December 2010
50 posts
1 tag
Near The Wall Of A House - Yehuda Amichai
Near the wall of a house painted to look like stone, I saw visions of God. A sleepless night that gives others a headache gave me flowers opening beautifully inside my brain. And he who was lost like a dog will be found like a human being and brought back home again. Love is not the last room: there are others after it, the whole length of the corridor that has no end.
(Translated by Chana Bloch...
1 tag
1 tag
““And you, who are you to tell me what’s best for my life?”
...”
– Delysia Lafosse and Guinevere Pettigrew in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008), directed by Bharat Nalluri
1 tag
“Relationships themselves are tragic, because they must inevitably fail. We have...”
– Stuart Walton, A Natural History of Human Emotions
1 tag
“Only the one who claims to have a simple, definite, and clear-cut identity has...”
– Sami Ma’ari
1 tag
“XIX. A CONVERSATION BETWEEN EQUALS THAN WHICH NOTHING IS MORE DIFFICULT TO...”
– Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband
1 tag
Gift - J. Neil C. Garcia
The rhythm that hears me this day is the sea’s: salt-borne, choking with weed and oysters, the movement of piscean shapes weaving water far as the eye can see. And I am back amid the repeating waves off Pamilacan: the vessel bearing me is little else but desire, a density much heavier than our earth’s liquid nature— its only choice is to float. It is not stillness I am seeking from...
1 tag
Self-Improvement - Tony Hoagland
Just before she flew off like a swan to her wealthy parents’ summer home, Bruce’s college girlfriend asked him to improve his expertise at oral sex, and offered him some technical advice: Use nothing but his tongue-tip to flick the light switch in his room on and off a hundred times a day until he grew fluent at the nuances of force and latitude. Imagine him at practice every evening,...
1 tag
The New Higher - John Ashbery
You meant more than life to me. I lived through you not knowing, not knowing I was living. I learned that you called for me. I came to where you were living, up a stair. There was no one there. No one to appreciate me. The legality of it upset a chair. Many times to celebrate we were called together and where we had been there was nothing there, nothing that is anywhere. We passed obliquely,...
1 tag
Timor Mortis - Louise Glück
Why are you afraid? A man in a top hat passed under the bedroom window. I couldn’t have been more than four at the time. It was a dream: I saw him when I was high up, where I should have been safe from him. Do you remember your childhood? When the dream ended terror remained. I lay in my bed— my crib maybe. I dreamed I was kidnapped. That means I knew what love was, how it places the soul in...
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
“Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed,” cried the phantom, “not to...”
– Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
1 tag
1 tag
Love Poem - Louise Glück
There is always something to be made of pain. Your mother knits. She turns out scarves in every shade of red. They were for Christmas, and they kept you warm while she married over and over, taking you along. How could it work, when all those years she stored her widowed heart as though the dead come back. No wonder you are the way you are, afraid of blood, your women like one brick wall after...
1 tag
“I can’t be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can...”
– Henri in The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
1 tag
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity....”
– Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”
1 tag
Because One Is Always Forgotten - Carolyn Forché
IN MEMORIAM, JOSE R. UDOLFO VIERA 1939-1981: EL SALVADOR When Viera was Buried we knew it had come to an end, his coffin rocking into the ground like a boat or a cradle. I could take my heart, he said, and give it to a campesino And he would cut it up and give it back: You can’t eat heart in those four dark chambers where a man can be kept years. A boy soldier in the bone-hot sun works his...
1 tag
“This, in the end, was not about the right to be gay, but the right to serve...”
– The Arc Of History - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
No group-based discrimination sounds nice, Andrew. Adding: carnival of color, excuses, circle of human freedom, at your service, America!
(via sexartandpolitics)
1 tag
1 tag
“I asked them to look into the Abyss, and, both dutifully and gladly, they have...”
– Lionel Trilling, “On the Teaching of Modern Literature”
1 tag
Plums Failing Well - Linda Gregg
So what if plums fall out of the tree, to lie squashed and decomposing on the earth? So what if the only attention they receive is from the ants and birds who find something in them to feed from still, all spayed and color changed? If they could breathe, do you think they would say more than so what? This is good, to live to the end as something to get taken. What was the ripeness for anyhow? Why...
1 tag
Poem - Donald Justice
This poem is not addressed to you. You may come into it briefly, But no one will find you here, no one. You will have changed before the poem will. Even while you sit there, unmovable, You have begun to vanish. And it does not matter. The poem will go on without you. It has the spurious glamor of certain voids. It is not sad, really, only empty. Once perhaps it was sad, no one knows why. It...
1 tag
Monet Refuses the Operation - Lisel Mueller
Doctor, you say there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction. I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don’t see, to learn that the line I called the horizon does not exist and sky and water, so long...
1 tag
“Alan Saunders: So what we’ve got here is something that you’ve...”
– From “Is a free market in ideas a good idea?” (The Philosopher’s Zone)
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
“As individuals, we sometimes feel that we have not done anything wrong, yet the...”
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, “A Time of Forgiveness”
1 tag
“Words are like that, they deceive, the pile up, it seems they do not know where...”
– José Saramago, Blindness
1 tag
“It’s always difficult to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this....”
– Henry Fonda as Davis/Juror No. 8 in Twelve Angry Men (1957), directed by Sidney Lumet
1 tag
“WARNING: Want a regular, down to earth guy? Keep moving. I am not the droid...”
– From the (allegedly authentic) OKCupid profile of WikiLeaks director Julian Assange
1 tag
“The writer is also not a prophet. What is important is to live in the present,...”
– Gao Xingjian, “The Case for Literature”
1 tag
1 tag
Pre-Columbian Societies in Amazon May Have Been... →
Regarding Scott, I’ve observed that, sadly, not many local academic works I’ve read seem to cite him, despite the fact that he is, as iwriteasiwrite has pointed out, the only one who has attempted to reconstruct and mine pre-Hispanic sources for useful information.
iwriteasiwrite:
Traditionally archaeologists have thought that these inland areas were sparsely populated also before...
1 tag
Covering Two Years - Weldon Kees
This nothingness that feeds upon itself: Pencils that turn to water in the hand, Parts of a sentence, hanging in the air, Thoughts breaking in the mind like glass, Blank sheets of paper that reflect the world Whitened the world that I was silenced by. There were two years of that. Slowly, Whatever splits, dissevers, cuts, cracks, ravels, or divides To bring me to that diet of corrosion, burned And...
1 tag
1 tag
“This is the stuff we’re made of, half indifference and half malice.”
– José Saramago, Blindness
1 tag
1 tag
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pendants and...”
– Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”
1 tag
A Poison Tree - William Blake
I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow. And I watered it in fears Night and morning with my tears, And I sunned it with smiles And with soft deceitful wiles. And it grew both day and night, Till it bore an apple bright, And my foe beheld it shine, And he knew that it was mine, And into my garden stole When the night...
1 tag
1 tag
I Write As I Write: Mum's the word... →
One important source of Japanese occupation-related material would be the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center at UP Diliman, but as far as I know, the place has no archivist, so the collection from the relevant period remains largely unorganized and unexamined.
If it helps, Dr. Helen Yu-Rivera of the Art Studies Department has published two books on Philippine-Japan relations...
1 tag
1 tag
The Apparition - John Donne
When by the scorn, O murderess, I am dead, And that thou think’st thee free From all solicitation from me, Then shall my ghost come to thy bed, And thee, feigned vestal, in worse arms shall see. Then thy sick taper will begin to wink, And he, whose thou art then, being tired before, Will if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think Thou call’st for more, And in false sleep...
1 tag
Wanting to Die - Anne Sexton
Since you ask, most days I cannot remember. I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage. Then the almost unnameable lust returns. Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass blades you mention, the furniture you have placed under the sun. But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply...
1 tag
