Stuff

Don’t you know that every perfect life would mean the end of art?

Robert Musil

"We are a life passage,

continuation of each other.

We belong to a sea of dreams,

reflections of a blue sea.

We live between two horizons,

that is our reality.

The stars are in the sky

to give light to the road

at the beginning and at the end

of our time, which is infinite.

At night we can’t see the colors

but they move in the dark

of the heart of our dreams".

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/dont-date-a-girl-who-reads/

http://litreactor.com/essays/chuck-palahniuk/nuts-and-bolts-%E2%80%9Cthought%E2%80%9D-verbs

Chuck Palahniuk

"In six seconds, you’ll hate me.

But in six months, you’ll be a better writer.

From this point forward – at least for the next half year – you may not use “thought” verbs. These include: Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires, and a hundred others you love to use."

***

http://www.nsmbl.com/love-we-love-devendra-banhart-and-ana-kras/

Such a romantic love story! Back in 2011, Serbian photographer Ana Kraš flew out to Los Angeles to take some photos of folk singer Devendra Banhart for a European magazine. Within five minutes of meeting each other, Devendra asked Ana to marry her, to which she said no (what?!). Still, though, Ana decided to stay in L.A. and the two have been together ever since. Gotta hand it to her, we wouldn’t be able to resist Devendra either.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/12/40-maps-that-explain-the-world/

http://www.poetryireland.ie/resources/feature-articles/writers-journey.html

In the dream you were etching something and it was
to be, later, me. And so we go on:
water, moving, makes its own hollow.

We teach ourselves, luck, and look: a moving retrospective
on, say, the thirty most recent nights.
These I carry along with me, and no more

are we able to break. From this as from land, from ocean.
At times we are touching and mostly
not. Mostly we are talking

***

Night’s a sea: of chanced things

like fish, nervy silver
dart in thin light,

like clouds. —siphoning, your form loaded with stars,
magic of failed desire—here—

doorway
between your body and the radiator

—limb in, thigh over thigh, so much body
touching body that my body becomes—

dawn creases
lines in the wash of black cold

your toes curled like a
diver’s and stilled, as if broken. A sea

***

Parallel Lovers

At night she wakes and feels the money move.
The sea is near tonight. She listens to wave after wave.
Intangible, electrical, the money’s flashed between brains,
from server in glinting impulse to server across the time zones.

She thinks of all the lit-up planes right now
rising and landing, that stream in an unstinting queue,
in brilliant trails faster than dawn to horizons
west of here; pathways the money both is and symbolises.

The Securities Desk

Money is a kind of poetry
—Wallace Stevens

Yes. It has rhythm, a book-kept symmetry, each debit
finding its rhyme on the opposite side of the ledger.
And its currents at night have a flickering aesthetic.
And it cycles in predictable metre, its seasons falling like stresses,

(boom, bust) but its weather ineffable: just ask the analysts, baffled,
resentful, in awe, to tell the why not the what of their graph.
Her husband sculpts money and it responds to his mind’s brisk sleight.
Options are formed: like making faith of water or engineering light.

New SPL Poem of the Moment, 'I, Lizard, performance artist' by Emily Ballou.

enact mediative studies
in the physics of gravity
motion vs. stillness
metaphysics, in particular
cyclical time.

My work muses on anonymity
the relation of body to place
the inevitability of decay
being ephemeral
object in space.

My art is my performance.
My performance is endurance.

source

“When you’re a young woman, and beautiful, all eyes are on you. Can you capture that experience? Can you collaborate with the people who hope to watch you and, instead of being the object of desire, redirect their desire toward making art?”

—Marilyn Minter

Adam's Complaint
Denise Levertov


Some people,
no matter what you give them,
still want the moon.

The bread,
the salt,
white meat and dark,
still hungry.

The marriage bed
and the cradle,
still empty arms.

You give them land,
their own earth under their feet,
still they take to the roads.

And water: dig them the deepest well,
still it's not deep enough
to drink the moon from.

***

THE EYE

The Atlantic is a stormy moat, and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific:
The ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, battle-falcons,
Are a mote of dust in the great scale-pan.
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like
dolphins through the grey sea-smoke
Into pale sea, look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this
dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close; this
is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth, and what it watches is not our wars.

Robinson Jeffers

***

We are the music-makers.
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample a kingdom down.

We in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

A. W. E. O'Shaughnessy

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/15/arts/design/an-art-critic-is-first-inspired-by-words.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2&ref=hollandcotter

„The more I looked at the picture, the better I liked it. I liked what I saw as its modesty, its tentativeness and its otherworldliness. (Heaven was blue, wasn’t it?) I liked that it was furnished with the idea of things, rather than actual things. I liked its semi-emptiness. I liked that it had stories not yet told. There was room for a writer-to-be in there.”

http://www.henri-matisse.net/paintings/bka.html