beauxland

"There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And..."

Thu, 23 May 2013 21:49:07 -0400

“There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact.”

- Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

“Birmingham” - Shovels and Rope

Fri, 17 May 2013 04:03:00 -0400

“Birmingham” - Shovels and Rope

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Wed, 08 May 2013 20:21:16 -0400

theparisreview: Today’s Tom Gauld cartoon.

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:43:00 -0400

theparisreview:

Today’s Tom Gauld cartoon.

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Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:21:23 -0400

"I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things."

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 23:32:39 -0400

“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”

- Tom Waits (via thatkindofwoman)

thatkindofwoman: Marjorie Celona, Y

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 17:37:13 -0400

thatkindofwoman:

Marjorie Celona, Y

agnosis: Holy crap! The world of rationality is collapsing!...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 06:43:06 -0400

agnosis:

Holy crap! The world of rationality is collapsing! Quick! Grab your syllogisms! It may be your last hope!

Winter Trees Cough Like Old Men

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:12:56 -0400

Winter trees cough like old men
about death’s white nightmares
while the rain talks in Latin.
They cough about the sobbing tragic
ash, they bind valises for leaving,
they darken - and in the chill
of frost from the sun, the lungs
bristle to see coffins hidden
in the dry capes of kings.

- Eugenio Montejo, translated by Kirk Nesset, The Paris Review, Fall 2008

Phosphorescent - “The Quotidian Beasts” Going on...

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 22:48:07 -0400

Phosphorescent - “The Quotidian Beasts”

Going on 48hrs of listening to this song nonstop. No end in sight.

Birds of America - “The Eyes of Our Youth are Evil”

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 03:20:00 -0400

Birds of America - “The Eyes of Our Youth are Evil”

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Fri, 15 Mar 2013 03:15:00 -0400

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Wed, 06 Mar 2013 17:17:38 -0500

dieyounglivefast: thepinesaredancing:thedailywilco: Jeff...

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 15:35:15 -0500

dieyounglivefast:

thepinesaredancing:thedailywilco:

Jeff Tweedy - “Remember The Mountain Bed”
Live at the State Theater in Portland, ME.
3/26/2011.

This is my last story.

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:59:00 -0500

“I’m never going to write another story. I don’t like writing stories. I don’t like putting he said she said he did she did, and telling people, the small dark woman who coughs into a silk handkerchief and says excuse me would you like another soda cracker. Mary, and the men with crease all over their clothes and lunch tins in their hands, the Hillside men who get into the tram at four forty-five, and hang on to the straps so the ladies can sit down comfortably, and stare out of the window and you never know what they’re thinking, perhaps about their sons in Standard two, who are going to work at Hillside when it’s time for them to leave school, and that’s called work and earning a living, well I’m not going to write any more stories like that. I’m not going to write about the snow and the curly chrysanthemums peeping out of the snow and the women saying how lovely every cloud has a silver lining, and I’m not going to write about my grandmother sitting in a black dress at the back door and having her photo taken with Dad because he loved her best and Uncle Charlie broke her heart because he drank beer. I’m never going to write another story after this one. This is my last story.

I’m not going to write about the woman upstairs and the little girl who bangs her head against the wall and can’t talk yet though she’s five you would think she’d have started by now, and I’m not going to write about Harry who’s got a copy of We Were the Rats under his pillow and I suppose that’s called experience of Life.

And about George Street and Princes Street and the trams up to twelve. I’m not going to write about my family and the house where I live when I’m Oamaru, the queerest little house I’ve ever seen, with trees all round it oaks and willows and silver birches and apple trees that are like a fairy-tale in October, and ducks waggling their legs in the air, and swamp hens in evening dress, navy blue with red at the neck, nice and boogie-woogie, and cats that have kittens without being ethical.

And my sister who’s in the sixth form at school and talks about a Brave New World and Aldous Huxley and DH Lawrence, and asks me is it love it must be love because when we were standing on the bridge he said. He said, she said, I’m not going to write any more stories about that. I’m not going to write any more about the rest of my family, my other sister who teaches and doesn’t like teaching though why on earth if you don’t like it they say.

That’s Isabel, and when it’s raining hear outside and I think of forty days and forty nights and an ark being built, when it’s dark outside and the rain is tangled up in the trees, Isabel comes up to me, and her eyes are so sad what about the fowls, the fowls I can see them with their feathers dripping wet and perches are such cold places to sleep. My sister has a heart of gold, that’s how they express things like that.

Well I’m not going to do any more expressing.

This is my last story.

And I’m going to put three dots with my typewriter, impressively, and then I’m going to begin …

I think I must be frozen inside with no heart to speak of. I think I’ve got the wrong way of looking at Life.

- Janet Frame, “My Last Story.” From Prizes: The Selected Stories of Janet Frame, 2010.

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Sun, 24 Feb 2013 13:02:14 -0500

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Thu, 21 Feb 2013 18:48:26 -0500

Typhoon - “Summer Home”

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:12:16 -0500

Typhoon - “Summer Home”

You just go on your nerve

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 13:39:00 -0500

“Everything is in the poems, but at the risk of sounding like the poor wealthy man’s Allen Ginsberg I will write to you because I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can’t be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on. I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have, I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.’

That’s for the writing poems part. As for their reception, suppose you’re in love and someone’s mistreating (mal aime) you, you don’t say, ‘Hey, you can’t hurt me this way, I care!’ you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and they always do ‘flay after a few months. But that’s not why you fell in love in the first place, just to hang onto life, so you have to take your chances and try to avoid being logical. Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.

I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They’re just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.

But how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies. As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There’s nothing metaphysical about it. Unless of course, you flatter yourself into thinking that what you’re experiencing is ‘yearning.’

Abstraction in poetry, which Allen recently commented on in It Is, is intriguing. I think it appears mostly in the minute particulars where decision is necessary. Abstraction (in poetry, not painting) involves personal removal by the poet. For instance, the decision involved in the choice between ‘the nostalgia of the infinite’ and the ‘the nostalgia for the infinite’ defines and attitude toward degree of abstraction. The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarme).

Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody yet knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poesie pure was to Beranger. Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it’s all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the person himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. That’s part of Personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on Augst 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it. While I have certain regrets, I am still glad I got there before Alain Robbe-Grillet did. Poetry being quicker and surer than prose, it is only just that poetry finish literature off. For a time people thought that Artaud was going to accomplish this, but actually, for all their magnificence, his polemical writings are not more outside literature than Bear Mountain is outside New York State. His relation is no more astounding that Dubuffet’s to painting.

What can we expect from Personism? (This is getting good, isn’t it?) Everything, but we won’t get it. It is too new, too vital a movement to promise anything. But it, like Africa, is on the way. The recent propagandists for technique on the one hand, and for content on the other, had better watch out.

September 3,1959.”

- Frank O’Hara, “Personism: A Manifesto,” Yugen #7, 1961

thecountryfucker: Storms - Best Coast via Pongo Rojo

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 16:13:06 -0500

thecountryfucker:

Storms - Best Coast

via Pongo Rojo