February 2012
1 tag
Micro-fiction
In the country I was born, there are as many dialects as there are citizens, and every house has a special room full of hundreds of tiny dictionaries with the names of all the people their owner knows, so he or she may understand them. Homeless people with no dictionaries don’t understand anyone, and since they cannot afford to publish their personal dictionaries, no one can...
1 tag
“The Irish have always been famous for being the iconoclasts of the British...”
– Jorge Luis Borges, quoted by Colm Toibin in “Flann O’Brien’s Lies,” London Review of Books, 5 January 2012, pages 32-33. (via j2parman)
2 tags
One thing does not exist, that is Oblivion. God, who saves the metal, saves the scum and marks on His prophetic memory the moons that were, the ones that will be. It is all there. The thousands of reflections that your face has left upon the mirrors between the two settings of the day and the ones it will leave on them again. And everything is part of that diverse crystal of that memory, the...
1 tag
“Oh, Kitty, my darling, remember that the...
Fancy Prose
It is one of those beautiful summer days which follow a great storm that cools the earth, and the sun’s rays are still weak and feeble like a well-groomed Samson and you feel the light light of the sun on your skin like a tender caress, and your eyes are blinded by the bright reflection of the sun on a white cat sleeping on the grass, while the marble-patterned strays you adopted as a child...
You too, my mother, read my rhymes For love of unforgotten times, And you may chance to hear once more The little feet along the floor.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, To my Mother
You know what this blog needs more of? Pictures of Darth Vader engaging in situations in which the presence of Darth Vader would seem incongruous.
1 tag
I have lost or lack the sea
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and...
yinishi replied to your post: The Brothers Karamazov. Original Title: Bratia…
Weeeell, I’m going to put on my douche hat for the moment, and say that “brother” is pronounced “brat” in Russian, so your joke is invalid :P
yinishi replied to your post: The Brothers Karamazov. Original Title: Bratia…
…and by “pronounced” I mean phonetically “brat” and therefore not a pun of the...
The Brothers Karamazov.
Original Title: Bratia Karamazovy
The Karamazov Brats.
1 tag
The Wooden Cane
María Kodama discovered it. Despite its authority and its firmness, it is curiously light. Those who see it observe it; those who observe it remember it. I look at it. I feel it a part of that empire, infinite in time, that erected a wall to build its magic precinct. I look at it. I think of that Chuang Tzu who dreamed he was a butterfly and did not know after waking up whether he was a man who...
I sit in my cubicle, here on the motherworld. When I die, they will put my body in a box and dispose of it in the cold ground. And in all the million ages to come, I will never breathe or laugh or twitch again. So won’t you run and play with me here among the teeming mass of humanity? The universe has spared us this moment.
No quisiera morir antes de conocer los monos del Brasil que duermen sin soñar, los zorros de Moscú devorando el jardín, las arañas de plata, de seda y de rubí. No quisiera morir sin saber si la luna redonda disimula el filo de una hoz, si en las cuatro estaciones caben tres primaveras, si hace frío en el sol. Sin haber paseado vestido de mujer por un gran boulevard, sin haber penetrado en las...
“A mi el sexo me gusta muy intenso” me dijo ella, metiendo un dedo en el...”
– Alejandro Dolina
2 tags
“The sea, the Englishman’s Pampas.”
– Jorge Luis Borges
A living man is blind and drinks his drop. What matter if the ditches are impure? What matter if I live it all once more? Endure that toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain Brought face to face with his own clumsiness; The finished man among his enemies? — How in the name of Heaven can he escape That defiling...
1 tag
A melancholy moment
When a beautiful girl gets on the bus and sits next to you and you kindle the hope that she may be everything you’ve ever wanted not only in body but in soul and mind, but then her phone rings, and she answers.
And then she starts to talk.
3 tags
“Luke, A Tribute”, a beautiful song in...
1 tag
6 tags
A short biography of T.S. Eliot, by J.L. Borges
An unlikely compatriot of the St. Louis Blues, Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in the energetic city of that name, in the month of September 1888, on the banks of the mythical Mississippi. Scion of a wealthy family with commercial and ecclesiastical interests, he was educated at Harvard and in Paris. In the autumn of 1911, he returned to North America and dedicated himself to the fervent study of...
3 tags
Never give all the heart, for love Will hardly seem worth thinking of To passionate women if it seem Certain, and they never dream That it fades out from kiss to kiss; For everything that’s lovely is But a brief, dreamy, kind delight. O never give the heart outright, For they, for all smooth lips can say, Have given their hearts up to the play. And who could play it well enough If deaf and...
Another problem with quotes is that it’s too much sometimes. You’re reading a novel and suddenly the author goes on a very predictable rant about life and all the important lessons he has to tell you about the world, about love and death, and you just kind of forgive him because he’s written so much so far that you may say “Okay, go on, wax philosophical on me like this was...
3 tags
Solía tener un amigo unos 15 años mayor que yo. Él siempre me decía “Cuando sea chico quiero ser como vos.” No sé qué fue de él.
1 tag
Boris Vian - Surprise Party
The turntable hacked up a melancholy blues The air was heavy with dust and odors Several zazous danced while holding to their hearts Short girls with spasmodic behinds In a closet, an amateur obstetrics couple Delivered themselves to games full of art and naivete Another in a corner attempted with ardor Tonsil-coupling, to music. Hands encountered one another under too-short skirts Drunk, two...
3 tags
“No problem is as consubstantial to literature and its modest mystery as the one...”
– Jorge Luis Borges, The Homeric Versions
2 tags
Suicide
he told me he had all the gas on without flame but when I got there at 11:30 p.m. the gas was flaming and he was drunk on the couch with his ragged goatee: “it got too much,” he told me, “I got to thinking and it got too much.” which is good enough, we who think or work with words, we who carve can come up against this, especially if we believe our early successes and...
2 tags
Before the World was Made
If I make the lashes dark And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right From mirror after mirror, No vanity’s displayed: I’m looking for the face I had Before the world was made. What if I look upon a man As though on my beloved, And my blood be cold the while And my heart unmoved? Why should he think me cruel Or that he is betrayed? I’d have him love...
2 tags
With Mercy for the Greedy, by Anne Sexton
For my friend, Ruth, who urges me to make an appointment for the Sacrament of Confession.
Concerning your letter in which you ask me to call a priest and in which you ask me to wear The Cross that you enclose; your own cross, your dog-bitten cross, no larger than a thumb, small and wooden, no thorns, this rose— I pray to its shadow, that gray place where it lies on your letter … deep,...
He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
—William Butler Yeats
1 tag
“Now I never saw such a lass
And I know she likes her glass
She could toss a...”
– Sally Wheatley, traditional Irish song
3 tags
1 tag
Let music be, more of it and always! Let your verse be the thing in motion Which one feels who flees from an altering soul, Towards other skies to other loves.
Let your verse be the happy occurrence, Somehow within the restless morning wind, Which goes about smelling of mint and thyme… And all the rest is literature.
—Paul Verlaine, Art Poétique
1 tag
my goldfish stares with watery eyes into the hemisphere of my sorrow; upon the thinnest of threads we hang together, hang hang hang in the hangman’s noose; I stare into his place and he into mine… he must have thoughts, can you deny this? he has eyes and hunger and his love too died in January; but he is gold, really gold, and I am grey and it is indecent to search him...
3 tags
timeimmemorial:
The poet is a man who feigns And feigns so thoroughly, at last He manages to feign as pain The pain he really feels…
— Fernando Pessoa, from “Autopsychography,” trans. Edouardo Roditi
Lately I have become rather obsessed with a Joyce poem, read and sung. What trifles do men obsess with.