February 2012
14 posts
Read this: “In Defense of Fact Checking,” Laura Miller, Salon.
Fingal pettifogs obsessively over whether there are 31 or 34 strip clubs in Las Vegas and D’Agata makes the absurdly highhanded pronouncement that “the rhythm of ‘thirty-four’ works better in that sentence than the rhythm of ‘thirty-one,’ so I changed it.” Several of D’Agata’s most dickish replies have been...
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Dear Residents
Dear residents of the world known as Planet Earth! I am required to inform you that the warranty on your world has come to an end the insured license will not be extended in connection with your not fulfilling the Conditions of Contract
From our perspective we have fulfilled our obligations see the attached table: Prevention of catastrophes of natural origin - 84% Prevention...
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“Come Pick Me Up” - Ryan Adams (via...
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“The house next door went up in smoke and flames one night ten or fifteen years...”
– William Maxwell - So Long, See You Tomorrow
I dream I never know anyone at the party and...
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Misgivings
“Perhaps you’ll tire of me,” muses my love, although she’s like a great city to me, or a park that finds new ways to wear each flounce of light and investiture of weather. Soil doesn’t tire of rain, I think, but I know what she fears: plans warp, planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away by floods. And worse than what we can’t control is what we could; those...
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things i haven't felt | emily lloyd
loveyourcrookedneighbor:
different, after losing my virginity. better, after the medicine i took. mosquitoes on my skin, before they’ve bitten me. profoundly changed, after i read that book. the call of the wild. the glow of pregnancy. guilty, after sleeping with someone’s wife. high as a kite, high even as a tree. the peace that passeth understanding. safe. god’s presence in the world, and that...
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“When it was decided (When was that again, and by whom?) that we were all...”
– Pam Houston
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Autopsy in the Form of an Elegy
In the chest in the heart was a vessel was the pulse was the art was the love was the clot small and slow and the scar that could not know the rest of you was very nearly perfect.
- John Stone
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“Blunt advice for beginning writers: You are not interesting. The world is...”
– Dinty Moore
January 2012
17 posts
“to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything...”
– Ellen Bass, “The Thing Is” (Mules of Love, BOA, 2002)
“True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise,...”
– David Foster Wallace
“Before you quit, try.”
– Ernest Hemingway. (via dearantarctica / blua)
“My battles as a writer are battles with that part of myself that thinks I’m...”
– Mary Karr (via thebronzemedal / steampoweredmedia)
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“What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory - meaning a...”
– William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow
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Held on as tightly as you held onto me.
...
“First of all:
I am tired.
I am true of heart!
And also:
You are tired....”
– Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
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"As It Will," by Genine Lentine
for Stanley Kunitz
Sometimes between one of Stanley’s Wells and whatever he says next, there’s ample space to take a nap – it’s late afternoon, and the porch is warm and quiet—I can drift knowing the front contour of his next word will retrieve me when I’m needed, and he will not have lost the thread of my question. I don’t fret that I’m neglecting my work when this happens—I suspect that...
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Why, why, why, why did Socrates apologize? Run,...
Lay your blouse across the chair, let fall the...
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Best book you read in 2011?
And, I strictly mean books you read. Not necessarily books that were published in 2011.
Mine: - Love and Shame and Love by Peter Orner - So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell - Bluets by Maggie Nelson - White People by Allan Gurganus - Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn - Four for a Quarter by Michael Martone
I finished The Art of Fielding on New Year’s Eve (and I’m dying to talk to...
December 2011
12 posts
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This, above everything else, is the most important thing I was told all year:
The world has no intention of making room for you. I don’t care if you write. The most active thing in the world is to ask questions. Ask your mom, your dogs, and your breakfast questions. I want you to work like fuck and exist for a reason. The moment the world stops surprising you, you have failed. The world hasn’t...
If you think you might come to California, I...
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“When, suddenly, instead of the world revolving around a person, a person becomes...”
– “I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time,” Kristin Prevallet
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“What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things...”
– Dave Eggers
“Class rules on public discussion:
Anybody gets to ask any question about any...”
– From David Foster Wallace’s English 102-Literary Analysis: Prose Fiction syllabus
Where the windows are breathing in the light, ...
November 2011
6 posts
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This Friday
Often I wonder what happened to lost buttons as well as husbands. We are in love and then not and then our coats hang open.
Today, I won’t go anywhere. I will untie myself. Tomorrow, my life will be over, so I need to practice.
The light on my hands looks real, and so does my skin with its gold hairs like any soft animal. The body is a museum of dreams and trinkets and hatchets and unsent...
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I was workshopped today
and nobody likes workshops - no matter how long they’ve been writing, no matter how good they are - because there aren’t many people who enjoy opening themselves up to the possibility that something they have created and loved and nourished might look shitty and sloppy to someone else. But: you open yourself up to that risk anyway and sometimes you land in the...
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Look at a toddler. Toddlers are boring - they run around, you have to watch them, you know - so we put them in high chairs. And we give them Cheerios. And then the toddler throws the Cheerios and eats the Cheerios and the Cheerios are exhausted. So, then we give them our keys. And you know what they do with our keys - after they put them in their mouth, of course? Toss them on the ground. And...
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“It’s baffling to me that there’s any uncertainty over how that truth spectrum...”
– The Missouri Review, “Like a Readheaded Picasso Symphony or Something”
October 2011
5 posts
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