READIN

Monday, July 4th, 2011

🦋 Not a soul to tell our troubles to

Woke up with a song ringing in my ears and a poem drifting through my head.

My shadow has no memory of
that frantic, panicked, pell-mell flight --

No pain or expectations, craving,
dying to escape his bondage.

Look, he's crouching, vibrates with
desire that only shadows feel;

He's poised to spring, to pounce, as if
the shadow of some predator,

Some dusky, fleeting contrast on
the sidewalk of my consciousness,

Some ragged blank impression on
the sand dunes of my memory --

We move, the spell is broken, sliding
frictionless along the garden

Seeking our reflection in
the pools of last night's rainfall,

In the golden machinations of the sunlight from the east.

posted morning of July 4th, 2011: Respond
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Saturday, July second, 2011

🦋 A Softer Cocktail

Thanks to young urban bicycle enthusiast Dorothy Gambrell, today I found out about Saveur's Recipe Comix -- right now I am drinking (courtesy of A Softer World's Emily Horne) a Black Mischief -- this is Horne's take on a Kingsley Amis cocktail recipe, and boy oh boy is it smooth.

In general I am all in favor of mixing comix with other forms. Gambrell's recipe for Chocolate Ice-Cream is a good one, and the peripheral cartoony stuff adds to it, gives it resonance. I will remember this cocktail recipe because of how good it tastes, and also because of the A Softer World tie-in.

posted afternoon of July second, 2011: 5 responses
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🦋 Secret Canyon in West Orange

A year or so ago, I was talking with Woody about interesting things to see in West Orange -- he told me how one time he had been walking up Valley to Northfield and had taken a meandering route... Eventually he found himself on "one of those dead-end streets behind Northfield" and had found a secret canyon, with a pedestrian bridge linking dead-end streets on either side of it. Ever since then I've been interested to find this place, and today (I'm pretty sure) I did.

The canyon I found doesn't precisely meet Woody's description -- it looks like there has been some construction in the intervening years. Riding up Northfield past Seton Hall (a long slog of an uphill, but not steep enough to make me give up midway along), there are two streets to the left marked "Dead End", Carter Rd. and Beverly Rd. I road up the hill and then back down, and turned right on Beverly -- Turns out it is no longer a Dead End as the road has been looped around to connect it to Carter. (This must be a fairly recent development, Google Maps at least still thinks both streets dead-end.) Right where it loops around, there is the canyon Woody was talking about. No pedestrian bridge anymore, the loop crosses over the canyon and the stream is in a culvert there -- very pretty waterfall where it pours out of the culvert, I tried to get a photo but the maple tree in front of me had its own ideas... There is still no connection to the south -- the dead-end street south of the canyon, also called Beverly, is a private street and gated off.

posted morning of July second, 2011: Respond
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Friday, July first, 2011

🦋 Wallpapers from a Multiverse

posted evening of July first, 2011: Respond
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Thursday, June 30th, 2011

"However much you feed a wolf, it always looks to the forest. We are all wolves in the dense forest of Eternity." This was written by the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the man said softly as he stroked the silver fur of the animal crouched in his arms. The animal pricked up its ears, then strained to look back at the dark copse of trees where shadows moved as if alive. As if alive and waiting to move out into the open.

Listen, this process called poetry is an exercise in imagining memory, and then having that memory snare and cherish imagination. Yet, every poem is and will be a capsule of territory in the perpetual present tense, a vessel taking on the ever-changing colors of the sea.

-- Breyten Breytenbach
"Poetry is the Breath of Awareness"
Intimate Stranger

(The Tsvetaeva quote is from her book of essays, Art in the Light of Conscience, tr. Angela Livingstone.)

posted evening of June 30th, 2011: Respond
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🦋 Breakfast and Lunch

A new poem from Pelele had the happy effect of reminding me of one of my very favorite poems, Kenneth Koch's "Lunch" -- and the funny thing is, I was noticing similarities to "Lunch" even before I looked up to the top of the poem and noticed Pelele's title...

Breakfast

by Eduardo Valverde

Last night I dreamed of you -- or of your father:
a tall man under his hat.
The place I found myself reminded me,
its silence, of a bird -- a bird that’s sleeping,
an engine, maybe, lying in the junkheap.
He came along, his face drawn long, like kids
when they play at grown-up
or like a bankrupt god
who tallies up his mornings carefully
and finds that all that glitters is not gold;
he carried a green bottle in his hands
and the analgesic pain that comes of touching earthly things.

He spoke enthusiastically of the sea's paternal womb,
of land unmapped, unconquered, which begins off in the darkness --
in every single letter of the word, “desperation” --
He spoke of a taste like olives, of the flavor in her breasts,
in hers who never aged but who had brought forth many daughters
each with olive nipples;
of the unease that he feels before the window in a photo
in which a bowl of fruit is standing lonesome on the floor
of the hallway in a vacant house --
or I should say, before the light that’s coming through the window,
an angel hewn of green basalt;
a solid angel, weak Annunciation.

He poured me out a cup and took the bottle by its neck.
Could not remember you; but he said,
with joy in his eyes, he said My kids were like the rattle
of the hills when trains are rolling by;
like a pack of dogs, dogs baying in the distance
to push your weary heart along the journey.
It must have been getting dark, I guess -- a solitary lamp
was turning back to ash his eyes and moustache

And me, I was anxious, I needed to pee;
I felt my dress was falling into shadow --
     its weight returning --
raised my hands to my cheeks and found I was not dying
nor was I really back among the living.

Two images in particular seem like they could have come from Koch's pen, the woman "who never aged but who had brought forth many daughters/ each with olive nipples", and the man boasting, "My kids were like the rattle/ of the hills when trains are rolling by" -- also the general flow of the text and of voice reminds me of Koch. (I have probably intensified this similarity in my translation; but I believe it is present in the original as well.) The "analgesic pain that comes of touching earthly things" is going to stay with me for a long time.

posted evening of June 30th, 2011: 2 responses
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Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

🦋 Accidente

Allí estaba, simplemente sentado allí en el parking del body shop, los guardabarros delantero plegado como acordeón. Me decías qué lástima, tan hermoso y casí nuevo un coche... Querías correr a casa para las pinturas y caballete traer, pero estaba ansioso. Quería ir.

Aquella noche fumábamos hierba, nosotros y Antonia, no podías dejar de inventar cuentos sobre el choque, tú loca, estabas riendo y contandonos lo que ha pasado, quiénes habían resultado herido, cuáles consequencias... Antonia reía tambien, una risa áspera, y su collar de coralina roja temblaba ritmicamente.

posted evening of June 28th, 2011: Respond
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Monday, June 27th, 2011

🦋 Haunting 8-string melody from Norway

Jonathan Ward of Excavated Shellac has a bunch of great new music posts up;* old recordings of flamenco, Turkish music, West African pop... particularly up my alley is a guest post from Swedish psychotherapist Tony Klein. A few years ago at a flea market in Uppsala, Klein found an old record of Signe Flatin Neset playing the traditional Norwegian tune «Skuldalsbruri» ("The Bride from Skuldal") on Hardingfele, a Norwegian fiddle with four resonating strings under the melody strings. Listen to the recording at box.net, and read Klein's post about the music and the artist.

*(Hmm, no, this is not correct. They are a bunch of old posts from the archives that Google Reader and/or WordPress decided should be reported as new today. This is a good thing as it exposed me to some fine music; but if you head over to Jonathan's blog the latest post you will see is from a couple of weeks ago.)

(Oh and speaking of great music to listen to, NPR's First Listen is now streaming Gillian Welch and David Rawling's new record, The Harrow and the Harvest, for free. Thanks for the link, cleek!)

posted evening of June 27th, 2011: 1 response
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🦋 Todo el cuento

Les diremos todo a ellos, todo el cuento a Antonia y a sus amigas, todo el cuento desde el inicio. Lo contaremos, como te has despertado aquella mañana, también agotada, repitiendo esas frases melosas y vacías que habías oído en sueños. Como no podía hacer cara o cruz de todo lo y he bajado para preparar café.

posted evening of June 27th, 2011: Respond
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Sunday, June 26th, 2011

🦋 El poeta licantrópico

I find myself fascinated by Steven White's statement about Alfonso Cortés, Nicaragua's "poeta loco," that he "was prone to fits of violence that coincided with the full moon" -- I am finding in Cortés' poetry some beautiful fragments without its yet coming together for me as a whole. Inscribed on Cortés' tomb in León (adjacent to the tomb of Rubén Dario) is his poem "Supplication."

Time is hunger, space is cold
pray, pray: only supplication
can satisfy the longings of the void.

Dreaming is a lonely rock
where the eagle of the soul can build his nest:
dream, dream, dream the whole day long.

(I see a couple of references, in the few of Cortés' poems that White includes, to ether -- I wonder if he was a recreational user and if so, whether that had anything to do with his reputation for insanity.)

posted evening of June 26th, 2011: 2 responses
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