carefullydoesit-blog

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#pew research center #partisan divides #october 2017 #politics #statistics #polarization

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Lighthouses of Sweden - nautical chart, 1911. Source: Institut für Geographie und Geologie, Universität Greifswald.

#reblog

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#David Olère #The Experimental Injection #1945 #Dr. Mengele #Schutzstaffel #holocaust #war #war images #painting #Sonderkommando

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#reblog #kathryn marks

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The Wife on Ambien

The wife on Ambien knows the score. I mean this literally. Rangers, 4–3 in overtime. Devils fall to the Flames, 3–1. Knicks lose again at home. In the morning, I open the paper and none of this checks out.

The wife on Ambien calls me Bob, calls me Mom, calls me Mr. Bluepants.

The wife on Ambien makes false starts. In one week, she has sketched a music hall (she is not an architect), designed a drone (she is not an engineer), written two scenes of a play called “Haunted Masquerade” (her M.F.A. is in sculpture). The handwriting is a bear, but I piece together a plot: society lady leads double life in the London of Jack the Ripper. In the morning, the wife on Ambien denies authorship, though at lunch I hear the first line of the soliloquy leave her lips.

The wife on Ambien cooks eggs. I take pains to hide the ingredients and the hardware. Still, she conjures omelettes from a secret stash of eggs, with a pan I somehow miss. She singes her robe. I gain five pounds in a month.

The wife on Ambien gets fresh. She moves on top of me like it’s spin class. That was nice, I say afterward. Really nice. It reminds me of our wedding night. Paris! My God! We were so young! Do you remember how the stars, I say, then stop, because she’s already snoring.

The wife on Ambien tries to order Ambien on Amazon.

The wife on Ambien makes up names of golfers.

The wife on Ambien keeps me guessing. You don’t want to know what I did in Tucson, she says, patting me on the head, like a child. I’d better not say what went down in West Hartford. Tell me, I say. She looks around for some eggs.

The wife on Ambien shifts her legs. To the left, to the right, to the left, to the right. She bends and extends. What are you doing? I whisper in her ear. Skiing, she says. Skiing in the Canadian Rockies with Mr. Bluepants.

The wife on Ambien recites the poetry of T. S. Eliot, sings the music of the Jesus and Mary Chain, calculates how much we need to save to retire. Her figures vary. The wife on Ambien also tells me it doesn’t matter, that the sun will swallow the Earth exactly eight billion years, or thirteen weeks, or twenty-four hours from now.

The wife on Ambien orders Uber after Uber. The cars stream toward us like a series of sharks. It’s 4 A.M. Drivers from many countries gather on the corner, fling curses at our window, break out the booze, arrange marriages among their offspring.

The wife on Ambien hacks into my Facebook account and leaves slurs on the pages of my enemies. Get a life, you’re a joke. She joins political causes directly opposed to her own. I spend an hour every morning cleaning up the digital trail.

The wife on Ambien shouts, Atlantis! Just that. Atlantis!

The wife on Ambien drinks an entire quart of milk. She washes out the slim jug and stands it up in the recycling bin like a soldier.

The wife on Ambien forgets about our children, Danica, eleven, and Morris, five. We named them after a race-car driver and a cat. It was her idea. She had it on Ambien. I get home from work after nine and see the kids attacking each other with belts while she sleeps, all the cushions and pillows piled in the center of the living room. Don’t wreck our fort, Daddy, Morris says. That’s more like a tower, I say. Then don’t wreck our tower, Danica says. What about your homework? I ask my daughter. Homework’s for losers, she says. Losers like you, Morris says. Honey, I call, but the wife on Ambien is sawing logs.

The wife on Ambien takes her vitamins, organizes the spice rack. She alphabetizes the shelves in the hallway and polishes my shoes. She wanders a while, adjusting picture frames that are out of true. Everything looks cleaner in the morning. But other nights she’s knocking tchotchkes off tables, surrounding the wastebasket with coffee grounds in ritual fashion.

The wife on Ambien—how can I describe her? The way she tilts her head reminds me of pictures of her grandmother as a youth. The way she does a Bronx cheer reminds me of my first boss, who was in the Merchant Marine.

The wife on Ambien scrolls through her phone, swipes with her eyes shut. I can’t wrench it from her iron grip. In the morning, she asks, Did you change the time zone to Dubai?

I sense a light. It’s 3:15 A.M., and the wife on Ambien is playing online poker. Around the virtual table are Joker17, AceInHole, and Mr_Bluepants. I would force her to stop, but she’s winning by a lot. Someone has to bring home the bacon while my startup starts up. That’s how I figure it. I’m seeking funding for a virtual-reality venture that will let you live in the home you grew up in.

The wife on Ambien can list the Presidents in order. The wife in real life can’t.

The wife on Ambien tries her hand at painting. The tubes are open, the brushes stand in a coffee can of gray water, there’s a becoming beige smudge on her brow, but where are the canvasses, whither the tableaux? Many years later, when we move out of the city, I find her art under a box of books in a basement storage locker. These are all pictures of toast, I say.

The wife on Ambien solves Danica’s Rubik’s Cube.

The wife on Ambien insists she doesn’t snore. One night, I set up my phone to record her, balancing it on an eyeglasses case between our pillows, wondering if that’s legal. In the morning, the device tells a different tale. It’s just me, calling out her name, my voice thinning to a whine, like a dog that’s strayed too far from its master. A voice that would keep the best of us up at night.

#Ed Park #The New Yorker #Flash Fiction #July 2017 #except I heard him read this like in 2016? #i think? #or maybe it was this past February #idr #shorts #short story #short stories #literature #fiction

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#something I heard on a walk the other night #8/17 #personal #sound #sounds #soundscape #creaky #and last night I just kept hearing a gate hinge screeching far away

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#Pelléas et Mélisande #Mary Garden #1904 #Debussy #Mes longs cheveux #opera #music video #youtube

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JEAN COCTEAU

LE LIVRE BLANC, ca. 1930

#reblog

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Lillian and Djuna opened the window and looked at the city covered with a mist. One could see only the lighted eyes of the buildings. One could hear only muffled sounds, the ducks from Central Park lake nagging loudly, the fog horns from the river which sounded at times like the mournful complaints of imprisoned ships not allowed to sail, at others like gay departures.

Lillian was sitting in the dark, speaking of her life, her voice charged with both laughter and tears.

In the dark a new being appears. A new being who has not the courage to face daylight. In the dark people dare to dream everything. And they dare to tell everything. In the dark there appeared a new Lillian.

 __________________________

The mist came into the room. Djuna thought: She’s such a hurt woman. She is one who does not know what she suffers from, or why, or how to overcome it. She is all unconscious, motion, music. She is afraid to see, to analyze her nature. She thinks that nature just is and that nothing can be done about it. She would never have invented ships to conquer the sea, machines to create light where there was darkness. She would never have harnessed water power, electric power. She is like the primitive. She thinks it is all beyond her power. She accepts chaos. She suffers mutely…

#Cities of the Interior #Ladders to Fire #Anaïs Nin #literature #passages #book #and a bonus: #…This rapacious love without polarity like a blind womb appetite…

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A Page from the Drawing Papers Archive

This page from Drawing Papers 61 features an untitled pencil and brown ink wash on paper drawing created by Eva Hesse in 1966.

The 2006 exhibition, Eva Hesse: Circles and Grids, was the first exhibition in over 20 years that focused on the role of drawing in the achievements of Eva Hesse - one of the most influential experimental  artists of the postwar era who continually challenged the conventions of her time.  For Hesse, drawing played a unique role, providing the nexus between her works in all media. Her early 1960s works on paper engaged with visual vocabularies from geometry to biomorphic abstraction.  Drawing Papers 61 presents a collection of Hesse’s important ‘grid’ and ‘circle’ drawings, assembled for the first time as a portfolio.

The Drawing Papers are a series of publications documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing a forum for the study of drawing. For more information about Drawing Papers 61, click here.

 -Kate Robinson, Bookstore Manager

#reblog

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#two beds #bed #personal #8/17

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#engraved maps #maps #holy land #astronomy #dutch #art #objects #art objects #sothebys #Fine Books & Manuscripts Including Americana #December 2015 #Sothebys December 2015

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#The Breast of Venus #Maxim's #Salvador Dali #Dali #Les Dîners de Gala #book #food #recipe #art #if this book wasn't so much money #i'd have bought that reprint dammit

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#Uhrm... it's good #crows #wind #fox #this is what i listen to #not the beach #not the womb #not the babbling fuckin brook #the crows in that night in england circa 1980 #100 #sounds #soundscape

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That feeling where you’ve been looking forward to something and your plans and day to day are working around this one thing but are put into perspective after the thing happens. I mean like, is the thing ever worth it? Last night was kind of lame?

#At least if someone asks B and his gf are not the last people I hooked up with? #still thirsting #also that one guy looked like my bf from 4 years ago? #but objectively hotter #way hotter #but nothing was satisfying #lots of butt sweat #and jujitsu #actually the jujitsu was so nice #that genderqueer instructor was such an angel #and that was a nice personal moment #and no contact #and they made me feel powerful #and i laughed #personal #8/17

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#tino sehgal #Elena Filipovic #felix gonzalez-torres #foundation beyeler #video #youtube #specific objects without specific form

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#go get em #cine-file #chicago #film