it's snowing

fell asleep in front of the fire reading another bullshit night in suck city, which is beautiful and wrenching, more wrought than written, an example of the poet's confidence in the role imagination plays in memory
how that is the closest we get to telling the truth.

postsecrets

courage

technology affects modern relationships in the most peculiar ways. I can call back an unanswered call on my cell and know someone used a friend's phone, thought twice about contacting me, or found out what they wanted to know. People fall in and out of love based on images they project and information they reveal on a screen. I'm tired of it. I want to crack this open. I want what the old woman whose voice broke when she stood up in the Q & A at Josh Shenk's reading fears there's no place for anymore. A time when people didn't feel like you could "google the essence of a soul."

new yorker poem #5

It feels so good to write, she
said, it’s like a second childhood
to be confronted by an empty page.
A troubadour, an indistinct
meager notion, cheap china figurines
and formal rooms, whose architecture
dictates within narrow parameters.
Now is the time to act. Before the turds
of your endurance disappear forever.
Don’t wear out your welcome. To the
fidelity of transposal, Nabokov said,
I have sacrificed everything: elegance,
euphony, clarity, good taste, modern
usage and even grammar. One assumes
the rather vacant, slapdash mood
is intentional. This life of mine
suffered from an excess of design.
I had to live through it to know that
the memory of pain can be a painkiller.
The will to believe is universal, but this
is Californian: faith boiled down to fad.
An American volunteer carries himself
through revolution in the self-conscious
poise of a lonely matador in the ring.
It is vital to be able to laugh at oneself,
the tragic flaw of many writers
is to laugh at the wrong thing.
When she cracks she cracks quickly
and almost noiselessly, like a teacup.
Time would gather up the ends,
see to it that honoring of a memory
was love that mattered also...

John Fowles

died today. His book, The Magus, changed my life as a teenager.

From the introduction:

• I do not defend Conchis’ decision at the execution, but I defend the reality of the dilemma. God and freedom are totally anti-pathetic concepts; and men believe in their imaginary gods most often because they are afraid to believe in the other thing. I am old enough to realise now that they do sometimes with good reason. True freedom lies between each two, never in one alone, and therefore is never absolute freedom.

• If there was some central theme beneath the (more Irish than Greek) stew of intuitions about the nature of human existence – and of fiction – it is perhaps in the alternative title, whose rejection I still sometimes regret: The Godgame. I did intend Conchis to exhibit a series of masks representing human notions of God, from the supernatural to the jargon-ridden scientific, that is, a series of human illusions about something that does not exist in fact, absolute knowledge and absolute power. The destruction of such illusions seems to me still an eminently humanist aim; and I wish there were some super-Conchis who could put the Arabs and the Israelis, or the Ulster Catholics and Protestants, through the same heuristic mill as Nicholas.

the poets march on washington

What do we want?
Immortality!
When do we want it?
Now!

What do we want?
Immortality!
When do we want it?
Now!

What do we want?
Immortality!
When do we want it?
Now

--by James Cummins

94%

Saw Capote tonight. Some things it made me think:

Sometimes people just want a witness.
There is a difference between a smart actor and an actor who can deliver smart lines. PS Hoffman is a smart actor; it's in what's between the words.
I wanted Catherine Keener to go away.
There is a difference between being a good supporting actor and bowing out altogether.
There is almost always some kind of roadkill involved in the act of creation; the more at stake, the better it tends to be.
The unreliable narrator can happen in the third person.
It is easy, and pleasing, to let people on screen be complicated, as opposed to in life, when it is difficult and often unpleasant.
I want a drink.

others

Okay, so I still have not figured out how to add the links to my template. So, for the time being, I’m going to make a list of blogs I love, like, am mildly fascinated by, pass the time with, or read compulsively. Some of them are my friends', some of them are people who don’t speak to me anymore for one reason or another, some of them are people I’ve never met but stumbled across:

aggressiveflashcards
swoonrocket
small sour mind
herecomeseverybody
danielnester.com/news/
freewillastrology.net
awfully serious girl
livejournal.com/~ro6ot/
scrolling.blogs.com/mothering
political mammal
stephenelliott.com
postsecret
apocryphaltext
my brazilian life
minor american nation
jewishyirishy.com
geneva convention
early hours of sky
margaretcho.net


K, well, that’s a start.