December 2011
17 posts
It's You
Later on, this discrepancy in the picture of ourselves according to whether it is drawn by one’s own hand or another’s was something I was to register in the case of others than myself, living placidly in the midst of a collection of photographs which they had taken of themselves while round about them grinned frightful faces, invisible to them as a rule, but stunning them with...
If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgement of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
—Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station
Maybe An Example When A Hackneyed Pun Is Not...
The following is the caption underneath a picture of a gaunt, bald, cancer-ridden Christopher Hitchens in one of his Vanity Fair columns:
“HOUSTON, WE’VE GOT A PROBLEM The author in Houston, where he is receiving treatment at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.”
Tell me again why anything matters at all ever. Tell me why I shouldn’t punch everything into smithereens and actually...
How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-strings: in the sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.
—William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
It’s something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. And let her rain now if she likes. Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come. I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now...
