To rest, go to the woods
Where what is made is made
Without your thought or work.

-Wendell Berry, "A Timbered Choir"

JeanYves Lemoigne

There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.

-Georges Braque

The way to develop good taste in literature is to read poetry.

-Joseph Brodsky, "How to Read a Book"

PBF

“The difference between poets and novelists is this,” writes the poet Randolph Henry Ash to the poet Christabel LaMotte in A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession, “that the former write for the life of the language—and the latter write for the betterment of the world.” In Byatt’s novel this has the glint of irony: a fictional poet contemplating his independence from the medium in which, unbeknown to himself, he exists. But it also contains the germ of a modern stereotype. The idea that poets and novelists possess separate and incompatible temperaments, like fortune-tellers and pharmacists, that poets are preoccupied with language (“for the life of the language”) while novelists are engrossed by society (“for the betterment of the world”), is a commonplace—perhaps also a consequence—of the paced battlements of the contemporary literary world.

-in Poetry

“I am the most artificial person you’ll ever meet.”

-Francis Bacon

Poltergeist (help·info) (from German poltern, meaning to rumble or make noise, and Geist, meaning "ghost" or "spirit") denotes an invisible spirit or ghost that manifests itself by moving and influencing objects, generally in a particular location such as a house or room or place within a house.

[as in Conor Oberst's "I felt your Poltergeist love / Like Savanna heat." Competing with Krankenschwester to be the greatest German word, and making me like the language again]

"Hejira" by David Sedaris

Amazon.com: Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt

Read the reviews.

[via it loved to happen]

By official decree, within the City of Salt, the right to use any of the following words and terms is suspended until further notice: henceforth nothing shall be deemed circular, infinite, innumerable, ancient, mysterious, endless, eternal, abstract, recursive, obscure, invisible, ambiguous, ludic, visionary, crystalline, dark. The following words shall be used only in discussing the objects they represent: mirror, labyrinth, dictionary, encyclopedia, library, lottery, memory, city.

-Kahn & Selesnick, from their stunning series City of Salt

The moon, tonight seems
To be the full moon
But the hare inside the moon
Does not seem to be alive

-Tsanyang Gyatso, number 36 in Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama

Oregon Trail Emulator. Dreams really DO come true. [via]

swings on the subway

[via]

here via

holy shit

My Life is Average, a perfectly normal spin on Fuck My Life.

"what is common about our “common sense” is not mutual suffering or universal benevolence, but a common rejection of pain by any sensitive person when he discovers that it can do neither the giver nor the receiver any good."

-Elizabeth Barnes, about Herman Melville's sympathy

Flood

I woke to a voice within the room. perhaps.
The room itself: "You're wasting this life
expecting disappointment."
I packed my bag in the night
and peered in its leather belly
to count the essentials.
Nothing is essential.
To the east, the flood has begun.
Men call to each other on the water
for the comfort of voices.
Love surprises us.
It ends.

-Eliza Griswold

[damn end of the goddamn year. I don't deal well with goodbyes.]

[via it loved to happen]

A student from Brown University went undercover at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and has written a book about it

[clusterflock]

the man who believed in the mot juste - the one and only correct word to use - the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives

-Hemingway about Pound, A Moveable Feast (134)

Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.

-Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (54)

[heehee. I've thought about doing that...]

accident-explanatory slings

In The Booth

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. Especially do all stories of monogamy end in death, and your man who is monogamous while he often lives most happily, dies in the most lonely fashion. There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

Sir, I do not know what you mean by love. It does not sound well as you say it.

Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are all marked by it and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times. I would sooner have the pox than to fall in love with another woman loving the one I have.

-Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (122)