A Collection

Over the last decade of internet bumbling, I've left a strange and twisty collection of ephemera behind. Many links and collected thoughts and notes. I have spent many an evening sniffing out interesting articles, or interviews, or videos, and taken pains to make mention of these wherever I have most recently kept my online diary. In migrating my work to this new site, I have tried to collect all of these pieces together, in whatever form they take, as a strange piecemeal diary of my wanderings since about 2018. They are copied here from earliest to latest.

From my commonplace book to yours, Mxx

+ Parker J. Palmer:
“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”

+ Amber Ruffin:
“I honestly believe that before you crash and burn in a show, you will never truly be a fearless performer,” she said in an interview. “You spend so long trying not to embarrass yourself. Once you have the worst show of your life and survive, you know it’s not that bad. Then, you become this fearless, shameless weirdo version of yourself that turns out to be who you really are.”

+ Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five:
“But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.”

+ Emma Rathbone’s ’Before the Internet’, in The New Yorker:
“It was a heady time!
You’d be in some kind of arts center, wearing roomy overalls, looking at a tray of precious gems, and you’d say, “That’s cat’s-eye,” and your friend would say, “Nope. That’s opal.” And you’d say, “That’s definitely cat’s-eye.” And there would be no way to look it up, no way to prove who was right, except if someone had a little booklet. 'Anyone got a little booklet?” you’d ask, looking around. “Is there a booklet on this shit?’
Then you’d walk outside and squint at the sky, just you in your body, not tethered to any network, adrift by yourself in a world of strangers in the sunlight.”

+ Mervyn Rothstein on Tennessee Williams, from the New York Times Archive:
"Sometimes he would be able to work, and sometimes he wouldn’t. He was tired. But he still was so courageous. He was so disciplined. His feeling about life was always positive. One must go on. ‘En avant, en avant.’ It was his cry.”

+ Teacher Hauna Zaich via Shoko Wanger’s Non-Career Advice series:
Sometimes, all they need is love. "On my desk, I keep two written reminders that I like to reference if my patience is being tested. One of them says, the student who needs the most love will ask for it in the most unloving ways. I think back, and there are so many instances in my life where I wish I’d known that. I could have really used it. When I was younger, I took rudeness personally. I had a hard time seeing past a person’s words. Now, especially with my students — but also in my friendships, relationships, and family life — I try to think, you must really be hurting. How can I help you through that pain? Some of the people I’ve loved the most deeply have also been some the hardest to love — but they need that acceptance more than anyone else. They just may not know how to ask for it.“

+ Margaux Williamson on how to act in real life:
“I set up a small red carpet in the dead center of the museum. Being dead center made me feel less cornered. Sheila and I sat there and I gave her these “acting lessons.” I’m not such a good teacher or a good student, but I understand having friends. So I gave Sheila some lessons, and she gave me some too. We made it up as we went along. The brochure was on a podium in front of us. When people picked up the brochure, they knew we were thinking of them and aware of them, but that we didn’t have to talk to them. It solved my problems. It was also surprisingly intimate and intense.”

+ Nicholson Baker on copying out passages of your favourite books by hand via Austin Kleon:
“Copy out things that you really love. Any book. Put the quotation marks around it, put the date that you’re doing the copying out, and then copy it out. You’ll find that you just soak into that prose, and you’ll find that the comma means something, that it’s there for a reason, and that that adjective is there for a reason, because the copying out, the handwriting, the becoming an apprentice—or in a way, a servant—to that passage in the book makes you see things in it that you wouldn’t see if you just moved your eyes over it, or even if you typed it. If your verbal mind isn’t working, then stop trying to make it work by pushing, and instead, open that spiral notebook, find a book that you like, and copy out a couple paragraphs.”

+ Examination for Capable Assistant by Jesse Ball:
Which month is best and why?
Take the overland route or a ship around? And (2) if possibility of bandits in mountain pass / pirates in straits — then which?
Shorthand: sad it has no use these days, or, it has a use! or never mind, it stinks.
Someone doesn’t like the great jazz singers of the mid twentieth century. How do we behave with/ trust such a person?
What book are you reading?
Do you occasionally put stones in your pocket? Why?
Why must we be friendly only to a point?
Which personal items should be of best quality?
Draw a map of your life, somehow.
If you had to appear in a photograph, would you want to be wearing a raincoat in 1948 or getting off a motorcycle in Cyprus in 1964 or standing on a Korean fishing boat in 1979 or sleeping under a bridge in Moscow this morning?
Someone of low quality wants to borrow something of yours, say, a book or a paring knife. Do you (1) let them borrow it, (2) give it them for good (it shall not be the same after they’ve had it), or (3) simply say no. What if you know it will get them out of a pinch?
Someone attempts to put you in his/her debt through purchasing you something without your permission (a drink, a coat, a roast chicken, a transit card, etcetera). Do you accept or not? What form would your analysis take?
Write a short plan for a bank heist.
(This is the written exam I give to prospective personal assistants. It generally allows me to determine whether a person would be suitable or not. There are many ways to go wrong. I’d say it is a test of discretion and imagination. - Jesse Ball)

+ Su Wu on an encounter for Moonlists:
“I’m pregnant, my best friend said into the phone without hello, and I yelled, holy fuck, on the street in another country. Some guy turned, rushed over and asked, are you okay?, and it was a new kind of joy for me, a whole joy running headlong into kindness, and I said, I’m okay, and really, more than ever this month, I was.”

+ “Fury Is a Political Weapon. And Women Need to Wield It.” in the New York Times by Rebecca Traister:
“Many of the women shouting now are women who have not previously yelled publicly before, many of them white middle-class women newly awakened to political fury and protest. Part of the process of becoming mad must be recognizing that they are not the first to be furious, and that there is much to learn from the stories and histories of the livid women — many of them not white or middle class — who have never had reason not to be mad.
If you are angry today, or if you have been angry for a while, and you’re wondering whether you’re allowed to be as angry as you feel, let me say: Yes. Yes, you are allowed. You are, in fact, compelled.
If you’ve been feeling a new rage at the flaws of this country, and if your anger is making you want to change your life in order to change the world, then I have something incredibly important to say: Don’t forget how this feels.
Tell a friend, write it down, explain it to your children now, so they will remember. And don’t let anyone persuade you it wasn’t right, or it was weird, or it was some quirky stage in your life when you went all political — remember that, honey, that year you went crazy? No. No. Don’t let it ever become that. Because people will try.”

+ Eileen Myles on writing and the impact of social media:
“I feel like so much of contemporary loneliness in motion is this compulsion to share my web browser. It’s like there’s a way of aesthetically stating your browser, which is kind of where you move and how you look and what you see. Even just breaking it up into close shots and long shots, and like what’s at the center. It’s not about a golden mean, but it’s a signature as poetry—which is how I see and how I move and what stops me—and putting them together.”

+ Anne Truitt on vulnerability, via Brain Pickings:
“I am always, and always will be, vulnerable to my own work, because by making visible what is most intimate to me I endow it with the objectivity that forces me to see it with utter, distinct clarity. A strange fate. I make a home for myself in my work, yet when I enter that home I know how flimsy a shelter I have wrought for my spirit. My vulnerability to my own life is irrefutable. Nor do I wish it to be otherwise, as vulnerability is a guardian of integrity.”

+ From Alain De Botton’s The Course of Love:
“We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes. How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right—in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable—given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unlearnt. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.”

+ Singer, writer and artist Claire Evans on "a new way of looking at things or something to attempt in the future”, via Moonlists:
“I learned that fire alarms don’t signal that a fire is happening; they signal that it’s socially appropriate to react. People will stay in a room as it fills with smoke, if nobody else moves — they don’t want to lose face. The alarm gives everyone a shared context, something to point to and say, “this is really happening.” It strikes me that art serves the same purpose.”

+ Poem by Nayyirah Waheed in her anthology, salt:
“in our own ways we all break. it is okay to hold your heart outside of your body for days. months. years. at a time.
– heal”

+ An extract from the East Folk newsletter:
“Our hands do a lot for us. More than any other body part, our hands work. They wash our bodies, hold our loved ones, build houses, cut vegetables, pick flowers, button shirts, take photos, write, caress, push, press, and touch. We use them to communicate. We wave them to say goodbye, put two fingers up for peace, and one for the opposite.”

+ Poem by Mary Oliver in her anthology, Felicity: (a lot of poetry was needed this week)
Nothing Is Too Small Not To Be Wondered About
“The cricket doesn’t wonder
if there’s a heaven
or, if there is, if there’s room for him.
It’s fall. Romance is over. Still, he sings.
If he can, he enters a house
through the tiniest crack under the door.
Then the house grows colder.
He sings slower and slower.
Then, nothing.
This must mean something, I don’t know what.
But certainly it doesn’t mean
he hasn’t been an excellent cricket
all his life.”

+ Poem by Hanif Abdurraqib in the May edition of Poetry Magazine:
For the Dogs Who Barked at Me on the Sidewalks in Connecticut
Darlings, if your owners say you are / not usually like this / then I must take them / at their word / I am like you / not crazy about that which towers before me / particularly the buildings here / and the people inside / who look at my name / and make noises / that seem like growling / my small and eager darlings / what it must be like / to have the sound for love / and the sound for fear / be a matter of pitch / I am afraid to touch / anyone who might stay / long enough to make leaving / an echo / there is a difference / between burying a thing you love / for the sake of returning / and leaving a fresh absence / in a city’s dirt / looking for a mercy / left by someone / who came before you / I am saying that I / too / am at a loss for language / can’t beg myself / a doorway / out of anyone / I am not usually like this either / I must apologize again for how adulthood has rendered me / us, really 
/ I know you all forget the touch / of someone who loves you / in two minutes / and I arrive to you / a constellation of shadows / once hands / listen darlings / there is a sky / to be pulled down / into our bowls / there is a sweetness for us / to push our faces into / I promise / I will not beg for you to stay this time / I will leave you to your wild galloping / I am sorry / to hold you again / for so long / I am in the mood / to be forgotten.

+ Extract from Something Fresh by P. G. Wodehouse:
“The silence lengthened. Aline could find nothing to say. In her present mood there was danger in speech. ‘We have known each other so long,’ said Emerson, ‘and I have told you so often that I love you, that we have come to make almost a joke of it, as if we were playing some game. It just happens that that is our way, to laugh at things. But I am going to say it once again, even if it has come to be a sort of catch-phrase. I love you. I’m reconciled to the fact that I am done for, out of the running, and that you are going to marry somebody else; but I am not going to stop loving you. It isn’t a question of whether I should be happier if I forgot you. I can’t do it. It’s just an impossibility, and that’s all there is to it. Whatever I may be to you, you are part of me, and you always will be part of me. I might just as well try to go on living without breathing as living without loving you.’ He stopped, and straightened himself.”

+ A quote from the inimitable Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with our old nonsense. This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.”

+ Anni Spadafora via Maryanne Casasanta’s Evenings and Mornings Spent Feeling Less Vulnerable:
“When I was a kid I’d ask my mama to make me ‘toota’: one part mildly steeped orange pekoe tea, 3 parts 2% milk, and lots of sugar. Toota. It was my discovery of the mighty feeling that comes with something hot on the roof of my mouth. Though I’m not sure when I first imagined that this wet heat could will me to the needs of my day.
I keep an endless archive of those who similarly rely on this imagined will. I watch them pass through a place like this: A food scientist meeting his copywriter to expedite his cricket-protein pasta sauce invention, a new mom who hasn’t left the house in 48 hours, two women who meet every week at the same hour to hash out the emotional boulders that don’t seem to budge.
Losing someone, winning something, idle time—coffee is often paired, and it’s cheap. How you take it is as boring as which wrist you drape your watch on. But it’s as relieving as rain when air is muscle-thick. It’s also just something hot on the roof of your mouth.”

+ Shriya Samavai on simple nourishment for The Moon Lists:
“The other night I skipped a party and went out to dinner with a friend instead. We sat at the restaurant and talked for two or three hours, then went on a leisurely walk through the neighborhood. It felt very right. I went home and read poetry and slept well.”

Burning the Old Year from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye:
“Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.
So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.
Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.
Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.”

+ Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s poem, Hammond B3 Organ Cistern, featured in the New Yorker:
The days I don’t want to kill myself
are extraordinary. Deep bass. All the people
in the streets waiting for their high fives
and leaping, I mean leaping,
when they see me. I am the sun-filled
god of love. Or at least an optimistic
under-secretary. There should be a word for it.
The days you wake up and do not want
to slit your throat. Money in the bank.
Enough for an iced green tea every weekday
and Saturday and Sunday! It’s like being
in the armpit of a Hammond B3 organ.
Just reeks of gratitude and funk.
The funk of ages. I am not going to ruin
my love’s life today. It’s like the time I said yes
to gray sneakers but then the salesman said
Wait. And there, out of the back room,
like the bakery’s first biscuits: bright-blue kicks.
Iridescent. Like a scarab! Oh, who am I kidding,
it was nothing like a scarab! It was like
bright. blue. forking. sneakers! I did not
want to die that day. Oh, my God.
Why don’t we talk about it? How good it feels.
And if you don’t know then you’re lucky
but also you poor thing. Bring the band out on the stoop.
Let the whole neighborhood hear. Come on, Everybody.
Say it with me nice and slow
no pills no cliff no brains onthe floor
Bring the bass back.    no rope no hose  not today, Satan.
Every day I wake up with my good fortune
and news of my demise. Don’t keep it from me.
Why don’t we have a name for it?
Bring the bass back. Bring the band out on the stoop.

+ Rebecca Solnit on the value of getting lost, in her incredible book “A Field Guid to Getting Lost”:
“Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”

William Cheng (pianist and teacher) on the implications of being a musician that can no longer play:
“My inability to translate suffering into artistry has made me doubt, among other things, how much I care about music — a strange rabbit hole for a music professor and lifelong musician. For if I loved music enough, shouldn’t music sometimes be enough to comfort me? Or, to frame this as the three-word inquiry at the heart of any difficult relationship: Is love enough?
As much as I would’ve hoped otherwise, music wasn’t. It was just one more thing excised from my daily activities, one more broken luxury in a life falling silent. The more I’ve felt pressured to rekindle my love for music, the more dejected I’ve become in failing to do so.
It’s marvelous, to be sure, when music therapy works, and I have nothing but admiration for artists who play and dance through disability or agony. It’s important to believe in heroes and hear their hopeful songs. It’s no less important, however, to relate and listen to the abundant stories that diverge from the happy overcoming tales that pervade our media. Because inspiration porn — like any porn — isn’t always grounded in reality, instead propping up stratospheric standards of beauty, stamina and narrative intrigue.
Not everyone gets to be a hero. Some people barely manage to hold on. So from time to time, let’s tell certain illness and disability stories as they are — even if they don’t come with the superhuman protagonists or stirring soundtracks we so crave.”

+ When I Tell My Husband I Miss the Sun, He Knows by Paige Lewis:
what I really mean. He paints my name
across the floral bed sheet and ties the bottom corners
to my ankles. Then he paints another
for himself. We walk into town and play the shadow game,
saying Oh! I’m sorry for stepping on your
shadow! and Please be careful! My shadow is caught in the
wheels
of your shopping cart. It’s all very polite.
Our shadows get dirty just like anyone’s, so we take
them to the Laundromat—the one with
the 1996 Olympics themed pinball machine—
and watch our shadows warm
against each other. We bring the shadow game home
and (this is my favorite part) when we
stretch our shadows across the bed, we get so tangled
my husband grips his own wrist,
certain it’s my wrist, and kisses it.\

+ Eileen Myles on the importance of poetry in the New York Times:
“Poetry always, always, always is a key piece of democracy. It’s like the un-Trump: The poet is the charismatic loser. You’re the fool in Shakespeare; you’re the loose cannon. As things get worse, poetry gets better, because it becomes more necessary.”

+ Toni Morrison on work in the New Yorker:
Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.
You make the job; it doesn’t make you.
Your real life is with us, your family.
You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.

+ Jim Jarmusch’s Rule #5 in MovieMaker Magazine:
“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”

+ Marianne Power on a moment of kindness for Conversations On Love:
“A few Christmases ago I was in the middle of a period of depression and on my way back from a trip to Ireland where my best friend had been looking after me. I landed back in London Kings Cross to a city in the middle of its office party. Everyone was excited and delighted and I felt like I was falling off the edge of the world. I got in a taxi home and when the driver asked me how I was, instead of pretending I was fine, I found myself saying: ‘I feel like I’m losing my mind.’ For the next hour he listened to me as I poured out a matted jumble of thoughts and feelings. He listened like he understood every word I said. He told me about his own breakdown. He told me that I would come back together again but I had to go easy on myself. 'Watch Paddington,’ he said. 'And have a cry whenever you need to. I used to cry all the time, even in the cab, I’d cry behind dark glasses.’ That advice has always stayed in my head: 'Watch Paddington and cry when you need to.’ I don’t even know his name but he was my Christmas angel.”

+ On the end of the year, from Laura Olin’s newsletter:
“A thought that came to me while watching a bunch of impressive speakers at a conference this fall, feeling sad I hadn’t accomplished as much this year as they had: “Maybe surviving this year was enough.” It was a rough year for a lot of people, and if that was true for you too, I invite you to give yourself a break about not doing all you may have hoped at the beginning of the year. If you’re still here, you’ve come out ahead in the biggest way that matters. Here’s to survival+ next year.”

+ David Whyte on naming love:
“Naming love too early is a beautiful but harrowing human difficulty. Most of our heartbreak comes from attempting to name who or what we love and the way we love, too early in the vulnerable journey of discovery.
We can never know in the beginning, in giving ourselves to a person, to a work, to a marriage or to a cause, exactly what kind of love we are involved with. When we demand a certain specific kind of reciprocation before the revelation has flowered completely we find ourselves disappointed and bereaved and in that grief may miss the particular form of love that is actually possible but that did not meet our initial and too specific expectations. Feeling bereft we take our identity as one who is disappointed in love, our almost proud disappointment preventing us from seeing the lack of reciprocation from the person or the situation as simply a difficult invitation into a deeper and as yet unrecognizable form of affection.”

+ Sunday by January Gill O’Neil:
You are the start of the week
or the end of it, and according
to The Beatles you creep in
like a nun. You’re the second
full day the kids have been
away with their father, the second
full day of an empty house.
Sunday, I’ve missed you. I’ve been
sitting in the backyard with a glass
of Pinot waiting for your arrival.
Did you know the first Sweet 100s
are turning red in the garden,
but the lettuce has grown
too bitter to eat. I am looking
up at the bluest sky I have ever seen,
cerulean blue, a heaven sky
no one would believe I was under.
You are my witness. No day
is promised. You are absolution.
You are my unwritten to-do list,
my dishes in the sink, my brownie
breakfast, my braless day.

+ Grace Paley on learning to grow old from her father:
“My father had decided to teach me how to grow old. I said O.K. My children didn’t think it was such a great idea. If I knew how, they thought, I might do so too easily. No, no, I said, it’s for later, years from now. And besides, if I get it right it might be helpful to you kids in time to come.
They said, Really?
My father wanted to begin as soon as possible.
[…]
Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.
That’s a metaphor, right?
Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully. It’s probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, don’t yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, don’t be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart.
Talk? What?
Say anything, but be respectful. Say — maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember.”

+ February by Margaret Atwood:
Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

+ Morgan Harper Nichols on when strength doesn’t look like strength:
“A year ago, you didn’t know you could be this strong. You didn’t know that all along, courage was rising up within you. Back then, it just seemed like you were trying to make it through. It just felt like you were trying to survive when all of the odds were stacked against you. You didn’t realize that every late night you fought through and every early morning you woke up to was a beautiful light-woven reminder that you were far from finished yet. It did not feel like it then, but the seeds you were sowing were being watered. What seemed like it was only rain was actually the nourishment you needed to grow into the next stage.”

+ Summing Up by Claribel Alegria:
In the sixty-three years
I have lived
some instants are electric:
the happiness of my feet
jumping puddles
six hours in Machu Picchu
the buzzing of the telephone
while awaiting my mother’s death
the ten minutes it took
to lose my virginity
the hoarse voice
announcing the assassination
of Archbishop Romero
fifteen minutes in Delft
the first wail of my daughter
I don’t know how many years yearning
for the liberation of my people
certain immortal deaths
the eyes of that starving child
your eyes bathing me in love
one forget-me-not afternoon
the desire to mold myself
into a verse
a cry
a fleck of foam.
— translated from the Spanish by the author and Darwin T. Flakoll

+ Seth Godin on why “I don’t like your work” doesn’t mean “I don’t like you”:
“Here are two useful things to consider:
There is plenty of disliked work from people (and things) where I don’t even know the creator. I don’t like Wagner’s operas, and I never even met him. If it’s possible to dislike something without knowing the person behind it, I hope we can embrace the fact that they’re unrelated.
If we need everyone to like our work in order to feel grounded, it means that we’ll sacrifice the best of what we could create in order to dumb it down for whatever masses happen to be speaking up. Which will make it more average (aka mediocre) and thus eliminate any magic we had hoped to create.”

+ And Day Brought Back My Night by Geoffrey Brock:
It was so simple: you came back to me
And I was happy. Nothing seemed to matter
But that. That you had gone away from me
And lived for days with him—it didn’t matter.
That I had been left to care for our old dog
And house alone—couldn’t have mattered less!
On all this, you and I and our happy dog
Agreed. We slept. The world was worriless.
I woke in the morning, brimming with old joys
Till the fact-checker showed up, late, for work
And started in: Item: it’s years, not days.
Item: you had no dog. Item: she isn’t back,
In fact, she just remarried. And oh yes, item: you
Left her, remember? I did? I did. (I do.)

+ Capellanus on Marriage:
The first rule from The Art of Courtly Love, written around 1180 by Andreas Capellanus: Marriage is no real excuse for not loving.

+ I’m a Depressed Poem by David Ignatow:
You are reading me now and thanks. I know I feel a bit better and if you will stay with me a little longer, perhaps take me home with you and introduce me to your friends, I could be delighted and change my tone. I lie in a desk drawer, hardly ever getting out to see the light and be held. It makes me feel so futile for having given birth to myself in anticipation. I miss a social life. I know I made myself for that. It was the start of me. I’m grateful that you let me talk as much as this. You probably understand, from experience; gone through something like it yourself which may be why you hold me this long. I’ve made you thoughtful and sad and now there are two of us. I think it’s fun.

+ If I Should Have A Daughter by Sarah Kay:
If I should have a daughter, instead of Mom, she’s gonna call me Point B,
because that way she knows that no matter what happens,
at least she can always find her way to me.
And I’m going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands,
so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say,
“Oh, I know that like the back of my hand.”
And she’s going to learn that this life will hit you hard in the face,
wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach.
But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air.
There is hurt here that cannot be fixed by Band-Aids or poetry.
So the first time she realizes that Wonder Woman isn’t coming,
I’ll make sure she knows she doesn’t have to wear the cape all by herself.
Because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers,
your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I’ve tried.
“And, baby,” I’ll tell her, “don’t keep your nose up in the air like that.
I know that trick; I’ve done it a million times.
You’re just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back to a burning house,
so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him.
Or else find the boy who lit the fire in the first place,
to see if you can change him.”
But I know she will anyway, so instead I’ll always keep an extra supply of chocolate and rain boots nearby,
because there is no heartbreak that chocolate can’t fix.
Okay, there’s a few heartbreaks that chocolate can’t fix.
But that’s what the rain boots are for.
Because rain will wash away everything, if you let it.
I want her to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind, because that’s the way my mom taught me.
That there’ll be days like this.
♫ There’ll be days like this, my momma said. ♫
When you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises;
when you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you want to save are the ones standing on your cape;
when your boots will fill with rain,
and you’ll be up to your knees in disappointment.
And those are the very days you have all the more reason to say thank you.
Because there’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it’s sent away.
You will put the wind in winsome, lose some.
You will put the star in starting over, and over.
And no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute, be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life.
And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting, I am pretty damn naive.
But I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar.
It can crumble so easily,
but don’t be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it.
“Baby,” I’ll tell her, “remember, your momma is a worrier, and your poppa is a warrior, and you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more.”
Remember that good things come in threes and so do bad things.
And always apologize when you’ve done something wrong.
But don’t you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining.
Your voice is small, but don’t ever stop singing.
And when they finally hand you heartache,
when they slip war and hatred under your door and offer you handouts on street-corners of cynicism and defeat,
you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother.

+ Austin Kleon on Bach:
“His music is so amazingly beautiful, but Bach didn’t grow up in some idyllic setting. Conductor John Eliot Gardiner, who’s written a biography of Bach, says that previous Bach biographies have painted rosy portraits of the composer, not allowing that a mere human could create such heavenly works. But his research has turned up evidence that Bach grew up in a “thuggish world.” (Don’t we all?) Bach was able to do what all great artists do: take their pain and despair and channel it into works of such beauty and truth that they turn us away from our own despair and towards the light. Artists like Bach do us the greatest service of any true artist: they give us encouragement to keep living, to keep going.”

+ Among Women by Marie Ponsot:
What women wander?
Not many. All. A few.
Most would, now & then,
& no wonder.
Some, and I’m one,
Wander sitting still.
My small grandmother
Bought from every peddler
Less for the ribbons and lace
Than for their scent
Of sleep where you will,
Walk out when you want, choose
Your bread and your company.
She warned me, “Have nothing to lose.”
She looked fragile but had
High blood, runner’s ankles,
Could endure, endure.
She loved her rooted garden, her
Grand children, her once
Wild once young man.
Women wander
As best they can.

+ Every Love Story in Alexandra Franzen's newsletter:
“Every love story ultimately ends in some type of loss. Worst case scenario: they betray your trust, have a secret affair, contract an incurable sexually transmitted disease, infect you, and your marriage crumbles apart in a fiery blaze of agony. Best case scenario: you spend many happy decades together and then eventually you watch your sweetheart wither and die. Either way, loss. Either way, grief. Either way, some flavor of heartbreak. Every romantic relationship has an expiration date. It’s not “will it end?” but “how?” and “when?” Just like they say in the musical Hadestown: “It’s a sad song. But we sing it anyway.” Why do we keep singing? Why do we keep loving and loving, knowing that pain is inevitable? Because, despite everything, I guess, I think…it’s still worth it. (At least, that’s what my mom tells me. And she’s very wise.)”

+ Mailboxes in Late Winter by Jeffrey Harrison:
It’s a motley lot. A few still stand
at attention like sentries at the ends
of their driveways, but more lean
askance as if they’d just received a blow
to the head, and in fact they’ve received
many, all winter, from jets of wet snow
shooting off the curved, tapered blade
of the plow. Some look wobbly, cocked
at oddball angles or slumping forlornly
on precariously listing posts. One box
bows steeply forward, as if in disgrace, its door
lolling sideways, unhinged. Others are dented,
battered, streaked with rust, bandaged in duct tape,
crisscrossed with clothesline or bungee cords.
A few lie abashed in remnants of the very snow
that knocked them from their perches.
Another is wedged in the crook of a tree
like a birdhouse, its post shattered nearby.
I almost feel sorry for them, worn out
by the long winter, off-kilter, not knowing
what hit them, trying to hold themselves
together, as they wait for news from spring.

+ future somatics to-do list by Jen Hofer
a love letter to traci akemi kato-kiriyama
does a voice have to be auditory to be a voice?
where in the body does hearing take place?
which are the questions that cannot be addressed in language?
which are the questions where promises lodge?
how do we hear what is outside our earshot?
when does distance look like closeness, feel like velvet sunrise cheek to cheek?
what are the objects, ideas, or experiences we drop beneath the more evident surfaces of our lives to the air or water or ground beneath? do we drop them purposefully? are they forgotten?
what word makes the body?
what body defies the word?
which figures, shapes, presences, haunts, methods, media, modes, ephemera, gestures, abandonments, models, anti-models, breaths, harmonics? which soil? which fields?
what does beginning sound like? what body does continuing form? what note does perseverance hum?
is a word a body?
which apertures? which hinges?
where does a body stand without settling?
through which holes does history break into our day?
where in the past does the future excavate?
where in the future does the past propel?
what are the distinctions between proximity and simultaneity?
where does a body resist without refusal?
can borders be exceeded? can borders be disintegrated?
where in the body does hearing take place?
where in the body does loving take place?
how do we make family with someone we do not know?
what do we carry with us and where in the body do we carry it?
might we be permitted a we this evening?
may I hold your hand? to feel your hand as its actual shape, clothed in its papery useful unequivocal skin, bones stacked like tiny branches, the balancing act of a bird, joints unlocking, span from thumb to pinky octaving out toward unfamiliar harmonics?
what space does the body occupy despite everything?
what does despite sound like? what does with sound like?
where does at take place? where does respite take place?

+ Rachel Cusk on making a home in The Modern House:
“What I found in this process is that I am very used to conceiving of something and realising it, in my grasp of language and form and technique. And the whole point of that is that what you end up with is something that has obeyed you. You have imposed yourself on it. This house is the opposite. It has to remain in a constant state of being created and being maintained. And, because you created it, you see it, you can’t forget it, you can’t be unconscious of it. The things that are wrong can’t be fixed. So, I’m really used to thinking ‘Oh, that’s wrong, I’ll cut it out’ but you can’t do that here. It’s more like a record of your mistakes and your successes; it’s almost unbearably real in that way.”

+ Indian Summer by Dorothy Parker
In youth, it was a way I had
To do my best to please,
And change, with every passing lad,
To suit his theories.
But now I know the things I know,
And do the things I do;
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you!

+ Gökotta in The Believer Magazine’s email newsletter:
The Swedish have a word, gökotta, with no English equivalent. It refers to the act of waking up early with the intention of going outside to hear the morning birds sing, or, as Google Translate will have it, “DAWN PICNIC TO HEAR FIRST BIRDSONG.”

+ Lies I Tell by Sara Borjas:
A woman has a window in her face: that is the truth. I look like my mother: that is the truth. I want to tell you I am not like her: that is the truth. I am ashamed walking in a woman’s body: that is the truth. I wish to take back everything I say: that is the truth. A window can be a mirror. It can also be a door: that is the truth. As a girl, my mother slept in a shack with no windows and one door: that is the truth. My grandma would slam windows: truth. A mother’s hands are stronger than God: truth. We often use fruit to describe a bruise, like plum or blackberry: truth. My mother’s window blackberried: truth. My mother’s door peached: truth. She loves peaches: that is the truth. My father could not stand them in our house: that is the truth. We had three doors and nine windows in our house: that is the truth. A woman has a face in her window: truth. A father has a window but I don’t know where it is: truth. What burrows is the peach fuzz, he said: that is the truth. I have never been close enough to a peach to eat one: truth. The worst things last on the skin: truth. I don’t like not having things: truth. My father has one door but I can’t find it: truth. Not all windows open: that is the truth. One night I see my father crying in the yard, head in his hands: that is the truth. I make things up that I want for myself: that is the truth.

+ A new year wish from Courtney E. Martin
That’s my new year wish for you — not the extraordinary, but the exuberant. Check all the windows. Taste all the bites. Feel all the hugs. When you can slow down, do it. This is life, all around you, already happening, waiting to be noticed and squealed about. It can be terrible. But it can be wonderful, too. Don’t get so effective that you forget to notice.

+ Animals by Frank O’Hara
Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth
it’s no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners
the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn’t need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water
I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

+ From Publishing for Humans by Lizzy Kremer:
“Here is our challenge, in one painting: to somehow internalise the horror and not to flinch from it but without at the same time destroying the beauty of what we know of as home. To sit inside typing, while outside or even in the next room all is terrifying and awful. This is our ‘new normal’, then, to accept the disjunct between home and unsafety and to try to fathom a way to be its mediator.”

+ A great sentence from Laura Olin’s new newsletter, Social Social Distance Club:
“…blueberry graham cracker galette - a reminder that if you fall apart as this crust does, just pinch yourself back together…”

+ A lesson for students by artist Jill Stoll, via Rob Walker’s newsletter, The Art of Noticing:
“Spend five solid minutes looking out a window. … Best of all is a window you’ve walked past a million times. Explore the very edges of what you can see. Note five specific things you can see. Now note five more. Notice what you didn’t notice earlier. Ask why. Pay attention to what has changed in the five minutes since you started looking. Spend five minutes sketching what you see.”

+ From Helen, Help Me by Helen Rosner in the New Yorker:
“Things are horribly bad, so much worse than anyone expected or hoped things could ever be. And yet somehow—blessedly—they aren’t so bad that we can’t still get potato chips when we need potato chips.”

+ Nikki Giovanni on living and writing:
“There are, still, so many books I want to read and reread. There are, still, so many places I want to travel to. There are, still, foods I want to eat and drinks I want to sample. There are blankets to lie upon or under; there are pillows upon which to prop my books or my head. I definitely want to travel to outer space; I also want to continue to explore inner space. I know no one ever wished they had been meaner, or hated more, or spent more hours away from people s/he loves. I know that life is interesting and that you can never go wrong being interested in exploring it. If I were giving advice I would say: Sing. People who sing to themselves, people who make variations on songs they know, people who teach songs to other people, these are the people who others want to be with. And that will let you be a good writer.”

+ Anne Enright on lockdown life for The Guardian:
“Honestly, there is a lot to be said for tooling about all day, looking up recipes and not making them, not bothering to paint the living room and failing to write a novel. In the middle of the messy non-event called your mid-afternoon, you might get something – a thought to jot down, a good paragraph, a piece of gossip to text a pal. Boredom is a productive state so long as you don’t let it go sour on you. Try not to confuse the urge to get something done with the idea that you are useless. Try not to confuse the urge to contact someone with the thought that you are unloved. Do the thing or don’t do it. Either is fine.”

+ Diary of a Non-Essential Worker by Omar Sakr:
“Did you know violins can shake the earth? Such sweet vessels, tiny planetary throats. I was sent an orchestra. They made music, a sorrow, a soaring, that shivered the dirt. I followed the notes to a barbarism. The composer said he created the beautiful hour as a space to think about war, and I heard my mother’s name, a dark cascade of her, I saw again the clamour behind her manner, her harrowed glamour; I am claiming all of it now not as a violence, but as an inevitability, always justifiable. I guess I don’t want to lose her, no matter the bruises. I haven’t seen her in weeks, a memory of cherries, a perishable delight. I stay home, she stays home, and with this distance we become old battlefields, able to appreciate our damages without adding to them. How lucky we are to have homes. How likely it is we will lose them. Months ago we couldn’t breathe and smoky miracles pulverised the sky, our fussy lungs. Everything is a miracle when you are alive. I am learning that against my will. Today I was sent a pink dwarf kingfisher, a bird thought extinct for over a century, and still, it was someone’s job to look for her, someone waited, camera in hand, for a glimpse of a glorious beak. Outside, I hear the camaraderie of ordinary wings, the chatter of birds we call pests. They don’t seem to mind the lockdown. I dare say they are having fun, a lark. I call my landlord, ask for a reprieve, and hear only birdsong. He’s having fun. I walk out into the park, where, months ago, a man was stabbed near to death; I sit on the bench close to the stain his blood left and receive a text reminding me to care about Kashmir, and Gaza, and our Uygur brothers and sisters, who I never stopped caring about, and for whom my care did nothing. Forgive me, I sometimes mistake grief for care. The orchestra follows me under the foliage, the violins unrelenting, the world shaken to their curvature, their high-strung demands, as I sift through the scattered lyric of my shattered life to find a way to love a woman, and the birds weave and whirl in the green, laughing at this non-essential work.”

+ Lydia Davis’ Getting to Know Your Body:
“If your eyeballs move, this means that you’re thinking, or about to start thinking.
If you don’t want to be thinking at this particular moment, try to keep your eyeballs still.”

+ From Courtney E. Martin’s newsletter:
“I don’t ever want to forget this happened–the grief and the beauty of it. I’m not even sure that will be possible, but if it were, I wouldn’t want it. I don’t want to vote like it didn’t happen. I don’t want to eat like it didn’t happen. I don’t want to consume like it didn’t happen. I don’t want to schedule like it didn’t happen. I don’t want to mother or daughter or befriend or neighbor like it didn’t happen. I don’t want to sit inside this little life, noticing and appreciating and breathing, like it didn’t happen. There is unnecessary suffering all around me, and inside of me, too, but there is also necessary meaning. May we hold on to that.”

+ An idea from Aishwarya Iyer via the Why is this interesting? newsletter:
“…last week after watching Frozen II, I was shocked by the sheer number of people who were involved, in the credits, so I spent over 5 hours pausing the screen on various names and googling all of them to learn what they do…I now know what a “crowds artist” and a “looks development artist” does!”

+ From Hala Alyan’s beautiful and illuminating essay in Emergence Magazine:
“As a therapist, a friend, a person, I’ve noticed a trend. The pandemic isn’t necessarily creating fears for people. It’s instead serving as a flashlight—illuminating people’s unsteadiest, half-finished parts. It’s showing us where our work remains. People talk about their ex-boyfriends, their long-resolved eating disorders, their childhood secrets. I don’t know why this is coming up for me right now, I keep hearing. But it makes sense. Much of the world is on lockdown. There’s nowhere to go, which means there are fewer places to hide from ourselves. From our fears, our sorrows, our obsessions. Modern life is one, long, built-in distraction, to say nothing of movement. Earlier generations spent their lives mostly at home, in their village, with their tribe. But modernity—and modern money—is marked by mobility: eating out in restaurants, going to bars, vacationing in foreign cities. Those distractions have abruptly ceased. As Blaise Pascal declared centuries ago, All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone, and we’re all, like it or not, being furnished an opportunity to remedy that.”

+ From the Bodha newsletter, titled “Some Days You Feel Flat, Some Days You Feel Fine”
“What little thing of beauty do you keep in your mind for those harder days? Do you have a song, a memory or a ritual? Something you keep close to your heart, a garden of favourite things you can return to over and over?”

+ Jessica Helfand on observing in the Self-Reliance Project:
“Observing is truth-telling. It’s not a picture postcard, or a gilded lily. And while it may be dominated by the repeat imagery coursing through your feeds—that random mashup of death statistics and cute puppies—that’s just the tip of the iceberg, because observing is not about passive consumption, or about silent spectatorship, or, much as we might need them right now, about cute puppies. Observing is about paying attention and leaning in: to everything you witness, even and especially those unbidden stories, the ones that torpedo into view, insinuating themselves into your consciousness like splinters.”

+ Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s “Oblique Strategies”:
Here’s one - be less critical more often.

+ Rebecca Solnit on “lost”:
“Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”

+ Giving up, or not, in Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami:
I rolled over in bed, stared at the ceiling, and let out a deep sigh. Oh give in, I thought. But the idea of giving in didn’t take hold. It’s out of your hands, kid.