Well put.

"Sorry—am I boring you with this fairy tale romance?"

I shake my head. "I have a feeling you're about to come to a turning point."

"You're right," Oshima says. "That's how stories happen—with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There's only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shames and sizes. It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness is a story."

—Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

past all accident.

Read this immediately.

You won't regret it.

Noted. And recorded.

I mentioned it here.

Now, for the actual quote:

He made me think of home—perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

Pretty close.

Ten points for me.

As Planned

courtesy of Frank O'Hara

because, at this point, it's been well established that his are the poems that I wish I wrote. And, because, well, it's been a awhile since I've posted.

It's been a strange few weeks. I'll write more soon, once I feel like reflecting.

In the mean, herewith:

After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called
La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words not their feelings
or what they mean and you write because
you know them not because you understand them
because you don't you are stupid and lazy
and will never be great but you do
what you know because what else is there?

Couldn't have said it better myself.

It's been a long weekend. Far too long.

Perhaps it's the 30 or so hours of small talk that I've made over the past 3 days, the several panicked phone calls, misprints contended with and the countless boxes that I've unpacked/shuffled/repacked/maimed myself with. Call it over-dramatizing and/or exhaustion, if you like. Whatever it is, I'm not inclined to do much else but sit and decompress at the moment.

For me, this means revisiting old favorites. And, sharing them.

So, another quote below. It's a good one, I promise.

"Official histories, news stories surround us daily, but the events of art reach us too late, travel languorously like messages in a bottle.

Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become.

Within two years of 1066, work began on the Bayeux Tapestry, Constantin the African brought Greek medicine to the western world. The chaos and tumble of events. The first sentence of every novel should be: 'Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.' Meander if you want to get to town."

-Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

Absolutely Alice

And the Gryphon added "Come, let's hear some of your adventures."

"I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning," said Alice a little timidly; "but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then."

-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

On writing

Too good not to share:

"The writer finds himself in this more and more comical condition—of having nothing to write, of having no means of writing it, and of being forced by extreme necessity to keep writing it."


—Maurice Blanchot

Fair Usage

I'm on a Bob Creeley kick.

Here's why:

The Sentence

There is that in love

which, by the syntax of,

men find women and join

their bodies to their minds

—which wants so to acquire

a continuity, a place,

a demonstration that it must

be one's own sentence.

Beckett Redux

Found the actual quote that I referenced a few days prior.

These are important things.

Really.

Or, not.

At any rate, here it is:

Be again, be again. [Pause.] All that old misery. [Pause.] Once wasn't enough for you. [Pause.] Lie down across her.

__
That is all.