how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
e.e. cummings, “i thank you god”
How could you believe that the life within the seed
that grew arms that reached
and a heart that beat
and lips that smiled
and eyes that cried
could ever die?
Matt Johnson (The The), “Love is Stronger Than Death”
spotify:track:5zOJ9QpCIPujTaZI1GV1n0
“Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives…In the information world created by telegraphy, this sense of potency was lost, precisely because the whole world became context for news. Everything became everyone’s business. For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply.”
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
spotify:track:3nhzPKCm2yqGmgEhdAg19u
“In walking along the pavement, I sometimes indulge myself in the unutterable, deeply rooted satisfaction of stepping on a separate flagstone where this is possible with every stride.”
– W.N.P. Barbellion, The Journal of a Disappointed Man
“Sonnet 130”
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
spotify:track:6nfQE0yIbRA9RIklATizoF
On “You Seemed So Happy” by The Japanese House Amber Bain sounds a lot like ‘Til Tuesday-era Aimee Mann.
But what do I know? I am an old person whose first concert was Duran Duran in 1984.
“With Mercy for the Greedy”
For my friend, Ruth, who urges me to make an appointment for the Sacrament of Confession
Concerning your letter in which you ask
me to call a priest and in which you ask
me to wear The Cross that you enclose;
your own cross,
your dog-bitten cross,
no larger than a thumb,
small and wooden, no thorns, this rose—
I pray to its shadow,
that gray place
where it lies on your letter … deep, deep.
I detest my sins and I try to believe
in The Cross. I touch its tender hips, its dark jawed face,
its solid neck, its brown sleep.
True. There is
a beautiful Jesus.
He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef.
How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in!
How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes!
But I can’t. Need is not quite belief.
All morning long
I have worn
your cross, hung with package string around my throat.
It tapped me lightly as a child’s heart might,
tapping secondhand, softly waiting to be born.
Ruth, I cherish the letter you wrote.
My friend, my friend, I was born
doing reference work in sin, and born
confessing it. This is what poems are:
with mercy
for the greedy,
they are the tongue’s wrangle,
the world’s pottage, the rat’s star.
Anne Sexton (1928-1974)
spotify:track:20tRwxVyguyMwijkNtH8oP“It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into night to make a great arching line of which I couldn’t see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars.”
Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
“Unconscious Melody” by Preoccupations sounds like XTC after spending a month listening to nothing but 80s-era Bowie.
spotify:track:58ITGKThH6gQ4qfkir8kKb
…Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
William Shakespeare (from Hamlet)
