May 2013
8 posts
5am
kristin-fitzsimmons:
When we got a new mattress, I thought I would get more sleep. But since it coincided with the arrival of summer after a long winter, this was not really the case. My cat Karl started the annoying habit of walking around the apartment, howling at night. I think there’s too much noise and too many smells coming through the windows for him to want to stay inside.
When I was a...
IN PRAISE OF TANGENTS
“The illogicality of its attitude, the arbitrariness of its conclusions, the frequency of the exceptional, should present no difficulty to the student of many grammars …. There is a generosity in its ardour of speech which removes it as far as possible from common loquacity; and it is ever too disconnected to be classed as eloquence.” I adapt these words from the passage near...
April 2013
38 posts
Thought Catalog: The 10 Ages You'll Have in Your...
sexpigeon:
1. 20
2. 21
3. 22
4. 23
5. 24
6. 25
7. 26
8. 27
9. 28
10. 29
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Like all things I have ever compared, between the Netherlands and the United States the American version is the worse and the Dutch version is wonderful!
working on my presentation about the history of...
“Sprinkles generally require frosting in order to stick to the desired food surface. They can be most commonly found on smaller confections.” … “ and muisjes(“little mice”) in 1860, candy-coated anise seeds traditionally eaten on rusks to celebrate a baby’s birth.”
2.57 a.m.
she would compare its hors d’oeuvres to a party she had been to once, in New York, and compare the attractiveness of its guests to a concert she had seen once, in London. Everything was better somewhere else, for Maxine.
If over my life I have encountered so many travelers who build the present city up as a series of comparisons to what they have left, it must be because such a person has an...
old men / props
“I’ll take some of that – some of that, what is it? Smirnoff Ice?”
“It is,” I said, reaching in for the bottles. “We’ve got to drink them here,” I said.
We stood around drinking them, looking at nothing. “Nice microwave,” he said, flipping the microwave door open and closed. “Works well?”
“I guess,” I said. “It’s a microwave.”
“Yeah,”...
1 tag
"request moments" f&*& you
… narrating something about Gaugin and Survivor, how they were both the product of a culture’s impulse toward the primal, how those color schemes were echoed in my work. “The primal,” he kept saying, “the primal,” until for the first time I broke the word apart in my head and thought of prime numbers, of animals that were indivisible, of a prim Victorian woman becoming an animal. “Yes,” he...
i like to write 'pauses' like i like to eat the...
Maxine grabbed for the short man’s joint. A moment of silence, as they watched her – woman in a white dress sucking down forgiveness, forgetting, the smell of the afternoon. On the railing, a pigeon stalked a line back and forth, back and forth. The Chinese man looked up at the sky, which was strangely white, that day, like the rolling papers on the table, like the starched white shirts they all...
“All the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity toward those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There...
Then, an older woman, Chinese and stately, sitting alone in an Eames chair, who called me to her with a slender finger. “Tell me about yourself,” she said. I sat forward on an ottoman and answered questions. She herself, she said, had once taken a photograph of a cat. A husband of hers, now dead, had entered it into a competition. And the photo had won the competition in the same month that the...
Trying for the Russian moment
“I do love an American girl. A new American girl. Where do you find them?”
“In your dreams,” Mrs. Holcum said. Then, “At weddings.”
“Weddings.” He had a faroff look, remembering something. “I suppose the one I refused to go to.”
“Yes that one.” Her face contorted. She grabbed at her eyes, stifling a laugh, stifling something.
He...
semioticsofsloth:
“suddenly I’m hip”
everyone...
having fun
“He reminded me of a guy I knew in college, Ben Perkins, who was always in the library eating a bag of M&Ms pre-sorted into the order of the visible spectrum. If you asked Perkins for an M&M he would offer a brown. ‘I don’t care for the browns,’ he’d say, sliding it across the table with an index finger. The browns! Which is was why Sheila had called Perkins...
Than longen folk to go on pilgrimages! Happy...
WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote 1
The droghte 2 of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich 3 licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
5Inspired hath in every holt 4 and heeth
The tendre croppes, 5 and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne, 6
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al...
March 2013
23 posts
““Is it always the same story, then? Somebody loves and somebody doesn’t, or...”
– Miranda Popkey interviewed Renata Adler about the rerelease of Speedboat and Pitch Dark. (via emilybooks)
Go Miranda!
tourism's dense narratives:
“This playful 16th-century fountain depicts four boys gently hoisting tortoises up into a bowl of water. Apparently, Taddeo Landini created it in a single night in 1585 on behalf of the Duke of Mattei, who had gambled his fortune away and was on the verge of losing his fiancée. On seeing the fountain, Mattei’s future father-in-law was so impressed that he relented and let Mattei marry his...
22/27
Maybe 27 isn’t a strawberry kiwi snapple stuffed with cigarette butts. It’s what Andrew says:
“This morning I drive down Interstate 5, the marine layer thicker than yesterday’s, suffocating the smoke of a used up cigarette butt in an empty can of orange juice, hand over the hole to the tune of My Bloody Valentine. I am twenty-seven years old. I am twenty-two years old. It’s...
XVII No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone. The accidents happen, we’re not heroines, they happen in our lives like car crashes, books that change us, neighborhoods we move into and come to love. Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story, women at least should know the difference between love and death. No prison cup, no penance. Merely a notion that the tape - recorder should have...
