Baby A, upstanding
“When the heart is not enough it finds another room. Water does this. Traffic slows for rain. Let the tangled roots come and teach you sprawl, moral substitution, efficiency: every weed leans towards the ungraspable. In time fingers write their own music whether or not they are slender. Breathe. Make your own gravity, pull down sunlight. It takes longer than years to cross the door.”
— Other Things and Other Poems
(new and selected poems, with Croatian translation)
by Alvin Pang
Alvin Pang— lovely poet, lovely human being. If you don’t have any of his work in your library, rectify immediately. That is all.
Adam Mansbach @ Young Chicago Authors, early 2013
STORYBOARD: Capturing the ‘Humans of New York’ (by Tumblr)
Street photography practise reaffirmed.
Yes, it’s essentially an advert. No, I don’t care. Love this project.
Just read poems at an event for the Forward Arts Foundation. With Rhian Edwards. Who is officially a bad-ass poet.
I haven’t shared a stage with Rhian since “back-in-the-day” and I remember seeing some of her early gigs at the Poetry Cafe. Now we’re both Forward Poetry shortlistees (2012). Time passes, eh?
Pictured: Maisie - Forward Arts Assistant Director - presides over copies of Breaking Silence, Clueless Dogs (Rhian’s award winning collection) and the Forward Poetry Anthology.
2013/4 Brad Frost (by CreativeMornings/PGH)
Right?
Tate: Remixed— five years after the fact, I stumble across this. More accurately, I’ve been pointed in this direction— some interesting new work on the horizon for me, and this serves as stimulus. Francesca Beard’s a perennial favourite around these here parts, but I’m particularly digging this work of hers. Nick Makoha and Polar Bear also produced work for the same project. Go see.
Fix, Whitecross Street, London
ability slows (by Nathaniel Whitcomb | Think or Smile)
According to one theory, the moon formed when a Mars-sized chunk of rock collided with Earth. After the moon coalesced out of the debris from that impact, it was much closer to Earth than it is today. This idea is taken to its fanciful limit in Italo Calvino’s story “The Distance of the Moon” (from his collection Cosmicomics, translated by William Weaver). The story, narrated by a character with the impossible-to-pronounce name Qfwfq, tells of a strange crew who jump between Earth and moon, and sometimes hover in the nether reaches of gravity between the two.
“When you recognize that you’ve found yourself in this wilderness (and you will; perhaps even often), just remind yourself that your goal should be to share something transcendent with others through your work. Even the best ships occasionally need a good course correction.” - The Define Journal | What I Have to Say Wednesday: Parker Fitzgerald
“First thing every morning after waking up, I take a pill that may cause drowsiness. The darkness begins to peel away in long, uneven strips, exposing patches of brighter darkness underneath. Later, I’ll feel as I often do, like a candle eavesdropping on sunlight. Going up on the escalator, a vague little man who reminds me of me will hug a bag from Infinity Shoes to his chest. I’ll have the sense that anyone who isn’t a victim is a suspect. In infinity shoes, you could, theoretically, walk forever.” - ‘The Shadow of an Airplane Crosses the Empire State Building’ - Howie Good; via Right Hand Pointing
“What I fault newspapers for is that day after day they draw our attention to insignificant things whereas only three or four times in our lives do we read a book in which there is something really essential. Since we tear the band off the newspaper so feverishly every morning, they ought to change things and put into the paper, oh, I don’t know, perhaps…Pascal’s Pensees! …and then, in a gilt-edged volume that we open only once in ten years…we would read that the Queen if Greece has gone to Cannes or that the Princesses de Leon has given a costume ball. This way the proper proportions would be te established.” - Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (via Caterina.net)
I spent a half hour this morning thinking about my ideal daily routine and here is the result.
Shameless reblog, for no reason other than to say “me too…”
“What’s that sound? It’s the sound of thousands of text-nerds squealing with delight as they open their freshly updated Drafts app for iOS.” -
By now, you probably already know how much of my writing gets done via an iPad (read: a lot). In terms of a writing workflow, I’ve been through most of the popular text editors, and while Drafts is a a bit of a “bus stop” app as referred to in the linked article, it’s a useful one for focusing on the writing first and pushing that writing to wherever it needs to be later.
Sadly, I’ve moved on from many of the iOS text editors I’ve fallen for over the past couple of years of writing on an iPad. WriteRoom’s still on my first page (and I refuse to delete it out of sheer love), but is gathering the digital equivalent of dust from lack of use. Writings and iA Writer never really saw that much active use if I’m honest, even though Writings was particularly interesting for organising sets of documents on the fly for readings. Although I recently reloaded Daedalus to see what I might gain from it’s organisational metaphor of “stacks” (as opposed to files in folders), I’m sure to delete it again (font options are limited/unappealing, and the page width doesn’t really support longer lines of poetry).
Fellow text-nerds in the audience, take note: I’m still a loyal Scrivener fan for longer writing projects, but since I made a shift from a plain text system (Shock! Horror!), Evernote is the hub for most of my writing. Evernote works everywhere— iPad, phone, desktop and web— and even supercharges my notebook fetish by allowing me to snapshot and tag handwritten pages. Drafts serves as a beautiful (read: effortlessly functional AND aesthetically pleasing) conduit for pushing my writing to Evernote or anywhere else I need it to be. Colour me one happy writer. Squeal.
“We need to make space for “creative reading” as much as “creative writing” – at least if we understand “creative reading” to be something like “ways of reading that are not only rigorous, careful, attentive to historical context, different connotations and nuances of meaning and so on, but also inventive, surprising, willing to take risks, to be experimental, to deform and transform.”” - Nicholas Royle on “composition and decomposition.” Pair with Francine Prose on how to read like a writer and Virginia Woolf on how to read a book, then follow up with this 1936 to acquiring knowledge, of which critical reading is a centerpiece. (via explore-blog)
“For a year I went blind as a freight train, thrashed
in a wild grief, because nothing as loud
as my sorrow could be heard. Now, in the formless dark
I can’t untangle my tongue
even to know what kind of help to ask.
But he tells me I’m all flintstrike
deep in the basement’s gut: again, again, again, again—” - Extract of Small Bang Theory by Anne Shaw | Kenyon Review Online. Follow the link for the full poem.
in a wild grief, because nothing as loud
as my sorrow could be heard. Now, in the formless dark
I can’t untangle my tongue
even to know what kind of help to ask.
But he tells me I’m all flintstrike
deep in the basement’s gut: again, again, again, again—” - Extract of Small Bang Theory by Anne Shaw | Kenyon Review Online. Follow the link for the full poem.
“Think about it this way. We have 7,000 languages. Each of these languages encompasses a world-view, encompasses the ideas and predispositions and cognitive tools developed by thousands of years of people in that culture. Each one of those languages offers a whole encapsulated universe. So we have 7,000 parallel universes, some of them are quite similar to one another, and others are a lot more different. The fact that there’s this great diversity is a real testament to the flexibility and the ingenuity of the human mind.” - Lera Boroditsky - ENCAPSULATED UNIVERSES | Edge.org (via Roberto Greco)
