The Murder Mile

Anna Akhmatova, "One Takes the Straight Line"

Sat, 26 May 2012 22:14:56 -0400

One takes the straight line,
another goes in a circle
and longs for the return to the parents’ house
and longs for a former girlfriend.
But I go, not in a straight line or in a zigzag,
into nowhere and never,
and disasters follow me
like trains crashing off the tracks.

(via rememo)

"Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth,..."

Wed, 23 May 2012 16:40:32 -0400

“Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.”

- Martin Amis, House of Meetings (via devilduck)

"Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or..."

Wed, 23 May 2012 09:51:19 -0400

“Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone’s hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted—wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought: Please don’t look at me. If you don’t, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.”

- Nicole Krauss, The History of Love (via larmoyante)

saturnrising: Kim Parko, from “Cure All” (via bloodmilk)

Tue, 22 May 2012 15:00:06 -0400

saturnrising:

Kim Parko, from “Cure All” (via bloodmilk)

Alvin Enck’s Holy Bible, 1935. Handwritten on page 246...

Tue, 22 May 2012 13:23:36 -0400

Alvin Enck’s Holy Bible, 1935. Handwritten on page 246 (Revelation: 22): ” Holy Bible. Life is pleasant, if you make it, Kiss me Baby, I can take it.” Collection Jim Linderman.

Martha Baird, "Do Not Make Things Too Easy"

Tue, 22 May 2012 13:17:01 -0400

Do not make things too easy.
There are rocks and abysses in the mind
As well as meadows.
There are things knotty and hard: intractable.
Do not talk to me of love and understanding.
I am sick of blandishments.
I want the rock to be met by a rock.
If I am vile, and behave hideously,
Do not tell me it was just a misunderstanding.

(via blogut)

Anna Akhmatova, "A land not mine"

Mon, 21 May 2012 20:05:49 -0400

A land not mine, still
forever memorable,
the waters of its ocean
chill and fresh.

Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,
and the air drunk, like wine,
late sun lays bare
the rosy limbs of the pinetrees.

Sunset in the ethereal waves:
I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets is inside me again.

(via rememo)

"I have always been a wretched speaker. My vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to..."

Mon, 21 May 2012 19:52:10 -0400

“I have always been a wretched speaker. My vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to wriggle out into the physical zone. Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasures.”

- : Vladimir Nabokov (via clavicola)

"i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other..."

Fri, 18 May 2012 21:18:20 -0400

“i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.”

- Lucille Clifton, from “won’t you celebrate with me” (via the-final-sentence)

Gwendolyn MacEwen, “Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear"

Fri, 18 May 2012 18:14:04 -0400

Let me make this perfectly clear.
I have never written anything because it is a Poem.
This is a mistake you always make about me,
A dangerous mistake. I promise you
I am not writing this because it is a Poem.

You suspect this is a posture or an act.
I am sorry to tell you it is not an act.

You actually think I care if this
Poem gets off the ground or not. Well
I don’t care if this poem gets off the ground or not
And neither should you.
All I have ever cared about
And all you should ever care about
Is what happens when you lift your eyes from this page.

Do not think for one minute it is the Poem that matters.
It is not the Poem that matters.
You can shove the Poem.
What matters is what is out there in the large dark
And in the long light,
Breathing.

(leprintemps via ahuntersheart)

Photo

Fri, 18 May 2012 18:08:31 -0400

Martín Espada, "How to Read Ezra Pound"

Fri, 18 May 2012 09:44:36 -0400

At the poets’ panel,
after an hour of poets debating Ezra Pound,
Abe the Lincoln veteran,
remembering
the Spanish Civil War,
raised his hand and said:
If I knew that
a fascist
was a great poet,
I’d shoot him
anyway.

(via wwnorton)

Joan Didion, "On Self Respect"

Thu, 17 May 2012 18:27:03 -0400

“To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

…People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of mortal nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.

People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk… They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.”

(via contempler)

My copy of Anne Carson's 'Antigonick' was delivered yesterday

Thu, 17 May 2012 16:03:47 -0400

My copy of Anne Carson's 'Antigonick' was delivered yesterday:

“Antigonick is a comic-book presentation of Sophokles’ Antigone in a new translation by Anne Carson, with text blocks hand-inked on the page by Carson and her collaborator Robert Currie. On separate translucent vellum pages, the artist Bianca Stone has created stunning drawings to overlay the text.”

It’s jaw dropping; if you’ve got the funds, it’s well worth it.

earlyfrost: Planetwide changes in Jupiter’s atmosphere during...

Thu, 17 May 2012 15:55:55 -0400

earlyfrost:

Planetwide changes in Jupiter’s atmosphere during 24 rotations from October 31st to November 9th, 2000

"When I die, lava will flow and preserve me whole for 50,000 years. I’ll be exhibited in a great..."

Thu, 17 May 2012 15:49:24 -0400

“When I die, lava will flow and preserve me whole
for 50,000 years. I’ll be exhibited in a great museum,
next to the whale bones and amethyst geodes.

You’ll be pinned with the butterflies,
handled with gloves, exquisitely fragile.

Isn’t it funny they’ll never connect us?
This rock woman with that paper man?
They were never in love.
She would have pounded him into dust.
He’d have been crushed by a woman like that.”

- Kathleen Flenniken, Natural History (via leda-swanson)

Paige Ackerson-Kiely, "to the understudy"

Thu, 17 May 2012 09:36:53 -0400

It is true I am afraid of the stranger in men.

On the Internet some woman kneeling
provocatively.

O one of many crickets
I crumpled into toilet paper,
deafening.

Where are the lacy
Christening gowns. The babies
leaning headstrong.

Took a walk in my neighborhood
past the church. Touched the
freshly painted siding, my side
that said sit down girlfriend.

Sidle up and let’s watch
the traffic like faces for
confirmation.

The night sky that does not
twinkle, the headlights
one

after another

not friendly eyes
averting.

I know I will probably die
with no one
around. I’m not sick or
anything

like that—
there they go. There they go again.

(via kodistes)

"The Word became flesh so that I might become God."

Thu, 17 May 2012 09:34:59 -0400

“The Word became flesh so that I might become God.”

- Angela of Foligno (via sex-death-rebirth)

“The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which...

Tue, 15 May 2012 14:44:00 -0400

“The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens into that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was a conscious ego, and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.”

— Carl Jung, The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man

(via frenchtwist)

Chris Jordan, Organ in canal near Venice (via chuckwashere)

Tue, 15 May 2012 14:38:40 -0400

Chris Jordan, Organ in canal near Venice

(via chuckwashere)