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Playing
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy
I SEE A DARKNESS
Friday, January 17, 2025
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
Memories of My Melancholy Whores
I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people’s time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.
Thursday, January 16, 2025
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WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing"
Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors' eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
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HALLDÓR LAXNESS
Independent People
“Oh yes,” said the old woman, “but I’ve heard these so-called stoves are by no means all they are supposed to be. I never saw a stove in my day, and yet never ailed a thing, at least as long as I could really be called alive, except for nettle rash one night when I was in my fifteenth year. It was caused by some fresh fish that the boys used to catch in the lakes thereabouts.”
The man did not answer for a while, but lay pondering the medical history of this incredible old creature who, without ever setting eyes on a stove, had suffered almost no ailments in the past sixty-five years.
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
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JOHN ASHBERY
"The Plywood Years"
Here in the open, love lies apart,
singing to its beads. How reflective is that?
Don’t be such a goose, love said.
They’ll tinsel you.
They came after me and in the end I was a sot.
They said on TV it didn’t matter.
One fallen ice cube is left. The others go in.
So it was on your conscience the hangover happened?
You don’t want to call.
Others than you are surfeited.
Bobby Burns said a rose is like no other,
neither is a lintel a blood-red reef.
They came and sat on the pier next to me.
I had piqued their curiosity
just like in the old days.
One spoke to a kitten. They shrugged.
I hadn’t had the mirror experience in the hangar
yet. Those were all days tumbling over me like water,
like a scented caress. Then a bumble bee
gladdens earth with its silver sound.
We lived under tarpaper and ebony slats,
dragging one’s feet across the floor.
Oh if you’re going to then do it
advised the eggbeater. Time got left out of the equation.
Monday, January 13, 2025
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KO UN
“Arrows”
Transformed into arrows
let’s all go, body and soul!
Piercing the air
let’s go, body and soul,
with no way of return,
transfixed there,
rotting with the pain of striking home,
never to return.
One last breath! Now, let’s quit the string,
throwing away like rags
all we’ve had for decades
all we’ve enjoyed for decades
all we’ve piled up for decades,
happiness,
the lot.
Transformed into arrows
let’s all go, body and soul!
The air is shouting! Piercing the air
let’s go, body, and soul!
In dark daylight the target is rushing towards us.
Finally, as the target topples
in a shower of blood,
let’s all just once as arrows
bleed.
Never to return!
Never to return!
Hail, arrows, our nation’s arrows!
Hail, Warriors! Spirits of the fallen!
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Sunday, January 12, 2025
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Saturday, January 11, 2025
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JEFF VANDERMEER
Hummingbird Salamander
Hard to describe what those next years felt like to live through. Except as a hollowing out, a loss beyond repair … even as it kept begging to be repaired. While the promise of what had been so very close haunted me. In so many ways.
"So much in motion, such energy, it disguised the decay of things, the incremental rot. How much was hollowed out."
Impossible to tell how fast society was collapsing because history had been riddled through with disinformation, and reality was composed of half-fictions and full-on paranoid conspiracy theories. You couldn't figure out if collapse was a cliff or a gentle slope because all the mental constructs obscured it.
Multinationals kept their monopolies, shed jobs or even their identities, but most did not go under. Governments became more autocratic, on average.
Here was fine, there was a disaster. But here was just a different kind of disaster. A thick mist drenched in the smoke of flares that kept curling back on us. Why fight a mist if all that lay ahead was more of the same?
Those of us who survived the pandemic, and all the rest, passed through so many different worlds. Like time travelers.
Friday, January 10, 2025
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Now banned from owning a gun or entering the nations of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Cambodia, CANADA, Chile, China, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Ethiopia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, ISRAEL, Japan, Kenya, Macau, Malaysia, MEXICO, Morocco, Nepal, New Zealand, Peru, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, and United Arab Emirates.
Who knows. Maybe President Musk can pull a few strings and at least get him into South Africa. Tour some emerald mines. Spit on some black people.
Banned for life from entering Canada and Mexico. LMAO.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
“Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading”
Harper’s Magazine, February 2008
The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.
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Thursday, January 9, 2025
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SAMUEL BECKETT
Texts For Nothing
Yes, I was my father and I was my son, I asked myself questions and answered as best I could, I had it told to me evening after evening, the same old story I knew by heart and couldn’t believe, or we walked together, hand in hand, silent, sunk in our worlds, each in his worlds, the hands forgotten in each other. That’s how I’ve held out till now. And this evening again it seems to be working, I’m in my arms, I’m holding myself in my arms, without much tenderness, but faithfully, faithfully. Sleep now, as under that ancient lamp, all twined together, tired out with so much talking, so much listening, so much toil and play.
Wednesday, January 8, 2025
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ROBERT CREELEY
“Night”
Needs most
happily mutual,
this given,
that taken,
the board clear,
and the food
reappears as
one after one
the night finds
persons in a
lovely particular
display. Here
is a street, and
now a car seems
to be coming,
the lights
signal approach at
an intersection when
a locked group
beats upon the
locked door an
inextricable tenderness
of one man’s
desire to be there.
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