February 2012
16 posts
This Heavy Craft
The wax has melted but the dream of flight persists. I, Icarus, though grounded in my flesh have one bright section in me where a bird night after starry night while I’m asleep unfolds its phantom wings and practices.
— P.K. Page
cognitive dissonance
thingsthatdontgetlost:
“It is more than just memory that allows our brains to negotiate our environments without having to reinvent responses all the time. Once these neural networks and cognitive maps are laid down and used for many years they become somewhat difficult to change and require considerable effort to do so. A mismatch between our neuro-perceptual-cognitive maps and our physical...
8 tags
“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit...”
– Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
I Wonder How Many People In This City
I wonder how many people in this city live in furnished rooms. Late at night, when I look out at the buildings I swear I see a face in every window looking back at me and when I turn away I wonder how many go back to their desks and write this down.
— Leonard Cohen
3 tags
7 tags
“Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.”
– Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet
January 2012
36 posts
1 tag
it's funny how sometimes I can guess a tumblr user...
somewhatforeign - Lord of the Rings gifs, articles about political movements, bad cartoons about being a 20something writer
jackgoodwin - cars, Pokemon references
alexisfancy - skinny topless girls with tattoos, blazers, instagrams from Tallahassee’s finest drunken nights
alexher - myspace-esque questionnaires, football commentary, occasional incredible urban photograph
kgtl - pictures...
“We laughed and laughed, together and separately, out loud and silently, we were...”
– Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
9 tags
Traveler
Your first time out of the country of your own skin, I didn’t bring a map.
You always hated that I’d been lucky enough to pick my way through streets
I couldn’t pronounce to find cathedrals, graveyards. If you were a city, you said,
I’d only like to know your suburbs.
If you were a city, I said, I’d like to know your poor neighborhoods, your inner parts.
Read your graffiti. Drink...
“Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time...”
– Annette Messager
moledro
dictionaryofobscuresorrows:
n. a feeling of resonant connection with an author or artist you’ll never meet, who may have lived centuries ago and thousands of miles away but can still get inside your head and leave behind morsels of their experience, like the little piles of stones left by hikers that mark a hidden path through unfamiliar territory.
“He moves toward her knowing he is about to / spoil the way they don’t know each...”
– excerpt from “Adults” by Jack Gilbert
9 tags
Dogheaded
(after “Scenes from the Battle of Us” by Cate Marvin)
Suzanne Highland
You are like a dream journal with an ellipsis in the middle of an image of bruised knees and being found crouching under the sink.
I am like a labrador biting fast to the leash because she’s tired of useless mouths.
My mother made me floss even when it bled. You can be the...
5 tags
8 tags
Endangered Species
(after “Real Estate” by Richard Brautigan)
Suzanne Highland
I have hands that are like sticks that can break themselves.
In winter, I go for weeks without moving.
I feel as if I am half of a bald eagle’s nest:
Some pine needles Some sticky feathers Shoot what you can now we’re off the list.
12 tags
“Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different...”
– Desmond Tutu
9.
Sometimes after I have come or just before I fall asleep, my mind seems to go out on a path the width of a thread and of endless length, a thread that is the same color as the night. Out, out along the narrow highway sails my mind, driven by curiosity, luminous with acceptance, far and out, like a feathered hook whipped deep into the light above the stream by a magnificent cast. Somewhere, out of...
8 tags
Sleepwalking
Suzanne Highland
They are at a party. They fight. They do this a lot, someone says to someone else, looking over their shoulder at that dark corner of the yard. She yells TRUST ME and a few more people turn their heads to look. He shushes her; tells her she’s being hysterical. She yells OF COURSE I— and he yells –EVER TRY SO HAR— and she yells –ON’T EVEN CA— and he throws his hands...
11 tags
“Most editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.”
– T.S. Eliot
8 tags
“Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and...”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”
