8.06.2008
out of the mouths of... craig thompson's friends
I'm at work catching up on some blogs I've been out of touch with recently...Just read this post on beloved graphic novelist Craig Thompson's blog with a sketchbook page quoting a conversation with a friend of his. His friend remarks:
"right now, in this world, to love is easy but to let someone else love you is difficult, because you have to show your weaknesses and stop being scared they'll eat you.
Truest.
"right now, in this world, to love is easy but to let someone else love you is difficult, because you have to show your weaknesses and stop being scared they'll eat you.
Truest.
Labels: love, otherpeopleswriting
5.28.2008
I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality
Anais Nin, in a letter to Henry Miller:
"You are right, in one sense, when you speak of honesty. An effort, anyway, with the usual human or feminine retractions. To retreat is not feminine, male, or trickery. It is a terror before utter destruction. What we analyze inexorably, will it die? Will June die? Will our love die, suddenly, instantaneously if you should make a caricature of it? Henry, there is danger in too much knowledge. You have a passion for absolute knowledge. That is why people will hate you.
And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.
What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world.
I want to both combat you and submit to you, because as a woman I adore your courage, I adore the pain in engenders, I adore the struggle you carry in yourself, which I alone fully realize, I adore your terrifying sincerity. I adore your strength. You are right. The world is to be caricatured, but I know, too, how much you can love what you caricature. How much passion there is in you! It is that I feel in you. I do not feel the savant, the revealer, the observer. When I am with you, it is the blood I sense.
This time you are not going to awake from the ecstasies of our encounters to reveal only the ridiculous moments. No. You won't do it this time, because while we live together, while you examine my indelible rouge effacing the design of my mouth, spreading like a blood after an operation (you kissed my mouth and it was gone, the design of it was lost as in a watercolor, the colors ran); while you do that, I seize upon the wonder that is brushing by (the wonder, oh, the wonder of my lying under you), and I bring it to you, I breathe it around you. Take it. I feel prodigal with my feelings when you love me, feelings so unblunted, so new, Henry, not lost in resemblance to other moments, so much ours, yours, mine, you and I together, not any man or any woman together.
What is more touchingly real than your room. The iron bed, the hard pillow, the single glass. And all sparkling like a Fourth of July illumination because of my joy, the soft billowing joy of the womb you inflamed. The room is full of the incandescence you poured into me. The room will explode when I sit at the side of your bed and you talk to me. I don't hear your words: your voice reverberated against my body like another kind of caress, another kind of penetration. I have no power over your voice. It comes straight from you to me. I could stuff my ears ad it would find its way into my blood and make it rise.
I am impervious to the flat visual attack of things. I see your khaki shirt hung up on a peg. It is your shirt and I could see you in it -- you, wearing a color I detest. But I see you, not the khaki shirt. Something stirs in me as I look at it, and it is certainly the human you. It is a vision of the human you revealing an amazing delicacy to me. It is your khaki shirt and you are the man who is the axis of my world now. I revolve around the richness of your being.
'Come closer to me, come closer. I promise you it will be beautiful.'
You keep your promise.
Listen, I do not believe that I alone feel that we are living something new because it is new to me. I do not see in your writing any of the feelings you have shown me or any of the phrases you have used. When I read your writing, I wondered, What episode are we going to repeat?
You carry your vision, and I mine, and they have mingled. If at moments I see the world as you see it (because they are Henry's whores I love them), you will sometimes see it as I do."
Labels: love, otherpeopleswriting
5.27.2008
Naked: I've forgotten.
Persimmons
by Li Young Lee
In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose
persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down the newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew on the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.
Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down,
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten.
Naked: I've forgotten.
Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.
Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.
Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn't ripe or sweet, I didn't eat
but watched the other faces.
My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.
Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set them both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.
Finally understanding
he was going blind,
my father sat up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.
This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents' cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.
He's so happy that I've come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.
Under some blankets, I find a box.
Inside the box I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.
He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?
This is persimmons, Father.
Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.
by Li Young Lee
In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose
persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down the newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew on the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.
Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down,
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten.
Naked: I've forgotten.
Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.
Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.
Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn't ripe or sweet, I didn't eat
but watched the other faces.
My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.
Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set them both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.
Finally understanding
he was going blind,
my father sat up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.
This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents' cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.
He's so happy that I've come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.
Under some blankets, I find a box.
Inside the box I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.
He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?
This is persimmons, Father.
Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.
Labels: love, otherpeopleswriting, poetry
5.24.2008
for you, i'd be happy to repeat myself forever
Poem for the Name Mary
by Mark Cox
Like smoke in a bottle, like
hunger, sometimes light fits,
wraps itself around a person
or thing and doesn't let go.
The light becomes a name,
and that name becomes a voice
through which light speaks to us.
Maybe this is what a friend means
when she says there is a pair of lips
in the air, maybe this is desire
and need too. Or maybe
this is just how to love a potato,
how to see what the potato sees:
the childish, white arms that reach out
through it's eyes into the dark of our cabinets
to bless them.
by Mark Cox
Like smoke in a bottle, like
hunger, sometimes light fits,
wraps itself around a person
or thing and doesn't let go.
The light becomes a name,
and that name becomes a voice
through which light speaks to us.
Maybe this is what a friend means
when she says there is a pair of lips
in the air, maybe this is desire
and need too. Or maybe
this is just how to love a potato,
how to see what the potato sees:
the childish, white arms that reach out
through it's eyes into the dark of our cabinets
to bless them.
Labels: love, otherpeopleswriting, poetry
Apropos.
"There's nothing the least bit sinful about it. Things like that happen all the time in this great big world of ours. It's like taking a boat out on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day and thinking both the sky and the lake are beautiful. So stop eating yourself up alive. Things will go where they're supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course. Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt. Life is like that. [...] You try too hard to make life fit your way of doing things. If you don't want to spend time in an insane asylum, you have to open up a little more and let yourself go with life's natural flow. I'm just a powerless and imperfect woman, but still there are times when I think to myself how wonderful life can be! Believe me, it's true! So stop what you're doing this minute and get happy. Work at making yourself happy!"
- Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood.
- Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood.
Labels: otherpeopleswriting
3.20.2007
"hordes of baby penguins"
I'm reading this book called Wide Eyed by Trinie Dalton. It was a random choice; a customer ordered it and I liked the cover and the sentences I read when I flipped it open, so I ordered it and bought it yesterday. I chose it over a bunch of other amazing books I had on hold because I asked Margaret which one I should buy and she flipped Wide Eyed open and read
We were both sold. Anyway, it's an amazing book and y'all should seek it out. It's like if Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born 25 years ago and listened to a lot of Sonic Youth. Or it's like Francesca Lia Block if Tori Amos never existed. Or it's like Jonathan Safran Foer but with a lot more kittens and horror movies. Or it's like nothing I've ever read, and it makes me want to write more than anything I've read in a long time. Here are a couple excerpts that will explain this book better than I can...
It's honestly not all as cutesy as that. There's a lot of death and sex and fur and blood and sadness, but (just like real life) there are also unicorns and dinner parties. Wide Eyed. Trinie Dalton. Read it up!
"Dear Human,
Thank you for assuming elves are literate!"
We were both sold. Anyway, it's an amazing book and y'all should seek it out. It's like if Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born 25 years ago and listened to a lot of Sonic Youth. Or it's like Francesca Lia Block if Tori Amos never existed. Or it's like Jonathan Safran Foer but with a lot more kittens and horror movies. Or it's like nothing I've ever read, and it makes me want to write more than anything I've read in a long time. Here are a couple excerpts that will explain this book better than I can...
"There's something evil about a world in which I can think of a hundred jobs I'd like, and none of them will support me. Puppy rancher, wild mushroom collector, designer of fantasy postal stamps, incense critic. I'd like to run a sticker museum, where I'd curate shows: The History of Scratch and Sniffs, or Great Designs: Stars and Rainbows. But who would come?"
I used to play a lot of Burgertime. I was living by myself in the Mojave Desert, and coyotes had just eaten my cat. Burgertime is a Nintendo game where the player is Chef Pepper, best burger-maker in the world. Chef Pepper positions buns so that lettuce, tomatoes, and yellow cheese will fall onto them from outer space. Since the game design is so primitive, the ingredients are chunky and squared and the colors are flat. The lettuce doesn't have the real thing's multiple shades of green. The buns are solid brown, and their rounded edges look zigzaggy, as if they're cross-stitched. Since Burgertime is my favorite video game, I sometimes think I should embroider a quilt covered with hamburgers and Chef Pepper's arch villians: Mr. Hot Dog, Mr. Pickle, and Mr. Egg. Quilts are also useful weapons in the fight againt loneliness.
It's honestly not all as cutesy as that. There's a lot of death and sex and fur and blood and sadness, but (just like real life) there are also unicorns and dinner parties. Wide Eyed. Trinie Dalton. Read it up!
Labels: otherpeopleswriting
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