"The world is crammed with delightful things. I think young people make such a mistake about that — not letting themselves be happy. I sometimes think that happiness is the only thing that counts."
Virginia Woolf | The Voyage Out
Sep 27, 2011
Sep 20, 2011
AFTER YOU LEFT
by Lydia Davis
You wanted me to tell you everything I did after we left each other.
You wanted me to tell you everything I did after we left each other.
Well, I was very sad; it had been so lovely. When I saw your back disappear into the train compartment, I went up on the bridge to watch your train pass under me. That was all I saw; you were inside it! I looked after it as long as I could, and I listened to it. In the other direction, toward Rouen, the sky was red and striped with broad bands of purple. The sky would be long dark by the time I reached Rouen and you reached Paris. I lit another cigar. For a while I paced back and forth. Then, because I felt so numb and tired, I went into a café across the street and drank a glass of kirsch.
My train came into the station, heading in the opposite direction from yours. In the compartment, I met a man I knew from my schooldays. We talked for a long time, almost all the way back to Rouen.
When I arrived, Louis was there to meet me, as we had planned, but my mother hadn’t sent the carriage to take us home. We waited for a while, and then, by moonlight, we walked across the bridge and through the port. In that part of town there are two places where we could hire a hackney cab.
At the second place, the people live in an old church. It was dark. We knocked and woke the woman, who came to the door in her nightcap. Imagine the scene, in the middle of the night, with the interior of that old church behind her—her jaws gaping in a yawn; a candle burning; the lace shawl she wore hanging down below her hips. The horse had to be harnessed, of course. The breeching band had broken, and we waited while they mended it with a piece of rope.
On the way home, I told Louis about my old school friend, who is his old school friend too. I told him how you and I had spent our time together. Out the window, the moon was shining on the river. I remembered another journey home late at night by moonlight. I described it to Louis: There was deep snow on the ground. I was in a sleigh, wearing my red wool hat and wrapped in my fur cloak. I had lost my boots that day, on my way to see an exhibition of savages from Africa. All the windows were open, and I was smoking my pipe. The river was dark. The trees were dark. The moon shone on the fields of snow: they looked as smooth as satin. The snow-covered houses looked like little white bears curled up asleep. I imagined that I was in the Russian steppe. I thought I could hear reindeer snorting in the mist, I thought I could see a pack of wolves leaping up at the back of the sleigh. The eyes of the wolves were shining like coals on both sides of the road.
When at last we reached home, it was one in the morning. I wanted to organize my work table before I went to bed. Out my study window, the moon was still shining—on the water, on the tow path, and, close to the house, on the tulip tree by my window. When I was done, Louis went off to his room and I went off to mine.
Sep 17, 2011
Sep 10, 2011
adomania
n. the crushing sense that the future is arriving ahead of schedule, that all those years with fanciful names like “2011” are bursting from their hypothetical cages into the arena of the present, furiously bucking the grip of your expectations while you lean and slip in your saddle, one hand reaching for reins, the other waving up high like a schoolkid who finally knows the answer to the question.
Sep 9, 2011
Sep 1, 2011
Aug 28, 2011
"The actual facts of the historical story had practically begged to become a novel: a beautiful Italian noblewoman, gone blind in the flower of her youth. A local inventor, inspired by her beauty to create the world’s first typewriter. The complication that both of them were married to other people. The lush backdrop of early nineteenth century Italy.
It was deceptively simple: Carolina, the contessa, wanted to write a letter to Turri, the inventor. When I had her sit down to do that with the tools she would have had at hand: a pen, ink, sealing wax, and open flame – I knew immediately why Turri would have been inspired to invent his new machine. For a blind person, these simplest elements of communication would have been not only virtually impossible to negotiate, but genuinely dangerous – which is why most early typewriters weren’t conceived of as commercial products, but as writing aids for the blind."
Carey Wallace | review of The Blind Contessa's New Machine
"and I could give you all the olive trees oh look at the trees and look at my face and look at a place far away from here"
eugene, ore. with jasmine | jun 6, 2009
OF SHELLS
As scale of balance. As object hollowed, emptied of its mass.
As framework, mere externality without substance; as in the outer part.
Received unto windows as indecent allusion; as glass in its two halves.
As if edifice or fabric whose interior, removed is now merely an arc.
As skeletal or concessive to such regression. Remains of a ship
once carved and filled. As in building invites a return unto dust.
As coming away, as departure from the unending hymnal
procession of blues that envelop an egg as it does.
As encasement shed in order to lay the insides bare
As the child or pupa casts its skin; as giving up its outer form.
No longer fixed close, but to divide and to pare.
As an empty case of crushed fruit sits outside in unexpected storms.
As currency. As drinking vessel. As containing pigment of erasure.
Vicissitude of hues; as whiteness in fragments. As opening or as closure.
As framework, mere externality without substance; as in the outer part.
Received unto windows as indecent allusion; as glass in its two halves.
As if edifice or fabric whose interior, removed is now merely an arc.
As skeletal or concessive to such regression. Remains of a ship
once carved and filled. As in building invites a return unto dust.
As coming away, as departure from the unending hymnal
procession of blues that envelop an egg as it does.
As encasement shed in order to lay the insides bare
As the child or pupa casts its skin; as giving up its outer form.
No longer fixed close, but to divide and to pare.
As an empty case of crushed fruit sits outside in unexpected storms.
As currency. As drinking vessel. As containing pigment of erasure.
Vicissitude of hues; as whiteness in fragments. As opening or as closure.
Aug 27, 2011
"I stripped Shakespeare's sonnets bare to the 'nets' to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible—a divergent elsewhere. When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it with or against this palimpsest."
Jen Bervin | Nets
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