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Saturday, February 24th, 2007
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It looks fake, doesn't it?
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Sunday, January 14th, 2007
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It is a whiny book, but with some moments of pure beauty.
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Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006
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Wednesday, May 24th, 2006
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| Time: | May 24th, 2006 | 22.20 |
| Music: | someone found the future as a statue in a fountain. |
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I received a surprise package from Amazon in the mail today - it was a book by Nabokov and an Elliott Smith cd.
Along with it was a note of congratulations.
There is something precious about a gift that arrives without any thought that anything might arrive.
Reading Nabokov on the train, I came across this line, "And yet I have been fashioned so painstakingly," thought Cincinnatus as he wept in the darkness. "The curvature of my spine has been calculated so well, so mysteriously." I have not found a line in a book amusing for years. I actually laughed out loud. I think that in the midst of all those college classes and papers, I forgot how to enjoy reading.
But I've remembered now.
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| Time: | May 14th, 2006 | 03.15 |
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“She's got everything she needs,
She's an artist, she don't look back.
She can take the dark out of the nighttime
And paint the daytime black.”
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"The creative writers in this country—those who have earned an MFA and those who haven't—produce untold millions of poems, stories, novels, and essays. But for whom are they writing? Where is the readership to support this prodigious output? Certainly, bookstores and libraries prove that there are still readers out there. Yet Reading at Risk sounds the alarm that the practice of literary reading in America is in serious decline.
How can it be that MFA programs in creative writing flourish in a country where literary reading does not? I recall the writer who told me, without irony, that he doesn't read because he doesn't want to be influenced. And the eight-year-old who, after I suggested we read some poems together, replied, 'I like writing poems better than reading them.'"
http://www.pw.org/mag/0605/newsbednarik.htm
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Thursday, April 6th, 2006
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I would like to learn more about publishing and design.
If anyone has suggestions on material to read or resources to research in order to learn how to create a webpage and how to get a webpage, I would be grateful.
Also, if anyone has knowledge about various design programs and wants to make suggestions as to the best program available now, that would be superb.
I would like to know if Quark or InDesign is better. Or if there is another program that seems to be better... Which is easier to use? How can I learn to use these programs? etc.
Please, please, please let me know.
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Tuesday, December 20th, 2005
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There is a citywide transit strike today. I've thought about staying home, but maybe I'll just go see what it's like out there, walk from 96th Street down to 56th Street, see what the city is like when everyone is without something they desperately need.
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Thursday, December 1st, 2005
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Wednesday, November 16th, 2005
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"You - You look a bit like coffee
And you taste a bit like me
How - Can I keep me from moving?
Now - I need a change of scenery
Just listen to me I won't pretend to
Understand the movement of the wind
Or the waves out in the ocean or how
Like the hours I change softly slowly
Plainly blindly"
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Tuesday, November 15th, 2005
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Monday, September 26th, 2005
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Christina took the free ColorQuiz.com personality test! "Intense, vital, and animated, taking a delight in ..."
Click here to read the rest of the results.
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Wednesday, September 21st, 2005
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This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051010/olds
No Place for a Poet at a Banquet of Shame
by SHARON OLDS
[from the October 10, 2005 issue of The Nation.]
For reasons spelled out below, the poet Sharon Olds has declined to attend the National Book Festival in Washington, which, coincidentally or not, takes place September 24, the day of an antiwar mobilization in the capital. Olds, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award and professor of creative writing at New York University, was invited along with a number of other writers by First Lady Laura Bush to read from their works. Three years ago artist Jules Feiffer declined to attend the festival's White House breakfast as a protest against the Iraq War ("Mr. Feiffer Regrets," November 11, 2002). We suggest that invitees to this year's event consider following their example. --The Editors
Laura Bush
First Lady
The White House
Dear Mrs. Bush,
I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival on September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the breakfast at the White House.
In one way, it's a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents--all of us who need the pleasure, and the inner and outer news, it delivers.
And the concept of a community of readers and writers has long been dear to my heart. As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a women's prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology ward for children. Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged, has been running now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA candidates and their students--long-term residents at the hospital who, in their humor, courage and wisdom, become our teachers.
When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost nonmoving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing. When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely nonspeaking and nonmoving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self-expression, accuracy, honesty and wit--and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person's unique story and song.
So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country--with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain--did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made "at the top" and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism--the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to.
I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness--as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing--against this undeclared and devastating war.
But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.
What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting "extraordinary rendition": flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us.
So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.
Sincerely,
SHARON OLDS
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Monday, August 29th, 2005
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Taken from I and You
August 28, 2005
By DAVID ORR
Consider, for example, a text message version of Keats's famous explanation of ''negative capability'' (as originally set forth in a letter to his brothers, George and Thomas, it's a kind of artistic disinterest):
JKEATS1: Iz tryN 2 dev mor neg cap
G&TKEATS: watz dat?
JKEATS1: dats bn N uncertainties -- misteries -- doubts w/o NE irritable reachN aftr fact & reasN : -)
G&TKEATS: kewl
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Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005
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If anyone wants a restaurant deal for some of the more expensive restaurants in NYC, this is pretty good:
Summer Restaurant Week:
For 10 days this summer—June 20-24 and June 27-July 1— enjoy three-course lunches for $20.12 and three-course dinners for $35, not including tax and gratuity, at more than 100 of the city's best restaurants.
http://www.newyorkmetro.com/restaurants/articles/restaurantweek/
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Wednesday, June 15th, 2005
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| Time: | June 15th, 2005 | 00.43 |
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I came home to a flooded kitchen. Hell, let the floods flood. It's all about the swim, isn't it?
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| Time: | June 5th, 2005 | 23.26 |
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"I think he disappointed me when he didn't let me down."
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| Time: | June 2nd, 2005 | 01.34 |
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When I arrived on Ellwood Street, I just wanted to take off my shoes.
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