Tag Archives: drunken library

Excerpt from Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

Seymour’s diary, Fort Monmouth, in late 1941 and early 1942:: J.D. Salinger

How I love and need her undiscriminating heart. She looked over at me when the children in the picture brought in the kitten to show their mother. M. loved the kitten and wanted me to love it. Even in the dark, I could sense that she felt the usual estrangement from me when I don’t automatically love what she loves. Later, when we were having a drink at the station, she asked me if I didn’t think that kitten was ‘rather nice.’ She doesn’t use the word ‘cute’ any more. When did I ever frighten her out of her normal vocabulary? Bore that I am, I mentioned R. H. Blyth’s definition of sentimentality: that we are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God undoubtedly loves kittens, but not, in all probability, with Technicolor bootees on their paws. He leaves that creative touch to script writers. M. thought this over, seemed to agree with me, but the ‘knowledge’ was’t too very welcome. She sat stirring her drink and feeling unclose to me. She worries over the way her love for me comes and goes, appears and disappears. She doubts its reality simply because it isn’t as steadily pleasurable as a kitten. God knows it is sad. The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth.”

Ashbery Talks of Jane – Poetry, Jan 2014

poetrysince1912:

“I met Jane Freilicher the day I arrived in New York in the summer of 1949, just after I graduated from college and decided to move here on the advice of my friend Kenneth Koch.”

John Ashbery talks about his friend, the painter Jane Freilicher, in the January 2014 issue of Poetry.

Excerpt from Men We Reaped – Jesmyn Ward

From 2000 to 2004, five Black young men I grew up with died, all violently, seemingly unrelated deaths…That’s a brutal list, in its immediacy and it’s relentlessness, and it’s a list that silences people. It silenced me for a long time. To say this is difficult is understatement; telling this story is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But my ghosts were once people, and I cannot forget that.

Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward, 2013

A new novel takes vengeance on Google, Facebook

The Circle, by Dave Eggers, carries the potential to change how the world views its addicted, compliant thrall to all things digital.

A new novel takes vengeance on Google, Facebook

“In the Book of the Disappearing Book” – John Gallagher

It’s a spring flowered dress that was her effacement.

On a train, and because of what windows do sometimes.

Her face is floating above the landscape

unaware.

I used to think that I was reporting my life to someone.

I was a radio.

I used to think things happening was unfolding.

The trees are blooming all through her

and there’s no one to tell.

And the discipline of roads.

The icy discipline of to and from.

In the air of nothing, I used to think

I was understanding distance.

Green God, in your language of silences, tell me.

(Courtesy of LIT)

Excerpt from You Can’t Go Home Again

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America — that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.

:: Thomas Wolfe

Excerpt from The House On Mango Street

You can never have too much sky. You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad. Here there is too much sadness and not enough sky. Butterflies too are few and so are flowers and most things that are beautiful. Still, we take what we can get and make the best of it.

:: Sandra Cisneros

Taro – Alt-J

http://open.spotify.com/track/4tmwiN9YU7xMjh2hoqcVuI?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio

This music takes the strings behind your ribcage and matches their frequency to the vibrations of every desperate child. senti questa.