Every human should be required to read Letters to a Young Poet

Turn therefore from the common themes to those which your own everyday life affords; depict your sorrows and desires, your passing thoughts and belief in some kind of beauty– depict all that with heartfelt, quiet, humble sincerity and use to express yourself the things that surround you, the images of your dreams and the objects of your memory. If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself, tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches; since for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place.

Rainer Maria Rilke

It Happened One Night

She'd have to be the sort of a girl who'd jump in the surf with me and love it as much as I did. You know, nights when you and the moon and the water all become one. When you feel you're a part of something big and marvelous. That's the only place to live... where the stars are so close over your head you feel like you could reach up and stir them around. Hey, I've been thinking about it. If I could only find a girl who was hungry for those things...

The National

call me back, i'm on a plane

i think i'm somewhere over spain

i'm in a dark without the stars

i've never seen a black so dark

thought i'd be above the rain

somewhere on a higher plane...

I nabbed tickets to see these guys with The War on Drugs in December. I'm quite excited for it. They've always struck a chord for me, but since I was in Paris, up through the summertime, they've gone from great to downright brilliant. I can't get enough. I may even be going to this if I'm not working that night... !

Aristotle

"This is why, when we enjoy something a great deal, we do not really do anything else, and when we are only mildly pleased by something, we do other things; people who eat sweets in the theatre, for example, do it most when the acting is bad."

He really knew his stuff.

Paula Scher, Designer

ARTIST SERIES: Paula Scher from Hillman Curtis on Vimeo.

"And it doesn’t smell right! It doesn’t smell like an art supply; it smells like a car."

- Paula Scher on computers 

I'm taking an intro class to graphic design programs this semester, and my professor showed us this video on the first day. I have to say that design and the world of typography are some things I know nothing about, so seeing videos like this is rather eye-opening for me.

Posting may be light around here as I adjust to my new and enormously stressful workload, but I will pop in to say hello and share fun things as often as possible.

Tiny Beautiful Things

Her name is Sugar, and she writes an advice column for The Rumpus. 

She was asked a version of that age old question: if you could talk to your 20-year-old self, what would you say?

This is her response.

It struck such a chord with me that I've been thinking about it for days. Especially this part:

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

Thank you, Sugar, for saying what I couldn't put into words.

And a photo, taken on a long, meandering walk through Madrid.

e.e. cummings

Now i lay(with everywhere around)
me(the great dim deep sound
of rain;and of always and of nowhere)and
what a gently welcoming darkestness--

now i lay me down(in a most steep
more than music)feeling that sunlight is
(life and day are)only loaned:whereas
night is given(night and death and the rain

are given;and given is how beautifully snow)

now i lay me down to dream of(nothing
i or any somebody or you
can begin to begin to imagine)

something which nobody may keep.
now i lay me down to dream of Spring

Patrick Modiano said it best:

En ce temps-là, Paris était une ville qui correspondait à mes battements de cœur. Ma vie ne pouvait s'inscrire autre part que dans ses rues. Il suffisait de me promener tout seul, au hasard, dans Paris, et j'étais heureux.

At the time, Paris was a city which corresponded to the beating of my heart. My life couldn't register itself anywhere but in its streets. It sufficed to take myself for walks all alone, randomly, in Paris, and I was happy.

Come and find me

So I keep you in a flower vase
   with your fatalism, your crooked face

with the daisies and the violet brocades

and I keep me in a vacant lot

in the ivies and forget-me-nots

hoping you'll come and untangle me one of these days

I will never hear this song and not think of riding buses all around Spain.
Weaving tales in my head and daydreaming for hours on end.
Passing by wind energy turbines and huge silhouette cutouts of bulls
perched on the tops of hills.
Rest stops. Fields and mountains.

More words from a master

It is claimed that there is such a moment of stooping, 

of summoning our strength, holding our breath, 

a moment of outward silence above the greatest internal
tension that exists between two human beings. 

There is no way of saying what takes place in that moment. 

It is, so to speak, the shadow that passion casts ahead of itself. 

An organic shadow; a relaxation of all earlier tensions 

and at the same time a new and sudden state of bondage
which contains the whole of the future; 

an incubation concentrated on the point of a needle . . . 

And on the other hand it is a nothing, 

a dull, vague feeling, a weakness, an anxiety . . .

Robert Musil

The Confusions of Young Törless

What I've Been Looking For!

This quote I found on one of my favorites, lolita, explicates literally perfectly a sentiment that I have been struggling with for the better half of my conscious life. I didn't think it could be done.

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs;
ask yourself what makes you come alive.

And then go and do that. 

Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

- Howard Thurman

Exactly.

At this point I meet Me face to face.

This is the most interesting research I've ever done.

At this point I meet Me face to face.
I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and
dearly and damnably important to Me.
Face to face I look at Me with some hatred, with despair and with
great intentness.
I put Me in a crucible of my own making and set it in the flaming
trivial Inferno of my mind. And I assay thus:
I am rare— I am in some ways exquisite.
I am pagan within and without.
I am vain and shallow and false.

I am a specialized being, deeply myself.
I am of woman-sex and most things that go with that, with some other

pointes.
I am dynamic but devastated, laid waste in spirit.
I'm like a leopard and I'm like a poet and I'm like a religieuse and
I'm like an outlaw.
I have a potent weird sense of humor— a saving and a demoralizing
grace.
I have brain, cerebration— not powerful but fine and of a remarkable
quality.
I am scornful-tempered and I am brave.
I am slender in body and someway fragile and firm-fleshed and sweet.
I am oddly a fool and a strange complex liar and a spiritual vagabond.
I am strong, individual in my falseness: wavering, faint, fanciful in my
truth.
I am eternally self-conscious but sincere in it.
I am ultra-modern, very old-fashioned: savagely incongruous.
I am young, but not very young.
I am wistful— I am infamous.
In brief, I am a human being.
I am presciently and analytically egotistic, with some arresting dead-feeling
genius.
And were I not so tensely tiredly sane I would say that I am mad.

Mary MacLane, in her journal. Butte, Montana. Early 20th century.

Marie Bashkirtseff

I am attempting to read her journals, which are compiled into one volume titled I Am the Most Interesting Book of All. She was born in Russia, lived in France, and died at age 25 from tuberculosis. She was an artist and avid academic.

Saturday, April 24, 1875

 I had a dream in which I saw an enormous bouquet of yellow heads of wheat, as big as my bedroom, hanging from the ceiling. It was hanging above a table all covered with flowers and magnificent fruits. This dream put me in a good mood all day. I was so happy that it was a pity to be that way for nothing. I put on the white silk skirt, and, for a blouse, the top of the white Jewish dress in light wool embroidered in white. I wore not even one plain gold bracelet and no gloves. There was nothing on my head, either, except two long curls tied together. Oh, yes— two diamond earrings.


my favorite.

Some new mantras

I know one is supposed to choose a single mantra for repetition, d'habitude, but I lately I've found some longer quotes that I wish could be inscribed on the backs of my eyelids so I could be reminded of them approximately 25 times per minute. In reality, they're not mantras at all; they're long, quoted from mildly-famous-but-only-in-niches people, and not really spiritual in the least. I even took a class on Hinduism! How dare I . . .

Quotes, and how they relate to my life presently.

On these past days, weeks:

I am convinced that there are times in everybody's existence when there is so much to be done, that the only way to do it is to sit down and do nothing.

Fanny Fern 

On adulthood:

Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork . . . . They run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time.

Elizabeth Bowen

On living in New York City:

Have you ever noticed? Anybody going slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac.

George Carlin

On growing:

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

Will Rogers

On current times: 

Leisure is gone — gone where the spinning wheels are gone, and the packhorses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.

George Eliot

On my love for my canine companion, Madison:

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.

Milan Kundera

On yoga, both the textbook definition and the practice:

No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

On smelling the roses:

Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.

Alan Watts

On taking it as it comes: 

What am I doing? Nothing. I am letting life rain upon me.

Rahel Varnhagen

All of the above is taken from the October issue of The Sun, my all time favorite literary publication. Ultimate goal: a photograph of mine on the cover.

A Balzacian run-on for the ages

If the artist does not throw himself into his work like Curtius into the gulf, like a soldier into the breach, unreflectingly; and if, in that crater, he does not dig like a miner buried under a fall of rock; if, in fact, he thinks about the difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one, like those mortals favored by the fairies, who, in order to win their princesses, fight a whole series of combats against successive enchantments, the work will never be completed; it will perish in the studio, where production becomes impossible, and the artist looks on at the suicide of his own talent.

Cousin Bette

I'm not looking for anything supernatural, 

it's the natural that I'm looking for — 

do you understand? 

Nothing outside of myself — 

I'm looking for something . . . within myself! 

Something natural! 

But something I still don't understand!

Robert Musil

The Confusions of Young Törless

I AM LOVE - IO SONO L'AMORE

I feel there is nothing quite like going to the movies by myself. I went to see I Am Love the week it came out. It was a long drive up to Cinema Arts in Huntington, and one of the hottest days of the summer. There was traffic. I won't bother trying to find words to brand this film and push it into a category, which would be neither fruitful nor accurate. But I do know that I felt true appreciation and utter jealousy that a person could make a film so well. Luca Guadagnino, I tip my hat to you.

A note, though: don't leave as soon as the end credits roll. Stick around until it's really over.

Appropriately from "Wisdom", the short film I posted the other day...

Love something. 

I think we've got to learn to love something deeply. I think it's love. 

It sounds sentimental as hell, but I really think it is.

Andrew Wyeth