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I woke up this morning at 5 and went to Walmart and the Somerset Mall, not because I needed anything, but because this holiday is so absurd it’s funny. On Thanksgiving people give thanks for all the things they have, but at 4 pm they're in lines ready to physically fight someone for the things they do not.

I sit at my computer now writing an essay on Thoreau’s Walden published in 1854. Today needs to read this. Thoreau spent two years in a cabin on Walden Pond in Connecticut relying on nothing but the fruit of his hands. He simplified his life to “only the essential facts” and argues this is the only way to find oneself and relinquish our “lives of quiet desperation.”

The world moves even faster now than then. When are we not exposed to advertisements? When driving, reading, watching TV, a movie, listening to music, walking through a city. Advertisements: attempts by people who want your money to tell you lack something you almost certainly do not.

You are enough. You can improve yourself, certainly, but do it for yourself. There are things worth fighting for—like justice—but a TV is not one of them.

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.” –Thoreau, Walden

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7/12/13

So tonight I'll sleep cold, wrapped up in a bed of diamonds, lie drifting between here and there with the thoughts of my filthy room tiding in my cranium: there the yearbook, there the post-it note poem, there the ticket stub, there the memories submerged for years washed up on my nauseous shore.

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“You were last seen walking through a field of pianos. No. A museum of mouths. In the kitchen of a bustling restaurant, cracking eggs and releasing doves. No. Eating glow worms and waltzing past my bedroom. Last seen riding the subway, literally, straddling its metal back, clutching electrical...

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In the orchard of abandoned dreams I am poured out like water. In the cities of the Caesars We are poured out like water. For the abandoned of the earth You pour me out like water, Like laughter over frozen rivers.

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Graves We Filled Before the Fire

by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Some lose children in lonelier ways: tetanus, hard falls, stubborn fevers

that soak the bedclothes five nights running. Our two boys went out to skate, broke

through the ice like battleships, came back to us in canvas bags: curled

fossils held fast in ancient stone, four hands reaching. Then two

sad beds wide enough for planting wheat or summer-squash but filled

with boys, a barren crop. Our lives stripped clean as oxen bones.

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[thecurseofbabel-blog]

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

Vladimir Nabokov  (via weaverofstars)

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Lazarus' Second Death

He slipped off

not so

unlike

the boy

Kulam:

silently,

his hands

crossed

in sleep

above his chest.

Like Kulam,

no one

sat up

by his side,

pitcher in hand

or song in throat.

Elsewhere

in his house,

his daughters

slept

knots

in their hair.

Three men

awake

in town

swore

they’d seen

that comet

before

loose in heaven.

This time

no one prayed.

[thecurseofbabel-blog]

Our two-bedroom duplex filled with more string basses than guests. The parched graveyard by the freeway where we tried to find Lightnin’ Hopkins’ plot. We did not. Once, I was lying down on the green couch with medicine you squeezed from a blue baster fizzing in my ear. But I could hear our...

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poem for the smallest ghost

The men made promises but failed. Somewhere in Ohio a small woman knelt down to scalp the soil of its weeds. Dirt and dirt and dirt. Ingrid, the worst part is true: only the lovestruck boy kept his word. He left you sleeping, your coffined hands a soft relief. A job well-done. Forgive me, I wanted to follow that boy back to the funeral parlor, to kiss the edge of each careful finger. Thank him for that quiet thread: the unlit bridge from lip to lip.

—Rachel McKibbens, Muzzle

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Magic and Power of Literature

"It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that were once in books… No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for… There’s nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only what books say." -Ray Bradbury May I disagree? To me, the magic of books is how they say what they have to say, not just WHAT it is. The power of prose and poetry is in the marriage of meaning to language.

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Reconciliation of Hands

First draft; I'll happily take suggestions.

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Yoko Ono - Grapefruit (1964)

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Immensity is within ourselves. —Bachelard The heart cannot be chewed down to wish. It cannot talk to the ribs or pelvis— those rock cradles of body bound by their hard and honest suit of machine. The heart cannot speak at all without metaphor; imagination is rumor and breath colliding in its dark avenues, seducing the meat from its born muteness. The heart is more than red and pulse, more, even, than a cell’s want for soul. So when the heart takes a name and greets me on the outside or calls me on the telephone, I realize I’m not dead yet, that I can come back from fading into the body’s old routine of being alive: that animal etiquette when the heart is just a lonely muscle, and language, just a tongue not knowing, not even touching, another tongue.

“Paradox,” Melissa Cundieff-Pexa (via commovente)

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Don't Belittle My English Degree

Alex Romanczuk, major in comparative literature and mathematics: I've derived no tangible benefits from my study of comparative literature. I have no intention of pursuing a graduate degree in the subject, and no employer will ever hire me because of my knowledge of early 20th-century German poetry. Hegel's dialectic won't feed a hungry child, and pretending to understand Finnegans Wake won't somehow give me the moral power to stop the evil scientists from unleashing their killer robots. To think so is dangerous, incorrect, and insulting. A comp-lit degree is really quite useless, which is exactly what I find so appealing.

Literature is beautiful, and even if it is nothing more, I study literature because of an insatiable desire to expose myself to beauty. I enjoy the moments of stillness that that beauty induces. I enjoy listening to myself in those moments.

Is dedicating 65 units of my Stanford career to cultivating stillness an arrogant, privileged, and irresponsible thing to do? Maybe. But it sure makes it easier to do those problem sets. You give to society what you gather in solitude. I've never understood why there's a tension between those who study useful things and those who study beautiful things. We can and should study both.

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Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poetry as Insurgent Art    (via barefoottrippin)