In Uncategorized on
1 January 2009 with no comments
Those without stories are preordained to repeat them,
I saw once in the stars.
. . . . . . . . . . Unclear who underwrote that,
But since then I’ve seen it everywhere
I’ve looked, staggering
Noon light and night’s meridian wandering wide and the single sky.
And here it is in the meadow grass, a brutish script.
We tend to repeat what we don’t know
Instead of the other way around -
. . . . . . . . . . thus mojo, thus misericordia,
Old cross-work and signature, the catechism in the wind.
We tend to repeat what hurts us, things, and ghosts of things,
The actual green of summer, and summer’s half-truth.
We tend to repeat ourselves.
- Charles Wright
A Short History of the Shadow
(via whiskey river)
* I blame the excessive amount of last nights champagne for the typo.
In quote on
1 January 2009 with no comments
“A second chance- that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
Henry James
In Uncategorized on
26 December 2008 with no comments
Back to NYC, maybe both literally and figuratively, blogging without the wine haze. Back from babyville and the threat of sudden suburban domestication.
Maybe it was all the recent life changes that made me as impressionable as an adolescent school girl (all the more reason to not fraternize with people under the age of four), but I’m looking forward to not waking up to feed children and change diapers (thought it was nice and nice to give the broheim a break.)
I’m thinking now about the realistic future. At least the future as realistic as after the New Year and resolution making. I’ve got one concrete so far and it entails not making the same mistakes I’ve made in the past. Looking forward instead of constantly looking back, a seemingly difficult feat for someone who loves ruminating and being introspective as much as I. There are some ruts that are a little more difficult to spot than others.
I’m still a bit discombobulated from the flight and the commute home. So all of my other 2009 thoughts will have to wait, but I have to say, I love this time of year, if only because a lot of people are all trying to figure out ways to make this year better than the one before. And even if they don’t succeed that collective feeling of go-to-do-betterness is fairly fantastic in and of itself.
In Uncategorized on
25 December 2008 with no comments
I’m home, which has been strangely wonderful. Strange because my mother is missing from the picture… and I feel for better or worse, it’s OUR (my brothet and i) Christmas. We made a whole big dinner, two pies, a cake, and chocolate chip, oatmeal and raisin cookies. There are presents under the tree, despite our current economic status -and I feel, despite the way that Texas usually makes me feel 17 again, older. We’ve sat around drinking on Christmas Eve, the way I remember my mother and brothers did and I write this with too much red wine in my stomach.
The children, especially though, are the big difference. I have a neice, with my eyes, my head and my name. I have a nephew, the literal replica of my brother. It makes the upcoming Christmas morning so special.
I’ve been through out my life, ridiculously anti-children. I say ridiculously because it’s a stance I’ve held as long as I can remember in my young life, and of course is one of those things that everyone knows (or hopes) will eventually change with age. So hello 25. I still feel like it’s much to early to have these thoughts, but suddenly…
I was sitting on the bed, Ann crawling and cooing across me, my nephew at my feet watching PBS, and suddenly I thought… I could do this…soon. It seemed a rather errant and irresponsible thought. Of course, I can’t. Not now.
These moods, this biological thing, sometimes you realize how deeply it’s engraned. Deeper than logical thought, it lodges itself into your brain. Maybe it means everything. Maybe it means nothing. Maybe it just means the most at Christmas time, when children rule the day, when their greatest gift is simply showing up, their tiny faces a glow, the day only once again loaded with meaning (and let’s not forget Santa.)
I’m rambling here.
What I mean is Merry Christmas. Slowly back away from your neices and nephews.
Get back to your single city life, quick like.
In Uncategorized on
18 December 2008 with no comments
Maybe because I’ve wriiten so much about summer or maybe it just stems from trying to conjur up a few things to love about New York winters, which I always find a bit difficult and trying. I started thinking back to my first winter here and by association, my first holiday season, not so much nostalgically but a feeling akin to leafing through an old journal and being transported back in time to a person you no longer are, with beliefs you no longer hold. The memories are like a dream both vivid and skewed. The colors still bright but some of the faces are missing. There are, slightly obscured from view, peripheal things dancing on the outer edges. Feelings that are, while maybe important then, lost in the shuffle of growing up. While maybe you recall feeling a certain way, it conjures no particular emotion other than the pleasure or pain caused from remembering a time not so long ago, when you were younger.
The first thing that my mind called to the forefront was the ice rink in Central Park. I can’t remember the ride to the park or renting the skates. Only that we were standing in the center of the rink, Brian and I, and it was just before Christmas. Maybe it was snowing. Maybe tiny snowflakes were drifting around us (it snowed more in New York not-so-long-ago). And he had, in his hands a small crudely wrapped, duct taped and glued package.
We had broken up a little over a month beforehand and were both dating other people, which we talked fairly openly about, but I’d gotten him a gift anyway. I remember he smiled so hard I thought the edges of his cheeks would grow extra dimples and crevices in them. I remember that he looked at me in a way I can only recall having seen once or twice since, like someone falling in love and he kissed me hard before opening it. What I can’t recall is how I felt exactly at that moment: excited about the watch which had cost me eighty dollars, a severe price on a student budget and excited about the moment which felt at the time so perfectly story book that we were both swept away in it. I skated small circles around him, helping him pull away the tape, nearly half a ridiculous roll, both of us giggling. We pulled and pulled and laughed, and maybe there was snow in our hair, maybe not, till finally he had to cut the box with a pocket knife I’d smuggled onto the ice. He pulled the watch out and turned it over in his hands, both of us still half laughing. And we kissed and our friends gave a small clap and it was one of those moments.
Times like these are as cherished as your first adolescent love letters. Tucked in a keepsake box.
In quote on
4 December 2008 with 1 comment
(ah. Yes. I know a lot of my post lately have consisted of reblogs from whiskey river, but some things are too good not to share)
Starfish
This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?
Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.
And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.
Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.
So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.
- Eleanor Lerman
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16 November 2008 with no comments
He sits in a small musty room behind the exhibit that smells like sweat and despiration. We talk for five minutes and I feel held hostage, despite the fact that he’s very nice. The right side of his face is slightly limp, like that of a stroke victim and his watermelon carving of frida kahlo (dedicated to her final painting of a watermelon) is particularly inspired.
I wonder what it must be like to create work that most people think of as compleletly ornamental.
Maybe it’s the same for all art.
In People, quote on
12 November 2008 with no comments
…love us back. In gratitude, we should promise not to cheat on them– not to pretend we’re better than they are; not to use them as target practice, agitprop, trampolines, photo ops or stalking horses; not to sell out scruple to that scratch-and-sniff infotainment racket in which we posture in front of experience instead of engaging it, and fidget our cynical opportunism for an angle, spin or a take, instead of consulting compass points on principle, and strike attitudes like matches, to admire our wiseguy profiles in the mirrors of slicks. We are reading for lives, not performing like seals for some fish.”
John Leonard
In personal, rant on
12 November 2008 with 1 comment
What I recall thinking, as I stood with the crowds in the gathered around the large tv in the neighborhood bar, having abandoned the home tv for just a minute to experience everyone else’s joy and laughter, to see what all the noise and honking and drinking in the streets was like, was that this was not only a historical change, but it was also the first time our generation had really got to witness something not only history making but in a positive way. Most of us were too young to really recall the Berlin Wall coming down in great depth, I simply remember the images and my mother’s tears, who had spent three years there.
What I do remember was watching from a class room window as the second plane hit the twin towers. I remember crying in front of the television as the Iraq war began. I remember the slow sinking feeling I’d come to expect with the making of “history.” I guess, without realizing it, I’d begun to lose faith in our country in so many ways. I was definitely one of the masses that was afraid to hope.
I didn’t cry when Obama won. I smiled. I smiled till my cheeks ached and all I could follow it up with was occasional outburst of laughter and “I can’t believe we did it.” I ordered two Johnny Walker Blacks and I smiled in front of the tv and at the people standing next to me at everything in nothing in general.
I think our generation needed to see something like this, needed the type of hope it would provide. Needed to believe. Insert cheesy proud to be an american quote.
(I know I’m a bit late on the whole thing, I’ve been internet free for daaaays, but it was nice to finally say my piece)
