the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Meh. Crap day.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. 

-- Emerson

never empty but filling

key west years with pauline hemingway

INTERVIEWER

Could you say something of this process? When do you work? Do you keep to a strict schedule?

HEMINGWAY
When I am working on a book or story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and you know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

The Paris Review, Issue 18, 1958

g a l a x i e s o f w o m e n

Planetarium

BY ADRIENNE RICH

Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750—1848)
astronomer, sister of William; and others.

A woman in the shape of a monster   

a monster in the shape of a woman   

the skies are full of them

a woman      ‘in the snow

among the Clocks and instruments   

or measuring the ground with poles’

in her 98 years to discover   

8 comets

she whom the moon ruled   

like us

levitating into the night sky   

riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there

doing penance for impetuousness   

ribs chilled   

in those spaces    of the mind

An eye,

          ‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’

          from the mad webs of Uranusborg

                                                            encountering the NOVA   

every impulse of light exploding

from the core

as life flies out of us

             Tycho whispering at last

             ‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’

What we see, we see   

and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain   

and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar

heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse   

pouring in from Taurus

         I am bombarded yet         I stand

I have been standing all my life in the   

direct path of a battery of signals

the most accurately transmitted most   

untranslatable language in the universe

I am a galactic cloud so deep      so invo-

luted that a light wave could take 15   

years to travel through me       And has   

taken      I am an instrument in the shape   

of a woman trying to translate pulsations   

into images    for the relief of the body   

and the reconstruction of the mind.

It must have been Saturn and the other old men

Who arranged this night of darkness for us.

So much of our life goes by in the murky dark.

- from The Night the Cities Burned, by Robert Bly.

When a poem takes me to that place where

No story ever happens twice, all I want

Is a warm room, and a thousand years of thought.

- from the poem Shabistari and the Secret Garden, by Robert Bly

"When you read it back, the dialogue should feel alive to you. But do keep in mind that actors, directors, and other craftsmen who work on the movie or show are going to elevate what you've done. Have faith in your work. You know when it's good, and also when it's not working."

- George Pelecanos

not a barometer

Interviewer: I ran across this quote of yours. I’ll read it to you: "I get out of bed, and I look around and say, 'Don’t you fuck with me today.' I tell the spirit, 'Today, I am in charge, and you are not going to screw with me.' And that’s how I start my day."

Elie Tahari: That’s right.

Interviewer: So who or what is this spirit that’s trying to fuck with you?

Elie Tahari: There was a show with Lena Horne—this must have been 25 years ago—and I watched her start the show like that, where she’s lying on the bed and she is waking up, and she says to the audience, "Good morning. I pray it’s going to be a nice day.” And then she stops and she looks at the audience and says, "This is how I get up out of the bed.” And she gets up out of the bed [Tahari stands up to demonstrate], and she walks over to the window, and she turns around, and she says, "Now you don’t fuck with me today!" But it stuck with me. . . . You can start your day saying, "I am not a barometer. A barometer goes up and down. I’m a thermostat. I’m going to set on 72 degrees, and I’m going to stay like that today. And nothing is going to take my mind off me and my center." I kind of have to deal with the spirit, and I think everybody has a ritual. It was, I think, Thoreau, or Browning, or Eric Butterworth who said, "I get up out of bed, and I get all the wrinkles out of my bed. And when I finish taking all of the wrinkles out of the bed, this is when I take all the wrinkles out of my day. And I’m set to be the master of my spirit, the captain of my soul."

-- from an interview with fashion designer Elie Tahari, 

Iranian-Israeli-Orphan-Refuge.

to Jane Cooney Baker, died 1-22-62:

I will not find you on the street
nor will the phone ring, and each moment will not
let me be in peace.
it is not enough that there are many deaths
and that this is not the first;
it is not enough that I may live many more days,
even perhaps, more years.
it is not enough.
the phone is like a dead animal that will
not speak. and when it speaks again it will
always be the wrong voice now.
I have waited before and you have always walked in through
the door. now you must wait for me.

-- Charles Bukowski

Moss grafitti... Put in blender: one can of cheap beer (or 1 1/2 cups buttermilk), a few handfuls of moss, one teaspoon of sugar. Paint on wall and mist daily until it grows.

Charlotte Farmer

Charlotte is an illustrator in the U.K., whose work I have been admiring for a while, now... she screen prints plates, stationery, tea towels, calendars and makes hand-printed boxes.

website inspiration