February 2011
30 posts
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January 2011
43 posts
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In A Station of the Metro, Ezra Pound
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
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Untranslatable words, part two.
Mamihlapinatapei
Yagán, Indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego, Chile: “a meaningful look shared by two people expressing mutual unstated feelings.” It describes a look in which each person is hoping that the other will initiate something that they both desire, but which neither person wants to start. Yagán or Yámana is a language isolate, meaning that it’s a “natural...
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Daily Routines
Arthur Miller
INTERVIEWER Do you have a routine for writing? MILLER I wish I had a routine for writing. I get up in the morning and I go out to my studio and I write. And then I tear it up! That’s the routine, really. Then, occasionally, something sticks. And then I follow that. The only image I can think of is a man walking around with an iron rod in his hand during a lightning storm.
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One Art, Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring...
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Complaint #247
smithiescomplaints:
Smoking in the winter doesn’t make me look cooler. Just cold.
Learned this the hard way.
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Pretty obsessed with this right now.
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Untranslatable words.
Arabic
taarradhin [tah-rah-deen] (noun)
Arabic has no word for “compromise” in the sense of reaching an arrangement via struggle and disagreement. But a much happier concept, taarradhin, exists in Arabic. It implies a happy solution for everyone, an “I win, you win.” It’s a way of resolving a problem without anyone losing face.
Czech
litost [lee-tosht]...
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The Encounter, Ezra Pound
All the while they were talking the new morality Her eyes explored me. And when I arose to go Her fingers were like the tissue Of a Japanese paper napkin.
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“If it is so painful to love and to be charged with this electric current, how...”
– Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak.
Rereading this book. It is painful - but that is because we are never allowed to be anything but the current.
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Get A Real Degree, Elif Batuman (LRB)
“The law of ‘find your voice’ and ‘write what you know’ originates in a phenomenon perhaps most clearly documented by the blog and book Stuff White People Like: the loss of cultural capital associated with whiteness, and the attempts of White People to compensate for this loss by displaying knowledge of non-white cultures. Hence Stuff White People Like #20, ‘Being an Expert on Your Culture’,...
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Variations on the Word Sleep, Margaret Atwood
I would like to watch you sleeping, which may not happen. I would like to watch you, sleeping. I would like to sleep with you, to enter your sleep as its smooth dark wave slides over my head and walk with you through that lucent wavering forest of bluegreen leaves with its watery sun & three moons towards the cave where you must descend, towards your worst fear I would like to give you the...
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Motherland by Rose Auslander
awritersruminations:
My Fatherland is dead. They buried it in fire.
I live in my Motherland— Word
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You Fit Into Me, Margaret Atwood
You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye
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“True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, in writing what...”
– Pliny the Elder
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“Have you ever had the experience,” Leon continued, “Of finding, in a book, some...”
– Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (via yeahwriters)
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Sonnet, John Keats (1818)
When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain, Before high-piled books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain; When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,...
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“Literature was not born the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of...”
– Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (via liquidnight)
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Ordeal, Nina Cassian
I promise to make you more alive than you’ve ever been. For the first time you’ll see your pores opening like the gills of a fish and you’ll hear the noise of blood in galleries and feel light gliding on your corneas like the dragging of a dress across the floor. For the first time, you’ll note gravity’s prick like a thorn in your heal, and your shoulder...