January 2011
120 posts
Forgetting Someone, by Yehuda Amichai
Forgetting someone is like
forgetting to turn off the light in the back yard
so it stays lit all the next day.
But then it’s the light
that makes you remember.
December 2010
90 posts
Play
When you hear the last piano chord in "A Day in the Life" and you just sit there like
The Problem, by Richard Siken
“The problem (if there was one) was simply a problem with the question. He wants to paint a bird, needs to, and the problem is why. Why paint a bird? Why do anything at all? Not how, because hows are easy, series or sequence, one foot after the other, but existentially why bother, what does it solve? Be the tree, solve for bird. What does that mean? It’s a problem of focus, it’s a problem of diligence, it’s supposed to be a grackle but it sort of got away from him. But why not let the colors do what they want, which is blend, which is kind of neighborly, if you think about it. Blackbird, he says. So be it. Indexed and normative. Who gets to measure the distance between experience and its representation? Who controls the lines of inquiry? He does, but he’s not very good at it. And just because you want to paint a bird, do actually paint a bird, it doesn’t mean you’ve accomplished anything. Maybe if it was pretty, it would mean something. Maybe if it was beautiful it would be true. But it’s not, not beautiful, not true, not even realistic, more like a man in a birdsuit, blue shoulders instead of feathers, because he isn’t looking at a bird, real bird, as he paints, he is looking at his heart, which is impossible, unless his heart is a metaphor for his heart, as everything is a metaphor for itself, so that looking at the page is like looking out the window at a bird in your chest with a song in its throat that you don’t want to hear but you paint anyway because the hand is a voice that can sing what the voice will not and the hand wants to do something useful. Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I fall asleep, I think about a poem I might write, someday, about my heart, says the heart. Answer: be the heart. Answer: be the hand. Answer: be the bird. Answer: be the sky.”
(via: lived)
I’d like to claim this Richard Siken poem. I would like to take it into my possession. It’s not that I want to have written it, no, I just want ownership of it.
Lapham's Quarterly: He lives, and he lives forever... →
laphamsquarterly.tumblr.com
DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says, ‘If you see it in THE SUN it’s so.’
Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?
VIRGINIA O’HANLON.
115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET.
VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They…
“In August of 1990 I found myself laying on my stomach in the woods with a pair of binoculars, a bottle of Canadian Club, and my friend Kurt Cobain. The reason why I had the binoculars was because I was the lookout while he ran across the street to a “teen pregnancy center” that had just opened in our town. It really wasn’t a teen pregnancy center, it was a right-wing con where they got teenage girls to go in there and then told them they were going to go to hell if they had abortions. Since Kurt and I were angry young feminists in the ’90s we decided that we were going to do a little public service that night. We drank our Canadian Club and he watched out while I went across the street and wrote, “Fake abortion clinic, everyone,” because I was kind of like the pragmatic one or whatever. He was more creative so he went over and in six-foot-tall red letters he wrote, “God is gay.” [applause]”
—
Kathleen Hanna, Our Hit Parade (via feminismistheshit)
my kinda people.
(via queerdiddlebot)
If you don’t know who she is, acquaint yourself immediately.
