May 2013
1 post
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March 2013
1 post
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The Contradiction
By Clare Pollard The absence contradicts itself: the missing conjures what we miss. You are not here, I’m not myself, but still I talk to you like this. You’re in the crowd, the news, the glimpse - I make you there when you’re not there. I trace your steps, I map your face, I say your name, see you in air. You’re all I know and so unknown. I cannot hold you, yet I do: please let me hold you in...
February 2013
2 posts
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To a love poet
By Dennis O’Driscoll
I
Fortysomething did you say? Or more? By now, no one could care less either way. When you swoop into a room, no heads turn, no cheeks burn, no knowing glances are exchanged, no eye contact is made. You are no longer a meaningful contender in the passion stakes. But a love poet must somehow make love, if only to language, fondling its contours, dressing it in...
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An editor's preface to the language of love...
by Helen Mort
Imagine love’s our youngest language. Two lexicographers in charcoal suits must spend their winters dotting parchment to trace soft plosives, map conspiracies of lips and fingers. How they’d stammer at the accent of a parting handshake or tremble at the easy grammar of heads tipped close. How they’d stand, hawk-eyed and watch two skaters glide, poised to catch the syntax of their...
January 2013
5 posts
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The Good Neighbour
by John Burnside Somewhere along this street, unknown to me, behind a maze of apple trees and stars, he rises in the small hours, finds a book and settles at a window or a desk to see the morning in, alone for once, unnamed, unburdened, happy in himself. I don’t know who he is; I’ve never met him walking to the fish-house, or the bank, and yet I think of him, on nights like these,...
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Amor Vincit Omnia
by John Burnside
Find me when summer ends and the lamps are everything. I have practised being the one to whom you return, if not the betrothed, then at least the autumnal familiar, the almost unveiled. Songlike and lost in the mist, I have made you a bed of fingerprints and outlook and those footsteps that go in the dark through a litmus of snow to seek benediction. Call it a house of cards, or...
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The end of the end of everything part 1 →
Novelist Sam Byers explores the uneasy relationship between the novel and technology.
“Catharsis? I know nothing of catharsis.”
– Nick Flynn, The Reenactments (via wwnorton)
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“Every age has the rhetoric it deserves.”
– Christine Brooke-Rose
December 2012
7 posts
4 tags
The Real Work
by Wendell Berry It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
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The Peace Of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel...
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On Being (Sometimes) Vertical and Verbal
by Carol Rumens
What on earth is it that explains our gait? Even in coupled poise we walk half-cock And crabbed with verbs: “regret”, “anticipate”. That leaves explain how cups originate, And sunlight on a swirl of crags, the clock, Is clear, but what on earth explains our gait?
Our soles plod on. Meanwhile, our palms vibrate
With cunning voices, digits, tones, caps lock, The lexis of young...
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“Behind every word a whole world is hidden that must be imagined.”
– Heinrich Böll
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Esthétique du Mal [excerpt] →
by Wallace Stevens
The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire Is too difficult to tell from despair. Perhaps, After death, the non-physical people, in paradise, Itself non-physical, may, by chance, observe The green corn gleaming and experience The minor of what we feel. The…
via lotsofwordstime
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“I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.”
– Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (via larmoyante)
November 2012
7 posts
4 tags
As I Walked Out One Evening
By W.H Auden
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.
'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
'I'll...
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“In Germany the most important creative social status is given to the musician....”
– Bernard Fixot, owner and publisher of XO, a small publishing house dedicated to churning out best sellers in France.
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“Ripeness is all.”
– Shakespeare (King Lear; spoken by Edgar.)
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“There are two things you don’t throw out in France — bread and books.”
– Bernard Fixot, owner and publisher of XO, a small publishing house dedicated to churning out best sellers in France.
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Golf Echo Romeo Tango India →
I have been listening to episodes of Cabin Pressure.
Therefore, Gerti.
Therefore, Golf Echo Romeo Tango India.
Therefore, the NATO Phonetic Alphabet.
Just saying.
October 2012
46 posts
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“Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it.”
– Salvador Dalí
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Walking away
These 55 writers walked away from diverse jobs and found their calling in writing.
Via amandaonwriting:
What they did before they wrote.
Anne Rice was a waitress, cook and insurance claims examiner.
Charles Dickens worked in a shoe-polish factory.
China Miéville lived in Egypt in 1990, teaching English for a year.
Dan Brown was a high school English teacher.
Dean Koontz was an English...
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“What is a rebel? A man who says no.”
– Albert Camus
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How To Recognize A Classic
Via wwnorton:
Literary history informs us that in every generation there have always been so-called “false positives” – writers deemed brilliant, their works hailed as classics, yet who ultimately recede or plummet from view. Public decorum, not to mention my future as a publisher, precludes an intimate discussion of which writers might today be labeled “false positives,” but I urge you to...
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Bye-Bye Barbar (or What is an Afropolitan?) →
An influential essay written in 2005 by up and coming talent from Africa, Taiye Selasi. We know it’s influential because she coined the term ‘Afropolitan’, which has seeped into the discourse on Africa. Selasi is an author who debuted in Granta last year (Issue 115) the issue on Feminism (memorably called the F word) with her short story ‘The Sex Lives of African...
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Anne Hathaway
by Carol Ann Duffy ‘Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed …’ (from Shakespeare’s will) The bed we loved in was a spinning world of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas where we would dive for pearls. My lover’s words were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme to his, now echo, assonance; his touch a verb...
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I say I say I say
by Simon Armitage
Anyone here had a go at themselves for a laugh? Anyone opened their wrists with a blade in the bath? Those in the dark at the back, listen hard. Those at the front in the know, those of us who have, hands up, let’s show that inch of lacerated skin between the forearm and the fist. Let’s tell it like it is: strong drink, a crimson tidemark round the tub, a yard of...
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I've Made Out A Will; I've left myself
by Simon Armitage
I’ve made out a will; I’m leaving myself to the National Health. I’m sure they can use the jellies and tubes and syrups and glues, the web of nerves and veins, the loaf of brains, and assortment of fillings and stitches and wounds, blood - a gallon exactly of bilberry soup - the chassis or cage or cathedral of bone; but not the heart, they can leave that alone....
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WatchA typewriter story via classicpenguin
Long live the typewriter. Via VSL.
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Writing advice from writers
(…) imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you. ~ Hilary Mantel
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The Caravan
by Clare Pollard
We were alive that evening, on the north Yorkshire moors,
in a valley of scuffed hills and smouldering gorse.
Pheasants strutted, their feathers as richly patterned
as Moroccan rugs, past the old Roma caravan –
candles, a rose-cushioned bed, etched glass –
that I’d hired to imagine us gipsies
as our bacon and bean stew bubbled,
as you built a fire, moustached,...
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Things I Learned at University
by Kate Bingham
How to bike on cobblestones and where to signal right. How to walk through doors held open by Old Etonians and not scowl. How to make myself invisible in seminars by staring at the table. How to tell Victorian Gothic from Medieval. How to eat a Mars bar in the Bodleian. When to agree With everything in theory. How to cultivate a taste for sherry. Where to bike on the pavement...
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“Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by...”
– Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
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Writing advice from writers
onlyaworkingtitle:
“Try to think of writing as a gift - more complexly put: it is the curse and the cure.”
Julianna Baggott (via writingquotes)
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Writing advice from writers
Via theparisreview:
“Once you’re into a story everything seems to apply—what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you’re writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.” Eudora Welty
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“You can’t know what a book is about until the very end. This is true of a book...”
– Lynda Barry (via writingquotes)
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Famous first lines
“It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member, She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.”
- Carson Mccullers, The Member of the Wedding.
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And If It Was
by Carol Rumens
If it was only for you all along, all the time, all the way, and nothing was left of our brightest exchange of brain-light and blood-sugar; if it turned out to be just for the flirt and the fling, the great luck when it worked, when we came, and I caught the whiff of your sweat, like human sweat, and your glow, saw your feathers and hair flare like an Inca head-dress, though no...
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