Betye Saar passed away in her sleep in the early morning of Sunday, July 26 in Los Angeles, just four days before her 100th birthday. via Roberts Projects.
“Each item I collect has a certain energy from its previous function that carries over into its new use.”
Drifting Toward Twilight, at the Huntington. The Betye Saar Art Box.
How to Eat an Ice-Cream Cone, L. Rust Hills (New Yorker)
“feet from one to two feet apart, body bent forward from the waist at a twenty-five-degree angle, right elbow well up, right forearm horizontal, at a level with your collarbone and about twelve inches from it. But don’t start eating yet!’
You are the ice cream sandwich connoisseur of your generation.
Blessed are your floral shorteralls, your deeply pink fanny pack with travel-size lint roller just in case.
Level of splendiferous in your outfit: 200.
Types of invisible pain stemming from adolescent disasters in classrooms, locker rooms, & quite often Toyota Camrys: at least 10,000.
You are not a jigglypuff, not yet a wigglytuff.
Reporters & fathers call your generation “the worst.”
Which really means “queer kids who could go online & learn that queer doesn’t have to mean disaster.”
Or dead.
Instead, queer means, splendiferously, you.
& you means someone who knows that common flavors for ice cream sandwiches in Singapore include red bean, yam, & honeydew.
Your powers are great, are growing.
One day you will create an online personality quiz that also freshens the breath.
The next day you will tell your father, You were wrong to say that I had to change.
To make me promise I would. To make me promise.
& promise.
Summer, Chen Chen
linkhut is a project that aims to revive the bookmarking flow of early Delicious.
“They describe the soul’s encounter with something hard—a thought, an event, a feeling, a pleasure or an undiluted pain—and that process of description is slow, difficult, erratic.” (AN)
My flowers are reflected
In your mind
As you are reflected in your glass.
When you look at them,
There is nothing in your mind
Except the reflections
Of my flowers.
But when I look at them
I see only the reflections
In your mind,
And not my flowers.
It is my desire
To bring roses,
And place them before you
In a white dish.
The Florist Wears Knee-Breeches, Wallace Stevens
Heart free, hand free,
Blue above, brown under,
All the world to me
Is a place of wonder.
Sun shine, moon shine,
Stars, and winds a-blowing.
All into this heart of mine
Flowing, flowing, flowing!
Mind free, step free,
Days to follow after,
Joys of life sold to me
For the price of laughter.
Girl’s love, man’s love,
Love of work and duty,
Just a will of God’s to prove
Beauty, beauty, beauty!
Sic Vita, William Stanley Braithwaite
his poetry wants so much to belong to us—to those who know intimately why a relentless self-exposure to the world has to be made, somehow, into a virtue because otherwise it is just abuse. (AN)
Leave the womb
Leave the fear
Leave the nest
Hit the road
Hightail it
Head the hell out
Live hidden
Without a sound
Not seen
Nor heard
Be not
From this earth
But from nothing.
Ex Nothing (Ex Nada), Cecilia Vicuña, translated from the Spanish by Rosa Alcalá
Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse, Anahid Nersessian
Information delayed. Information withheld.
Saturation with info, useless and helpful blended. Plot
not “completed.” Size and significance of events
unemphatic: far too much attention paid to
tiny subjects. Option on funny noises.
Order of info homogeneous. Litotes, a Greek god,
Litotes of Lacedaemonia. Why isn’t this boring?
Do I need this info? It changes all the time,
doesn’t repeat itself, it only almost does.
What is a “conditional honorific”?
Randomness and inductive method, both at once.
“So what?” is a valuable question to ask. Frame story,
like Taming of the Shrew, but W.S. didn’t
finish the frame! A is really a pretext for B. B is what counts.
Title Not Given, Caroline Knox
Support Structures, Céline Condorelli, 2009, Sternberg Press.
El día de mi suerte – Héctor Lavoe, Orquesta de Willie Colón
Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.
I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe, and am not contain'd between my hat and boots,
And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,
The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.
I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself,
(They do not know how immortal, but I know.)
Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female,
For me those that have been boys and that love women,
For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,
For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the mothers of mothers,
For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,
For me children and the begetters of children.
Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,
I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,
And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.
Song of Myself, 7 , Walt Whitman