For Junior Gilliam (1928-1978)
And so I dreamed: to rise far
from Kansas skies and fenceless outfields
where flies vanished in the summer sun.
To wake up black in Brooklyn,
to be a Bum and have folks call me Junior
and almost errorless hit .280 every year
and on the field, like you, dance double plays,
make flawless moves, amaze the baseball masses.-B.H. Fairchild (excerpt)
(Source: nlbpa.com)
to the girls who made me uncomfortable today, who made a conversation into a strand of incoherent pop-culture-pseudo-intellectual references and pretension, and to those who think brooch bouquets are a good idea: you do the same thing. here’s to you. here’s to marianne moore.
“No water so still as the
dead fountains of Versailles.” No swan,
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine
as the chinz china one with fawn-
brown eyes and toothed gold
collar on to show whose bird it was.
Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth
candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-
tinted buttons, dahlias,
sea-urchins, and everlastings,
it perches on the branching foam
of polished sculptured
flowers—at ease and tall. The king is dead.
mary.
(via capecodcollegiate)
this week i have been thinking about what graham and i will register for, what i will do next year, what i will wear to engagement parties, important things like that. so while in anthropologie today, i read a plate by kylie johnson.
“and next he said: how tiny it is we whispered, winter has long gone beneath the misty places of your shadow….. ships are my language, and light your storm.”
it said. it was only six inches in diameter, but it really picked me up, pulled me out of a funk, made me dream. maybe it’s possible, if kylie johnson (not the playmate) says so, to leave winter long behind, and maybe i can refinish furniture with my poetry, strip paint, stain wood, trick a trade. how encouraging.
Let us eat cake!
And Let Rococo Week 2012 Commence!
I will begin the second annual Rococo Week— the week leading up to Valentine’s Day, as established by um… me last year when I was in Thomasville all alone— with a website I found displaying appropriations of my favorite Rococo painting, the one that so captures the aesthetic movement, Fragonard’s The Swing.
(Source: historyfan2.wordpress.com)
Ode to Ophelia
I’ve thought of her today and found these images scattered about the internet (I’m glad I’m allowed to reproduce them here!). She’s one of my least favorite characters in Shakespeare, and yet she’s my favorite pictorial muse.
(Source: tuttotheatre.org)
NPR Blog Russia by Rail finished 14 January 2012. David Greene and Laura Krantz report both on Russian cliches and current realities, and David Gilkey offers glimpses of Russian views and faces. His slideshows are athttp://www.npr.org/news/specials/2012/russia-by-rail/. “The people are what made it all worth the effort,” Gilkey reports. For the last couple of months, I’ve been trying to understand contemporary Russian culture and how it relates to literary views of the place and people. I’ve struggled to understand how the people I’ve seen protesting recent elections and those hard-faced women on American reality TV shows relate to Kitty and Anna and Dolly, Stepan and Levin and Vronsky. Perhaps even more so than the two reporters on the trans-Siberian journey, Gilkey drew a connection between characters and contemporaries. “The adversity is always present— in life, in government, in the environment,” he said, “but they march through it while holding on to a strong sense of the past.”
tea time.
(via jaclynpaige)
some days you twist up your hair and wear party dresses with beads that frame your shoulder-blade wings, then the happiest you’ll be is in the dramatic, head in your hands, remembering that life has downs, so too it must always have ups. then you stand up and flit away.
(Source: mythwovenworld)
