Meant to post this days ago but couldn't find words for this top section. So, a list: browning butter on my little gas stove with the porch door open, popsicles for breakfast, mellow nights at work and mornings spent reading in the light of my apartment. Solo beach days and salad lunches.
Lately:
"When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse." Baltimore.
On James Salter, whose works are " hewn from the same stone: the fretfulness that stalks us even in the moments when we should be most content." (Currently reading the dreamlike A Sport and a Pastime.)
Embracing a life of solitude in a mountain town.
"Three or four times I went away to teach, but usually M. would come with me, and we simply made our home, temporarily, somewhere else. And, while I always loved the stillness I found in the fields and the woods, our house was a different thing, and I loved that too. We were talkers -- about our work, our pasts, our friends, our ideas ordinary and far-fetched. We would often wake before there was light in the sky and make coffee and let our minds rattle our tongues. We would end in exhaustion and elation. Not many nights or early mornings later, we would do the same. It was a forty-year conversation." Mary Oliver writes of her longtime partner, photographer Molly Malone Cook, and their life together.
"Listen, my wary one, it's far too late to unlove each other." Misgivings.
Alexander Chee on drag.
"The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind and shade. These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph." Sally Mann's exposure, via Jessica Stanley.
Chasing Yeats / Building the man I am / Molly Lambert on Mad Men / Good intentions / Remembering Dave Goldberg / NYC subway style / Enjoying the Lit Up podcast / Richard Scarry's LA / A beautiful Florida home / Really looking forward to The Folded Clock / A keeping society / Also looking forward to Spinster / and Krakauer's take on Missoula.
"Faced with the knowledge that nothing we say, no matter how trivial or silly, will ever be completely erased, we find it hard to take the risks that togetherness entails. But perhaps, as lonely people often are, I am being too negative, too paranoid. Perhaps we are capable of adapting, of finding intimacy in this landscape of unprecedented exposure. What I want to know is where we are headed. What is this sense of perpetual scrutiny doing to our ability to connect?"
"When I began seriously reading Joan Didion, in my early twenties, my response was less 'this is amazing' than 'this is allowed?' As is the case with many young writers, early encounters with Didion felt to me like a revelation, a shocking and delightful window into what it meant to forge an intimacy with one's readers while remaining duly mysterious." Meghan Daum on Joan Didion.
Lately:
"When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse." Baltimore.
On James Salter, whose works are " hewn from the same stone: the fretfulness that stalks us even in the moments when we should be most content." (Currently reading the dreamlike A Sport and a Pastime.)
Embracing a life of solitude in a mountain town.
"Three or four times I went away to teach, but usually M. would come with me, and we simply made our home, temporarily, somewhere else. And, while I always loved the stillness I found in the fields and the woods, our house was a different thing, and I loved that too. We were talkers -- about our work, our pasts, our friends, our ideas ordinary and far-fetched. We would often wake before there was light in the sky and make coffee and let our minds rattle our tongues. We would end in exhaustion and elation. Not many nights or early mornings later, we would do the same. It was a forty-year conversation." Mary Oliver writes of her longtime partner, photographer Molly Malone Cook, and their life together.
"Listen, my wary one, it's far too late to unlove each other." Misgivings.
Alexander Chee on drag.
"The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind and shade. These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph." Sally Mann's exposure, via Jessica Stanley.
Chasing Yeats / Building the man I am / Molly Lambert on Mad Men / Good intentions / Remembering Dave Goldberg / NYC subway style / Enjoying the Lit Up podcast / Richard Scarry's LA / A beautiful Florida home / Really looking forward to The Folded Clock / A keeping society / Also looking forward to Spinster / and Krakauer's take on Missoula.
"Faced with the knowledge that nothing we say, no matter how trivial or silly, will ever be completely erased, we find it hard to take the risks that togetherness entails. But perhaps, as lonely people often are, I am being too negative, too paranoid. Perhaps we are capable of adapting, of finding intimacy in this landscape of unprecedented exposure. What I want to know is where we are headed. What is this sense of perpetual scrutiny doing to our ability to connect?"
"When I began seriously reading Joan Didion, in my early twenties, my response was less 'this is amazing' than 'this is allowed?' As is the case with many young writers, early encounters with Didion felt to me like a revelation, a shocking and delightful window into what it meant to forge an intimacy with one's readers while remaining duly mysterious." Meghan Daum on Joan Didion.