Alone again or

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The Gulag Express

In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly

Dylan Thomas, "I See the Boys of Summer"

A process of individual museumification

I recently had a conversation about exploitation for the sake of art and it made me think of this post from my old blog:

Roi Vaara, "The Artists Dilemma"

"The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. But every damn thing matters! It's just that we don't realize. We tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, we don't even realize that's a lie."
- from "Dentist" in Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño

In a silent way

Albert Londe, Hysteria

Currently reading

Where I Wanna Be

That outfit, that drink

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?"

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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."