A sixty-nine year old love letter

My grandma promised to send me one of the letters and today it came. The pages are thin, the folds pronounced, it is typed out with penned in corrections of his English.

“How can I ever doubt your esteemed character when I have spent five days and six evenings in your company…I like to recollect all my memories. But you I shall always see in my mind that way as I first met you when I was introduced to you by the Senator whose name I cannot remember. If you could only know how beautiful you looked that night when you appeared at the dance and you so tall in the dress which fell to the toes and made you look so lady like. So there you see I remember you. Perhaps you think I am saying this as an excuse for my lateness in answering your letter but do believe me I would have the same to say if I had answered immediately.”

This part is handwritten in a green pen: “I am writing a long letter because I wish to write to you always. You are truly to me very dear. Every moment of that thought gives me great pleasure. Your remembrance has been a great reward for that trip. Speaking in English I shall save everything for you… yes just for you.”

The letter is dated December 26, 1940 and Yugoslavia was on the brink of being taken over by the Axis powers. “Can you forgive my tardiness? Believe me I was away where it was impossible to write as I was on duty as you know todays situation in the world…We are preparing to celebrate our great day the birth of Christ a moment when we Yugoslavs realize peace and a future in the wings of our home. We are at peace now when from all sides blood is being spilled of young and good sons of different lands.”

I tried googling his name but got absolutely no responses, not a single thing even appeared. I can’t help but conjure in my mind the possibilities of who this man is – endless elaborate concoctions, piecing together the bits I know, weaving through them varying negative or positive contemplations. Whatever his intentions, for whatever reason the letters stopped coming, whoever he was, he was a man who closes tender letters by saying “Always I am to you.”

Do I post this and share? Or is it too sacred perhaps? Did she really love him or is this letter really nothing? She was about to destroy the letters, worried that people would gossip about the romance, but my grandma had protested and kept one of the letters all these years. Thelma was an avid traveler, going to every continent, and she did make it to Yugoslavia at one point, it was actually her last international trip, two weeks in Dubrovnik in 1982. Had he faded from her memory years before that, or did glimpses of him and that voyage still appear on lonely nights?

BABIES!!

The credit for sharing this gem goes to Shark Gillins. Check it out!!

For Amy...

In honor of Amy's engagement I have a different kind of transpacific proposal...

Much has been written, composed, sand, performed, painted, etc about the ol' idea of "Love" - may I suggest now a time to share with Amy and the rest of us our favorites of all variety on the matter...

for amy!

so when composer schumann asked dear clara for her hand in marriage back in 1837, she wrote in response...

‘you require but a simple yes? such a small word – but such an important one. but should not a heart so full of unutterable love as mine utter this little word with all its might? i do so and my innermost soul whispers always to you.’

oh how beautiful! it popped into my mind when i heard the blessed news of amy + warren = eternity. congrats dearest amy! i'm so so happy for you two! a grand huzzah for the small word "yes" and all that it embodies as the starting-point of a full life together :)

a few lovelies for all you lovelies

last night was a beautifully calming show in williamsburg of keren ann and claire + the reasons.

(embedding is broken! but go to the links for loveliness! the video links on "ann" and "claire + the reasons" are wondrous)

and do you all know about habit? if not, please acquaint yourself now.

Tragic European Secret

*sorry i haven't posted anything in a long time, but here is something that changed my world today

For as long as I can remember my Great Aunt Thelma has been a huge factor in my life, both during the few shorts years I knew her and after her death. The main descriptions people give of her are driven and compassionate. She never married and spent her whole life striving to serve others as well as reach her utmost potential. You have likely heard me speak of her before.

Today I interviewed my Grandma, Thelma's only surviving sibling. I asked many questions, including this one I have always been afraid to ask,"did she have any romance in her life?"
"Why, yes!" my grandma said and her face lit up, waiting to tell me the dramatic story.

In 1939, at the age of 35, she left for her first trip to Europe for an international meeting of women. Her voyage to Europe was on the luxury ship the 'Queen Mary', and it was filled with movies stars, senators, and other elites of the world. On the boat she met a man from Yugoslavia who had been in Washington DC for some uncertain, but high-profile meetings. Thelma and the man fell in love, and he said he would find her once this ever present war ended. She received two letters from him, professing his love and asking about the possibility of marriage. After the 2 letters, she never heard from him again. (My grandma said she has one of the letters and will give to me).

In 1944, Thelma went back to Europe abroad the 'Queen Mary' again, but this time it was a troop ship and she was to spend the rest of the war working for the American Red Cross in Liverpool. She then spent 2 more years helping rebuild the continent. During that time she was invited to Buckingham Palace and met the King, Queen, and future Queen, drove a jeep alone all night to see the Nuremburg trials, and did much tiring work in Paris, Munich, and elsewhere.

- The 'Queen Mary' 1939.

Captain Von Trapp....sigh...

perfect

Edelweiss - Sound of Music - Christopher Plummer's own voice from Mark on Vimeo.

Don't Think Twice, It's Alright

A friend of mine posted on our group blog about a blessed experience he had at the Joshua Radin concert last night in NYC. A happy crowd, an acoustic Dylan cover, and a talented (and handsome) performer? Yes, please!

day two

stuck in bed with a medley of bronchitis and swine flu (as diagnosed by your local insta-care) means that i finally have time to post the goods i've been saving up for you, my dear friends.

The Cinnamon Peeler

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
And leave the yellow bark dust
On your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
You could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to you hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
--your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in the water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
you climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
Peeler's wife. Smell me.

Michael Ondaatje

a poem, of sorts

i'm currently lying in bed in a sequined hoody and leggings, swimming beneath a hundred heavy blankets and a floaty sea of kleenexes. i've succumbed to defeat by infantile infectious somethings (i.e. i have literally been coated by a multitude of six-year-old viruses and have been unable to stop coughing for the past four and a half weeks) and thought: oh where, oh where did my transpacifists go?

silly question. you've been here all along.

so i've been doing this little teaching thing for the past few months, and it sort of takes up the entirety of my life. and suddenly, at the age of twenty-three, i have 29 little guppies that i get to kiss and hug every day, and worry about whether they have enough food at home, and whether or not they put the larger number in their hearts as an addition strategy. i run around the classroom commanding "pencils down. hands folded. eyes on me," whilst sprinkling magic math dust on their heads with a tattered silver wand. i teach them how to say nice things to each other, and we practice giving each other compliments. when they do something wrong, they say sorry to one another, and not just sorry, but sorry for ___________, and this is what i can do next time to fix it.

and sometimes, james marshmallow (whose name may or may not actually be marshall), who has the largest smile on planet earth and the smoothest, softest cheeks (which he claims is possible for anyone if you get puffy like him!), when he isn't suspended for rolling down the hall and kicking the principal, or suffering from a high degree of anxiety disorders no six-year-old should ever have to deal with, also plays the apology game.

after kicking at the wall for a half hour and then throwing a screaming tantrum under the table one day:




i was under the table. i'm sorry for going under the table. i love you. i'm sorry, do you accept my apology, do you?

after which, while trying to hide the giant tears rolling down my face, i squeezed his puffiest of cheeks and replied, oh james. i love you so much back, and i accept.

kind of my personal hero

lovely

cayman islands is one of my favorite kings of convenience song and i just found this beautiful b-side that features feist. such a good song for days like these:


if you haven't heard declaration of dependence, their new album, check it out on grooveshark.com!

Ode to Autumn

I had a dinner party on Saturday dedicated to this poem. A really good decision.

By Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cell.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir, the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

i can't embed this video, but do watch it! it is truly stunning.

http://scher.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/the-shadows-dream/

beautiful

happy monday

after months of silence, this!

it's the end of the workday, end of the workweek, and i'm reading an interview with author nelson algren [famous for writing about junkies in the 1950s-60s], and just found this paragraph so absolutely honest and correct and beautiful that i had to burst and share it. it could be applied to anything, to any life or lifestyle or person or community, not just heroin addicts. he taps into truth, absolutely unfettered --

Well, there’s always something wrong in any society. I think it
would be a mistake to aim at any solution, you know; I mean, the
most you can do is—well, if any writer can catch the routine lives
of people just living in that kind of ring of fire to show how you
can’t go out of a certain neighborhood if you’re addicted, or for
other reasons, that you can’t be legitimate, but that within the
limitation you can succeed in making a life that is routine—with
human values that seem to be a little more real, a little more

intense, and human, than with people who are freer to come and
go—if somebody could write a book about the routine of these
circumscribed people, just their everyday life, without any big
scenes, without any violence, or cops breaking in, and so on, just
day-to-day life—like maybe the woman is hustling and makes a
few bucks, and they get a little H just to keep from getting sick,
and go to bed, and get up—just an absolutely prosaic life without
any particular drama to it in their eyes—if you could just do that
straight, without anybody getting arrested—there’s always a little
danger of that, of course—but to have it just the way these thousands
of people live, very quiet, commonplace routine . . . well, you’d
have an awfully good book.

FINALLY!!!!

NEW KINGS OF CONVENIENCE!!!!

album out Oct. 10

Rosh Hashanah

Amy and I have been talking about redemption. About the possibility. And the necessity. Mostly about the first moment in fall when your breath, as I said to her, puffs out in wafts. That moment, she replied, it's like the simplest reminder of the simplest fact: we are alive. We are breathing in and out this air and we can see it.

It started because I realized as I was pulling on my long-sleeved blouse that it smelled of last winter. It smelled of settling in the curve of someone's side and huddling under blankets. I have not worn it since, with the summer's heat, and I must not have washed it.

Today, she told me, begins Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It is one filled with contemplation and repentance. And prayer. And psalms, which I love, because they are a textual sacrifice and an attempt to praise the infinite with words. "I offer in his tabernacle sacrifices of joy; I will sing, yeah, I will sing praises unto the Lord."

Amy told me that last Saturday at midnight Ashkenazi Jews began reciting Selichot, or Shelosh-'Esreh Middot, poems seeking the thirteen attributes of mercy listed in Exodus 34. Selichot, prayers as she explained them. Key words being: forgiveness, chorus, binding, we have sinned, and petition. Key words being: compassion, mercy, grace, patience, truth, mercy, pardoning. Seeking, beseeching mercy. Forgiveness for: iniquity, transgression, sin. Key words always, insistently: forgive me, forgive me forgive me. It seems appropriate, she continued, to designate full days, weeks, months of awe—both for the things we lose, and the things we redeem. For the compassion, mercy, grace, and truth in the Lord’s infinite mercy.

And the fall is the perfect time for this, I told her. A time of forgiveness and mercy, just what I ought to feel as the sun is saying I've stayed too long already and blushing behind trees earlier in the evening. And things are getting older. Maybe that's why I'm so anxiously waiting for the cold to come and for the humidity to leave. I am craving the assurance of cardigans and warm soups. There is something comforting in the pain of frosted ears warming again. Probably about the thawing of mercy, of redemption from hurt and bleakness that sometimes doesn't seem appropriate in summer.

It seems all too appropriate, she said, to remember with longing those of our past in this week of remembrance and prayer. The many small misdoings we did to each other, the many tender acts we shared together. Even the scent of them lingering in the hems of things.

Also, Amy ROCKS

Because you're not hardcore unless you live hardcore, right, Miss Best American notable? Wahoo!

Score One for the Home Team

Just wanted to draw your attention to our friend Pat Madden's bound-to-be-awesome (wa waaa) book, Quotidiana, coming out in March. And yes, that's a kookaburra on the cover. "Legend has it that Montaigne kept one in his tower to announce the arrival of bothersome warring factions or emissaries from the king requesting his services" (PM's Facebook wall). I shared this fun fact with my roommate, who then informed me about David Sedaris' latest piece in The New Yorker, which led us in a round about way to the following great video, which certainly makes me laugh a whole lot:

Astor Piazzolla: So Hot.

He plays a mean bandoneon. He wed tango and jazz. He collaborated with Jorge Luis Borges. He had me at Libertango.

(This one kind of jumps in a second or two into it, but it's Yo Yo Ma. And therefore Awesome.)

(The one below is about the fastest I've ever heard the Libertango performed, and I don't like it as much as the versions that keep the bandoneon/accordion sound in there, but this one is tootally worth watching, just for the conductor (see 1.35 and you'll know exactly what I mean). Hoooly smokes.)

On That Note...

Patricia's post brought to mind one of my favorite pieces by one of my favorite composers, Chopin. It's his Fantasie Impromptu, Op. 66 and it is rapturous. Enjoy!

Oh. My.

Thank you, Rachel, for drawing my attention to this song. I fall more and more deeply in love with the cello every day. I have been listening to Bach's unaccompanied cello suites not stop for the past 2 weeks, and this really hit the spot.

zee avi

kind of in love
(also, sorry for being so dead online--i just moved and my internet is not hooked up yet! i will be back very shortly xo)

The Greatest Thing in the World

I'm supposed to be studying course material for the class I'll be teaching in less than a month, which means of course that I'm reading through a book by Henry Drummond, an influential Scottish writer and lecturer who lived during the late nineteenth century and wrote mostly about his two passions in life: science and religion. The title chapter of his book is a meditation on Love and since reading it I keep thinking about this:

"Religion is not a strange or added thing, but the inspiration of the secular life, the breathing of an eternal spirit through this temporal world. [Love], in short, is not a thing at all, but the giving of a further finish to the multitudinous words and acts which make up the sum of every common day."

If you have some free time, check out the full lecture here.

Inadvertent Elegies

is the name of Sarah Jenkins' chapbook, which I "won" a copy of here and which I recently read through and of course loved. I hope she doesn't mind if I share a few lines here because they are beautiful and full of heart (as is the poet), which I've been told is "the crucial bone for a writer." So:

First and Last Looks

In the beginnig was light / emanating from the first / opened eye; the implications / I let you enumerate as we exchange first and last / looks. Look / I don't know / what I see / until I see you. / I don't want to see / until I see / you. The eye emenates all / opening a thin lid / sudden expected sight. The eye emenates / all things, bright and dark, all / people, places, things. That first flame of being, beginning / kindled under streetlights / along horizons.

Emanate: give birth / give light. I give you / you give me / illumination. / We belong on the horizons, / our eyes lighting the skyline. / We belong looking at each other / for the first time, quick / glancing-- / the next word blows, but I see / white light separated: / red, orange, yellow, / orange, yellow.

[Walt Whitman Blesses the Grass]

Walt Whitman blesses the grass growing from our beautiful bodies--excellent argument, until I find you / at the base of a desert mountain, the red earth eating your bones.

Did you read Whitman? Did you imagine your body joining the mothers and sons and old men waiting? I imagine your soul triumphant, but your body--

I hate this desert, the land flat and empty, every thing dead. / If I were Whitman, I would recite your name over and over, / in perfect syllables, but I cannot translate it to sun and dust and / there are no seasons here.

I imagine you in the heat, how it makes every thing quiet.

the essence of things

It is fascination to try to pinpoint the essence of something or someone. Of course, there is the danger that you can misread or limit someone, that it can become a trite stereotype that fails to do justice to the beauty of individuality. But I think metaphors were born out of the desire to love someone deeply and to express them in terms of other wonderful things. For this reason, I love this poem by ee cummings. it won't let me get the spacing right, so check it out here.

i have found what you are like
the rain
(Who feathers frightened fields
with the superior dust-of-sleep. wields
easily the pale club of the wind
and swirled justly souls of flower strike
the air in utterable coolness
deeds of gren thrilling light
with thinned
newfragile yellows
lurch and.press
--in the woods
which
stutter
and
sing
And the coolness of your smile is
stirringofbirds between my arms;but
i should rather than anything
have(almost when hugeness will shut
quietly)almost,
your kiss

e e cummings

My Hat's Off to You Yet Again, Mr. Doyle

I am in the midst of Brian Doyle's great book of stories, "The Grail: A year ambling & shambling through an Oregon vineyard in pursuit of the best pinot noir wine in the whole wild world," and of course I am loving every page of it. Here is one chapter/essay/story/excursion of mind called Humming:

June. On my way to a town three towns past Dundee I stop by the vineyard and wander for a moment through the old pinot noir block, trying to sketch the new leaves in my notebook, trying to guess which canes Jesse will want to train where next year, keeping a weather eye out for hawks, and wondering if the easy breeze sifting through the vines is indeed between five and ten miles an hour like it is supposed to be.

I am supposed to give a talk in the town three towns away, but whenever I am supposed to give a talk I end up just telling stories, because I have no particular wisdom or expertise or lesson to convey, and am loathe to lecture and suspicious of sermon, and I am only a storyman anyway, absorbed by and agape at stories all the time, so I just tell stories, which is what we all are anyways, walking collections of stories, and as I amble through the fluttering rows I get to thinking of all the stories I have been told amid these vines, wet stories and dreamy stories and dusty stories, plant stories and animal stories and people stories, and for a minute I wonder if all those stories soaked not only into me but into the vines and dirt here, so that the dirt is a little deeper and redder than it used to be, having been watered with words, and this thought makes me smile because it reminds me of my sister who is a Buddhist nun who says, We tread only on the rim of things and hardly ever see how much more vast and infinite is the Gift, and her wise words remind me of my boy Billy Blake the great mad poet who says, If the doors of perception were cleansed we would see everything as it is, Infinite, and as I am chewing on this remark I come to the end of the row and notice a big hawk looming over the young chardonnay block, which makes me happy for murky reasons.

On my way back uphill to my car I remember what Jesse told me once, that each vine produces enough grapes to make about three-fourths of a bottle of wine, and I chew on the idea that three-fourths of a bottle of excellent wine is probably just the right amount necessary for two or three people to start telling stories fast and furious, so that each of the vines I pass is pregnant with stories, some of which were never born into the world before, and this idea makes me happy also, so by the time I get to the town where I am supposed to give a talk I am cheerful as a chipmunk, and start right in telling funny stories, and after a few minutes I notice an older woman with tired eyes laughing fit to bust, and I think to myself, you know, today I didn’t totally screw up like I usually do, today I brought some light to tired eyes, and I drive home humming.

Deirdre

The plot of William Butler Yeats' play "Deirdre" goes something like this:

King Conchubar (pronounced Conahur) finds a beautiful young girl named Deirdre and decides to marry her, but has to wait until she comes of age. In the meantime, he sequesters her in a house in the woods. Enter Naoise (pronounded Neesh-eh), a young king who falls in love with Deirdre and decides to rescue her from Old Man Conchubar, whom Deirdre decidedly does not want to marry. Long-play-short, Conchubar has Naoise killed, which leads to Deirdre's committing suicide. BUT. Right before Naoise and Deirdre are separated, right on the cusp of the tragic finale, Deirdre, who has had about enough of Naoise playing the part of the brave, stoic hero, asks,

Do you remember that first night in the woods
We lay all night on leaves, and looking up,
When the first grey of the dawn awoke the birds,
Saw leaves above us? You thought that I still slept,
And bending down to kiss me on the eyes,
Found they were open. Bend and kiss me now,
For it may be the last before our death.
And when that's over, we'll be different;
Imperishable things, a cloud or a fire.
And I know nothing but this body, nothing
But that old vehement, bewildering kiss.

The Ohio

Scott Russell Sanders, you are wonderful and your prose is inspiring. This from an essay called "The Force of Moving Water" about the Ohio River specifically and about our need for rivers and water generally:

"Watching Eva enter the world, and then, a few years later, watching newborn Jesse, I understood more deeply than ever before my love for water. We all ride the river, we are all born from a sack of water, and some of us never quit hankering for that original wetness. From birth onward, we are drawn to the wash of lakes, the heave of oceans, the hustle of streams, the needling drum of rain. I hike miles to see a creek slide over ledges, I gaze like a soothsayer into ponds, I slip into a daze from the sound of drizzle on the roof. When it storms and the street is running like a sluice, I go out barefoot or booted and slosh about while neighbors stare at me from the shelter of porches."

and and and!

"Riverness--the appeal of a river, the way it speaks to us--has to do with our craving for a sense of direction within the seeming randomness of the world. Narrative offers us the same pleasure, a shape and direction imposed on time. And so we tell stories and listen to them as we listen to the coursing of water."

Reading Sanders is getting me even more excited about my move to Ohio next month!

Homing

I just started reading Staying Put: Making a home in a restless world by Scott Russell Sanders this morning and I've already marked a bunch of passages and wept once. The following are brief excerpts from chapter 2, "House and Home," a beautiful contemplation of our ties to the places we live in.

"The homing pigeon is not merely able to find the roost from astounding distances; the pigeon seeks its home. I am a homing man. Away on solo trips, I am never quite whole. I miss family, of course, and neighbors and friends; but I also miss the house, which is planted in the yard, which is embraced by a city, which is cradled in familiar woods and fields, which gather snow and rain for the Ohio River. The house has worked on me as steadily as I have worked on the house. I carry slivers of wood under my fingernails, dust from demolition in the corners of my eyes, aches from hammering and heaving in all my joints."
--

"The word house derives from an Indo-European root meaning to cover or conceal. I hear in that etymology furtive, queasy undertones. Conceal from what? From storms? beasts? enemies? from the eye of God? Home comes from a different root meaning 'the place where one lies.' That sounds less fearful to me. A weak, slow, clawless animal, without fur or fangs, can risk lying down and closing its eyes only where it feels utterly secure. Since the universe is going to kill us, in the short run or the long, no wonder we crave a place to lie in safety, a place to conceive our young and raise them, a place to shut our eyes without shivering or dread."

--

"No doubt it is only a musical accident that home and womb share the holy sound of om, which Hindu mystics chant to put themselves in harmony with the ultimate power. But I accept all gifts of language. There is in the word a hum of yearning."

Moon Rising Over Fog

when one gets to iowa

it is best to write a song, which is what trish and i did today. it's about iowa and love.
We place our weary hands
In the fields that we work
And toss heaps of earth
To protect our fragile hearts
And we dig, we dig, and we dig
In Iowa.

We drove from Rochester to Cropseyville
Just to see you my dear.
Will you harvest my heart,
My sad and lonely heart,
My little Iowa sweet.

We may act a little shy
When we look in your eyes
But don't be confused
We were once made out of straw
And we swayed, we swayed, and we swayed
Down in Iowa.

We drove from Rochester to Cropseyville
Just to see you my dear.
Will you harvest my heart,
My sad and lonely heart,
My little Iowa sweet.

In the place where we meet
We let the corn grow in heaps
We walk through the felds
And let the dew stick to our knees,
And we sing, we sing, and we sing,
Down in Iowa.

Who'd think that all that love
Would come from one little seed
My lovely Iowa sweet.

Who'd think that all that love
Would come from one little seed
My lovely Iowa sweet.

i've always loved maira kalman

my dear friend julie gave me her fabulous book, "the principles of uncertainty" last year... and she strikes again with this fabulous post.

it makes me want to be a more contemplative person and spend my days better.

holy.cow.

forserious?iaminlove!

thanksmegan!

what the amazing?

this has to be added to the cute cure archives:

the weapon of creativity

Yesterday I discovered the Human Rights Watch Podcast, and listened to episode #10 Rape in Congo. There actually might not be a more depressing topic ever, but the podcast was amazing in that it talked about two women who have used their creativity to help. "Playwright Lynn Nottage takes on the brutality of rape in Congo and the complexity of modern Africa in her Pulitzer Prize-winning play Ruined. Lisa Jackson's film "The Greatest Silence" has inspired policymakers to action on the issue. With reporting by Amy Costello and Christina Salerno." Listen to it HERE

I was so inspired by this podcast as well as last night showing a group of my friends here the movie Amandla: Revolution in Four Part Harmony.

Systematic Landscapes

Last night at the Corcoran Gallery I got to walk around, through, under, and on top of great art, so I must share:

One of the featured exhibits at the Corcoran right now is Maya Lin's Systematic Landscapes, a series of installations that blend...you guessed it! Systems and landscapes. It's all about exploring "how people perceive and experience the landscape in a time of heightened technological influence over our perception and environmental awareness of our place in the world" and features several large-scale installations:

Water Line, 2006
(A to-scale representation of an underwater land mass in the South Atlantic Ocean!)

Blue Lake Pass, 2006
(Modeled after a mountain ridge near Lin's home in Colorado.)

2x4 Landscape, 2006
(Made of over 50,000 fir and hemlock boards.)

Upon entering the room where 2x4 Landscape was set up, my friend and I were asked to sign waivers and wear little blue baggies over our shoes so we could walk all over it! And as I stepped gingerly across the uneven surface, a couple of young girls ignored the waiver's plea to please keep only to the mostly flat areas and started climbing the hill and tossing a bouncy ball around, giggling and squealing all the while. It was perfect. Here we were in this carefully constructed, pixelated landscape feeling as though we were strolling by kids playing on a hill in the park outside.

And what I loved most of all was this quote by Maya Lin:

"I feel that I exist on the boundaries. Somewhere between science and art, art and architecture, public and private, east and west. I am always trying to find a balance between these opposing forces, finding the place where opposites meet."

I believe we all share this appreciation of boundaries, intersections, connections, meeting points, through our art, our lives, and this blog!

(Also, just as a teaser: Remember this post? WELL! Turns out that the Corcoran is hosting an exhibit of William Eggleston's stuff (including the very photographs that Lia posted) that opens this Saturday!! So you can expect to read about that very soon!)

dearest friends:

this is not a real post.
by that, i mean that because i hadn't posted in a while, i became increasingly stressed as to what might qualify as a worthy return post, but not stressed enough to really seek one out, and instead left this magical intersecting world of ours slightly dormant, only to realize (duh) how much i love and miss you and your penchant for the loveliest of things, and thus how irrelevant my excuse for absence was, and how consequently necessary it is for me to return. so (with that ridiculously convoluted sentence in tow), this non-real post is my way of sidestepping sharing something actually revelatory or interesting. except for one thing: i really do love you all, sosososososo much. and (as i shall be moving to the east coast in two short days!) i will hopefully have the chance to see more of you as the days progress.

much love,
lia

PS:

I just added a search box so you can look up past entries! Also, this image should be a serious contender for our summer theme

in love with

Also, more LIFE beach photos by Wallace G. Levison.



















A man at the beach in push-up position w. a barrel around his waist, 1897.



















Three fully-clothed women, Gertrude Hubbell, Ruth Peters and Mildred Grimwood, hiking their skirts at the shoreline of the beach in Averne, Queens, 1897.



















Mildred Lord talking to Mrs. Simpson as her son Chester Lord aggressively peers into the camera at Sea Gate Beach. Brooklyn, 1911.

i'd like to marry this man

absolutely!

i could not agree more.

It is rainy season here...

Alfred Stieglitz "Spring Showers"

EFT (especially for thelma)

This is something I cannot watch without crying with joy:

Also: Am I a bad person that I use this video to teach my students about parody?

summer of seabears

if this song doesn't define summer, i don't know what does

(courtesy rachel kester's lovely blog)

sintra stole my heart

So I just got back from maybe the most blissful week in Paris and Portugal. And one of the reasons is because of places like Sintra (could it be more charming?):


AKA, Quinta da Regaleira, this fabulous castle in Sintra with a backyard like you wouldn't believe. Secret passageways, hidden grottoes, towers leading to no where, ponds, and trees heavy with trumpet flowers. Pretty much paradise. Witness the grotto:

It was enough to make me weak in the knees.

patterns of memory

"In my current paintings, I apply store-bought paper sewing patterns directly to the canvas. To represent figurative imagery, I reinterpret the patterns outside their usual functional context as garment templates. In this way, I work to shape a narrative that references fable, myth, and folklore. As a garment is made through the assembly of parts cut from sewing patterns, likewise, myths and fables are a kind of fabric cut from human experience.

Making paintings in the above fashion, I ask three central questions: Is our memory of stories from youth in jeopardy of fading or losing its relation to modern life? Is quickening technological advancement altering the relevance of stories and fables woven through our childhood? Are there therapeutic or harmful effects from these changes?

The story invoked in these paintings allows each viewer to “read” the surface. Patterns and templates are the genesis of assembly; once they are realized, they are tucked away or discarded. These paintings expose and liberate the pattern to become something to keep. It is my hope that the patterns convey a high-tech, engineered language that contradicts the practical or narrowly utilitarian nature of garment making."
- John Westmark

Light, Remembering, and Benjamin

 I have been reading about memory and remembering. The other day my friend shared another excerpt from Gilead. He loved, as Amanda did, the relationship between light and memory. He shared this: 

 I was struck by the way the light felt that afternoon.  I have paid a good deal of attention to light, but no one can begin to do it justice.  There was the feeling of a weight of light--pressing the damp out of the grass and pressing the smell of sour old sap out of the boards on the porch floor and burdening even the trees a little as a late snow would do.  It was the kind of light that rests on your shoulders the way a cat lies on your lap.  So familiar.

 And this:

The moon looked wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning.  Light within light. . . .  It seemed to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within the great general light of existence.  Or it seems like poetry within language.  Perhaps wisdom within experience.  Or marriage within friendship and love.

And then there is Walter Benjamin's essay "Image of Proust," which discusses memory and forgetting: "When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with or purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and ornaments of forgetting."

I am not sure what I have to say about them, but they just were so beautiful I've been thinking about them for days. 

Bon Iver

I had listened to this song several times when Amy shared it with me over Christmas, but I just bought a ticket to see him in Orlando, and my love for this song was rekindled. The lyrics, his voice/s, the guitar.



Skinny Love

Come on skinny love just last the year
Pour a little salt we were never here
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer

I tell my love to wreck it all
Cut out all the ropes and let me fall
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Right in the moment this order's tall

I told you to be patient
I told you to be fine
I told you to be balanced
I told you to be kind
In the morning I'll be with you
But it will be a different "kind"
I'll be holding all the tickets
And you'll be owning all the fines

Come on skinny love what happened here
Suckle on the hope in lite brassiere
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Sullen load is full; so slow on the split

I told you to be patient
I told you to be fine
I told you to be balanced
I told you to be kind
Now all your love is wasted?
Then who the hell was I?
Now I'm breaking at the britches
And at the end of all your lines

Who will love you?
Who will fight?
Who will fall far behind?

Mundane Miracles

I'm reading Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and loving it, every page. Especially the pages that contain pearls like this one:

"You and Tobias are hopping around in the sprinkler. The sprinkler is a magnificent invention because it exposes raindrops to sunshine. That does occur in nature, but it is rare. When I was in seminary I used to go sometimes to watch the Baptists down at the river. It was something to see the preacher lifting the one who was being baptized up out of the water and the water pouring off the garments and the hair. It did look like a birth or a resurrection. For us the water just heightens the touch of the pastor's hand on the sweet bones of the head, sort of like making an electrical connection. I've always loved to baptize people, though I have sometimes wished there were more shimmer and splash involved in the way we go about it. Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water."

where's a good warehouse when you need one

but i'll take it

I like this quite a bit: [Ah, the line breaks don't transfer for some reason, so look here]

Vespers
Charles Wright

Who wouldn't wish to become
The fiery life of divine substance
blazing above the fields,
Shining above the waters,
The rain like dust through his fingerbones,
All our yearning like flames in his feathery footprints?
Who, indeed?
And still . . .

The world in its rags and ghostly raiment calls to us
With grinding and green gristle
Wherever we turn,
and we are its grist, and we are its groan.
Over the burned lightning strikes of tree shadows
branded across the near meadow,
Over the dusk-dazed heads of the oat grass,
The bullbat's chortle positions us, and hold us firm.
We are the children of the underlife,
at least for a time,
Flannel shirt on a peg, curled
Postcards from years past
thumbtacked along the window frames.
Outside, deer pause on the just-cut grass,
The generator echoes our spirit's humdrum,
and gnats drone high soprano . . .
Not much of a life, but I'll take it.

get ready to be delighted

dedicated to thelma, to get through this coming week:

(from zooillogix)

Digging Limestone

Here is another Scott Russell Sanders excerpt, this one from an essay about the many and massive limestone quarries in southern Indiana and the people who work them:

"Wherever holes have been drilled in the quarry ledges, dirt catches and seedlings take root. Eventually these roots will burst the stone. Our roots also go down into rock—the rock of caves, spearheads, knives, the megaliths and cairns and dolmens of our ancestors, the rock of temples and pyramids, gravestones, cathedrals. Entire millennia of human labors are known to us solely through their stone leavings. The only common stuff that rivals it for durability is language, words laid down in books and scrolls like so may fossils. With a touch of mind, the fossil words spring to life; so might the stones, if we look at them aright."

Obituaries

Nicole Krauss's The History of Love ends with an obituary of Leo Gursky written by himself. I reread it today and was incredibly moved. Leo's life of solitude makes me sad. He knew how to love so deeply. And even though he was a writer, he could not communicate when it mattered the most. And I cannot help but love him.

THE DEATH OF LEOPOLD GURSKY

Leopold Gursky started dying on August 18, 1920.
He died learning to walk.
He died standing at the blackboard.
And once, also, carrying a heavy tray.
He died practicing a new way to sign his name.
Opening a window.

He died alone, because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone.
Or he died thinking about Alma.
Or when he chose not to.

Really, there isn't much to say.
He was a great writer.
He fell in love.
It was his life.

Thank you NY Times for introducing me to St. Vincent

Maybe I'm out of the music loop and everyone already knows about this goodness... but enjoy anyway

The Dream and Lie of Franco

I've been a bit in love with Picasso's "Guernica" lately - but also love with this panel - "Dream and Lie of Franco"

Ae Fond Kiss by Robbie Burns

I may have just spent the past hour listening to every version of this song I could find on YouTube.

Galveston, 1961

[I have problems with rhyming poetry but I LOOVE it when it does it well, with grace, like this wonderful Richard Wilbur one. Also, he uses "flense," which is a spectacularly specific word meaning to strip the blubber from a whale. I love specificity in language so much.]



You who in crazy-lensed
Clear water fled your shape,
By choppy shallows flensed
And shaken like a cape,

Who gently butted down
Through weeds, and were unmade,
Piecemeal stirring your brown
Legs into stirred shade,

And rose, and with pastel
Coronas of your skin
Stained swell on glassy swell,
Letting them bear you in:

Now you have come to shore,
One woman and no other,
Sleek Panope no more,
Nor the vague sea our mother.

Shake out your spattering hair
And sprawl beside me here,
Sharing what we can share
Now that we are so near-

Small talk and speechless love,
Mine being all but dumb
That knows so little of
What goddess you become

And still half-seem to be,
Though close and clear you lie,
Whom droplets of the sea
Emboss and magnify.

[From The New Yorker]

Plus, now you can listen to this great "60s hit" and be so happy:

my life just got so much better

When I saw Julia Child's kitchen in the Museum of American History I started crying--the good kind. I'm still not sure why, but it seemed important to note here.

carebear stare

I'm pretty sure this is what a Carebear Stare would look like in our world:

Coeur de Pirate || Comme des enfants from Dare To Care Records on Vimeo.

Self-Sacrifice

I just wanted to share a post on self-sacrifice from written by a friend. Cassie is a dedicated student, intensely talented writer, beautiful woman, loving wife, and compassionate friend, among many other great things. She is also soon to be a doting mother. I encourage you to read as much of her blog as you can, but this post in particular has me wondering at how perfectly patterned this existence reveals itself to be sometimes.

rave on

m. ward, zooey, and gorgeous animation--what could be better?

robert frost

I have mixed feelings about Robert Frost. But my workshop teacher shared a quote with us last night about form that I find intriguing and possibly true:

"There are no two things as important to us in life and art as being threatened and being saved. What are ideals of form for if we aren't going to be made to fear for them? All ingenuity is lavished on getting into danger legitimately so that we may be genuinely rescued."

I don't know if I agree with everything said here, but I do think it is important to look at the form or structure of a piece of writing to see if it's doing everything possible, including taking the necessary risks that make us a little bit afraid, which means we are pushing through something to perhaps get beyond something.

John expanded on it saying that form is a way to control and protect ourselves as we are writing so we have a space to work in, but it also gives us something to challenge, something to play with, which I agree with completely.

pessoa, a man after my own heart

my friend sarah just wrote a glorious essay that talked about fernando pessoa, a truly stunning writer. if you have not read his book of disquiet, i highly recommend it--it is infuriating and wonderful simultaneously. and since i'm in the process of avoiding real work, i will include a great quote on working:

I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.

first time i actually cried at a poetry reading.

i've never been so moved. i have a new hero. i want to be antije krog. i want to have her effulgence of life springing out of me at every turn! i want to be overcome with living in all its wonders and splendors! i tell you she was miraculous to behold. this is life, people! this is life!!!

listen to her here!

and listen to all 9 parts of the poem and krog's reading in all her afrikaans glory, it's so worth it...


I want
the I that is I
to stay

but where
does it begin,
this being-I?

at the place
where the I is like you
or there where the I is other than you?

80s teen movies LOOOVED dancing

and i love them for it. this is rather brilliant

National Arboretum

On Saturday I spent several hours wandering the grounds of the National Arboretum with a good friend and am so pleased to say that I think I have found my new Regent's Park. When I studied in London a few years ago, I adored all of the fantastic restaurants, theaters, museums, and parks, but especially the parks. I spent many afternoons reading in Regent's Park even though Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens were much closer to where I lived. Each time I walked along the water, sat in the rose garden, or spread out on the grass to read and nap, I felt the world is alive and drenched in beauty.

I felt that again this weekend, walking through orchards and running into friends on shaded paths, and I want to go back again and again and again. This past week the azaleas were in full bloom, splashing the hillsides with pinks and whites and reds and purples. It is on days like Saturday, when I have been reveling in natural beauty, reading lots of Scott Russell Sanders, and soaking in hours of sun while weeding and gardening, that I wonder at myself for not spending every moment I possibly can outdoors.

HOW EXCITED AM I

I am watching this in the Jacksonville Airport and even though it has to buffer every 3 or 4 seconds, it's TOTALLY worth it. Ken and Bill from Freaks and Geeks and Michael Cera!!!

and the pursuit of happiness

my dear friend annie grey sent me this lovely, lovely maira kalman piece and i had to share. it will make you so glad.

my love

this is such, such, SUCH a good song! plus, glitter dresses and singing in LA's natural history museum? cannot be topped.

The Dogwoods are Blooming

(I just sent this to Patricia, but I thought I'd share since I've been wanting to write poetry again because I haven't in years until just now) I just wrote a poem, like not 30 seconds ago. I was driving today--it was a blissfully beautiful day, blue sky, warm, everything spring like. And I was in the ugliest part of town, populated with strip malls and Kmarts. It's a busy street, a highway actually, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a girl stop walking to look at this tree blooming in a riot of pink and white. And then she did something remarkable, which was that she went to the tree to get a closer look. When she was about a foot away, she put out her hand and touched a blossom so tenderly it was like a prayer and it was beautiful. I'm a bit rusty so the poem is kind of cheesy but you know, it's spring--it kind of inspires all sorts of lovely cheesiness :)

Without Which, We Cannot Reach

A drab furrow of strip malls
Blurs as I drive by.
The tawny sunlight catching in the grass
Rings irascible, virulent.
The windshield is moving tableaux
Framing a girl in gym shorts,
A Nike backpack,
Standing in a gully
Bloated with runoff, trash, debris.
Her ponytail nips at the wind.
She is still, still
So still that what happens—
The raising of her hand,
The unfurling of her fingers
Towards blossoms—
Seems impossible.

cornacopia of images...

the wisdom of kevin arnold

This ending contains one of my all time favorite meditations on memory. I've been thinking a lot about memory lately, how faulty but necessary it is. I think it most necessary because it allows us to mend our broken things, as well as to hold on to what is important to us.

Lines on the Darkness

From the Introduction of Scott Russell Sanders' Paradise of Bombs:

The dance of nature has been on people's minds more than usual lately, with the ballyhooed return of Halley's Comet. Surely it is a greater marvel, I tell myself, for my heart to beat sixty times a minute than for a ball of ice to swing around the sun every seventy-six years. Still, whenever I look at the sky these nights, I find my skeptical heart kicking up into a faster pace. A few cold evenings ago, my wife, daughter, son, and I walked to the park near our home to look for Mr. Halley's wonder. The newspaper had announced that an astronomer would be there to help people find the comet, so a crowd had gathered. The four of us huddled together among strangers in the knifing cold darkness and searched the sky with binoculars. We had only the vaguest notion where to look. I calculated that my son and daughter, at eight and twelve years old, would have a chance of seeing the comet on its next visit, in 2062. I knew this would be my only season.

"Does anyone need help?" a voice called from the crowd.

The Sanders family gave a shout. Presently a man loomed out of the darkness, his face a disk of shadow under a parka hood, and he gave us directions for looking. His words drew imagined lines on the sky for us, beginning with Jupiter down near the western horizon, swinging up to the Great Square in Pegasus, back to the Y-shaped Water Jar in Aquarius, and so on star by star until our gaze reached a tiny blur of light. "That's Halley's Comet," said the astronomer, and he drifted away to help other searchers.

We took our turns at the binoculars, mother and daughter, father and son.

"That's the comet?" said my daughter when her turn came. '"That little smudge? That's all?"

"Where is it?" my son cried. "I can't see it. Everything's fuzzy."

I pointed, aimed the binoculars for him, but still he could not find the firefly in the glitter of stars. He was trembling. I squatted down and took his face in my hands to guide his looking and whispered directions in his ear.

"Do you see it now?" My breath cast a cloud about our heads.

"I don't know," he said, his voice raw with frustration, "I can't tell, it's all a jumble. There's too many lights. What if I miss it?"

I felt like weeping, there in the night among strangers, holding my son's face and murmuring in his ear, because I could not see through his eyes, he could not see through mine, and all I had to offer were a few words to draw lines on the darkness. Since it was all I knew how to do, I kept murmuring, stringing words into sentences, sentences into galaxies and constellations.

At length he murmured, "I think I see it. yes, there it is. I see what you're saying."

But whether he saw the comet, or only my words sketched over the darkness, I do not know.