effra road

2010-11-18T15:49:00.000Z

*For Melanie, who could not find me

2010-11-05T14:54:00.001Z

This time he is close to her, he speaks to her. She welcomes him without surprise. They are without memories, without plans. Time builds itself painlessly around them. Their only landmarks are the flavour of the moment they are living and the markings on the walls.

La Jetée, Chris Marker

2010-10-11T23:11:00.000+01:00

O mortal and perishing love, born with this flesh and dying with this brain, your memory will haunt the earth forever.

And now the voyage out. Where?

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

2010-10-11T23:05:00.000+01:00

2010-09-30T00:40:00.000+01:00

15h da tarde / mergulhada no Outono

Cuidar de um jardim, ter terra à volta da sua casa, é um privilégio; é um trabalho em que todo o corpo, a pessoa inteira, se funde, se projecta no movimento. Vejo-me respirar, dar as minhas mãos e força às plantas e à terra, e, no fim, não me distingo do dia que passa.

Uma Data em Cada Mão. Livro de Horas I, Maria Gabriela Llansol

2010-09-28T23:16:00.000+01:00

We are the Lambeth girls

2010-09-28T17:50:00.000+01:00

Un été avec Monika

2010-09-28T16:51:00.002+01:00

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

Murphy, Samuel Beckett

2010-09-28T11:16:00.000+01:00

Wherever his hand has lain there is a tiny purple blemish.

2010-09-27T11:39:00.001+01:00

2010-09-27T11:01:00.000+01:00

Anthropométries de l’Epoque bleue, Yves Klein

2010-09-27T10:17:00.000+01:00

Twelve o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions.
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one,
The street-lamp sputtered,
The street-lamp muttered,
The street-lamp said, "Regard that woman
Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin."

The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.

Half-past two,
The street-lamp said,
"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter."
So the hand of the child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child's eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.

Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The lamp hummed:
"Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smooths the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and eau de Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain."
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.

The lamp said,
"Four o'clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair.
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life."

The last twist of the knife.

Rhapsody on a Windy Night, T. S. Eliot

2010-09-27T10:03:00.000+01:00

2010-09-26T22:09:00.001+01:00

2010-09-26T22:07:00.000+01:00

This is lovely.

All your books and postcards and...

Paperbacks and postcards, Jenny.

It's all you need, isn't it?

An Education, Lone Scherfig

2010-09-24T11:31:00.002+01:00

2010-09-24T10:55:00.000+01:00

2010-09-23T10:11:00.000+01:00

You are my little string

2010-09-22T10:18:00.002+01:00

She writes like a man

Margaret Atwood in Cambridge, 1963

2010-09-22T10:09:00.001+01:00

The blue gulf of the sky was spread with light massy clouds: they cruised like swift galleons, tacking across the hills before the wind, and darkening the trees below with their floating shadows.

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

2010-09-22T10:07:00.002+01:00

A rich warm wind was blowing, turning all the leaves back the same way, and making mellow music through all the lute-strings of flower and grass and fruit.

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

2010-09-22T10:05:00.001+01:00

The day was like gold and sapphires: there was a swift flash and sparkle, intangible and multifarious, like sunlight on roughened water, all over the land.

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

2010-09-21T16:45:00.002+01:00

If I were tickled by the rub of love

2010-09-21T11:27:00.004+01:00

2010-09-20T21:42:00.004+01:00

2010-09-20T17:40:00.000+01:00

Pretty as can be

France Gall

2010-09-19T23:06:00.001+01:00

2010-09-19T23:02:00.002+01:00

A winter's sun laboured through the mist. Low on the meadows, and high on the hills, the sunlight lay on the earth like milk.

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

2010-09-19T23:00:00.000+01:00

2010-09-17T16:15:00.002+01:00

2010-09-16T09:45:00.001+01:00

2010-09-16T01:17:00.003+01:00

2010-09-16T01:08:00.001+01:00

Stills from Eadweard Muybridge's 1887 motion studies of a dancing lady

2010-09-16T01:07:00.001+01:00

Time droned like a sleepy October fly.

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

2010-09-15T18:10:00.001+01:00

2010-09-15T12:23:00.003+01:00

Pretty as can be

Jean Seberg, 1963, Henri Dauman

2010-09-15T00:50:00.001+01:00

Come on over, turn me on

2010-09-15T00:06:00.007+01:00

2010-09-14T17:16:00.001+01:00

He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet.

William Butler Yeats

2010-09-14T12:33:00.006+01:00

2010-09-14T12:09:00.001+01:00

And you shall take me strongly
In your arms again
And I will not remember
That I even felt the pain.
We shall walk and talk
In gardens all misty and wet with rain
And I will never, never, never
Grow so old again.

Sweet Thing, Van Morrison

2010-09-14T10:55:00.001+01:00

2010-09-13T12:39:00.002+01:00

Le fleuve silencieux s’agite et remue dès que quelque chose passe dessus, le vent, la pluie, les gros bateaux. J’adore le fleuve – jamais affecté par quoi que ce soit.
C’est calme maintenant et le silence est seul exceptés le grondement de tonnerre des choses inconnues et au loin des coups de tambour très présents, et sauf des cris perçants et le murmure
des choses, et les bruits aigus et soudain étouffés en gémissements au-delà de la tristesse – terreur au-delà de la peur. Le cri des choses, vague et trop jeune pour être encore connu. Les sanglots de la vie même.

Tu dois souffrir — de la perte de ton or sombre quand ta couverture de feuilles déjà mortes te quitte

Fort et nu tu dois être – vivant quand tu regardes la mort droit devant penché sous le vent

Et porter la souffrance et la joie du nouveau dans tes membres.

Solitude – sois calme.

Marilyn Monroe

2010-09-13T11:43:00.002+01:00

Love is the Plan The Plan is Death

2010-09-13T09:26:00.000+01:00

2010-09-13T09:24:00.001+01:00

She saw the unholy fires that cast their sword-dance on his face, she saw the hunger and the pain, and she fed him - majestic crime! - on poetry.

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

2010-09-13T00:01:00.001+01:00

She remained.

2010-09-12T23:54:00.002+01:00

Virginia Woolf by Gisèle Freund

2010-09-12T23:36:00.001+01:00

In winter, he went down joyously into the dark howling wind, leaning his weight upon its advancing wall as it swept up a hill; and when in early Spring the small cold rain fell from the reeking sky he was content. He was alone.

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

2010-09-12T23:31:00.002+01:00

In autumn, a late red moon rode low in the skies till morning. The air was filled with dropping leaves, there was a solemn thunder of great trees upon the hills; sad phantasmal whisperings and the vast cathedral music deepened in his heart.

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

2010-09-12T00:47:00.000+01:00

Remember me to one who lives there

2010-09-12T00:20:00.000+01:00

2010-09-12T00:17:00.003+01:00

2010-09-09T17:50:00.000+01:00

2010-09-08T23:11:00.010+01:00

nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

somewhere i have never travelled, e. e. cummings

2010-09-08T17:23:00.000+01:00

2010-09-07T11:29:00.004+01:00

2010-09-07T10:17:00.001+01:00

Silence
and a deeper silence
when the crickets
hesitate

Summer-Haiku, Leonard Cohen

2010-09-06T23:28:00.001+01:00

Nothing happens in September, ask now how she remembers

she remembers

2010-09-06T22:46:00.003+01:00

Together they entered the sacred grove of poetry

René Groebli

2010-09-06T21:30:00.003+01:00

2010-09-06T18:04:00.001+01:00

Stroked by the slow heat-tingle she smiled slowly with indifferent affection on all the boys. No men came to see her: like a pool she was thirsty for lips. She sought no one. With lazy cat-warmth she smiled on all the world.

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

2010-09-05T23:41:00.003+01:00

And see she flies and she is everywhere, see she flies all around

2010-09-05T23:28:00.002+01:00

The plum-tree, black and brittle, rocks stiffly in winter wind. Her million little twigs are frozen in spears of ice. But in the spring, lithe and heavy, she will bend under her great load of fruit and blossoms. She will grow young again.

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

2010-09-03T16:53:00.002+01:00

Virginia and Mr. Bridges

2010-09-03T12:29:00.000+01:00

Elizabeth Bowen with students at Bryn Mawr, 1956

2010-09-03T11:01:00.002+01:00

O pitiful lovers of earth, why are you keeping
Such count of beauty in the ways you wander?
Why are you so insistent on the sweeping

Poetry of sky and sea?

For an Old Woman in a Wig, Wallace Stevens

2010-09-03T10:59:00.000+01:00

I don't believe in God. I believe in Wallace Stevens.

A. S. Byatt

2010-09-02T23:18:00.002+01:00

I cannot understand why my arm is not a lilac tree.

Leonard Cohen

2010-09-02T17:10:00.002+01:00

Spring lay strewn lightly like a fragrant gauzy scarf upon the earth; the night was a cool bowl of lilac darkness, filled with fresh orchard scents.

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

2010-09-02T15:10:00.002+01:00

The long sea-plunges in the unending scroll-work of the emerald and infinite sea, which had beat in his brain from his father's shells, which had played at his mountain heart, but which never, until now, had he seen.

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe, 1937, Carl Van Vechten

2010-09-02T10:20:00.002+01:00

The commonness of all things in the earth he remembered with a strange familiarity - he dreamed of the quiet roads, the moonlit woodlands, and he thought that some day he would come to them on foot, and find them there unchanged, in all the wonder of recognition. They had existed for him anciently and forever.

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

2010-09-01T16:10:00.000+01:00

2010-09-01T16:08:00.001+01:00

Self Portrait, 1930-34, Walker Evans

2010-09-01T15:48:00.001+01:00

And whatever he touched in that rich fortress of his soul sprang into golden life.

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

2010-09-01T13:05:00.002+01:00

Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell

2010-09-01T10:42:00.002+01:00

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again

2010-09-01T10:36:00.002+01:00

It was great autumnal November: the mountain forests were quilted with dry brown leaves. They blew about the streets of Altamont, they were deep in lane and gutter, they scampered dryly along before the wind.

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

2010-08-31T14:18:00.003+01:00

Elle est retrouvée,
Quoi? — L'Éternité.
C'est la mer allée
Avec le soleil.

L'Éternité, Rimbaud

2010-08-31T12:23:00.002+01:00

She would have brought me the sun making me smile

2010-08-31T11:08:00.003+01:00

2010-08-31T09:51:00.003+01:00

2010-08-31T09:37:00.002+01:00

There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves. We're only just beginning, she thought, to understand, here and there. She hollowed her hands in her lap, just as Rose had hollowed hers round her ears. She held her hands hollowed; she felt that she wanted to enclose the present moment; to make it stay; to fill it fuller and fuller, with the past, the present and the future, until it shone, whole, bright, deep with understanding.

The Years, Virginia Woolf

2010-08-30T16:01:00.000+01:00

2010-08-30T14:52:00.002+01:00

And she did not weep for herself, but for him: the hour after his birth she had looked in his dark eyes and had seen something that would brood eternally, she knew, unfathomable wells of remote and intangible loneliness: she knew that in her dark and sorrowful womb a stranger had come to life, fed by the lost communications of eternity, his own ghost, haunter of his own house, lonely to himself and to the world. O lost.

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

2010-08-30T14:46:00.000+01:00

2010-08-30T10:54:00.001+01:00

Something in her stopped; something began.

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

2010-08-30T10:33:00.001+01:00

2010-08-30T10:27:00.001+01:00

2010-08-30T01:16:00.003+01:00

Here, my Friend it is Winter.*

*and she wept anew

2010-08-29T23:47:00.001+01:00

And she knew she would always be the sad one

2010-08-29T23:28:00.002+01:00

And left alone to sleep within a shuttered room, with the thick sunlight printed in bars upon the floor, unfathomable loneliness and sadness crept through him: he saw his life down the solemn vista of a forest aisle, and he knew he would always be the sad one: caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages. Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any one, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never.

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

2010-08-28T10:00:00.002+01:00

2010-08-27T17:26:00.002+01:00

And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face. His poem, "I did it, I." Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists. The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words; his poems are strong and blasting like a high wind in steel girders. And I screamed in myself, thinking: oh to give myself crashing, fighting, to you.

Sylvia Plath on meeting Ted Hughes

2010-08-27T17:03:00.003+01:00

Swim back home to me

Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald

2010-08-27T16:58:00.002+01:00

No part of the night was not breathless breathing, no part of the quickened stillness not running feet.

A World of Love, Elizabeth Bowen

Troubled Waters, William Eggleston

2010-08-27T12:10:00.002+01:00

I can keep you right behind me all my days in the sun

2010-08-27T10:12:00.001+01:00

And far far ahead a little golden moon daintily, graciously dances in the blue floor of the sky. A white moth flutters past me. I hear always the whispering of the water.

Katherine Mansfield

2010-08-27T10:10:00.000+01:00

Bathers at Moritzburg 1909/26, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

2010-08-26T17:37:00.003+01:00

Moi je ne cherche pas le port, mais la haute mer.

Gustave Flaubert via Katherine Mansfield