Paul Yoon = yes please!

Sarabande put out a collection of Paul Yoon stories called Once the Shore. Though I've only read the stunning title story, I imagine the rest of the book is just as glorious. Rumpus interviewed him and I love how he closes the interview:

I recently read Don Lee’s brilliant new novel, Wrack and Ruin, and what stays with me the most from that book are these moments we’re talking about. There’s an amazing narrative force to that story but once in a while it pauses, briefly, and he reveals these surprising scenes of intimacy and tenderness. (Both of which can be a form of kindness, I think.) It gave the story breath and silence and I admire that so much. The way Terrence Malick does in his films. They stay with me, these small moments I have read about or witnessed or experienced; they last a minute, perhaps, even less, and yet you become connected to another person through that act. I mean, in the end, it’s a form of love, isn’t it?

Years ago I was on the coast of Belize and I had stumbled on my very first coconut and I had no idea how to break open the husk. I was holding a machete—that was a first, too—and practicing my swing when a neighbor, an old woman, appeared, smiling, and without a word placed the coconut on the sand between her legs, took the machete from my hands, bent her knees, and broke open the husk in seconds. Then she smiled once more and walked back to her house. I never saw her again. But I will always remember her, the shape of her body and her stance and her arm swinging.

I think that, at the bottom of it all, these small moments is what this blog tries to capture. And that I love.

good

emiliana torrini

also, let's all go to iceland

Inspired by Iceland Video from Inspired By Iceland on Vimeo.

Sometimes I Miss Virginia

"Now to sum up," said Bernard. "Now to explain to you the meaning of my life. Since we do not know each other (though I met you once I think on board a ship going to Africa) we can talk freely. The illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life. If it were possible, I would hand it you entire. I would break it off as one breaks off a bunch of grapes. I would say, 'Take it. This is my life.'

"But unfortunately, what I see (this globe, full of figures) you do not see. You see me, sitting at a table opposite you, a rather heavy, elderly man, grey at the temples. You see me take my napkin and unfold it. You see me pour myself out a glass of wine. And you see behind me the door opening, and people passing. But in order to make you understand, to give you my life, I must tell you a story--and there are so many, and so many--stories of childhood, stories of school, love, marriage, death, and so on; and none of them are true. Yet like children we tell each other stories, and to decorate them we make up these ridiculous, flamboyant, beautiful phrases. How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half sheets of notebook paper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement. I begin to seek some design more in accordance with those moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then undeniably."

-Virginia Woolf's The Waves