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Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. by A. Poulin Jr., Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

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“The basic function of popular music is to create an environment for courting, lovemaking, and doing the dishes. It’s useful because it addresses the heart in the midst of all these activities, and it will always be useful in this very important way.”

— Leonard Cohen in a 1985 interview

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Hans Erni (Swiss, 1909-2015), Figure Study. Tempera and scratch technique on paper, 35.5 x 29.5 cm.

#hans erni

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Eating Chocolate Ice Cream:

BY BARBARA GUEST

Since I’ve decided to revolutionize my life                       since                                  ”                       decided                                           ”                       revolutionize                                           ”                       life                                                 ”                                       How early it is! It is eight o’clock in the morning. Well, the pigeons were up earlier Did you eat all your egg? Now we shall go for a long walk. Now? There is too much winter. I am going to admire the snow on your coat. Time for hot soup, already? You have worked for three solid hours. I have written forty-eight, no forty-nine, no fifty-one poems. How many states are there? I cannot remember what is uniting America. It is then time for your nap. What a lovely, pleasant dream I just had. But I like waking up better. I do admire reality like snow on my coat. Would you take cream or lemon in your tea? No sugar? And no cigarettes. Daytime is good, but evening is better. I do like our evening discussions. Yesterday we talked about Kant. Today let’s think about Hegel. In another week we shall have reached Marx. Goody. Life is a joy if one has industrious hands. Supper? Stew and well-cooked. Delicious. Well, perhaps just one more glass of milk. Nine o’clock! Bath time! Soap and a clean rough towel. Bedtime! The Red Army is marching tonight. They shall march through my dreams in their new shiny leather boots, their freshly laundered shirts. All those ugly stains of caviar and champagne and kisses have been rubbed away. They are going to the barracks. They are answering hundreds of pink and yellow and blue and white telephones. How happy and contented and well-fed they look lounging on their fur divans, chanting, “Russia how kind you are to us. How kind you are to everybody. We want to live forever.” Before I wake up they will throw away their pistols, and magically factories will spring up where once there was rifle fire, a roulette factory, where once a body fell from an open window. Hurry dear dream I am waiting for you under the eiderdown. And tomorrow will be more real, perhaps, than yesterday.

#barabara gust #eating chocolate ice cream #mundane #winter #poetry

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Bathy

AMY LOWELL

The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is a smell of tulips and narcissus in the air.       The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.       Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot and the planes of light in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me. The day is almost too bright to bear, the green water covers me from the too bright day. I will lie here awhile and play with the water and the sun spots. The sky is blue and high. A crow flaps by the window, and there is a whiff of tulips and narcissus in the air.

#bath #amy lowell #summer #poetry

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Men in general think badly: in disjuncture with their personal lives

Adrienne Rich

#Adrienne Rich #on thinking #women's minds

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I have this feeling more and more that writing a book should be a side-effect of a life, a consequence of one’s experiences and curiosities instead of one’s primary goal.

Catherine Lacey

#life advanced 3

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“Sit in the deep chair before the fire. I will warm your feet in my hands; I will warm your breasts and thighs with kisses. I wish I could build a fire In you that would never go out.”

— Kenneth Rexroth, excerpt of “Runaway”, in Sacramental Acts

#kenneth rexroth #sacramental acts #commas of care #tenderness #intimacy

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At 16 I read my first book and it was pretty much the same day that i had my first drink in a pub, and fell in love for the first time. And all three seemed to work on the same bit of the brain. There was a similar kind of thickening of the world at stake in each of the three things and they became sort of conflated for me.

AK Benjamin 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p07369q6

#AK Benjamin #on reading #life advanced 3 #mariam #this makes me think of zambra

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One might think that five hundred lengths would be monotonous, boring, but I have never found swimming monotonous or boring. Swimming gives me a sort of joy, a sense of well-being so extreme that it becomes at times a sort of ecstasy. There is a total engagement in the act of swimming, in each stroke, and at the same time the mind can float free, become spellbound, in a state like a trance. I have never known anything so powerfully, so healthily euphoriant—and I am addicted to it, fretful when I cannot swim.

Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks. “Everything in Its Place”.

#oliver sacks #on swimming #flow #swimming

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When I came to New York, in the mid-1960s, I started to swim at Orchard Beach in the Bronx, and would sometimes make the circuit of City Island—a swim that took me several hours. This, indeed, is how I found the house I lived in for twenty years: I had stopped about halfway around to look at a charming gazebo by the water’s edge, got out and strolled up the street, saw a little red house for sale, was shown round it (still dripping) by the puzzled owners, walked along to the real estate agent and convinced her of my interest (she was not used to customers in swim trunks), reentered the water on the other side of the island, and swam back to Orchard Beach, having acquired a house in midswim.

Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks. “Everything in Its Place”.

#oliver sacks #whimsy #new york #city swimming #swimming

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“We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people.

Montaigne

#montaigne #the self

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"As I grew I surrounded myself with images, abstractions that drew warmth from me or wrapped me in loveliness. Paintings and poems are moments, capturing or seducing us, when we are so vulnerable. These images are metaphors. This is my life, how I see and, therefore, am able to speak. Praise the spirits and the stars that there are others among us who allow us visions that we may converse with one another."

Ntozake Shange

#on art #Ntozake Shange

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From the fifties and early sixties, I remember a cycle. It began when I had picked up a book or began trying to write a letter. . . . The child (or children) might be absorbed in busyness, in his own dream world; but as soon as he felt me gliding into a world which did not include him, he would come to pull at my hand, ask for help, punch at the typewriter keys. And I would feel his wants at such a moment as fraudulent, as an attempt more- over to defraud me of living even for fifteen minutes as myself – Adrienne Rich

Photo: Carrie Mae Weems

#kitchen table #carrie mae weems #women writers #writing as a woman #queer phenomenology #adrienne rich

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“Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama. For not only do we touch our most profoundly creative source, but we do that which is female and self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society.”

Audre Lorde

#audre lorde #uses of the erotic #the erotic #politics of the erotic #feminism

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“And yes, there is a hierarchy. There is a difference between painting a back fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity. And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.”

Audre Lorde

#audre lorde #uses of the erotic #the erotic #love #literary essays

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“During World War Two, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncoloured margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow colouring perched like a topa just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. Then taking it carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the colour had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly colouring it.

I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colours my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.”

Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic

#audre lorde #uses of the erotic #metaphor #the erotic #life advanced 3 #literary essays