Sunday, December 30, 2007

Marilyn Monroe wasn’t Jean Harlow.
Jayne Mansfield wasn’t Marilyn Monroe.
Anna Nicole Smith wasn’t Jayne Mansfield.
Thankfully, there is only one Britney Spears.

But know, whoever you are,
whatever your gender, hair color, physique,
within you there does reside an unhappy blonde
archetype with enormous breasts.

It is her you need to contact.


- Elaine Equi, "#4 The Girl Can’t Help It (Jayne Mansfield unbuttons her blouse)" via Silliman's Blog

Sunday, December 23, 2007

My living will, waiting to be signed,
sits next to an old New Yorker
it's my ritual to read with breakfast
each morning, to finish
one issue before going to the next,
and this way I skip
the news merely timely—October 2004
with a fundraiser bringing Kerry
within blocks of President Bush

proves painful in December '05
but fast turning to find Graham Greene
his authorized biography reviewed,
I'm relieved, though perplexed, by
Because of an ambiguous comma
in a document Greene signed on his deathbed
other scholars were forbidden to quote . . .

and I wonder as I slowly eat
my oatmeal with raisins and cranberries
and four summer blueberries
I pick from their bag in my freezer,
gathering what pleases me, a woman of 73
with a will nearby, if I might not like
lingering in an ambiguous comma
someday, not rushing
to an afterlife I don't believe in,
drifting dreamily, held
for a day or two in its pause.

- Myra Shapiro, "Because of the Ambiguity"

Friday, December 21, 2007

Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists.
- Donal Henahan

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Friday, November 30, 2007

If you don't know where you are going,
any road will take you there. - Lewis Carroll

Monday, November 19, 2007

Buy the ticket, take the ride. - Hunter S. Thompson

Friday, November 16, 2007

I am your pilgrim, who wanders
to stay home; your monk,
who keeps silent when you demand
confessions and theology.

You are too difficult to love
directly; you have no roof
or floor, and I am too pious
for your rain and mud.

So I keep your shrine, the best of you,
the clean, the smiling rest of you.

I am a stubborn priest, who knows himself
only in the dwindling oil of you,
the weeping and rebellious flame
about to die.

- Val Vinokur, "Your Worship"

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Give my regards to Broadway
Remember me to Herald Square
Tell all the gang at Forty-second Street
That I will soon be there.
- George M. Cohan

Saturday, November 3, 2007

Much that is terrible we do not know. Much that is beautiful we shall still discover. Let's sail till we come to the edge.
- Thomas M. Disch

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

It can be a fascinating game, noticing how any person with vitality and vigor will have a little splash of red in a costume, in a room, or in a garden. - Edgar Cayce

Sunday, October 28, 2007

The only sure thing about luck is that it will change. - Bret Harte

Monday, October 22, 2007

Work hard all your young days
and they’ll find you too, some morning
staring up under
your chiffonier at its warped
bass-wood bottom and your soul —
out!
— among the little sparrows
behind the shutter.

- William Carlos Williams,
"January Morning: Suite 13"

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Time does go on—
I tell it gay to those who suffer now—
They shall survive—
There is a sun—
They don’t believe it now—

- Emily Dickinson

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Because life's too short to blush,
I keep my blood tucked in.
I won't be mortified
by what I drive or the flaccid
vivacity of my last dinner party.
I take my cue from statues posing only
in their shoulder pads of snow: all January
you can see them working on their granite tans.

That I woke at an ungainly hour,
stripped of the merchandise that clothed me,
distilled to pure suchness,
means not enough to anyone for me
to confess. I do not suffer
from the excess of taste
that spells embarrassment:
mothers who find their kids unseemly
in their condom earrings,
girls cringing to think
they could be frumpish as their mothers.
Though the late nonerotic Elvis
in his studded gut of jumpsuit
made everybody squeamish, I admit.
Rule one: the King must not elicit pity.

Was the audience afraid of being tainted
--this might rub off on me--
or were they--surrendering--
what a femme word--feeling
solicitous--glimpsing their fragility
in his reversible purples
and unwholesome goldish chains?

At least embarrassment is not an imitation.
It's intimacy for beginners,
the orgasm no one cares to fake.
I almost admire it. I almost wrote despise.

- Alice Fulton, "About Face"

Monday, October 15, 2007

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. - Susan Sontag

Wednesday, September 5, 2007


We love our cat
for her self
regard is assiduous
and bland,

for she sits in the small
patch of sun on our rug
and licks her claws
from all angles

and it is far
superior
to "balanced reporting"

though, of course,
it is also
the very same thing.

- Rae Armantrout, "Thing"

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them. - John Steinbeck

Thursday, August 30, 2007

If I have learnt anything, it is that life forms no logical patterns.
It is haphazard and full of beauties which I try to catch as they fly by, for who knows whether any of them will ever return?
- Margot Fonteyn

Sunday, August 26, 2007

You can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face. - Malcolm Gladwell

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars. - Fred Allen

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Either be hot or cold. If you are lukewarm, the Lord will spew you forth from His mouth. - Jerry Lee Lewis

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Let us touch each other
while we still have hands,
palms, forearms, elbows . . .
Let us love each other for misery,
torture each other, torment,
disfigure, maim,
to remember better,
to part with less pain.

- Vera Pavlova

Monday, July 30, 2007

Come to the edge
He said. They said: We are afraid.
Come to the edge
He said. They came.
He pushed them, and
they flew...

- Guillaume Apollinaire

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.

His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?

- William Meredith, "The Illiterate"

Friday, July 27, 2007

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood. - George Santayana

Thursday, July 26, 2007

When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.
- Oscar Wilde

Wednesday, July 25, 2007



My forefathers gave me
My spirit’s shaken flame,
The shape of hands, the beat of heart,
The letters of my name.

But it was my lovers,
And not my sleeping sires,
Who gave the flame its changeful
And iridescent fires;

As the driftwood burning
Learned its jewelled blaze
From the sea’s blue splendor
Of colored nights and days.

- Sarah Teasdale, "Driftwood"

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor. - Albert Einstein

Thursday, July 19, 2007

When the young man on State Street
approached as if to ask directions,
saying, "Can you help me out a little here?"
and I, though I already knew, said,
"Help you out how, exactly?"
"A dollar or two if you can,"
he said, and I took a deep breath,
holding in what I might've held out,
hearing When someone asks, you
give what you can, from my bank
of training in the ways of compassion,
and though I didn't want to,
opened my wallet, and
with the munificence of a toad,
pulled out a five and bought him off.

- Dan Gerber, "Bodhisattva"

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease. - Joan Didion

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

The entire sum of existence is the magic of being needed by just one other person. - Vi Putnam

Monday, July 16, 2007

It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it. - Henry Allen

Sunday, July 15, 2007

You live and learn. At any rate, you live. - Douglas Adams

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Cruising these residential Sunday
streets in dry August sunlight:
what offends us is
the sanities:
the houses in pedantic rows, the planted
sanitary trees, assert
levelness of surface like a rebuke
to the dent in our car door.
No shouting here, or
shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt
than the rational whine of a power mower
cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.

But though the driveways neatly
sidestep hysteria
by being even, the roofs all display
the same slant of avoidance to the hot sky,
certain things:
the smell of spilled oil a faint
sickness lingering in the garages,
a splash of paint on brick surprising as a bruise,
a plastic hose poised in a vicious
coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows

give momentary access to
the landscape behind or under
the future cracks in the plaster

when the houses, capsized, will slide
obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers
that right now nobody notices.

That is where the City Planners
with the insane faces of political conspirators
are scattered over unsurveyed
territories, concealed from each other,
each in his own private blizzard;

guessing directions, they sketch
transitory lines rigid as wooden borders
on a wall in the white vanishing air

tracing the panic of suburb
order in a bland madness of snows

- Margaret Atwood, "The City Planners"

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars. - Casey Kasem

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Everything has been taken that anyone
thought worth taking. The stairs are tilted,
scattered with sycamore leaves curled
like ammonites in inland rock.
Wood shows through the paint on the frame
and the door is open--an empty room,
sunlight on the floor. All that is left
on the porch is the hollow cylinder
of an Albert's Quick Oats cardboard box
and a sewing machine. Its extraterrestrial
head is bowed, its scrolled neck
glistens. I was born, that day, near there,
in wartime, of ignorant people.

- Sharon Olds, "Japanese-American Farmhouse, California, 1942"

Monday, July 9, 2007


I laugh sometimes when I think about
say
Céline at a typewriter
or Dostoevsky...
or Hamsun...
ordinary men with feet, ears, eyes,
ordinary men with hair on their heads
sitting there typing words
while having difficulties with life
while being puzzled almost to madness.

Dostoevsky gets up
he leaves the machine to piss,
comes back
drinks a glass of milk and thinks about
the casino and
the roulette wheel.

Céline stops, gets up, walks to the
window, looks out, thinks, my last patient
died today, I won't have to make any more
visits there.
when I saw him last
he paid his doctor bill;
it's those who don't pay their bills,
they live on and on.
Céline walks back, sits down at the
machine
is still for a good two minutes
then begins to type.

Hamsun stands over his machine thinking,
I wonder if they are going to believe
all these things I write?
he sits down, begins to type.
he doesn't know what a writer's block
is:
he's a prolific son-of-a-bitch
damn near as magnificent as
the sun.
he types away.

and I laugh
not out loud
but all up and down these walls, these
dirty yellow and blue walls
my white cat asleep on the
table
hiding his eyes from the
light.

he's not alone tonight
and neither am
I.

- Charles Bukowski, "one thirty-six a.m."

Thursday, July 5, 2007

Drugs have taught an entire generation of Americans the metric system. - P.J. O'Rourke

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever. - Chinese proverb

Sunday, July 1, 2007

Dear Magnitude, I leave the how much
to you. Bereft of equation,

I'd rather logarithms lodged elsewhere—
there is no sensitivity in numbers,

only in effects. In the calm, let us speak
in effects: a ball drops

dragon's mouth-to-frog's mouth,
a pendulum swings on its knife-edge

pivot. I'd say the measurable
captivates more than the measurement

in any accident, but I am merely a mass
suspended. Set my pen

to drum, set my drum recording—
I am the instrument of your intensity

and you my more. If there
be foundation, I have found it

to be oscillating. If there be water,
it is something falling.

Be peak to my trough, be hand
fastened to my throat. Shake me

something fierce and I will be the figure
of what you did.

- Cecily Parks, "Self-Portrait as a Seismograph"

Sunday, June 24, 2007

It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.
- Anna Quindlen

Thursday, June 21, 2007



The Devil finds work for idle hands. - Proverb, 1721

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Finally, it was the city that held us, the city they said had no center, that all of us had come to from all over America because this was the place to find dreams and pleasure and love. I noticed – looking at headlines – that some cities emptied and some didn’t. Ours didn’t, not completely. They said we were crazy to stay. But then someone had always said we were crazy to be here in the first place. And someone had always said Noah was crazy to build a boat in his desert, and Lot had been crazy to pack up, on an impulse, and head west. - Carolyn See, Golden Days