One hundred percent stolen from The Awl

"Within her context, there was never a singing star who shone as brightly as Whitney Houston. The run was shorter than almost every one of her competitors, but diva greatness is not a marathon, but rather, a shining example of the possibility of the human being. There will probably never be another Aretha—certainly, the Beyonce BORG and the militias of teenybopper chart-toppers seem to indicate the end of her era—but it's probable that the never-to-be-famous next Aretha is singing in some church, somewhere. She exists but she simply will never be. Whitney, on the other hand, stretches what we can reasonably comprehend—how could we ever expect to see another with those pipes, that face, that knack for the moment, that personal drama, that incandescent potential?"

_source

Romance

Last night I dreamt of the line, "Then one night, the goddess deigns to write to you!" It's a Rimbaud line. Someone repeated it several times, and afterward it floated in the darkness like a neon marquee. Does anyone else dream of words?

I find it funny, and odd, that even as I am making a concerted effort to Read Less Poetry (I bought a hard copy of  The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs a few days ago and have been reading that), it has to remind me that it's still there, literally haunting my dreams.

William Carlos Williams, in a letter to his son

"You say you’d like to see my book of poems. What the hell? Let 'em go. They are things I wrote because to maintain myself in a world much of which I didn't love I had to fight to keep myself as I wanted to be. The poems are me, in much of the faulty perspective in which I have existed in my own sight—and nothing to copy, not even for anyone even to admire."

And the sun drips down like honey on our lady of the harbor

The emperor of ice-cream

I don't exactly know how to make the leap from all black everything to candy-coated but I am fucking down

Human league

Earlier this week I went to a job interview with mustard on my shoes from the street dog I'd drunkenly consumed on the walk home from the Short Stop the night before; it was washed away by the rain and then dried by the sun fifteen minutes later so by the time I'd reached the interview my shoes were fly and mustardless and that, you guys, is one of the many reasons why I fucking love Los Angeles.

Total anarchy: six months later

In 2011 I fell in love and moved away. It's hard to think about 2011 before that happened. I was with someone I didn't love and I was dissatisfied, not only with him, but with almost every aspect of my life. But, to borrow from Antwerp (again), "then came [June], and before I knew it, everything had changed."

The Temptations: Klonopin

Girl with a Bamboo Earring, Awol Erizku

Flesh of my flesh

 

_{A note I left for Xena this time last year - the cider days}

I saw Carl Dix and Cornel West speak at Berkeley last week, and when Alice Walker was pointed out in the crowd I had to fight back tears.

My housemate got a cat and I'm afraid it thinks that Sam and I are his owners.

Today I learned that William Carlos Williams hated Ezra Pound. The narcissism of small differences? I guess, aside from Pound being an anti-semite and WCW...not.

♫: _{Flesh of My Flesh / Tonight You Belong to Me (1) (2) / In A Mess}