneself in another but the other, whilst almost entirely alike, also possessing just a fractionmore of something unnamable but undeniably real and really lacking in oneself, just the missing bit to being a complete person. Lohmaunsheit is longing with equal force for both togetherness with and the annihilation of someone, because they are the same. That is fine so far, were it not for the appendix - per definitionLohmaunsheit is always unrequited. It is you as the external me and me knowing that to be true because the feeling is just too strong, yet you just not seeing it, and me knowing that this negates our mirroring on a fundamental level, but that impossibility seeming impossible in itself. That is its inherent tragedy.—Karolina Elyse Watson, Everything

And then this:

you guys. i’m sorry to announce that i made this whole thing up. i made up a german-sounding word and ascribed a random melancholic-pretty definition to it, made up a quote from a made up source by a made up author to describe it. i did it after i saw something similar about an icelandic word on my dash, and i thought to myself, “that’s so cool, even though they could have made that word up, how would i know, but what does that matter”, so i decided to try myself to see what happened. a bunch of likes and reblogs happened but nobody called me out on it and now i feel like a jerk because i’m writing this explanation unasked and because i mean i do think myself that it really doesn’t matter if a word or whatever is “real” or not as long as it resonates with you and gives you something, which incidentally is also what i think about authenticity in pop culture, e.g. lana del rey, so in hindsight it makes no sense that i did this in the first place. the end. From Herzschrittmacher

Photo: Chateau Marmont by Gia Coppola for Lula

yes.

angels in america

Act 1, Scene 6

First week of November. In the men’s room in the offices of the Brooklyn Federal Court of Appeals. Louis is crying over the sink. Joe enters.

JOE: Oh, um...Morning.

LOUIS: Good morning, Counselor.

JOE (He watches Louis cry): Sorry, I...I don't know your name.

LOUIS. Don't bother. A word processor. The lowest of the low.

JOE (Holding out hand): Joe Pitt. I'm with Justice Wilson.

LOUIS: Oh, I know that. Counselor Pitt. Chief Clerk.

JOE: Were you...are you OK?

LOUIS: Oh, yeah. Thanks. What a nice man.

JOE: Not so nice.

LOUIS: What?

JOE: Not so nice. Nothing. You sure you’re...

LOUIS: Life sucks shit. Life...just sucks shit.

JOE: What’s wrong.

LOUIS: Run in my nylons.

JOE: Sorry...?

LOUIS: Forget it. Look, thanks for asking.

JOE: Well…

LOUIS: I mean, it really is nice of you.

(He starts crying again)

Sorry. Sick friend…

JOE: Oh, I'm sorry.

LOUIS: Yeah, yeah, well, that’s sweet.

Three of your colleagues have preceded you to this baleful sight and

and you're the first one to ask. The others just opened the door, saw me, and fled. I hope they had to pee real bad.

JOE (Handing him a wad of toilet paper): They just didn't want to intrude.

LOUIS: Hah. Reaganite heartless macho asshole lawyers.

JOE: Oh, that's unfair.

LOUIS: What is? Heartless? Macho? Reaganite? Lawyer?

JOE: I voted for Reagan.

LOUIS: You did?

JOE: Twice.

LOUIS: Twice? Well, oh boy. A Gay Republican.

JOE: Excuse me?

LOUIS: Nothing.

JOE: I'm not...

Forget it.

LOUIS: Republican? Not Republican? Or…

JOE: What?

LOUIS: What?

JOE: Not gay. I'm not gay.

LOUIS: Oh. Sorry.

(Blows his nose loudly) It’s just…

JOE: Yes?

LOUIS: Well, Sometimes you can tell from the way a person sounds that...I mean you sound like a …

JOE: No I don’t. Like what?

LOUIS: Like a Republican.

(Little pause. Joe knows he’s being teased; Louis knows he knows. Joe decides to be a little brave)

JOE (Making sure no one is around): Do I? Sound like a…?

LOUIS: What? Like a…? Republican, or…? Do I?

JOE: Do you what?

LOUIS: Sound like a…?

JOE: Like a…?

I’m...confused.

Louis: Yes.

My name is Louis. But all my friends call me Louise.

I work in Word Processing. Thanks for the toilet paper.

(Louis offers Joe his hand, Joe reaches, Louis feints and pecks Joe on the cheek, then exits.)

Drawing: Kiki Smith, Silver Bird, 2006 at Brooklyn Museum