February 2013
1 post
"Gears" by Alex Pruteanu: "Nth Week in Rehab"
Gears by Alex Pruteanu “Nth Week in Rehab” “i’ll tell you this. the last time I burned rock in the glass dick they found me in a santa suit walking up and down Military Trail throwing bags of shit at cars and reciting Kierkegaard outloud. i woke up in the drunk tank in hallandale beach florida next to a cuban tranny who was urinating in my hair entertaining the...
January 2013
1 post
Excerpt from “Betty Superman” by Tiff Holland
Excerpt from “Betty Superman” by Tiff Holland
“What she says: you look like a boy. Chest out! You read too much. Just a minute, can’t you see I’m on the phone? All girls who play sports are lesbians. Football players are a bunch of fanny patters. Oh, sit on my lap, you know you want to: you’re mommy’s little girl. Don’t frown, you’ll get wrinkles. You could be beautiful if you wanted to. I wish...
December 2012
4 posts
Excerpt from "The Edge of the Alphabet," by Janet...
Excerpt from “The Edge of the Alphabet,” by Janet Frame: “But there is a family of secret rats. They wear the fur of habit. They destroy with their sharp teeth. They are Change, Time, Forgetfulness, who invade first for a few minutes, then for hours; finally they stay. You may wish to be rid of them, to sprinkle in your mind the succulent high-priced poison which, the...
Excerpt from "The Edge of the Alphabet," by Janet...
Excerpt from “The Edge of the Alphabet,” by Janet Frame “It is the clutter of death which is inescapable. Winter is death; the old comparison; the cruising whale-spouting clouds with their silver undersides, refusing to swim from the sky; the untidy heaps of sodden leaves; dark layabouts of ponds in the shelter of hedges, in the hollows of the paddocks; the determined squatting...
Excerpt from "The Edge of the Alphabet," by Janet...
An excerpt from “The Edge of the Alphabet,” by Janet Frame “It is raining and raining and I will die. The buildings topple, slide with the bruised and broken leaves into the earth, folded deep. The yellow glare in the sky is the striped mantle of tigers, licked cool, healed by the darting tongues of frost. Yet winter, age, loneliness, have come leaping with seventy claws...
Excerpt from "The Edge of the Alphabet," by Janet...
Excerpt from “The Edge of the Alphabet,” by Janet Frame. “Man is the only species for whom the disposal of waste is a burden, a task often ill judged, costly, criminal–especially when he learns to include himself, living and dead, in the list of waste products. The creator of the world did not employ a dustman to collect the peelings of his creation. Now I, Thora Pattern (who...
November 2012
1 post
Happy birthday, brilliant Anne Sexton! LOVE YOU!...
Happy birthday, brilliant Anne Sexton! Music Swims Back To Me Anne Sexton Wait Mister. Which way is home? They turned the light out and the dark is moving in the corner. There are no sign posts in this room, four ladies, over eighty, in diapers every one of them. La la la, Oh music swims back to me and I can feel the tune they played the night they left me in this private institution on a hill....
May 2012
3 posts
"Little Things," by Raymond Carver
Little Things by Raymond Carver
Early that day the weather turned and the snow was melting into dirty water. Streaks of it ran down from the little shoulder-high window that faced the backyard. Cars slushed by on the street outside, where it was getting dark. But it was getting dark on the inside too.
He was in the bedroom pushing clothes into a suitcase when she came to the...
"After the Hysterectomy," by Mary Stone Dockery...
“Mirrors crack in my teeth. I have to squint to see the scar on my belly and through the blur imagine a cesarean scar, press its ridges, consider something once grew beneath it. I see mostly difference. My hands versus her hands. My uterus versus hers. She tells me she refuses to have children and I imagine cutting babies from her womb, taking them into my dreams. Her womb is milky, full,...
Excerpt from "Nothing or next to nothing," by...
Excerpt from “Nothing or next to nothing,” by Barry Graham “History made sense to me, not because you need to learn where you came from in order to know where you’re going, or because you must learn from past mistakes or you’ll be destined to repeat them, or even because it helps explain why things are the way they are, none of that cliche bullshit. History made...
From Twenty poems by Anna Akhmatova
From Twenty poems by Anna Akhmatova “It is not with the lyre of someone in love that I go seducing people. The rattle of the leper is what sings in my hands.”
April 2012
6 posts
"In My Craft or Sullen Art," by Dylan Thomas
“In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all the griefs in their arms, I labor by singing light Not for ambition or bread or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages But for the common wages Of their most secret heart Not for the proud man apart From the raging moon I write On these spindrift pages Nor for the...
Excerpt from "Sanitorium Under the Sign of the...
“It is strange how old interiors reflect their dark turbulent past, how in their stillness bygone history tries to be reenacted, how the same situations repeat themselves with infinite variations, turned upside down and inside out by the fruitless dialectic of wallpapers and hangings. Silence, vitiated and demoralized, ferments into recriminations. Why hide it? The excessive excitements and...
Excerpt from "Sanitorium Under the Sign of the...
Excerpt from “Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” by Bruno Schulz “Where is truth to shelter, where is it to find asylum if not in a place where nobody is looking for it: in fairground calendars and almanacs, in the canticles of beggars and tramps, which in direct line are derived from stamp albums?”
"Delirium," by Arthur Rimbaud, Alchemy of the Word
“Delirium,” by Arthur Rimbaud Alchemy of the Word “Now for me! The story of one of my follies. For a long time I boasted of possessing every pos- sible landscape and held in derision the celebrities of modern painting and poetry. I loved maudlin pictures, the painted panels over doors, stage sets the back-drops of mountebanks, old inn signs, popular prints; antiquated...
"Nothing Into Nothing Equals Nothing," by Howie...
“Nothing Into Nothing Equals Nothing,” by Howie Good. Poem from his collection, “Little Tragedies.” “The tiny bird riding on my shoulder only uses words I haven’t ever looked up. Better to live life, I answer, than to write about it. I walk out of the room followed by the man Chekhov said we should hire to hit us with a hammer when we’re happy - and who...
March 2012
4 posts
Excerpt from "Ryder," by Djuna Barnes
“Given an empty beaker, would she not have quaffed and have become drunken; given a flowerless stalk, would she not have dipped her little nose thereto and have breathed “A rose! A rose!” in ecstastic syllables, thereby throwing all men from earth’s end to earth’s end to their knees with something of religion and painful lust, religion’s breakwater? Given a...
Excerpt from my favorite Irish writer, Flann...
Excerpt from my favorite Irish writer, Flann O’Brien (The Third Policeman) “Preparations for the funeral were put in hand at once. Lying in my dark blanket-padded coffin I could hear the sharp blows of a hammer nailing down the lid. It soon turned out that the hammering was the work of Sergeant Pluck. He was standing smiling at me from the doorway and he looked large and lifelike and...
Excerpt from "Owls Do Cry," by Janet Frame. (In...
Excerpt from “Owls Do Cry,” by Janet Frame. (In honor of International Women’s Day tomorrow) “And Daphne lived there alone for many years, amid the assault and insinuation of sound in days unshining and nights without darkness; first the farm cries from the hill, the lariat of surging animal talk whipped in and out of the morning mist; the ear strangled in a noose of bark,...
Excerpt from "One Hundred Years of Solitude,"...
Excerpt from “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez on his birthday. “So much time had passed since the sun had mummified the empty skin of the last animal that everybody took it for granted that the lady of the house and the maid had died long before the wars were over, and that if the house was still standing it was because in recent years there had not been a...
February 2012
9 posts
Quote from "Insomnia" by Kristine Ong Muslim
Quote from “Insomnia,” by Kristine Ong Muslim: Key to the Body “Each twisting of the scalpel incites blood to well on the surface, the hairless skin. When we tire of the fine stitches that sew tight the once gaping wounds which could have revealed rooms and corridors of dirty objects, we do not take time to double-stitch. We scrimp on patches of sky, and soon, we are left...
Quote from Jim Valvis: "How to Say Goodbye,"...
Quote from Jim Valvis’s “How to Say Goodbye.” Breasts “All my life I loved breasts, and now that I have them my wife wants me to diet.”
Oscar Wilde on Love:
Oscar Wilde on love:
“True love suffers, and is silent.” “It is said that passion makes one think in a circle.” “I might mimic a passion that I do not feel, but I cannot mimic one that burns one like fire.” “…not love at first sight, but love at the end of the season, which is so much more satisfactory.”
Excerpt from "Chronology of Water," by Lidia...
Excerpt from “Chronology of Water,” by Lidia Yuknavitch “You will see you have an underlying tone and plot to your life underneath the one you’ve been told. Circular and image bound. Something near tragic, near unbearable, but contained by your irreducible imagination–who would have thought of it but you–your ability to metamorphose like organic material in contact...
Excerpt from "Adventures in the Skin Trade." Dylan...
Excerpt from “Adventures in the Skin Trade.” Dylan Thomas “He sank into the ragged green water for the second time and, rising with seaweed and a woman under each arm and a mouthful of broken shells, he saw the whole of his dead life standing trembling before him, indestructible and unsinkable, on the brandy-brown waves. It looked like a hallstand.”
Herman Melville: Excerpt from Moby Dick
“All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters around their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not...
Janet Frame: Excerpt from "Owls Do Not Cry."
Excerpt from Janet Frame: “Owls Do Cry.”
“The hand of silence over their mouths till the first taste that brings peace and war, while the matron and the ward sister, in white communion with the speech of mill and laundry, flow like waves from table to table, spilling and salt and omnipotent.
After the meal the half-minute to arrange the head and focus the withered eyes back to the heat and...
Excerpt from "Nightwood." Djuna Barnes
Excerpt from ‘Nightwood.’ Djuna Barnes “We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality. We sleep in a long reproachful dust against ourselves. We are full to the gorge with our own names for misery. Life, the pastures in which the night feeds and prunes the cud that nourishes us to despair. Life, the permission to know death. We were created that the earth might be made...
Excerpt from "Sisters": James Joyce (Happy...
Excerpt from “The Sisters”
James Joyce
“He had often said to me: I am not long for this world, and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Cathechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of...
December 2011
1 post
Flannery O'Connor reading "A Good Man is Hard to...
http://manasto.tumblr.com/post/107920720/a-good-man-is-hard-to-find-by-flannery-oconnor
What a treasure!!!! The incomparable Flannery O’connor reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” in 1959!!!! WOW!!!
August 2011
1 post
Quote from Aldous Huxley
“There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that’s your own self.”
July 2011
5 posts
Excerpt from "Watt" by Samuel Beckett
“Alone the bed maintained the illusion of fixity, the bed so tasteful, the bed so solid, that it was round, and clamped to the ground. Mr. Knott’s head, Mr. Knott’s feet, in nightly displacements of almost one minute, completed in twelve months their circuit of this solitary couch. His coccyx also, and adjacent gear, performed their little annual revolution, as appeared...
Excerpt from "Dust Tracks on a Road," by Zora...
“‘First it is the number of men who pant in my ear on short acquaintance, “You passionate thing! I can see you are just burning up! Most men would be disappointing to you. It takes a man like me for you. Ahhh!! I know that you will just wreck me! Your eyes and your lips tell me a lot. You are a walking furnace!’ This amazes me sometimes. Often when this is whispered...
Excerpt from "The Street of Crocodiles" by Bruno...
“Am I to conceal from you,’ he said in a low tone, “that my own brother, as a result of a long and incurable illness, has been gradually transformed into a bundle of rubber tubing, and that my poor cousin had to carry him day and night on his cushion, singing to the luckless creature endless lullabies on winter nights? Can there be anything sadder than a human being changed...
Excerpt from The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
“De Selby has some interesting things to say on the subject of houses. A row of houses he regards as a row of necessary evils. The softening and degeneration of the human race he attributes to its progressive predilection for interiors and waning interest in the art of going out and staying there. This in turn he sees as the result of the rise of such pursuits as reading,...
Excerpt from Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
“It was the world that was absent-minded and it was Pnin whose business it was to set it straight. His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence. He was inept with his hands to a rare degree; but because he could manufacture in a twinkle a...
June 2011
9 posts
Herman Melville: excerpt from Moby Dick
“Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-colored squares and triangles; and this arm of his tatooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one...
Excerpt from "The Displaced Person," by Flannery...
“Mrs. Shortley recalled a newsreel she had seen once of a small room piled high with bodies of dead naked people all in a heap, their arms and legs tangled together, a head thrust in here, a head there, a foot, a knee, a part that should have been covered up sticking out, a hand raised clutching nothing. Before you could realize that it was real and take it into your head, the picture...
Excerpt from "Miss MacIntosh, My Darling," by...
“She presumed always that things were not what they seemed, that all forms must change their shapes, that all characters must bear, even to those most familiar with them, an element of cold surprise, even of horror, that her life was this play of illusion, that there should be nothing certain but uncertainty, no pavement more secure than the glassy surface of the evening tide and the...
An anonymous quote from Heidi Schulman
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
Excerpt from "Big Blonde" by Dorothy Parker
“The women at Jimmy’s looked remarkably alike, and this was curious, for, through feuds, removals, and opportunities of more profitable contacts, the personnel of the group changed constantly. Yet always the newcomers resembled those whom they replaced. They were all big women and stout, broad of shoulder and abundantly breasted, with faces thickly clothed in soft, high-colored...
Excerpt from "Big Blonde" by Dorothy Parker
“She was not a woman given to recollections. At her middle thirties, her old days were a blurred and flickering sequence, an imperfect film, dealing with the actions of strangers.”
Quote from Dylan Thomas
“An acoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.”
Excerpt from "Nightwood" by Djuna Barnes
” The sleeper is a proprietor of an unknown land. He goes about another business in the dark–and we, his partners, who go to the opera, who listen to gossip of cafe friends, who walk along the boulevards, or sew a quiet seam, cannot afford an inch of it; because, though we would purchase it with blood, it has no counter and no till. She who stands looking down upon her who lies...
Excerpt from "Nightwood" by Djuna Barnes
Excerpt from Nightwood by Djuna Barnes “Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them. Stretch it as thin as the temple flesh of an ailing woman and still it serves to ache the bone and to move the bone about; and in like manner the night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in a torment. We will find no comfort until the night melts away; until the fury of the...
May 2011
3 posts
David Sedaris: excerpt from "The Monster Mash."
“In the lobby was a potted plant and a receptionist who kept a can of Mountain Glen air freshener in her desk drawer. “For decomps,” she explained, meaning those who had died alone and rotted awhile before being found. We had such a case on Halloween, an eighty-year-old man who had tumbled from a ladder while replacing a lightbulb. Four and a half days on the floor of his...
Anna Akhmatova/ Poem written in 1917
Anna Akhmatova Poem written in 1917 “There is a certain hour every day so troubled and heavy… I speak to melancholy in a loud voice not bothering to open my sleepy eyes. And it pulses like blood, is warm like a sigh, like happy love is smart and nasty.”
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad quote:
“A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.”
April 2011
3 posts
Sylvia Plath "Aftermath"
“Compelled by calamity’s magnet
They loiter and stare as if the house
Burnt-out were theirs, or as if they thought
Some scandal might any minute ooze
From a smoke-choked closet into light;
No deaths, no prodigious injuries
Glut these hunters after an old meat,
Blood-spoor of the austere tragedies.
Mother Medea in a green smock
Moves humbly as any housewife through
Her ruined...
Robert Musil "The Man Without Qualities" (2...
Robert Musil: excerpts from “The Man Without Qualities.”
“This town had a past, and it even had a face, but the eyes did not go with the mouth, or the chin with the hair; over everything lay the traces of a hectic life that is inwardly empty. This could possibly, under special personal circumstances, foster great originality.”
“Ulrich had the sense of something...
