maurice sendak

Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters - sometimes very hastily - but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.

[original maurice sendak art via here]

emily giffin

I love him for his intelligence, his sensitivity, his courage. I love him wholly and unconditionally without reservation. I love him enough to take risks. I love him enough to accept my own happiness and use it, in turn, to make him happy back.

[image via here]

rainer maria rilke

A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity. In this manner of its origin lies its true estimate: there is no other. Therefore, I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths whence your life wells forth; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it as it sounds.

[image via here]

theodore isaac rubin

I must learn to love the fool in me, the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries.

[image via here]

chuck klosterman

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

[image via here]

me too

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

Elizabeth Taylor

[image via here]

and speaking of forts

[image via vera vodak]

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.

[image via here]

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

[image via here]

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

[image via here]

fallen

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

- Andrea Gibson

[image via little brown pen]

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

[image via here]

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.