i made up ice bats

On writing: “we’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. starting over with accuracy. i mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. every accuracy has to be invented. . . . i feel i am blundering in concepts too fine for me.”

On ice bats: “I made up ice bats, there is no such thing.”

On teaching: “when i began to be published, people got the idea that i should ‘teach writing,’ which i have no idea how to do and don’t really believe in. so now and then i find myself engaged by a ‘writing program’ (as at nyu, stanford) and have to bend my wits to deflect the official purpose.”

On contradiction: “i realize all this sounds both chaotic and dishonest and probably that is the case. contradiction is the test of reality, as Simone Weil says.” Anne Carson in the NYT

Chairs: Margaret Howell; Designed in 1957 by Lucian R. Ecolani

it is still

It is still news to her that passion
could steer her wrong
though she went down, a thousand times
strung out
across railroad tracks, off bridges
under cars, or stiff
glass bottle still in hand, hair soft
on greasy pillows, still it is
news she cannot follow love (his
burning footsteps in blue crystal
snow) & still
come out all right.

Diane di Prima from Loma

Photo: La garçonne at Nino Cerruti 2011 via Christian Polout

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

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

filly

blog and shop.

someday i'll make it all up to you

I love how Jess tags and tracks the books she reads and I really loved her Top 10 at the end of the year. Hila has book reviews and M. has begun writing reviews as a way of thinking about what she's read. I've never tracked the books I read. My GoodReads shelf is more a mashup of books I've read, bought, bookmarked, heard about, thought about, whatever. And I buy (like Andrew Sean Greer says) many, many more books than I read. My bedside table reflects books I've started, not books I've finished, so I'll start tracking books I've finished here:

January 2012

Wonderstruck, Brian Selznick

Looking for Alaska, John Green

In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway

Where She Went, Gayle Forman

Fighting Fire, Caroline Paul

The Sense of An Ending, Julian Barnes

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sacred, Elana K. Arnold (Random House, Fall 2012)

Photo: Tegan wearing my favorite T-shirt from

Cali DeWitt and Blood is the New Black

my imaginary self

is wearing this dress right now.

Mara Hoffman at Bona Drag

I enjoy the wanting

This year I gave a lot of gifts made by Wendy MacNaughton and last year I gave a lot of gifts made by mgealach. I also gave M. a copy of Of Recklessness and Water. And M. gave me things that only she could. Sometimes I bookmark a lot of stuff, like this Rye Bread and this t-shirt, but probably I enjoy the wanting more than the getting.

Photo via welcome back, oldtimer

i love you to pieces, distraction, etc.

If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Catcher in the Rye

Photo: Mark McNairy cap toe boot via welcome back, oldtimer

already, the facts dissemble

Understand, I love you, even as I turn from you like this,
stumbling breathless down a dim and disappearing street behind
a man who squints at house numbers, bewildered, about to say
something I can almost hear.

From "Apology" by Marie Howe

Undercover and Golden Goose and Maryam Nassir Zadeh

your clever hands never lie

G1 via JeanaSohn.

restroll and stroll some never deepening beach

Shoes via Dores

(e.e. cummings)

she said that we'd see buffalo

We fought. When my mother and I crossed state lines in the stolen car, I’d sit against the window and wouldn’t talk. I wouldn’t even look at her. The fights came when I thought she broke a promise. She said there’d be an Indian reservation. She said that we’d see buffalo in Texas. My mother said a lot of things. We were driving from Bay City, Wisconsin, to California, so I could be a child star while I was still a child. Anywhere but Here, Mona Simpson via distraction no. 99

Photo: Herschel Supply Co. lookbook via Tomboy Style

was, i repeat, highly prized by me

The slight silken scrape of her knock-knees when she walked quickly was, I repeat, highly prized by me. I thought that if I were a locust such a sound would send me soaring over mountain ranges. From Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow via Karan Mahajan in Canteen

Photo by The Sartorialist

writers nap

Just as I’m inspired by the past, I find myself drawing comfort from the writers I know. I have the great good fortune to work at the Writers Room, a communal writing space in downtown Manhattan. I write in the silent company of others, in a big, open space much like a newsroom without noise. And it is here that I often draw solace from the writing practices of all kinds of writers. It’s helpful to see that writers nap, take frequent breaks, stare out the window, engage in on-line procrastination. Anne Landsman on second novels via Maud Newton

Photo: Bohemian fashion for Harper’s Bazaar, 1969,

via The Ugly Earring

the transformation may not be purposeful

In George MacDonald's The Princess and Curdie, Curdie is informed that many human beings, by their acts, are slowly turning into beasts; he is given the power to detect the transformation before it is visible, and is assisted by beasts that had been transformed and are working their way back to humanity.

In C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, Eustace Scrubb transforms into a dragon, and the war-monger Rabadash into a donkey. Eustace's transformation is not strictly a punishment - his transformation simply revealing the truth of his human nature. It is reversed after he repents and his moral nature changes. Rabadash is allowed to reverse his transformation, providing he does so in a public place, so that his former followers will know that he had been a donkey. He is warned that, if he ever leaves his capital city again, he will become a donkey permanently, and this prevents him leading further military campaigns.

Also in The Chronicles of Narnia the Dufflepuds are dwarfs who have been transformed into monopods as a punishment. However, it ultimately transpires that they are happier with their new form.

In the novel I, Coriander by Sally Gardner, Prince Tycho is transformed into a fox after refusing to marry Undwin, Queen Rosmore's daughter.

Some giants abducted humans to reduce them to slavery. In the famous Irish legend of Prince Diarmuid, the giant of the forest of Black Beech was holding captive three women. For a given to maintain its appearance, but the other two, turned for fun in a dog and a horse.

In The Marmot Queen by Italo Calvino, a Spanish queen is turned into a rodent by the Morgan le Fay.

In a Turin Italian tale by Guido Cozzano: The Mare of the Necromancer, the Princess of Corelandia was turned into a horse by the baron necromancer for refusing to marry him. Only love and intelligence of a nice guy named Candido save the princess from the spell.

The Neapolitan tale written by Giambattista Basile: The Deer in The Wood describes the transformation of Princess Desiderata into a doe. Envy and jealousy of a fairy who saw his unrequited love, because of the beauty of the noble lady, she decided to take revenge on changing it into a deer. Here, too, will always be the prince to save his beloved princess from the evil spell.

From shapeshifting

Photo: The Sartorialist

intuition's links

...perhaps just a desire to experience things as an endless set of beginnings, with the implied promise and permission; a sequence of dawns, of first kisses, a constellation without the picture-making lines drawn. From The Night Sky by Ann Lauterbach

Photo: Black and Cream Tuxedo Jacket by Emerson Made

falling

The Filly Fall 2011 lookbook is out.

filly designs

I love everything about these clothes. From Emily: I dropped out of law school when I was twenty-four and returned to my hometown of Santa Cruz, California. I did not have a plan but I did have a promise: no more “shoulds”. I was determined to follow my heart wherever it wanted to go. In the following years I worked as a bicycle messenger, learned to garden, fell in love, sold my car and for the first time felt truly competent and at home in my own skin. I began to notice and be taken with my own physicality: the crook of my arm holding the shovel, my thighs tightening as I pedaled, my hands strong and stained by the day. These were common moments when function was unexpectedly beautiful. This, I determined, was a form of beauty I needed to capture and express. So I began to make things, with metal, with wood, and eventually with fabric. And here, where the practical and the precious come together, was where my heart led me. I enrolled at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco for clothing design. Two years later I started Filly.

Photo from Apartment Therapy Re-Nest

in the blue

My gmail automatically marked the APC sale as very important.

Photo: Sartorialist via Scout the Store