Established 2002
THE LISTENERS By Walter de la Mare ‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence champed the grasses Of the forest’s ferny floor: And a bird flew up out of the turret, Above the Traveller’s head: And he smote upon the door again a second …
Joan Mitchell, quoted by Patti Smith: “The solitude that I find in my studio is one of plenitude. I am enough. I live fully there.” From “The Garden” by Jack Gilbert, a poem of 29 lines; below are the first four and the final five. We come from a deep forest of years into a …
MR. PRODUCTIVITY Band of maroon at sunset Beautiful view Someone at La Galette Where they have happy hour practically all day Called it “the actual ocean.” What I’m saying is It was like weird. This other service that I work with, One of the guys I worked with On that project A sales guy, 31.2 …
I HAVE A BEACH BOYS SONG FOR YOU Everybody surfing now Everybody surfing now I PRETENDED I WAS LUCY But didn’t know I was a barking Lucy. Daddy came home and I barked too much. He’s sick with his flute. And that’s it. THE SEAT BELT The seat belt walked around and somebody tried to …
WALKING TOURS I was in Maputo, Beijing and Caracas Zagreb, Nairobi, Vancouver, Cairo, Florence (Loggia della Signoria) Seoul, Dhaka, Tokyo (Shinjuku) Algiers, Beirut, Damascus, Tashkent Lagos Nigeria AND Lagos Portugal Reykjavik the same as Asunción the same as Jerusalem Kigali (cleaner than Dubai?) London’s Chinatown Medellin, New York City (Bushwick) Oslo, Banjul, Mexico City, Toronto …
There was in a country not very far hence, a monastery more abounding in sanctity and monks than it is nowadays, and therein, among others, was a young monk, whose vigor and lustiness neither fasts nor vigils availed to mortify. It chanced one day, when all the other monks slept, that, as he went all …
Robert William Service (16 January 1874 – 11 September 1958) was a British-Canadian poet and writer, often called “the Bard of the Yukon”. I’m a vernacular aficionado, and this is one of my all-time favorites, written in “an accent o’ Scotland”. Enjoy. “Bessie’s Boil” by Robert W. Service Says I to my Missis: “Ba goom, …
If you’re like me you guessed Gertrude Stein, and like me you’d be wrong. It’s Edgar Allan Poe. But let’s take the guesswork out of the rest of this combo Choice Bits/Shop Talk summertime post. Julia Kristeva: “In terms of their attitude toward life, cultivated and cultivating people are vegetarian wolves,lying in wait for the …