chuck klosterman

People who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they'd never admit in normal conversation.

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me too

Oh I love red.  I'm very loyal to my colors.

Elizabeth Taylor

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and speaking of forts

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on art

The following excerpt has changed the way I look at everything. It's also changed the way I look at my gray cube, as a photocopy of page 204 from Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog now hangs on my wall:

But when we gaze at a still life, when - even though we did not pursue it - we delight in its beauty, a beauty borne away by the magnified and immobile figuration of things, we find pleasure in the fact that there was no need for longing, we may contemplate something we need not want, may cherish something we need not desire. So this still life, because it embodies a beauty that speaks to our desire but was given birth by someone else's desire, because it cossets our pleasure without in any way being part of our own projects, because it is offered to us without requiring the effort of desiring on our part: this still life incarnates the quintessence of Art, the certainty of timelessness. In the scene before our eyes - silent, without life or motion - a time exempt of projects is incarnated, perfection purloined from duration and its weary greed - pleasure without desire, existence without duration, beauty without will.

For art is emotion without desire.

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andy andrews

Until a person takes responsibility for where he is, there is no basis for moving on. The bad news is that the past was in your hands, but the good news is that the future, my friend, is also in your hands.

Andy Andrews

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bob marley

Tonight I've signed myself up for a Bob Marley Friday Night Flow class at Garden State Yoga. The room is candle-lit and Bob Marley music accompanies the practice. I can't think of a better way to start my weekend.

george whitman

Shakespeare & Co. is my idea of the perfect refuge, and while my Parisian affair was brief, I spent a generous amount of time in this warm, affable bookstore just across the Seine from Notre Dame.

The Sundance Channel aired a special on George Whitman, ex-patriot and owner of Shakespeare & Co., entitled Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man. At the end of the documentary, Whitman recites the poem below. I fell in love with his cadence, the serenity in his gaze, the simplicity of that moment he chose to share his poem, the eccentricity of his haircut. I’ve memorized his poem and it’s morphed into mantra of sorts; I catch myself thinking the words without realizing I’m doing so.

Here is my best effort at putting this poem on paper (so to speak). I can't find it in written form, trust me, I've tried:

Among the visions which my fancies trace
There was one brightest star, one face -
One image from afar filled with syruped grace

Each poem is her heart’s fantasy
Each flower and tree is framed within her memory
Each dream, each midnight, and each dawn
Are garments, thoughts of her put on

Each beam of light from the imperial blue
With her in falls the good
The beautiful
The true

okay

Begin anywhere.

- Frank Giampietro

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fallen

Autumn is the hardest season. The leaves have fallen. And they fell like they were falling in love with the ground.

- Andrea Gibson

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three lives

Last Saturday, I spent several hours at Three Lives & Company, a special bookstore in Greenwich Village.  It is small, quaint, and stocked with bestsellers, obscure titles, travelogues, local authors, classics, children's books, and so on.   I wanted to read (okay devour) every book my fingers tumbled amorously across.  Miraculously, I narrowed my massive pile down to just one, A Moveable Feast.  Thrilling.

I approached the cashier and he asked, "All that time spent and just this to show for it?"  I smiled and said back, "That time spent is my favorite part." 

p.s. Google Books gives the best previews for perspective reads, typically the first three chapters (or more).

up

This news story was bizarre/perfect material for the stunt below.  I might recommend the following be read out loud for cadence's sake.  Make Will proud now. 

[via here]

wtf

The ink pad would need replacing by the end of day one.

one big wish

I was within and without.  Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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stapled

Empty thoughts obstruct what I love -
what I long to do in the moments I’m unable,
chained
and stuck
and stapled,
forming an enemy bent to snuff what remains.
Creatively I abscond,
an anti-arsonist.

The bucket of flour – mine,
teeters confidently on the shelf above what’s left,
(now only slight smolderings of craft)
so that it can bully and blanket
my only motive
with a film that hints
teasingly toward a suffocating end.

“Children,” the teacher instructs,
“the pyromaniac is one who gives in to incendiary longing,
weak like the stilted victim with roots that no longer matter.”

So I am both – the anti and the obsessed,
Negation for a brief, anomalous minute
Only until the bucket tires of teasing
and falls,
leaving me
(me!)
languid.

e.e. cummings

here's to opening and upward, to leaf and to sap
and to your (in my arms flowering so new)

self whose eyes smell of the sound of rain

and here's to silent certainly mountains; and to

a disappearing poet of always, snow

and to morning; and to morning's beautiful friend

twilight (and a first dream called ocean) and

let must or if be damned with whomever's afraid

down with ought with because with every brain

which thinks it thinks, nor dares to feel (but up

with joy; and up with laughing and drunkenness)

here's to one undiscoverable guess

of whose mad skill each world of blood is made

(whose fatal songs are moving in the moon

oh the temptation

This is too good:

Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.

muriel barbery

Currently reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog. I'm one thoroughly smitten aristocrat.

On the character Manuela -

'When you eat a walnut, you must use a tablecloth,' says Manuela, removing from her old shopping bag a little hamper made of light wood in which some almond tuiles are nestled among curls of carmine tissue paper. I make coffee that we shall not drink, but its wafting odor delights us both, and in silence we sip a cup of green tea as we nibble on our tuiles.

-

This girl from Faro, as I was saying, who wears the requisite black support stockings and a kerchief on her head, is an aristocrat. An authentic one, of the kind whose entitlement you cannot contest: it is etched onto her very heart, it mocks titles and peole with handles to their names. What is an aristocrat? A woman who is never sullied by vulgarity, although she may be surrounded by it.

-

Yes, as if I were a queen. When Manuela arrives, my lodge is transformed into a palace, and a picnic between two pariahs becomes the feast of two monarchs. Like a storyteller transforming life into a shimmering river where trouble and boredom vanish far below the water, Manuela metamorphoses our existence into a warm and joyful epic.

an accurate capture

Just remember, the same as a spectacular Vogue magazine, remember that no matter how close you follow the jumps: Continued on page whatever. No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it at all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice. None of this matters. We're just warming up.

Chuck Palahniuk

water for elephants

Read this. It is excellent in all of its ying-yang'd glory.  Gruen creates two contrasting worlds, the Benzini Brother's Most Spectacular Show on Earth contra a lifeless nursing home seeping inertia (my oxymoronic tendencies need a leash, forgive me).  Although these worlds exist decades apart, Jacob Jankowski's barreling fervor laces a common youthfulness throughout - twenty or twenty-three, ninety or ninety-three no matter.

I took an immediate liking to Gruen's subtle intent; very Joseph-Heller-esque (and believe me when I say whoever borrowed-for-good my copy of Catch-22, my heart is broken).  Camel may have been my favorite character for this reason - "'It's Camel,' Earl says in a hushed voice. 'He's got trouble. Foot trouble.  They've gone all floppy.  He kind of slaps them down.  His hands aren't so great neither.'" Rosie and Rosemary are a close second, but not second and third.  I thought they played too similar an understanding and sustaining role in Jacob's life to differentiate between them both (and not for physical reasons, obviously).  

Again, it's fulfilling and will not disappoint.  Themes abound, plus, the cover's a good one.  I love stripes.

jeffrey mcdaniel

Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice
the ring that’s landed on your finger, a massive
insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end
of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt
in your voice under a blanket and said there’s two kinds
of women—
those you write poems about
and those you don’t. It’s true. I never brought you
a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed.
My idea of courtship was tapping Jane’s Addiction
lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M.,
whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked
within the confines of my character, cast
as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan
of your dark side. We don’t have a past so much
as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power
never put to good use. What we had together
makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught
one another like colds, and desire was merely
a symptom that could be treated with soup
and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now,
I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy,
as if I invented it, but I’m still not immune
to your waterfall scent, still haven’t developed
antibodies for your smile. I don’t know how long
regret existed before humans stuck a word on it.
I don’t know how many paper towels it would take
to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light
of a candle being blown out travels faster
than the luminescence of one that’s just been lit,
but I do know that all our huffing and puffing
into each other’s ears—as if the brain was a trick
birthday candle—
didn’t make the silence
any easier to navigate. I’m sorry all the kisses
I scrawled on your neck were written
in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you
so hard one of your legs would pop out
of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you’d press
your face against the porthole of my submarine.
I’m sorry this poem has taken thirteen years
to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding
off the shoulder blade’s precipice and joyriding
over flesh, we’d put our hands away like chocolate
to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy
of each other’s eyelashes, translated a paragraph
from the volumes of what couldn’t be said.


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