in case you were wondering

"The function of the poem is to fuck the words good and hard." -- Breyten Breytenbach, Intimate Stranger

In other news, these mid-August Minnesota allergies are eating my face. I look and feel like I have pink eye. I'm ready for fall.

yeah

Source: flickr.com via Bonnie on Pinterest

"Short Lecture on Shakespeare"

by Mary Ruefle, "Twenty-Two Short Lectures," Madness, Rack, and Honey, Wave Books, 2012

"They say there are no known facts about Shakespeare, because if it were his pen name, as many believe, then whom that bed was willed to is a moot point. Yet there is one hard cold clear fact about him, a fact that freezes the mind that dares to contemplate it: in the beginning William Shakespeare was a baby, and knew absolutely nothing. He couldn't even speak."

used without permission. sorry.

move me

". . . when you think about it, poets always want us to be moved by something, until in the end, you expect that a poet is someone who is moved by everything, who just stands in front of the world and weeps and laughs and weeps and laughs. . . " 


-- Mary Ruefle


from "On Sentimentality," Madness, Rack, and Honey, Wave Books, 2012

the universe inside you

"Each of us is conceived with a unique set of coiled genes 'primed' for realization. We are born with a desire to develop our resources and contribute our matured talents to the pool of human resources. This unfolding and becoming of an individual self is not only a biological activity--it is also a spiritual one. When we bring to life our unique personal contribution, we are active, local participants in the endless cosmic drama of the creation of ultimate meaning, as the universe, itself divine, 'becomes.'"

--Albert Pesso

Also, this:

24: photo diary

some photos from yesterday evening, before Laura and I headed out to see Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes.... (more of that to come)

"But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold...."

--Oliver Wendell Holmes

my amazing lunch and a tribute to Dr. Gregory House

Today my lunch was so delicious that I have to tell you about it, and I knew it was going to be delicious so I took a picture before I ate it.

Ingredients:

mixed spring greens

cucumber slices

crumbled feta cheese

honey roasted sunflower seeds

raspberry vinaigrette

It. Was. So. Good.

On a sad note, tonight is the SERIES FINALE of House, the only television show I really care about watching. Because it's always on when Evelyn is still awake, Jason and I usually watch it Tuesdays on Hulu. Our obsession with this show began one rainy weekend when I was pregnant and Jason was sick. His parents were gone and we sat in his loft for 8 hours (no lie), and watched the House marathon that was on USA or FX or some cable channel like that.  Ever since then we've watched every single episode, as far as I know, and I can't believe it's going to be over! It's crazy how these characters begin to feel like real people!

If I was ever traumatically ill, I'd definitely want House to be my doctor.

source

What a fox! And he's really fucking smart. And an atheist. What more could a girl want? Ha. Let's look at some quotes!

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"Everybody does stupid things, it shouldn't cost them everything they want in life."


"It's one of the great tragedies of life — something always changes."


"Our bodies break down, sometimes when we're 90, sometimes before we're even born, but it always happens and there's never any dignity in it. I don't care if you can walk, see, wipe your own ass. It's always ugly. Always. You can live with dignity, we can't die with it."

Good-bye, House. 

Waaaaaa.... 

writer's block

For the first time this semester I've had true, hardcore writer's block. I thought this was something I'd outgrown, but maybe it's one of those things that plagues all writers for all of time... and by writer's block I mean that everything I try to write just doesn't work. For some reason I can't access the part of my brain that I need... maybe I've been watching too much television. Maybe it's the weather. I always blame things on the weather. Oh! Maybe it's my spider bite! Lately I'm blaming everything on my spider bite. Sore throat? Spider bite. Stiff neck? Spider bite. Feeling tired? Spider bite. Can't write a damn thing? Must be the spider bite!

Here's a quote I saw on Facebook that I love:

“Literature says nothing to those human beings who are satisfied with their lot, who are content with life as they now live it. Literature is the food of the rebellious spirit, the promulgator of nonconformities, the refuge for those who have too much or too little in life. One seeks sanctuary in literature so as not to be unhappy and so as not to be incomplete…to divest ourselves of the wrongs and the impositions of this unjust life, a life that forces us always to be the same person when we wish to be many different people, so as to satisfy the many desires that possess us. Literature pacifies this vital dissatisfaction only momentarily - but in this miraculous instant, in this provisional suspension of life, literary illusion lifts and transports us outside of history, and we become citizens of a timeless land, and in this way immortal.” - Mario Vargas Llosa

Hope your day is less frustrating than mine!

"There is a world..."

"There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world."

from Mary Ruefle's "Someone Reading a Book is a Sign of Order in the World."

Mary teaches poetry at VCFA, and I'm highly considering working with her for my last semester... she is brilliant.

More quotes from the above piece:

"I am a writer, and the next step is inevitable: I used what had been revealed to me in my own writing."

"We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love—a connection between things."

"Our minds and the universe—what else is there? Margaret Mead described intellectuals as those who are bored when they don't have the chance to talk interestingly enough. Now a book will talk interestingly to you. George Steiner describes the intellectual as one who can't read without a pencil in her hand. One who wants to talk back to the book, not take notes but make them: one who might write "The giraffe speaks!" in the margin. In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?"

And she quotes Kafka:

"'Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far away from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.'—Kafka in a letter, 1904"

"However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."

A poet friend just posted this on Facebook and it's exactly what I needed (that and hollow milk chocolate Easter eggs). And, interestingly, that bit at the end about light and dark fits perfectly with my critical thesis. In my thesis I approach poetry through the lens of literal light and dark as used in photography, which leads to metaphorical forms of light and dark... Both light and dark are necessary...it's the darkness that's inevitable, and it's light that we have to make. One way I make light is writing. Another is friends. I think I would like to have more friends.

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rilke begs me...

its constant hunger

Source: truthandfairytales.blogspot.com via Sarah on Pinterest

Source: tumblr.com via Sarah on Pinterest

Source: tumblr.com via Sarah on Pinterest

what they said

I don't spend a lot of time on Pinterest but every once in a while I like to browse the "prints & posters" section for quotes that I like. A lot of the stuff on there is terribly cliched but sometimes I find sentiments I agree with. Tonight I found a few, although finding sentiments you agree with and acting on sentiments you agree with are two entirely different things....:

Source: favim.com via GLIMPSE on Pinterest

Source: google.pt via Isabel on Pinterest

Source: behappy.me via Be on Pinterest

And on a less serious note:

Source: someecards.com via Laura on Pinterest

haha, only a little bit true.

astound yourself

My friend Azia gave me this magnet. It's on my fridge, holding up a photo of my mom and brother in mid-embrace at my brother's basic training graduation last month in Fort Benning, Georgia. My dad took the photo. My dad who was also in the Army, for over 20 years. While the military is something my sensitive soul could never endure (I can barely endure the thought of my brother's deployment some time later this year), we were basically raised with the Army motto, "Be All You Can Be." I was told that I could do virtually anything I wanted as long as I was willing to work for it. All through my childhood I believed it.

Today I still believe it. And it makes me happy, keeps me going. It's what I hold on to at the end of the day.

Thanks, Dad.

Back to digging myself out of the philosophical psycho-sociological mess I've made of my critical thesis... Yikes.

crackmeopen {quote to fall in love with}

from Pam Houston's novel Contents May Have Shifted:

"He tells me we've been put on earth to crack each other open, and then to stick around long enough to watch the thing that, having been cracked open, suddenly shines."

"there are no foreign lands..." (& secrets for you!)

When you go on a tropical vacation it's sort of expected that you post beautiful beach and sun photos, and while I have plenty of those and will share plenty more (see a few here), I want to first share with you some of the other photos from my time in the Caribbean last weekend. The beaches were, of course, amazing, but I was equally amazed by the life of the island itself, its people and its culture, its crooked houses on its narrow winding roads (and how people drive fast and reckless and on the left side), its food and drink (lots of rum!) and town and color and architecture.... and I thankfully got to see a lot of that--on the shuttle ride to and from the airport, walking the streets of downtown St. Thomas, and on a taxi ride that ended up taking us all over the island...(more on that later)...

Plus, everyone's seen beautiful photos of beautiful beaches--that doesn't make them any less beautiful, and I'm excited to share my beautiful beach photos, but these photos here are more special to me, more sacred...odd-angled snapshots of my experience on the island that are virtually impossible to recreate...  

So here, I share my secrets with you!

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” --Robert Louis Stevenson