rmluna-blog

[rmluna-blog]

There's something so satisfying about listening to sad songs. They're like how you would actually be spending your day if you were allowed to just break down and sob and grab hold of everyone you met. They make you feel less alone with your crazy thoughts. They don't judge you. In fact, they understand you. A break-up song won't ever suggest you start online dating or that you're better off without him. They tell you that you're worse without him, which is exactly what you want to hear because it's how you feel. I didn't want to be cheered up. I didn't want to bounce back. I didn't want to meet someone new. I wanted to wallow, big time, deeply, and with the least amount of perspective possible.

Starlee Kine, This American Life, 339: Breakups

[rmluna-blog]

The book reveals another side of Murakami, one not so easy to pin down. Incurably restive, ambiguous and valiantly struggling toward a new level of maturation. A shedding of Murakami skin. It is not “Blonde on Blonde,” it is “Blood on the Tracks.”

Patti Smith, "Deep Chords: Haruki Murakami’s ‘Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage’" New York Times

[rmluna-blog]

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another; rather, it teaches us to abide with the fact that, in their own way, all things are true, and helps us, in the face of this terrifying knowledge, continually push ourselves in the direction of Open the Hell Up.

George Saunders

[rmluna-blog]

Faint Music

Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.

When everything broken is broken,   

and everything dead is dead,

and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,

and the heroine has studied her face and its defects

remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,

as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves

has lost its novelty and not released them,

and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,

watching the others go about their days—

likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears—

that self-love is the one weedy stalk

of every human blossoming, and understood,

therefore, why they had been, all their lives,   

in such a fury to defend it, and that no one—

except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool

of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic

life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,

faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.

As in the story a friend told once about the time   

he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him.

Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.   

He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge,   

the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon.

And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,”

that there was something faintly ridiculous about it.

No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch

he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass,   

scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp

along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word   

was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise

the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs,   

and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up   

on the girder like a child—the sun was going down

and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket   

he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing   

carefully, and drove home to an empty house.

There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties

hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed.   

A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick   

with rage and grief. He knew more or less

where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill.   

They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears   

in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,”   

she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights,   

a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay.   

“You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?”

“Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now,

“I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while—

Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall—

and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more,   

and go to sleep.

                        And he, he would play that scene

once only, once and a half, and tell himself

that he was going to carry it for a very long time

and that there was nothing he could do

but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened   

to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark

cracking and curling as the cold came up.

It’s not the story though, not the friend

leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,”

which is the part of stories one never quite believes.   

I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain

it must sometimes make a kind of singing.

And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps—

First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.

                                 - Robert Hass

[rmluna-blog]

“I wanted to do something real American, about what it’s like to live in America around the millennium.” He continued, “There’s something particularly sad about it, something that doesn’t have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It’s more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness. Whether it’s unique to our generation I really don’t know.”

David Foster Wallace on his novel Infinite Jest

10 Novels We Dare You To Finish - Flavorwire

[rmluna-blog]

This is what it's like to be alive without you here: some fall out of the world. I fall back into what I was. Days go by when I do nothing but underline the damp edge of myself. What I want is what I've always wanted. What I want is to be changed.

Mary Szybist, from “To Gabriela at the Donkey Sanctuary” (via renegadetongue)

[rmluna-blog]

The primary challenges of the theatre should not always be getting people to give a shit about it. The primary challenge should be to produce plays that reach out to people and change their lives. Theatre is not an event, like a hayride or a junior prom--it's an artistic, emotional experience in which people who have privately worked out their stories share them with a group of people who are, without their knowledge, their friends, their peers, their equals, their partners on a remarkable ride.

Arthur Penn

[rmluna-blog]

It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over — the moment. 

[rmluna-blog]

When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a hose on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant...

[rmluna-blog]

Rain Light

All day the stars watch from long ago my mother said I am going now when you are alone you will be all right whether or not you know you will know look at the old house in the dawn rain all the flowers are forms of water the sun reminds them through a white cloud touches the patchwork spread on the hill the washed colors of the afterlife that lived there long before you were born see how they wake without a question even though the whole world is burning

[rmluna-blog]

XXIII

There many pages keep the impression where a sharp nail has made a dent. On these, with something like obsession, the girl’s attentive eyes are bent. Tatyana sees with trepidation what kind of thought, what observation, had drawn Eugene’s especial heed and where he’d silently agreed. Her eyes along the margin flitting pursue his pencil. Everywhere Onegin’s soul encountered there declares itself in ways unwitting �� terse words or crosses in the book, or else a query’s wondering hook.

XXIV

And so, at last, feature by feature, Tanya begins to understand more thoroughly, thank God, the creature for whom her passion has been planned by fate’s decree: this freakish stranger, who walks with sorrow, and with danger, whether from heaven or from hell, this angel, this proud devil, tell, what is he? Just an apparition, a shadow, null and meaningless, a Muscovite in Harold’s dress, a modish second-hand edition, a glossary of smart argot… a parodistic raree-show?

[rmluna-blog]

Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

On Keeping a Journal - Joan Didion

[rmluna-blog]

                             I can tell you, the telling gets old…

First, check your list: three shallots, peeled, two cloves garlic, cup and a half of chicken stock, worry about rice later. Focus dicing then mincing and organizing heaps— are they all square? Good, grease the pot .

                                                                        first I tried to avoid it,                                                                         easier to push your arm away                                                                         than shake you from sleep,                                                                         easier not to mention your advances.

medium-high heat, simmer until clear spread 1 cup of rice stir heat stock

                                                                        it’s arrogant, I’d say, to assume so much.                                                                         You knew every girl I loved, bore                                                                         my incessant swooning

stir

                                                                        latching to a song

add threads of saffron to the stock, wait until the rice tans

                                                                        I should have been clear,

add broth

                                                                        I tried distance—                                                                         it is easy to avoid your arms                                                                         when they’re in a different                                                                         time zone

one ladel at a time.

                                                                         I tried forgetting—                                                                          how when we first met you told                                                                          about your last boyfriend.

remember to stir,

                                                                         But you expected certainty.

if you want, add wine.

                                                                          I tried being sorry,                                                                           concealing my happiness                                                                           after each date—you asked me                                                                           not to talk about it, to apologize                                                                           subtly, for my sexuality,                                                                           through inside jokes, regarding stacks,                                                                           something unspoken held                                                                           in our walking

the stock should be empty by now,

                                                                         We were close, I know. I                                                                           wanted it to work,                                                                          for silence and a few                                                                               months distance to make                                                                              things clear,

starch lines should circle the pot add cheese,

                                                                          I never thought of you that way.

when ready

                                                                          I can’t deny what you did                                                                           for me, how often I still catch                                                                           myself mirroring you

taste

                                                                          I never thought you would                                                                           accuse me                                                                           so earnestly—sitting next                                                                           to me on your                                                                           couch, insisting our                                                                           friendship                                                                           was something more—

think of this as a base

                                                                          I thought it would be different. add what you want                                                                           I’d say it’s my fault,                                                                           and it is. I left,                                                                           for now. be creative

                                                                          I didn’t want it to end like this                                                                           believe me.

                                      I can tell you,                                       I can wait

make something new.

Risotto

[rmluna-blog]

In the life we lead together every paradise is lost. Nothing could be easier: summer gathers new leaves to casual darkness. So few things we need to know. And the old wisdoms shudder in us and grow slack. Like renunciation. Like the melancholy beauty of giving it all up. Like walking steadfast in the rhythms, winter light and summer dark. And the time for cutting furrows and the dance. Mad seed. Death waits it out. It waits us out, the sleek incandescent saints, earthly and prayerful. In our modesty. In our shamefast and steady attention to the ceremony, its preparation, the formal hovering of pleasure which falls like the rain we pray not to get and are glad for and drown in.

robert hass

[rmluna-blog]

the shrinking lonesome sestina

Somewhere in everyone's head something points toward home, a dashboard's floating compass, turning all the time to keep from turning. It doesn't matter how we come to be wherever we are, someplace where nothing goes the way it went once, where nothing holds fast to where it belongs, or what you've risen or fallen to. What the bubble always points to, whether we notice it or not, is home. It may be true that if you move fast everything fades away, that given time and noise enough, every memory goes into the blackness, and if new ones come- small, mole-like memories that come to live in the furry dark-they, too, curl up and die. But Carol goes to high school now. John works at home what days he can to spend some time with Sue and the kids. He drives too fast. Ellen won't eat her breakfast. Your sister was going to come but didn't have the time. Some mornings at one or two or three I want you home a lot, but then it goes. It all goes. Hold on fast to thoughts of home when they come. They're going to less with time. Time goes too fast. Come home. Forgive me that. One time it wasn't fast. A myth goes that when the years come then you will, too. Me, I'll still be home. Miller Williams

[rmluna-blog]

(Sigh. Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness—a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest Self which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of a kitchen chair—then this confirmation that you have triumphed again and managed to gull yet another mark, except this time it was the one person you’d hoped might be immune to your ever-creakier, puddle-shallow, sideshow-barker variation on “adorable,” even though you’d been launching this campaign weekly with a single-minded concentration from day one…well, it conjures up feelings that are best described as mixed, to say the least.)

[rmluna-blog]

Letter to N.Y.

For Louise Crane In your next letter I wish you'd say where you are going and what you are doing; how are the plays and after the plays what other pleasures you're pursuing: taking cabs in the middle of the night, driving as if to save your soul where the road gose round and round the park and the meter glares like a moral owl, and the trees look so queer and green standing alone in big black caves and suddenly you're in a different place where everything seems to happen in waves, and most of the jokes you just can't catch, like dirty words rubbed off a slate, and the songs are loud but somehow dim and it gets so teribly late, and coming out of the brownstone house to the gray sidewalk, the watered street, one side of the buildings rises with the sun like a glistening field of wheat. --Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid if it's wheat it's none of your sowing, nevertheless I'd like to know what you are doing and where you are going.