February 2012
1 post
“It’ll just be something you see and all of a sudden you realize, ‘I’m on the...”
– Gil Scott-Heron
January 2012
3 posts
“I give as much attention to a letter as I do to anything I write.”
– William S. Burroughs
Find a girl who reads. →
"This Mandarin Coat was often worn by Mrs. Minnie... →
December 2011
5 posts
“If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.”
– W. H.
Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet... →
November 2011
3 posts
“My mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. ...”
– Pablo Picasso
“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in...”
– Gustave Flaubert
October 2011
2 posts
“If you don’t know what you love, you are lost.”
– Haruki Murakami
“The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of...”
– Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance
September 2011
1 post
“In order to stay relevant, in order to be successful: you must continue to...”
– RWR
August 2011
3 posts
“Tell the truth and trust the people.”
– Joseph Newton Pew Jr., 1946
July 2011
1 post
June 2011
5 posts
1 tag
May 2011
3 posts
you shouldn’t use the word ‘class’
At each of the (five) Seven Sisters, a professor walks into the classroom at 9am and says, “Good morning, class.”
At Mount Holyoke, 20 students wait expectantly.
At Wellesley, 20 students furiously scribble “good morning, class” in their notebooks.
At Bryn Mawr, the students look puzzled, and one says “Excuse me, professor, but I don’t think this issue was addressed in the assigned ...
April 2011
1 post
March 2011
3 posts
February 2011
1 post
the solitary intensity of creative life
“Publishing in its popular incarnation – the legendary long lunches, the opportunistic punts on unheard-of but brilliant young writers, the smoke-filled parties and readings – is probably gone for good. Although you do wonder about the halcyon version of events: with all those long lunches, how did anyone get any editing done in the first place?”
January 2011
4 posts
“If you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so...”
– Personism: A Manifesto, by Frank O’Hara
Living in Sin
She had thought the studio would keep itself; no dust upon the furniture of love. Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal, the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears, a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat stalking the picturesque amusing mouse had risen at his urging. Not that at five each separate stair would writhe under the milkman’s tramp; that morning light so coldly would delineate...
In Memoriam.
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud...
November 2010
6 posts
Bright Enough to See Your Face In
Twice a year she polished “the old silver.” This was a ceremony that demanded towels spread out at one end of the table, basins of soapy water and clear water, many soft cloths, the squat jar of polis, and, lined up for exacting treatment, things we lived with day by day and never looked at: the teapot hardy any company was grand enough to merit, napkin rings (only two: the...
“It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order....”
– Ernest Hemingway
“If you need to present your waiter with a spreadsheet of ingredients you...”
October 2010
4 posts
Perfection Wasted
And another regrettable thing about death is the ceasing of your own brand of magic, which took a whole life to develop and market- the quips, the witticisms, the slant adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears, their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat, their response and your...
It was love at first sight. →
“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the...”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The era of juxtaposed city slickers and country bumpkins is eroding, and in its...”
– The American Prospect
September 2010
5 posts
You're just trying to scrape out a living.
Randal Graves: [On the second Death Star] A construction job of that magnitude would require a helluva lot more manpower than the Imperial army had to offer. I'll bet there were independent contractors working on that thing: plumbers, aluminum siders, roofers.
Dante Hicks: Not just Imperials, is what you're getting at...
Randal Graves: Exactly. In order to get it built quickly and quietly they'd hire anybody who could do the job. Do you think the average storm trooper knows how to install a toilet main? All they know is killing and white uniforms.
Dante Hicks: All right, so even if independent contractors are working on the Death Star, why are you uneasy with its destruction?
Randal Graves: All those innocent contractors hired to do a job were killed - casualties of a war they had nothing to do with. [notices Dante's confusion]
Randal Graves: All right, look-you're a roofer, and some juicy government contract comes your way; you got the wife and kids and the two-story in suburbia - this is a government contract, which means all sorts of benefits. All of a sudden these left-wing militants blast you with lasers and wipe out everyone within a three-mile radius. You didn't ask for that. You have no personal politics. You're just trying to scrape out a living.
“Moving from chair to chair, from coffee machine to coffee machine is the limit...”
– Stephen Fry
When you say something, make sure you have said...
“Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram.”