from The Guermantes Way

That she should have also worked, with the perseverance and the ingenuity that came naturally to her, to undo the social status she owed to her high birth does not in any way imply that, even in that remote period of her youth, Mme de Villeparisis did not attach great importance to her position. In the same way, the neurasthenic can contrive the web of isolation and inactivity in which he lives from morning to night without its seeming any more bearable, and as he hastens to add another mesh to the net that holds him captive, it is possible that he is dreaming only of dancing, sport, and travel. We constantly strive to give our life its form, but by copying, in spite of ourselves, like a drawing, the features of the person we are, not the person we should like to be. (181)

yes

i'm still here. i love you all.

Nat King Cole - tea for two

Nina Simone - my baby just cares for me

Yes! No!

- Mary Oliver

How necessary it is to have opinions! I think the spotted trout
lilies are satisfied, standing a few inches above the earth. I
think serenity is not something you just find in the world,
like a plum tree, holding up its white petals.

The violets, along the river, are opening their blue faces, like
small dark lanterns.

The green mosses, being so many, are as good as brawny.

How important it is to walk along, not in haste but slowly,
looking at everything and calling out

Yes! No! The

swan, for all his pomp, his robes of grass and petals, wants
only to be allowed to live on the nameless pond. The catbrier
is without fault. The water thrushes, down among the sloppy
rocks, are going crazy with happiness. Imagination is better
than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless
and proper work.

why do fools fall in love?

further automated correspondence from the internet, to me and a million others

1. It is really beautiful how quickly and well
Drosera and Dionaea dissolve little cubes
of albumen and gelatine.

I kept the same sized cubes on wet moss
for comparison. When you were here
I forgot that I had tried gelatine,

but albumen is far better for watching
its dissolution and absorption. Frankland
has told me how to test in a rough way

for pepsin;

and in the autumn
he will discover

what acid the digestive juice contains.

Ike and Tina Turner

LIKE A BULWARK

Affirmed. Pent by power that holds it fast-
a paradox. Pent. Hard pressed,
you take the blame and are inviolate.
Abased at last?
Not the tempest-tossed.
Compressed; firmed by the thrust of the blast
till compact, like a bulwark against fate;
lead-saluted,
saluted by lead?
As though flying through Old Glory full mast.

- Marianne Moore

i know it, you know it, but really- lean on back and listen well...

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

-- Rilke

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

- ee cummings

The Plaid Dress

Strong sun, that bleach
The curtains of my room, can you not render
Colourless this dress I wear?—
This violent plaid
Of purple angers and red shames; the yellow stripe
Of thin but valid treacheries; the flashy green of kind deeds done
Through indolence high judgments given here in haste;
The recurring checker of the serious breach of taste?

No more uncoloured than unmade,
I fear, can be this garment that I may not doff;
Confession does not strip it off,
To send me homeward eased and bare;

All through the formal, unoffending evening,
  under the clean
Bright hair,
Lining the subtle gown. . . it is not seen,
But it is there.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

joni mitchell

poem from the trash in my inbox

Try...

Warm milk, caffeine-
free herbal
tea, or hot water
with lemon

and honey. These
drinks may help
get your body ready
for rest.

Two suns are cooling

Two suns are cooling - O save me, God!

The first - in heavens, the second - in heart.
Will I have an excuse for that? -
Both suns made me fully mad!
No pain from the beams - they're lost!
Hotter sun will be frozen first.

- MARINA TSVETAEVA

From Barthes's prefatory material to Tricks

Homosexuality shocks less, but continues to be interesting; it is still at that stage of excitation where it provokes what might be called feats of discourse. Speaking of homosexuality permits those who "aren't" to show how open, liberal and modern they are; and those who "are" to bear witness, to assume responsibility, to militate. Everyone gets busy, in different ways, whipping it up.

Yet to proclaim yourself something is always to speak at the behest of a vengeful Other, to enter into his discourse, to argue with him, to seek from him a scrap of identity: "You are..." "Yes, I am..." Ultimately, the attribute is of no importance; what society will not tolerate is that I should be... nothing, or to be more exact, that the something that I am should be openly expressed as provisional, revocable, insignificant, inessential, in a word: irrelevant. Just say "I am," and you will be socially saved.

Barthes, Roland. Preface. Tricks. 1981.

in anticipation of

I had a dream that I was pregnant, and that I was required to join a team of werewolf hunters, and the werewolves were shiny, slippery, wet-looking, covered in afterbirth.

gertrude stein's tender buttons (food)

BUTTER.

Boom in boom in, butter. Leave a grain and show it, show it. I spy.

It is a need it is a need that a flower a state flower. It is a need that a state rubber. It is a need that a state rubber is sweet and sight and a swelled stretch. It is a need. It is a need that state rubber.

Wood a supply. Clean little keep a strange, estrange on it.

Make a little white, no and not with pit, pit on in within.

-1914

in summer 2005 or 2004

at islendingadagurinn, gimli. the only place in the world to buy tiger tiger icecream. also, there are cormorants, and a beach, sunshine, sailboats, etc.

a poem to darken a winter's day

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We do not know his unheard of head,
in which the seeing of his eyes ripened. But
his trunk still glows like a thousand candles,
in which his looking, only turned down slightly,

continues to shine. Otherwise the thrust of the
breast wouldn't blind you, and from the light twist
of the loins a smile wouldn't flow into
that center where the generative power thrived.

Otherwise this stone would stand half disfigured
under the transparent fall of the shoulders,
and wouldn't shimmer like the skin of a wild animal;

it wouldn't be breaking out, like a star, on
all its sides: for there is no place on this stone,
that does not see you. You must change your life.

-Rilke

thunderheist

you should all go listen to thunderheist and read _faggots_ and eat chocolate.

http://www.myspace.com/thunderheist

you should all be like me. i model superior behaviour at all times.

This came unsolicited in the form of electronic mail
[first line is the subject, second line the body]
[italics added]:


How does your ladyship like.
Many a manstongue shakes out his.

hi.