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.

also, because i love the pop

this is one of the catchiest songs i've heard in a long, long time

miniature tigers (from phoenix, az! woot woot trish!) "cannibal queen"

i will be calm calm calm

i love phosphorescent for many reasons (including their pretty remarkable willie nelson cover album) but this song always makes me glad


i can fly through these hallways
dressed in light though it always
it always gets cold
i can sing through my fingers
though the worth of a singer
is nothing i'm told

i am a full grown man
i will lay lay lay
in the grass
in the grass
all day

i can freeze in the place that
gets me free from this taste that
i have in my heart
we can curl in the waters
naked swirling like otters
(you know how they are)

i am a full grown man
i will be calm calm calm
in the grass
in the grass
in your arms

plus this song is a great excuse to post this video again, to warm all of our winter hearts

Toward an Impure Poetry... ya know those days you need Neruda

by Pablo Neruda

It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter's tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things---all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.

In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substance, footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out.

Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of the lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.

A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes.

The holy canons of madrigal, the mandates of touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing, the passion for justice, sexual desire, the sea sounding---willfully rejecting and accepting nothing: the deep penetration of things in the transports of love, a consummate poetry soiled by the pigeon's claw, ice-marked and tooth-marked, bitten delicately with our sweatdrops and usage, perhaps. Till the instrument so restlessly played yields us the comfort of its surfaces, and the woods show the knottiest suavities shaped by the pride of the tool. Blossom and water and wheat kernel share one precious consistency: the sumptuous appeal of the tactile.

Let no one forget them. Melancholy, old mawkishness impure and unflawed, fruits of a fabulous species lost to the memory, cast away in a frenzy's abandonment---moonlight, the swan in the gathering darkness, all hackneyed endearments: surely that is the poet's concern, essential and absolute.

Those who shun the "bad taste" of things will fall flat on the ice.

when in childhood

Yesterday my friend Jess and I drove around town getting lost and more lost but we were happy winding down streets that deadended or took us to the opposite of where we needed to be. We were en route to pick up some popsicle molds from a Freecycler but things happened and we didn't get them. But we did go home and have lemonade popsicles and Jess told me the most lovely story that I wanted to share with you.

She was a little girl, maybe 6 or so. She was at a house and her aunt was somewhere in the house cleaning or something. Jess was playing but suddenly caught sight of the sunset and it was so staggeringly gorgeous that she started calling out for her aunt, who came running saying, "What is it what is it?" because when a child calls the first thing an adult thinks involves a crash, but Jess wasn't hurt, she was struck amazed with the beauty before her. She pointed and her aunt looked and saw and said, softly, "I'm so glad you called me," and she knelt down and gathered Jess in her arms and together they watched the sun set, all fire and gold, into the horizon.

I hope we all have an occassion to tell this to a person, "I'm so glad you called me"--it is one of the most beautiful things I have heard in a long, long time.

Patricia, let's go see this...

mind. blowing.

and beautiful

popsickles & puppets!

I used to listen to this song every morning back in the day and since spring has finally sprung, I wanted to share. Plus, tomorrow my friend Jessica and I are having a Popsicle-making date!

Okay, Just One More

And totally worth it.

Because Some of Us Make Our Dreams Come True

I never thought I'd post something from American Idol on here, but here it is (sorry, embedding disabled).

having a rothko moment

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

Charles Wright

Lonesomeness. Morandi, Cezanne, it's all about lonesomeness.
And Rothko. Especially Rothko.
Separation from what heals us
beyond painting, beyond art.

Words and paint, black notes, white notes.
Music and landscape; music, landscape and sentences.
Gestures for which there is no balm, no intercession.

Two tone fields, horizon a line between abysses,
Generally white, always speechless.
Rothko could choose either one to disappear into. And did.

------

Perch'io no spero di tornar giammai, ballatetta, in Toscana,
Not as we were the first time,
not as we'll ever be again.
Such snowflakes of memory, they fall nowhere but there.

Absorbed in remembering, we cannot remember--
Exile's anthem, O stiff heart,
Thingless we came into the world and thingless we leave,

Every important act is wordless--
to slip from the right way,
To fail, still accomplishes something.
Even a good thing remembered, however, is not as good as not
remembering at all.

From "Night Music"

Each second the earth is struck hard
by four-and-a-half pounds of sunlight
Each second
Try to imagine that
No wonder deep shade is what the soul longs for,
And not, as we always thought, the light.

[I have a touch of insomnia right now so sorry for the overload of posts! I'm cleaning out my mailbox and keep stumbling across the most beautiful things...this is worse than cleaning out my closet. Also, I am having trouble with the first poem--I find it beautiful in a devastating way and don't agree with much of it. But the second excerpt...now that just shook my bones.]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am in love with this

marilynne does it again

A dear friend recently sent me an email that included a spectacular Marilynne Robinson quote:

I recently read a thought provoking essay in Marilynne Robinson's The Death of Adam. In "The Tyranny of Petty Coercion" Robinson talks a lot about bravery. She says that society has all sorts of ways to enable physical bravely, but very few ways to help people be brave intellectually and morally and emotionally. Perhaps there must also be a prevenient courage to nerve one to be brave, she writes. It is we human beings who give one another permission to show courage . . . .

I've been thinking a lot about courage lately, especially moral and emotional courage. It is something that I want in my own life because when I see it or use it in my life, I am a better person. I think that moral and emotional courage is something that rightly couples itself with integrity--which is a word that contains within it many other words: consistency, steadfastness, soundness. Courage comes from the Latin "cor," or heart--one's core, from which inner strength, steadfastness, and soundness begins and radiates. I love all of your unique examples of integrity and courage because they help me to be brave, to do things I would never expect of myself, to want to do more than I think I am able to do. So thank you, dear ones, a lot.

Gettin excited for Penang

I have to go leave the country for visa run (first time to really leave Thailand in 6 months) - so I'm heading to the diverse island of Penang Malaysia.The town of Georgetown is a UNESCO World Heritage site apparently for its amazing architecture. I'll let you know how it goes.

Feelin' Jazz Casual

that just happened.

many thanks, xarissa :)

microscopic and beautiful

a lovely combination of science and art and beauty and seriousness and sillyness.

feeling real good about...

Lisbon. (I just bought my ticket!)

Welcome to my neighborhood

So I did a short little film for my family to give them a glimpse of where I live - and since ya'll are like family...


Welcome.... from Thelma Young on Vimeo.

Ya'll know my love for Burmese hip hop....

(forgive the commercial intro, the video is from salon.com)