the weather undersea

"But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the..."

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 02:48:49 -0500

“But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, “I should sit here and I should be entertained.” And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.”

- Zadie Smith (via lyras)

"[I] imagine that there’s some secret to writing, and no one will tell me what it is. I know it’s not..."

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 02:44:42 -0500

““[I] imagine that there’s some secret to writing, and no one will tell me what it is. I know it’s not true, but still, despite all the evidence to the contrary, all the years of working on my books, part of me does still feel that if I ever really learned how to do this, I would stop writing such crazy material, such bad first drafts, and get it right the first time.””

- Andrea Barrett (via theparisreview)

Girls, girls, girls and their portrayal in art

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:16:27 -0500

nouvellabooks:

“Because such stories exposed the private lives of male intellectuals, they got critiqued as icky, sticky memoir—score-settling, not art. (In contrast, young men seeking revenge on their exes are generally called “comedians” or “novelists” or “Philip Roth.”)”

-Emily Nussbaum over at the New Yorker in “‘Girls,’ ‘Englightenment’ and the comedy of cruelty.”

The Philip Roth bit made us laugh. For a long time.

"When you get to the last sentence of a novel you often find that it was implicit in the first..."

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:11:24 -0500

““When you get to the last sentence of a novel you often find that it was implicit in the first sentence, only you didn’t know what it was.””

- William Maxwell (via theparisreview)

theparisreview: Roberto Bolaño on writing short stories. (via)

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 23:52:39 -0500

theparisreview:

Roberto Bolaño on writing short stories. (via)

"Your name is a — bird in my hand, a piece of ice on my tongue. The lips’ quick opening. Your name..."

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 23:49:50 -0500

“Your name is a — bird in my hand,
a piece of ice on my tongue.
The lips’ quick opening.
Your name — four letters.
A ball caught in flight,
a silver bell in my mouth”

- from “Poems for Blok” by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine (via andantecantible)

Photo

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 23:42:35 -0500

"Think of yourself rather as something much humbler and less spectacular, but to my mind far more..."

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 14:56:41 -0400

“Think of yourself rather as something much humbler and less spectacular, but to my mind far more interesting—a poet in whom live all the poets of the past, from whom all poets in time to come will spring. You have a touch of Chaucer in you, and something of Shakespeare; Dryden, Pope, Tennyson—to mention only the respectable among your ancestors—stir in your blood and sometimes move your pen a little to the right or to the left. In short you are an immensely ancient, complex, and continuous character…”

- Virginia Woolf A Letter to a Young Poet (via alex-ivy)

poetsorg: Photo : l. to r. John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Patsy...

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 14:43:54 -0400

poetsorg:

Photo : l. to r. John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Patsy Southgate,
Bill Berkson, Kenneth Koch, copyright © Mario Schifano, 1964.
The image is taken from Homage to Frank O’Hara, ed. Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 01:03:06 -0400

apoetreflects:

“Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.”

—Meister Eckhardt

"[A]s intense heat and cold, though unlike, produce like sensations, so innocence and guilt, when,..."

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 19:28:03 -0400

“[A]s intense heat and cold, though unlike, produce like sensations, so innocence and guilt, when, through casual association with mental pain, stamping any visible impress, use one seal—a hacked one.”

- Melville, Benito Cereno

"Life / Consists of propositions about life."

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 18:49:34 -0400

“Life / Consists of propositions about life.”

- Wallace Stevens

"Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its..."

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 22:25:22 -0400

“Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.”

- W. S. Merwin, “Separation” (via proustitute)

apoetreflects: “The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then...

Fri, 18 May 2012 01:06:38 -0400

apoetreflects:

“The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist.”

—Ernest Hemingway, from A Farewell to Arms (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929)

"Springtime always reminds me of how dead I am inside."

Thu, 17 May 2012 22:15:30 -0400

“Springtime always reminds me of how dead I am inside.”

- Dorothy Parker (via larmoyante)

"I can’t go on, I’ll go on."

Thu, 17 May 2012 22:13:21 -0400

“I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

- Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (via proustitute)

Virginia Woolf outside a summerhouse with her house guests,...

Sun, 13 May 2012 21:43:33 -0400

Virginia Woolf outside a summerhouse with her house guests, economist Maynard Keynes (right) and Angelica Bell, Vanessa Bell and Clive Bell.

"Reading books, in public, by or about Thomas Pynchon; organizing a local version of the W.A.S.T.E...."

Tue, 08 May 2012 11:01:38 -0400

“Reading books, in public, by or about Thomas Pynchon; organizing a local version of the W.A.S.T.E. postal network, as described in The Crying of Lot 49; take a hot-air balloon trip in honor of the Airship Boys in Against the Day—openly carry a copy of the book as you do so; pledge to begin writing a Pynchon-influenced novel or short story; calling local radio stations, requesting they play Gravity’s Rainbow by the Klaxons and other Pynchon-themed songs; launching model V-2 rockets in an appropriate safe open area.”

- What the website for “Pynchon in Public Day”—which is today, in honor of Thomas Pynchon’s 75th birthday—recommends as celebration. (via classicpenguin)

"Here is the time for the sayable, here its home. Speak and avow it. More than ever things that can..."

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:05:00 -0400

“Here is the time for the sayable, here its home.
Speak and avow it. More than ever
things that can be experienced fall away,
shunted aside and superseded by unseeable acts,
acts under crusts that readily shatter
when the inner workings outgrow them and seek new
containment.
Between the hammers
our heart endures, like the tongue
between the teeth, which yet
continues to praise.”

- (Rilke, from the The Ninth Elegy, trans. Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann)

apoetreflects: Certainty If it is real the white light from this lamp, real the writing hand, are...

Sat, 05 May 2012 22:24:39 -0400

apoetreflects:

Certainty

If it is real the white
light from this lamp, real
the writing hand, are they
real, the eyes looking at what I write?

From one word to the other
what I say vanishes.
I know that I am alive
between two parentheses.

—Octavio Paz, from The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957-1987, edited by Eliot Weinberger (New Directions, 1987)