April 2010
37 posts
“At times it is in the fissure caused by an earthquake, through the radical...”
– Hélène Cixous, from The Laugh of the Medusa
A Narrative of Certain Years in No Particular...
I decide not to go to college. My parents eye me increasingly warily. I take a temp job in a sad building on top of a hill. I feel like a ghost. I file insurance papers belonging to dead people, I think about them, in the dark little rooms where I file. I repeat their names, like chants. They are ceaseless, relentless in their dying, in the filing. Every morning I sit in the car and wait for...
2 tags
“The ocean is becoming rough; the waves coming in slowly, tugging strength from...”
– Delmore Schwartz, from “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”
1 tag
“We may spend the better part of our lives projecting strength and toughness, but...”
– Alain de Botton, from A Week at the Airport
3 tags
“We will always be one of very few people in each others’ lives who...”
– _________, via a very profound rectangular conversation
1 tag
“Even the ones who laugh are sometimes caught without an answer: these creatures...”
– The Log Lady, Twin Peaks
I have been loved, she said, by something strange, and it has forgotten me.
-Djuna Barnes, from Nightwood
1 tag
“It is time,” said Reiza.
The word time split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places.
-Virginia Woolf, from Mrs. Dalloway
“I sometimes feel that all a waking relationship is is a way to exhaust us so...”
– from an e-mail
Synaesthesia by Leslie McGrath
I am waiting to breathe the light. They say there will be a long tunnel, then light. Will I see, just for a moment? Seeing, what is it? Better than tasting, than hearing? I can feel the machines whirring; so big, so heavy. Something being pumped from a bag is a salty fire in the back of my right hand. “David,” they say “David, can you hear me? Are you in pain?” I think yes and the...
Words I am Fairly Certain Cormac McCarthy Made Up
In the first three pages of Suttree alone:
cupracers
photoplates
countercat*
spoorless
bonedust
afreight
unbelled
frograils
dogwhelk
fishplates
pinchbeck
clockless
deathwear
*from the funniest sentence** I have ever read while tipsy and trying to fall asleep at 2:00 in the morning:
Down there in grots of fallen light a cat transpires from stone to stone across the cobbles liquid...
Known Structures
What if we took us out of these rooms, but the imprint of our lives remained. Here is what one would see, would hear. What the space of two lives knotted together added up to:
the creaking floorboards of shifting weight, tentative, in the doorway
tangled blankets in the darkness, the imprint where two hands met where they lay
the heavy pause of listening
glass breaking
a groove in the...
A True Story
“Touch is a memory,” he said.
“I know,” she said.
Time-Space Synaesthetes →
In general, these individuals perceive months of the year in circular shapes, usually just as an image inside their mind’s eye,” says David Brang of the department of psychology at the University of California, San Diego.
One of Brang’s subjects was able to see the year as a circular ring surrounding her body. The “ring” rotated clockwise throughout the year so...
