in the heart's elasticity, that she will love better and stronger and bigger and more always, every time. except it also means that it will hold looser, be more open, and keep nothing.
it takes some time for the ego, the brain, even the body to keep up.
Who would /have guessed/it possible/that waiting/is sustainable—/a place with/its own harvests./Or that in/time's fullness/the diamonds/of patience/couldn't be /distinguished/from the genuine/in brilliance/or hardness.
(Kay Ryan - Patience)
Grammatical rules have always baffled"Diagramming Won't Help This Situation" by Kevin Brown, from Exit Lines. PlainView Press, 2009
me, leaving me wondering whether my
life is transitive or intransitive, if I am the
subject or object of my life, and no one
has been able to provide words to describe
my actions, even if they do end in –ly.
But now the problem seems to be with
pronouns: I am unwilling to be him
and you are unable to be her, so we
will never be them~the ones talking
about what they need from the grocery
store because the Rogers are coming for
dinner tonight; the couple saving for a
vacation, perhaps a cruise to Alaska or a
museum tour of Europe; the two who meet
with a financial advisor to plan their children's
college fund while still managing to set enough
aside for their retirement~and so we will
continue to be nothing more than sentence
fragments, perfectly fine for effect,
but forever looking for the missing
part of speech we can never seem to find.
The radiance of the star that leans on me Was shining years ago. The light that now Glitters up there my eyes may never see, And so the time lag teases me with how Love that loves now may not reach me until Its first desire is spent. The star's impulse Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful And love arrived may find us somewhere else.Delay Elizabeth Jennings
two women in three days
cried on the green bench in the park
where i found a dollar
folded into a boat.
i thought it was the crying bench and cried
on the crying bench
when it became available.
i cried
by thinking of all the people
who've never broken a shop window, not the baker's
window, the bead-seller's,
who sells beads for purposes
i find hard to list: necklaces,
the hanging of strings of beads
in doorways, the owning of beads
just in case.
breaking a shop window with a piece of shale
the size of my heart, a piece of shale
on which i've drawn my heart, not my actual heart
but my feelings of my heart,
since i've never seen my heart,
would set something free.
i don't know what that something is
but it would be free.
and my heart would have survived its travels
through glass, its jagged voyage
through my reflection.
you see now why i cried: none of this is real.
until i can answer yes to the cop who asks, is this your heart
among the ruins of your reflection?
i won't be a man, despite what my anatomy
insists.
it insists
that i overcome a sense of resistance when i move,
that i move
as long as i am able to move, and when i am unable
to move, that i stop.
it would be free and look like a bird, an actual bird
or a dollar folded into a bird, a dollar bird
in a dollar boat.
which is to say
i believe origami arrives
when we need it most.
i can't prove this but i can't prove
you're a good person though i suspect
you're a good person.
you who opened the door.
you who tipped your hat.
you who ran into the fire and carried
the fire safely out.
a history of origami
bill hicok
italics mine.
the month of the rosary, the month that begins with the feast of the guardian angels and ends with all hallow's eve.
but more importantly, it's breast cancer awareness month. i wear and bring enough pink to last me the year, but still, check yourself. listen to your body, and take care of yourself.
Wonka Redux: "
Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published in 1964. The movie starring Gene Wilder (tag line: “It’s Scrumdidilyumptious!”) came out in 1971. A second version hit theaters in 2005. Which is all to say that the story of a loony inventor revealing his sugary trade secrets to a bright young kid holds a certain perennial appeal.
Part of this allure lies with the story’s masterful structure: part mini-bildungsroman and part fairy tale, it combines adventure, supernatural phenomena, moral perils and a grand journey. Some of the story’s greatness is also due to the inventive genius of Roald Dahl. And part of it––a large part––stems from the concept of magical candy. Who doesn’t love magical candy?
Katrina Markoff is a real-life Willy Wonka of sorts, if Wonka was a globetrotting woman who trained at Le Cordon Bleu. Markoff’s company, Vosges Haut-Chocolat, specializes in exotic candy bars meant to be nibbled in the tiniest of savoring bites (no Violet Beauregards allowed.) The Black Pearl bar––speckled with ginger, wasabi and black sesame seeds––tastes like the result of Wonka running wild in a sushi restaurant. The Habana bar is crunchy with plantain chips (Wonka-Goes-To-Cuba), and the Enchanted Mushroom bar, with Reishi mushrooms and walnuts, is like a chocolatey trip to the forest floor.
If it all sounds weird––well, it is. And that’s definitely not a bad thing.
we laugh at oprah because really she might just be a little too earnest. but when i'm tired, like mentally tired, i read an oprah magazine and instantly instantly want to say
i'm sorry, let me back into the fold.
and be gathered back into her arms.
-------
now that i think is called power.
We don't pay for "content," we pay for "form": "In Paul Graham's provocative 'Post-Medium Publishing,' he argues that we've rarely paid for 'content,' but rather for 'form' -- that's why a good hardcover costs the same as a bad one, and both are more expensive than paperbacks. As the newspaper and CD forms lose currency, their publishers argue that what we've been buying all along is the 'content' and demand that we 'continue' to pay for it online.
What about iTunes? Doesn't that show people will pay for content? Well, not really. iTunes is more of a tollbooth than a store. Apple controls the default path onto the iPod. They offer a convenient list of songs, and whenever you choose one they ding your credit card for a small amount, just below the threshold of attention. Basically, iTunes makes money by taxing people, not selling them stuff. You can only do that if you own the channel, and even then you don't make much from it, because a toll has to be ignorable to work. Once a toll becomes painful, people start to find ways around it, and that's pretty easy with digital content.
I also wonder if St McLuhan might not object here, with something about the form being the content.
Post-Medium Publishing
(via /.)
i love notes. more people should be writing and leaving notes for more people.
especially when they have maps on them.
and are box tops for pies.
maybe if i post more of these, they will come.
Just bought a laptop, and about three days into it, realized that I have learned to live without one.
As a student, even a teacher, it made sense to have one. Especially since the thesis, which is my last step before i am finally master of something, really does have its place in a portable computer. But I'm not. And though Bubba will be good to have at presentations (when I don't have a designer with me,) I have always found that scribbling on a notebook is fine.
Once at a meeting, my design manager and I were both bearing notebooks while the pr group came bearing laptops (nice, teeny tiny netbooks) and the project team was trying to figure out how to fix the projector for theirs. I found it funny that we were ready because we just needed to open our bags and set our notebooks on the table. Though it must be said that I did have to borrow a pen.
So now with portable things becoming more and more ubiquitous and chock-full with features (the new nano has a video camera!) does it really mean that we're really moving around more?
though today was Bubba's first sojourn that wasn't my room or my office, (he and i spent time in the garden) i couldn't help remembering how as a kid i would carry around a small-ish attache case bearing papers and a couple of pens around the house. definitely to mimic my parents, but also because i felt i always needed to have whatever it was i was scribbling with me. but that was around the house.
this isn't about what you want to grab when something goes wrong.
i realize that with portability comes a sense of everything instant. you want to hear a song, HERE! you want to see pictures, HERE!
and also single-serve, this is YOUR phone, YOUR iPod, YOUR laptop. Really, the time spent and money generated just personalizing these portable things. and definitely a sense of privacy. though with the internet and satellites, privacy has definitely gone through the wringer.
I'm obviously thinking out loud here. This is a blog after all. But soon it seems, we really are going to get cybernetic implants, and perhaps we'll definitely find quicker ways to 'share' things. Though even with the cautionary tales of science fiction, I don't think we realize that it really is happening. And not even as judgement (not in the mood for a materialism chorvaness, I did buy my laptop for more emotional than practical reasons), but just as matter of fact.
how will we evolve socially, emotionally and spiritually when we carry everything with us? what changes are we going to see?
And on certain nights,
maybe once or twice a year,
I'd carry the baby down
and all the kids would come
all nine of us together,
and we'd build a town in the basement
from boxes and blankets and overturned chairs.
And some lived under the pool table
or in the bathroom or the boiler room
or in the toy cupboard under the stairs,
and you could be a man or a woman
a husband or a wife or a child, and we bustled around
like a day in the village until
one of us turned off the lights, switch
by switch, and slowly it became night
and the people slept.
Our parents were upstairs with company or
not fighting, and one of us — it was usually
a boy — became the Town Crier,
and he walked around our little sleeping
population and tolled the hours with his voice,
and this was the game.
Nine o'clock and all is well, he'd say,
walking like a constable we must have seen
in a movie. And what we called an hour passed.
Ten o'clock and all is well
. And maybe somebody stirred in her sleep
or a grown up baby cried and was comforted . . .
Eleven o'clock and all is well.
Twelve o'clock. One o'clock. Two o'clock . . .
and it went on like that through the night we made up
until we could pretend it was morning.
"The Game" by Marie Howe, from What the Living Do. © W.W. Norton and Co, 1999.
i love it when good poetry always, always, always makes you stop and look at things again. the way that it reveals that beneath the veneer, there is darkness—and that always gives "look how this word shines."
(1) 
via: FFFOUND
(2)
hunger by kit kwe
(3)
Typophile Film Festival 5 Opening Titles from Brent Barson on Vimeo.
from Pause for thought. there is always hope for strangeness.
I like to watch an old man cutting a sandwich in half,
maybe an ordinary cold roast beef on whole wheat bread,
no pickles or onion, keeping his shaky hands steady
by placing his forearms firm on the edge of the table
and using both hands, the left to hold the sandwich in place,
and the right to cut it surely, corner to corner,
observing his progress through glasses that moments before
he wiped with his napkin, and then to see him lift half
onto the extra plate that he had asked the server to bring,
and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife
while she slowly unrolls her napkin and places her spoon,
her knife and her fork in their proper places,
then smoothes the starched white napkin over her knees
and meets his eyes and holds out both old hands to him.
and it seems like the perfect time to be reading. but am hungry too. today people seem to be thinking the same thing.
From PopMatters, a surprising argument on reading everything (well, not really) from a pop culture blog.
Reading deeply and widely -- from Stephen King to Walter Mosley to Jane Austen to James Joyce -- at the very least makes us less dull and more patient, and it happens to be the only way to make informed, qualitative judgments within and across genres
Continue it here
While on the New York Times, they talk about reading on the subway. They've even included a blog that's devoted to that.
Another nice thing to share. Now if i could just find something to eat.
In Place of Emotion
120 pounds of absence weigh heavy
on the body. When they said, depression,
they meant as opposed to elevation;
not a case of psychiatry, but one
of topography. Death, they did
say, would shake, shatter the world,
yet there were only fissures, only ruptures,
as if land does not believe in endings. Only the slow
release of grief, as steam unfurling into the air.
Just sadness writing its own space, its own geography.
While beneath, blood curdles
thick, a compression of the living
that is left to be done, to its own.
and years pass, not to heal,
but that they do. A study in geology.
A map now reads new countries
in pink relief on brown, worn skin.
There are the occasions that men – intellectual men, clever men, engaged men – insist on playing devil's advocate, desirous of a debate on some aspect of feminist theory or reproductive rights or some other subject generally filed under the heading Women's Issues. These intellectual, clever, engaged men want to endlessly probe my argument for weaknesses, wrestle over details, argue just for fun. And they wonder, these intellectual, clever, engaged men, why my voice keeps rising and why my face is flushed and why, after an hour of fighting my corner, hot tears burn the corners of my eyes.
Why do you have to take this stuff so personally? ask the intellectual, clever, and engaged men, who have never considered that the content of the abstract exercise that's so much fun for them is the stuff of my life.
"Misogyny, up close and personal" by Melissa McEwan on the guardian
from here
and you'd think i have more to say. but have been looking for little bread crumbs of happiness. because sometimes i feel like i'm lost in the woods, but still haven't found the gingerbread house and its witch.
(one)
wild sweet things
from here
(two)
day flight
from here
i can always depend on BoingBoing and WeLoveYouSo to make my little fat heart sing.
am trying to take comfort in the fact, that once i heard that you are cut off at the knees so that you may learn to ask for grace.
and yearning—begging becomes the only recourse.
Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.
We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we're lying.
If we say No, we don't see it,
That No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.
So let us rather not be sure of anything,
Beside ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.
Rumi
grace is like an steep climb, one done on your stomach.
Not to trouble you with love, I mean
those adolescent dreams of great, of greater,
or of greatest loving, let alone
the crumbly personal kind—compared with, say,
the public good or harder thoughts of death
obliterating thoughts of love, or after-
thoughts of love outgrown or love undone;
and not to be ironic either, not
to forget we come into the world alone
and leave it so; and not to be claiming more
than you can give, uncertain as I am
what I require: something like love, I guess,
whatever it is we've done without so long,
so faithfully and with such tenderness.
"Not To Trouble You" by Leonard Nathan, from Ragged Sonnets. © Orchises Press, 2008.
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