I used to think (some kind of sacred)

“I used to think I couldn’t write without a scotch and a cigarette and one of the scariest things about quitting one then the other was the idea that I wouldn’t be able to write. Well, I quit and I write. That’s more about addiction than about writing. Then I thought I couldn’t write without my dog nearby, but my dog passed away and I still write. One day this summer I wrote in a room full of people in bathing suits cooking bacon. Not for long, though. How to get out of bed and get my coffee without waking up too much before I start writing is a big deal for me. I don’t like to eat until I’m incredibly hungry when I’m writing. I don’t write with music, but I don’t mind ambient sound. I like to be near a window with not a lot going on outside. My current study has a window that is completely filled with hedge and sometimes birds poke around in it. Perfect.

I don’t write every day. I wait until I can’t bear it and then I write, or I write because I can’t wait to write, or I write because there are nuts I want to crack. I was a kid who made ice cream last. I don’t believe in letting writing time be agony. I don’t believe in letting insomnia get me, either. I get up or I take a pill, no thrashing around. The bed needs to be a beautiful place, and the desk does, too. If writing is some kind of agony, I should get over myself and do something nice for the neighborhood. I do ritualize everything, though. I need to because of whatever kind of brain I have. So whatever my writing situation is, I ritualize it, I’m just learning that I can make a ritual out of anything, and it’s not the ritual so much as the ritualizing: making some kind of rhythm in a way that makes something some kind of sacred.” Lucy Corin in American Short Fiction blog. Lucy has a new site.

Photo of J. Morgan Puett's home by Phil Mansfield for NYT

a mercy

"And Florens, poor Florens, she was completely smitten." A Mercy, Toni Morrison (for Clara)

Photo from Kissssing, a Love Blog from Porter Hovey

in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,

our friend the poet comes into my room
where I've been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,

From "Twenty-one Love Poems," Adrienne Rich

Photo: Elizabeth Weinberg, Of Recklessness and Water

an abstract beatitude

From NYT: "In Ms. Martin's case, this was a kind of abstract beatitude: floating disembodied fields and hazes of color and light, which upon closer examination are triggered by surprisingly mundane causes...

The combination of simplicity and optical snap..."

Photo: Agnes Martin
On view at SFMOMA, the Fisher Collection
Also, no digital image of her work could do it justice

winsome

"...win some or learn some" I'm Yours, Jason Mraz

Photo: Arktip, Serena Mitnik-Miller

scout holiday's

summer list.

loyalty and perceptiveness

What is your idea of misery? Bullied onto a path I have not chosen

-- Dries Van Noten in hint via hpnfrhpyacdns

Dries sweater via Jak & Jil

is deeper than the sea

"August Wave" and "September Wave" by Tom Phelan via Graphic Studio Dublin

nothing other than this

"Gymnast Karin Janz, 15, had been nominated Athlete of the Year in East Germany, where the Cold War propaganda tool of athletic training was an emblem for Soviet triumph (for the East), and personal escape from grinding Soviet repression (for the West). Richter, who had fled Dresden for Düsseldorf, fuses that inherent contradiction with "Leap Into the Void," a famous photograph of French artist Yves Klein appearing to soar out a second story window on tippy toes, which Richter saw in a 1963 Paris gallery exhibition.

The smile on the girl's face seems caught between joy and hysteria, youthful optimism and forced cheer. Forget exalted painterly uplift. A chilly, meditative small masterpiece, "Gymnastics" refuses idealized fantasies of escape -- athletic, artistic or political." LA Times review of from Calder to Warhol:Introducing the Fisher Collection (a completely staggering exhibit).

Gymnastics, 1967 Gerhard Richter

it's not something to hold

"I was thinking about Justin Taylor and a short online conversation we had around this article, the final point being ambition. I was thinking about rock climbing and bouldering problems, the differences in how the routes are rated. You climb with your feet so you don't tire out, but at some point you have to make a move, find the hold, press your hand on the top of a rock that doesn't even make sense, be willing to fall. They say writing's not a competition, and it isn't, but it also is. If we're being honest we should admit certain things. Even a great book might not find its audience, which strikes me as less of a tragedy than spending years writing something that's only very good. There are other factors. It's best just to believe in the meritocracy. It's still most of it. Get your foot up on the wall, stretch toward an innocuous bump. It's not something to hold, but you can lean against it. Work yourself straight until your body is finally angled into the face and you can rest for a moment. I don't know if it's a good thing, but it matters." Stephen Elliott in the Daily Rumpus

swoon

Celine shoes on Jak & Jil. And this post at Shiny Squirrel.

in a very good way

"I think a large part of the obligation of art is to not express how things are, but to rather express how things feel. The beauty of play is that it is completely submersive: you can't play and do something else at the same time. It monopolizes your attention, in a very good way. (And that sounds beautiful as I write this blog post, check Twitter, respond to emails, and have a chat with a friend.) With play, you focus on nonsense to see the potential of what's around you. And doesn't being completely submersed in the infinite potential of every single little bit sound like a beautiful way to live?" Frank Chimero via lemonade

Photo: tall ships via jokemijn via lemonade

you are the full four seasons

Photo from jja_bra via evencleveland

Académie Matisse

Creativity takes courage. Matisse

Photo: Brassai, Matisse with his model

my roommate wants a wife

she must be: smart, assertive and good at word games.

Photo by Martien Mulder via Horse Hunting

this would also

make a good tattoo. Vivian Mandala via the ugly earring

that would be nice

Eugenides: It is, actually. It’s a pleasurably absorbing activity. I do it a lot, obviously. Most every day, and all day long. So I had better well be enjoying myself. And yet it’s often demoralizing. Right though, and ever since I figured this book out, I’ve been working away more or less happily, or at least without significant dread. Chekhov said he wrote as easily as a bird sings. That would be nice. I’m like a bird who’s listened to all the other birds singing. Over there, in the next yard (very distant), are the songs I like. For a while I imitated them as best I could, until I figured out my own song, which I am now contentedly singing. Of course, what the bird doesn’t know (because it has a birdbrain) is that it isn’t just a matter of learning one song. You have to come up with a new song for every book. For now, I’ve got the song for this book. And that’s when it becomes fun. That’s why you don’t want to finish too quickly. Because the part that’s fun comes between the discovery of the song and the singing of the last note. Then you’re back to silence, and listening. And that can be a bit rough, especially for an increasingly older bird like me.

Interview with Eugenides in Work in Progress

jennifer

showed me this.

taking a trip

Because it's summertime.

Ewan Mcgregor's restored VW Van via Frolic

avoid all entanglements

twining

Via all the mountains.

scatter joy redux

It's in the smiles. Photo from Sartorialist.

("Scatter joy." Ralph Waldo Emerson)

the carpenter said nothing but

O Oysters,' said the Carpenter,

You've had a pleasant run!

Shall we be trotting home again?'

But answer came there none —

And this was scarcely odd, because

They'd eaten every one."

From The Walrus and the Carpenter

summer

Ana Kras via Horse Hunting

don't

unfind me.

Photo from "I will Dream of You," Jackson Eaton

canoodle playfully, crazily, or not

You know, woozy, half woke-up. And, with that, it felt/feels completely likeable, warm and evocative of a world where people move in and out of space and each other and don’t yank themselves different in the doing so.

Easy ebullient intimacy, I suppose, is what I’m saying. Or close enough.

From Robert Cook on Jackson Eaton
Photo from "I Will Dream of You," by Jackson Eaton

sitting bitch

Photo: Scott Pommier via Jen

in my mouth the tea

the parking lot is

crowded and I stand

rattling my keys the car

is empty as a bicycle

what are you doing now

where did you eat your

lunch and were there

lots of anchovies it

From "Morning," by Frank O'Hara

vertigo

Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory. Milan Kundera

Painting April, 2008, Becca Mann via Now Voyager

bowl cuts

A celebration over at Nearness of Distance.

Photo: Cat Power

une fille comme moi

Garance Dore on Jak & Jil

via montmartre

Sartorialist

porter hovey's dress

From Opening Ceremony.

either

Either write things worth reading or do things worth writing. Carson McCullers.

Cypress Kayaks via Hollister Hovey

until I found a way to quiet it

I don't seem to be able...(long hesitation)...to depart. Waiting for Godot

Photo: Portraits & Incidents, Bill Durgin

self portrait, jerusalem 1958

Inge Morath via Horse Hunting.

that something

Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are. Jose Saramago.

the way to finish the book

There's a set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. There's maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about. But one of them has to do with the sense of capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell "Another sensibility like mine exists." David Foster Wallace via Razzoo

Photo from Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection

recognizable feature

The only recognizable feature of hope is action. Grace Paley

Photo: Orange Beach, Alabama, more than 90 miles from BP oil spill,
Dave Martin, AP via Razzoo

but the real life

But the real life of a writer resides in showing up at the keyboard every day, with the necessary patience and mercy, and making the best decisions you can on behalf of your people. It’s a slow process. It often feels hopeless, more like an affliction than an art form. Steve Almond from The New Yorker's One over 40 in The Rumpus

Photo via per temeritas

vale press monogram

Another tattoo idea. Via John Coulthart

sometimes I imagine

Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. Jonathon Safran Foer

Edward Hopper, Reclining Nude, c. 1924-27 via silk and saffron via lost

via

Sarah Mei Herman via Scout Minami

this post

at Convoy kills me.

rachel's brother

designed Wiki Seat. Wildly cool.

the tattoo i want

has something to do with Serena Mitnick-Miller's artwork.

cabin bed

Cabin Bed by Jeff Lapid

immoderately perceptive

Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was, in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces, a stunning and final girl. "Down at the Dinghy" JD Salinger

sometimes it is necessary to make a confrontation

Once I was beset by anxiety but I pushed the fear away by studying the sky, determining when the moon would come out and where the sun would appear in the morning. Louise Bourgeois

Photo Robert Mapplethorpe

some days i have an obstinate fondness for all my poems

Some days I have an obstinate fondness for all my poems. Other days I dislike them intensely. Stanley Kunitz in The Paris Review

Photo Edward Weston 1979

and today

at Clara's graduation from SJSU, 24 Japanese American students who were forcibly removed from California universities to be interned during World War II were honored with degrees as part of the California State University's Nisei Diploma Project.

Photo Dorothea Lange

here's the thing

I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty... you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. JD Salinger

Photo via Nearness of Distance

good morning

via Native Kee

hunger is a funny thing

It has a kind of intelligence all its own. My Side of the Mountain (1959)

Photo: Ashley Helvey