Stranger than Paradise | Jim Jarmusch (1984)

"If there is no fog on the day you come home I will build a bonfire / So the smoke will make the cedars look the way you like them"

Matthea Harvey

In order to go to sleep, you must build a canoe. In order to go to sleep, you must put yourself in this canoe. You must launch from the shore and on this shore you must leave all objects and people behind. Sometimes one person can go in the canoe to help you along. Only one person is allowed. This person can never be a lover nor a child. As you get further from the edge, you will have to commit to cutting the string that binds you. You must resolve to let them go, or you will never be free. So remove the scissors from your dress and cut the line. Cut this line.

from PLEASE LIGHT UP

by Ted Powers

Because we are in love
I can know five or six things.
If the band plays inside the barn
and we stand outside the barn
we won’t need earplugs.
The next day the cows will moo
louder without realizing it.
Two down. You can probably
guess the final three or four:
the one about doubt,
the one about change,
the one about the void in people
and/or what the neighbors think.

another season brings another set of songs to remind me of

Il y a des beautés qui sautent aux yeux et d'autres qui sont écrites en hyéroglyphes: on met du temps à déchiffrer leur splendeur mais, quand elle est apparue, elle est plus belle que la beauté.

― Amélie Nothomb

I wandered home, saying your name

You'll be having my head, big as a birthday

The lights here are softer than you'd think

The dim lit peacocks in the trees,

They're hiding their eyes

(click image to enlarge)

i'd rather be

photos by nousjka

i've begun to forget what this place was created for because i don't know what should inhabit it and what does not belong. but why refine ourselves? i, for one, whose interests are elated by their own thoughts of themselves and then wane...

clenching my teeth i can hardly step outside of this first person narrative.

a voice to be deterred. a detour, for fun, to put it lightly.

if ever
then that's when.

it's obvious i can't keep myself straight in one place that i need two or three and can never keep track of what's at once.

i'm actually being literal, but it might not come off that way. it's actually much too stuffy in here and we can each of us tell each other where we decided to go for breakfast after all. apparently i chose the jumbled mess and four-berry jam.

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

Albert Camus

two truths and a lie

photos by Mark Leidner

OH MAN I REALLY MISS THE FEELING OF SUMMER AND BEING WITH YOU THEN

LUNAR ECLIPSE 2011

from top to bottom: Indian Peaks in Colorado with the eclipsing Moon setting overhead. Credit: Patrick Cullis; A composite image of the Dec. 10, 2011 lunar eclipse as seen from Ankara, Turkey. Credit: M. Rasid Tugral; A spooky-looking eclipsed Moon, as seen in Oakland, California. Credit: Eexelbots.

(source: universetoday)

maybe if i keep track of my spending there will be less of it to come

this is my premature spellbound and optimistic greeting to 2012, and winter since it's official now

providence co-pay: $20
hydrocodone: $6.40
bulk donuts (4 bismarcks): $2.36
1 cup coffee and 1 slice zucchini bread: $4.25
fence double-issue fall 2011: $10
16 oz rose milk tea and aloe: $3.25

*

(save $40 for pair of shoes spotted but had no money for)

*

dear lord

is there a cure for this?
and
is it worth it?

reminder for when "i just don't feel like it"

you are my safe place

nothing else seems better right now

microwaves
they ongoing



today we are so
unfamiliar and
destroying


a stick of butter
straight as the expressway
straight as your back
away from me
into the next room


cities, by definition, are made up of strangers



i wonder
what we must look like in aerial view?



colors colors
colors



tangled
mess


tell me
what makes special?


we are so ordinary


we contend ourselves with
mirrors


i could have sent you
a postcard while away
but i thought my voice
in absentia
would make you love me
less

wandering
from room to room, we sometimes do
things wrong, waiting for
a better body to arrive

Garth Graeper | "Better Cabin"

"It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over."

Frank O'Hara | "Meditations in an Emergency"

"Entrapped in being, we shall always have to come out of it. And when we are hardly outside of being, we always have to go back into it."

Gaston Bachelard | Poetics of Space, "The Dialectics of Outside and Inside"

SUNDANCE SHORTS : a selection

(from top to bottom) The Strange Ones by Christopher Radcliff & Lauren Wolkstein, USA; We're Leaving by Zachary Treitz, USA; The High Level Bridge by Trevor Anderson, Canada; Worst Enemy by Lake Bell, USA; Deeper than Yesterday by Ariel Kleinmann, Australia; Incident by a Bank by Ruben Östlund, Sweden.

"We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it’s a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it."

Andrei Tarkovsky

"j’étais fort mauvais poète. Je ne savais pas aller jusqu’au bout"

WINTER LOVE

by Linda Gregg

I would like to decorate this silence,
but my house grows only cleaner
and more plain. The glass chimes I hung
over the register ring a little
when the heat goes on.
I waited too long to drink my tea.
It was not hot. It was only warm.

FIRST STATION

by Alice Bolin

Our morning is the movement of a wound,
the trace of heartbeat I stranded under your shirt.

Afternoon, the pages of a novel sticking.
Its chapters speak step by step of attrition,

a guidebook for a bleak beatitude.
Anaphora for an afternoon:

when we rode to the country,
when we sucked rocks at the riverbed,

when a familiar gloom
creeped in under our happiness.

The dire sun curled against my limbs
and dead aspens rose like ribcages

in the mountains. Face it —
you leak dissipation on every book you pray over.

The bus stop guards the carcass
of an elementary school,

its walls and wiring gutted out.
We wait in the white dark of morning.

In February 2010, Franzen (along with writers including Richard Ford, Zadie Smith and Anne Enright) was asked by The Guardian to contribute what he believed were ten serious rules to abide by for aspiring writers. Franzen's rules ran as follows:

1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
2. Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
3. Never use the word "then" as a ­conjunction – we have "and" for this purpose. Substituting "then" is the lazy or tone-deaf writer's non-solution to the problem of too many "ands" on the page.
4. Write in the third person unless a ­really distinctive first-person voice ­offers itself irresistibly.
5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
6. The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than "The Metamorphosis".
7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.
8. It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction [the TIME magazine cover story detailed how Franzen physically disables the Net portal on his writing laptop].
9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
10. You have to love before you can be relentless.

Needle Plater, Glenview, Illinois

This is an incredible story from World War II. Here's the original caption on this photo: "Formerly a sculptress and designer of tiles, Dorothy Cole converted her basement into a workshop to tin plate needles for valves for blood transfusion bottles prepared by Baxter Laboratories, Glenview, Ill. She turns in her profits to war bonds to provide a college education for her young nephew."

from Twenty Plays of the Nō Theatre

In the town of Kowata,
There were horses to hire,
But I loved you so much
I walked barefoot all the way.