Saturday, February 27, 2010
Friday, February 26, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
Ruth Stone
Turn Your Eyes Away (Second-Hand Coat)
The gendarme came
to tell me you had hung yourself
on the door of a rented room
like an overcoat
like a bathrobe
hung from a hook;
when they forced the door open
your feet pushed against the floor.
Inside your skull
there was no room for us,
your circuits forgot me.
Even in Paris where we never were
I wait for you
knowing you will not come.
I remember your eyes as if I were
someone you had never seen,
a slight frown between your brows
considering me.
How could I have guessed
the plain-spoken stranger in your face,
your body, tagged in a drawer,
attached to nothing, incurious.
My sister, my spouse, you said,
in a place on the other side of the earth
where we lay in a single bed
unable to pull apart
breathing into each other,
the Gideon Bible open to the Song of Songs,
the rush of the El-train
jarring the window.
As if needles were stuck
in the pleasure zones of our brains,
we repeated everything
over and over and over.
Accepting (In the Dark)
Half-blind, it is always twilight.
The dusk of my time and the nights
are so long, and the days of my tribe
flash by, their many-colored cars
choking the air, and I lie like a shah
on my divan in this 21st century
mosque, indifferent to my folded
flesh that falls in on itself,
almost inert, remembering crossing
the fields, turning corners, coming
home to the lighted windows,
the pedestrian years of it, accepting
from each hand the gifts,
without knowing why they were
given or what to make of them.
| Always on the Train | ||
| by Ruth Stone | ||
Writing poems about writing poems is like rolling bales of hay in Texas. Nothing but the horizon to stop you. But consider the railroad's edge of metal trash; bird perches, miles of telephone wires. What is so innocent as grazing cattle? If you think about it, it turns into words. Trash is so cheerful; flying up like grasshoppers in front of the reaper. The dust devil whirls it aloft; bronze candy wrappers, squares of clear plastic--windows on a house of air. Below the weedy edge in last year's mat, red and silver beer cans. In bits blown equally everywhere, the gaiety of flying paper and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds. | ||
Two Pears
Study of Two Pears
I
Opusculum paedagogum.
The pears are not viols,
Nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing else.
II
They are yellow forms
Composed of curves
Bulging toward the base.
They are touched red.
III
They are not flat surfaces
Having curved outlines.
They are round
Tapering toward the top.
IV
In the way they are modelled
There are bits of blue.
A hard dry leaf hangs
From the stem.
V
The yellow glistens.
It glistens with various yellows,
Citrons, oranges and greens
Flowering over the skin.
VI
The shadows of the pears
Are blobs on the green cloth.
The pears are not seen
As the observer wills.
Wallace Stevens
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
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Amy Tan on creativity | Video on TED.com
Amy Tan on creativity | Video on TED.com: " "
listen to her:
Born in the US to immigrant parents from China, Amy Tan rejected her mother's expectations that she become a doctor and concert pianist. She chose to write fiction instead. Her much-loved, best-selling novels have been translated into 35 languages. She's writing a new novel and creating the libretto for The Bonesetter's Daughter, which will have its world premiere in September 2008 with the San Francisco Opera.
Tan was the creative consultant for Sagwa, the Emmy-nominated PBS series for children, and she has appeared as herself on The Simpsons. She's the lead rhythm dominatrix, backup singer and second tambourine with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a literary garage band that has raised more than a million dollars for literacy programs.
"[She] has a wonderful eye for what is telling, a fine ear for dialogue, a deep empathy for her subject matter and a guilelessly straightforward way of writing."Orville Schell, New York Times
listen to her:
Born in the US to immigrant parents from China, Amy Tan rejected her mother's expectations that she become a doctor and concert pianist. She chose to write fiction instead. Her much-loved, best-selling novels have been translated into 35 languages. She's writing a new novel and creating the libretto for The Bonesetter's Daughter, which will have its world premiere in September 2008 with the San Francisco Opera.
Tan was the creative consultant for Sagwa, the Emmy-nominated PBS series for children, and she has appeared as herself on The Simpsons. She's the lead rhythm dominatrix, backup singer and second tambourine with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a literary garage band that has raised more than a million dollars for literacy programs.
"[She] has a wonderful eye for what is telling, a fine ear for dialogue, a deep empathy for her subject matter and a guilelessly straightforward way of writing."Orville Schell, New York Times
Milton Glaser on using design to make ideas new | Video on TED.com
Milton Glaser on using design to make ideas new | Video on TED.com
Milton Glaser's work is easy to spot in a lineup -- it's simple, direct and clear, while leaping over conceptual boundaries, so that his work connects directly to the viewer like a happy virus. His best-known work may be the I [heart] N Y logo -- an image so ubiquitous, it's hard to believe there was a time when it didn't exist.
Glaser's other well-known work includes a cache of posters that defined the style of the '60s and early '70s, and numerous logos, including such instantly familiar identities as Barron's and the Brooklyn Brewery. He is a co-founder of New York magazine and helped set that magazine's honest and irreverent tone.
Recently he's been exploring the space where paintings and graphic design meet. A show in 2007 celebrated his explorations of Piero della Francesca's work. The 2009 film To Inform and Delight: The World of Milton Glaser tells the story of his celebrated career.
"The hallmarks of his work are its simplicity, wit and elegance; it may be commercial art, but with a capital A. "Stephen Holden, New York Times
Milton Glaser's work is easy to spot in a lineup -- it's simple, direct and clear, while leaping over conceptual boundaries, so that his work connects directly to the viewer like a happy virus. His best-known work may be the I [heart] N Y logo -- an image so ubiquitous, it's hard to believe there was a time when it didn't exist.
Glaser's other well-known work includes a cache of posters that defined the style of the '60s and early '70s, and numerous logos, including such instantly familiar identities as Barron's and the Brooklyn Brewery. He is a co-founder of New York magazine and helped set that magazine's honest and irreverent tone.
Recently he's been exploring the space where paintings and graphic design meet. A show in 2007 celebrated his explorations of Piero della Francesca's work. The 2009 film To Inform and Delight: The World of Milton Glaser tells the story of his celebrated career.
"The hallmarks of his work are its simplicity, wit and elegance; it may be commercial art, but with a capital A. "Stephen Holden, New York Times
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Begin by starting to write.
Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence and then go on from there.
I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day.
- Ernest Hemingway
I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day.
- Ernest Hemingway
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Paris
Founded on the island where a natural north-south highway crosses the Seine River, some 233 miles (375 kilometres) upstream from the river mouth on the English Channel, Paris, the largest city proper of continental Europe and the capital of France, is over 2,000 years old.
For hundreds and hundreds of years, by a process never successfully explained, Paris has radiated an enchantment irresistible to millions around the world, including hosts of people who would live and die without ever seeing the place.
Basilique Sacre-Coeur
For hundreds and hundreds of years, by a process never successfully explained, Paris has radiated an enchantment irresistible to millions around the world, including hosts of people who would live and die without ever seeing the place.
Basilique Sacre-Coeur
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Daily Action
Remember to seek progress over perfection and seek to do a little every day to achieve your goals.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Monday, February 8, 2010
Yeats
I heard the old, old men say,
"Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away."
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn-trees
By the waters.
I heard the old, old men say,
"All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters."
William Butler Yeats, ""The old men admiring themselves in the water"
Denial of Death
Stephen Leacock - "I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so."
tetrahedra
Green is the night, green kindled and appareled.
It is she that walks among astronomers.
She strides above the rabbit and the cat,
Like a noble figure, out of the sky,
Moving among the sleepers, the men,
Those that lie chanting *green is the night*.
Green is the night and out of madness woven,
The self-same madness of the astronomers
And of him that sees, beyond the astronomers,
The topaz rabbit and the emerald cat,
That sees above them, that sees rise up above them,
The noble figure, the essential shadow,
Moving and being, the image at its source,
The abstract, the archaic queen. Green is the night.
Wallace Stevens, "The candle a saint".
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