Still Life with Electric Fan - Antony Williams , 2013.
British, b. 1964 -
Egg tempera on panel , 75 x 120 cm.
“I think there is a general misconception that you write poems because you “have something to say.” I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say. Poetry allows us to hold many related tangential notions in very close orbit around each other at the same time. The “unsayable” thing at the center of the poem becomes visible to the poet and reader in the same way that dark matter becomes visible to the astrophysicist. You can’t see it, but by measure of its effect on the visible, it can become so precise a silhouette you can almost know it.”
— Rebecca Lindenberg, from Why Write Poetry? (via violentwavesofemotion)
screamon-deactivated20230625
adonis, tr. by khaled mattawa
“I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.”
— Mary Oliver
mohd-s
“I have my own medicine against loneliness reaching the degree of despair: I read. I read as one swims to shore - when reading anything, I am not there, and therefore not alone; I am somewhere else, in the book with those people… Also when writing because then too, I am not there, not me, not this special mass of blood and flesh with all its tedious problems; I am a conveyor, a tool, I am living in the lives I am making. Beyond theses medicines, I have nothing.”
The selected letters of Martha Gellhorn
“I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them. Suddenly things no longer need to make sense. I’m satisfied with being. Are you? Certainly you are.”
Clarice Lispector, from A Breath of Life
[ID: Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, right? They have a life to live and they’re really not that concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anyone’s poems—until, their father dies; they go to a funeral; you lose a child; someone breaks your heart. And all of a sudden you’re desperate for making sense out of this life. “Has anybody felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud?” Or the inverse—something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes—you love them so much you can’t even see straight. You’re dizzy. “Did anybody feel like this before? What is happening to me?” And that’s when art’s not a luxury—it’s actually sustenance. We need it. /ID]
[additional image information: screenshots of ethan hawke saying the above text in a documentary-style interview. He is gesturing animatedly. End ID]
“Some scholars observe that, in classrooms today, the initial gesture of criticism can seem to carry more prestige than the long pursuit of understanding. One literature professor and critic at Harvard - not old or white or male - noticed that it had become more publicly rewarding for students to critique something as “problematic” than to grapple with what the problems might be; they seemed to have found that merely naming concerns had more value, in today’s cultural marketplace, than curiosity about what underlay them.”
“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is trust. Reading is bliss.”
— Nora Ephron, “Blind as a Bat.”
“When you are not fed love on a silver spoon you learn to lick it off knives.”
— Lauren Eden
“Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.”
— Robert MacFarlane, Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit
i spent $32 on this fucking bowl at the moma and at first i felt bad buying it bc it was so expensive but ive had a terrible day today and every time i look at my lil bowl im like :o) you know what. i can get through anything with this bowl by my side
i literally get what marie kondo was talking about now
bc everyone keeps requesting to see it filled :)
I don’t know how long I’ve been here. Time seems to pass differently. But the place is cozy and private so I have no complaints. And whenever I’m hungry, I go outside with my bowl and walk down the hill to the shore. Sometimes the lake is made of soup. Sometimes it’s huge pasta noodles the size of barges. Sometimes it’s breakfast cereal. Sometimes it’s dumplings the size of great whales. I dip my little bowl and take a portion and carry it back up to the house.
Today I found a new bowl! In its center is a little hill with a little house. I will carry it down to the shore and fill it up, and whomever lives in that little house can have a tiny portion of my meal. I hope they have a nice bowl to put it in..
tags by @crackinglamb
