January 2012
11 posts
1 tag
People look at the sky and at the other animals. They make beautiful objects, beautiful sounds, beautiful motions of their bodies beating drums in lines. They pray; they toss people in peat bogs; they help the sick and injured; they pierce their lips, their noses, ears; they make the same mistakes despite religion, written language, philosophy, and science; they build, they kill, they...
2 tags
solitary motion in the wake of an avalanche
PIN THE TAIL ON THE ARCHETYPE:
- Downton Abbey Personality Quiz - What Your American Girl Doll Says About the Rest of Your Life - Which Beverly Hills Housewife Are You? - Which Dawson’s Creek Character Are You?
I FORGOT TO TELL YOU THE MOST IMPORTANT PART
lunchboxpoems:
Without this knowledge, you’ll never make it: it’s one part fashion advice and two parts survivalist. Learn to talk to people so they think you’re honest but never be honest. Cooking eggs may save your life, so crack them, neat and firm, pour into the skillet, stir gently. Forget about your shoes; people will judge you by your shine, the imminent light you offer them. Be a...
I’m growing like quickening hues
I’m just scared to learn the lessons Drake x...
December 2011
7 posts
happy new year, you’re my only vice
These sudden ends of time must give us pause. We fray into the future, rarely wrought Save in the tapestries of afterthought. More time, more time. Barrages of applause Come muffled from a buried radio. The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow. RICHARD WILBUR
“Once, a duck she was cooking caught fire, and she threw it in the pool.”
– Michael Stipe on Gwenyth Paltrow, from The New Yorker’s Best of the Talk of the Town 2011. (via onemoresalutetovanity)
I used to love the run-up to a storm, watching from the porch as the grown-ups hurried to bring things in, my mother rummaging through drawers for a flashlight, cursing: nothing was where it was supposed to be in our house. It can’t be so, but the only people I ever remember huddled in the basement were my mother and me, suspended in that eerie half-light like bats. We’ve just spent a week...
November 2011
10 posts
I wanted to text you my brightening outlook in hopes you’d forget all the troubles we’d run into in the gridded city of Wednesday where the automatic windows of my rental car wouldn’t roll up in a downpour and my debit card demagnetized and I showed up so late so often and disheveled we missed every night of the opera, but I hoped you might forgive all that and fall in love anyway with the...
THE GIFT OUTRIGHT
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from...
Never has the nightclub seemed so dreadful, a sort of strobe-lit, bottle-service purgatory. It’s one thing to describe acts of epic self-medication; it’s another to perform booziness and offer the clarity of a spinning room as lure for an audience mortified on your behalf. But this correspondence to real life seems important, since life itself has become fully subsumed as part of...
THE RESURRECTION OF MATTHEW LILLARD
What’s it like sharing scenes opposite George Clooney all of a sudden? It’s great. You want to be great. Nobody goes into this business going ‘You know, I want to be marginal and shitty for the rest of my life.’ You want to be great. So when you get a chance to do a movie like this and to work with Alexander and to do a scene with Clooney, you want to step up and carry the game. You want to...
I moved to the coast, under a mountain Swam in the...
Just as parents project their own hopes onto their children, they also project their own failed aspirations: In this case, the will to fame. In a culture that values women as sexual objects above all else, what could be more awesome than being nationally validated as a sexual object? (I dunno, a Pulitzer?) Because they never fully achieved this aspiration, they never thought beyond the plausible...
October 2011
14 posts
OCTOBER, AN ELEGY
lunchboxpoems:
The whole month of October is an elegy, a used book store getting rained on. This weather makes me read endings first. Partings and farewells, the way we’re baffled, startled when happiness falls. Let me tell you something about darkness, though, because there’s been enough about light. But first about the handwritten poem copied out in the back of a Rilke translation. It begins...
Never Say Never has a lot more in common with The Lord of the Rings trilogy than one would initially think. Both films depict a tiny, appealing protagonist in possession of something powerful; both films involve rabid fan bases and powerful allegiances; both films use shots of deafening, multi-thousand-person crowds. The Battle of Helm’s Deep : Orcs :: Bieber’s climactic Madison Square Garden...
2 tags
was it the light ways
ain’t no time for lengthy speeches
"I HAVE A THEORY: DRAKE IS A VAMPIRE"
“Check the video for “Headlines,” released this past weekend. Wearing all black? Weird classical imagery? Terminally alienated from the world? Baseball? Maybe I’ve been recapping too much True Blood, but all of this says VAMPIRE to me. It’s like Drake is an ancient being living in the shuttered Rainbow Room. He is pioneering a new style I termed ’80s Sitcom...
3 tags
AFTER CALMING DOWN YOU HAVE AN OLD FEELING
It’s all position position and a push in a certain direction. We are not calm. A feeling like the daisies that wouldn’t die. It is not automatic. Then all of a sudden, automatic! This is an old feeling. A feeling that feels good now. Like how lions do very cool things and then are also scary. You can observe this just after sunset. Just because you know something doesn’t mean someone else does....
NOVEMBER NIGHT
Listen. . With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts, The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees And fall.
ADELAIDE CRAPSEY
September 2011
13 posts
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and...
and you, have proved, to be
So what we share with brothers and sisters is, in every sense, our DNA: not just elements of the real, physical double helix, but also the more metaphoric helix, the twisted-together nucleus of references, humiliations, ambitions, smells and sources of light that form what used to be called a soul. Ours is a bookish family, but even if the referents are tire swings and swimming holes and ponds...
“A series of pictures here of mothers and daughters switching places— women switching places to take care of one another. You, the daughter, becoming the mother, the Ceres, and she the daughter, kidnapped to hell, and you roam the earth to find her, to mourn her, leaving the trees and grain to wither, having no peace. You have no peace.”
LORRIE MOORE
“I brought all of this with me, ideas about who to think about and how to act and where to say I’m from, and I got my sister to come and make sure it’s really true, that I arrived and that I still exist. All of the people who love me, who I love, I think about them all the time that I am not worrying about sunscreen or my reading for Tuesday or new wrinkles.”
In Which The...
5 tags
definitely not a nashville party