Love by Eric Fischl

If this was love, she wanted a piece. 

As weddings go, this one had been relaxed, easy. 

Who skips vows? But she'd been relieved. They'd moved onto the beer. A lot of the guests waded into the water, she stayed on sand. 

Her feet burned slightly, her fingers grew numb from the chilled bottle. Nobody cut the cake.

She waited till sundown to leave. The party hadn't thinned. 

She carried the last bottle back to a disposal crate, said goodbye. 

If this was love, she wouldn't mind. 

waking up to renoir

There is a small Renoir poster, and I bought it so I could safely forget about it.

Can you dance?

If the lights are low,
And the room is spinning,
Spinning out of my hand
Into a whirl of hearts and limbs


Would you care to walk with me awhile?

Yes, please, if you'll take it slow and laugh at me and, a little at you.
If you'll walk in silence, and talk only a little, if you won't scare me with intensity.
I can walk, but I get lost in my own thoughts sometimes, take it lightly.
I'm terrible at storytelling, and gifted at bad jokes.
But the stories get better when we've walked a little, when I've grown less conscious of you, receded back into me.


You're awfully quiet today

I'm just sole-tired,
And winded from spinning around the room
I wanted to go home, just now
I just want it to be time to leave
So I can tell you what a great time I had,
And we'll meet again

I've been spending a lot of time recently reading interviews. About writing. And usually, there's the same stuff about rituals or lack thereof, isolation, journeys, drafting or lack thereof, it'll all be sprinkled with anecdotes...it's fairly repetitive after a while. [Except Ginsberg, but more on that later.]

Anyway, I found this. It's an interview in the Paris Review that was called the Art of Fiction. And the author said something about God and writing that amused me.

" ......I imagine He (God) just decided, Well, this one’s been paying his dues, so let’s give him a bonus book. But Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks. Stendhal wrote Charterhouse of Parma in twelve days. That’s proof God spoke to them—if proof is needed. Twelve days! If it wasn’t God it was crass exhibitionism. "

Now, I would like very much to be a crass exhibitionist.

Three teaspoons of How.

From The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis,

'What does this stuff remind you of?' I ask her, standing back. 'Degas? Seurat? Renoir?'
She looks at the canvas and says, 'Scooby Doo.'

From Man Alone With Himself by Friedrich Nietzsche,

The street of one's ancestors. It is reasonable to develop further the talent that one's father or grandfather worked hard at, and not switch to something entirely new; otherwise one is depriving himself of the chance to attain perfection in some one craft. Thus the saying: 'Which street should you take? - That of your ancestors.

From A Blue Hand by Deborah Baker,

For twenty years Ginsberg had relished the ritual of pens and paper, the relief that accompanied the emptying of his thoughts and the satisfaction of notebooks with filled pages. There were the small spiral bound pocket notebooks that he wrote in on subways and buses, and there were sturdy bedside notebooks for nighttime cris de coeur or an early morning dream. Returning to a notebook after a day's neglect. he would begin in the present and circle back, writing his thoughts and observations not as he had them, but as he recalled them. Periodically he cast back through the pages, prospecting for the glowing seam of a poem, like a miner long accustomed to working in the dark.

As the years had passed, the notebooks changed. More and more, Allen Ginsberg used them like a blank tape, inviting the world outside and inside his head to inscribe its noisy jive of unlikely juxtapositions. In India he had several notebooks going, and one, designed for schoolwork, now sat open on his lap, interleaved with unanswered letters. On its pages the tracks of his thinking crossed the borders of day and night, past and present, waking and dreaming, poetry and prose. The rhythm of the train itself was inscribed in his handwriting and jagged line breaks.

************************************************************************************
This is from books I read recently.

Howl

"If you walk down the street, in New York, for a few blocks you get this gargantuan feeling of buildings and if you walk all day you'll be on the verge of tears. But you have to walk all day to get that sensation. What I mean is, if you write all day you'll get into it, into your body, into your feelings, into your consciousness....."

-Howl the Movie

Electrifying your bones, seeping into your marrow like cold, chilblains working like shock receptors in your fingers and toes, stiffening your neck into immovability and concentration, narrowing your eyes to a typewriter's precision, deforming the font into one adopted by newsprint, fueling the words into a reporter's truth, tapping into a fluid, pungent reality, tweezing strands to create stick figure representations, coughing up enough phlegm to give breath to stone, purging through finger pricks till madness's howl has coagulated to form a coat either of rust or sheen. And then you must do it over and empty yourself again.

'The people of coming days will know about the casting out of my net.' - Yeats

'If you close the door
The night could last forever
Leave the wine-glass out
And drink a toast to never.'

-The Velvet Underground

It comes with the house wine, and it goes down well with the steak.

It spills over, onto the street.

And its in the night air now.

Its sending you shivers, but the evening's holding on.

Eyes light up, half smiles are a French consistency.

It doesn't stick, it empties out. It empties in.

Its a different blue, time to be gone.

'There's nothing as cold, baby, as a spark that won't be flame.'

'Tell me,
Did you sail across the sun?
Did you make it to the milky way to see the lights all faded
And heaven is overrated?'
-The Train

Turn everything away in a coffee swirl.

The stars tonight are a million years old, and another million of years away.

Too late, they're getting away.

You, me and everybody else.

The world's elastic; too small for patience, too big for love.

And its back and forth, and back and forth trying to bridge the gap.

Some people choose, one end of the world over the other.

The others, they shuttle like stars.

Always leaving impressions behind, not knowing that space will stretch itself out, and there's only really a half way back.

Space over time, one without the other.
One without the other.

'We shroud our lives in mysteries,
In shooting stars and storming seas,
If we have any sense.'
-I am Kloot

Skipping stones tonight, we are.

The sounds of water can give silence a queasy turn.

Takes a while for the water to ease out.

Should know better than to fish at night.

Can't even see where the line hits the water, until there comes a massive tug.

Been there so many times on some many assorted nights, but there's still that surprise.

Don't mind it, makes one remember. Feel a little more alive.

Time to wind back the line, and a feeling creeps in,

What if its a Maud Gonne tonight?

Of Anish Kapoor and bathroom glass.

Its clay mold, all of it really.

And to some of us, it comes down to restructuring, reinventing.

Some of us, we turn reality inside out.

We're fascinated with the inside of things, it touches what is most base, most inherent in us.

Nakedness is fascinating as art. Not overt, crude nakedness. No.

Not aesthetic realism or plaintive impressionism, no.

Not even human nakedness, just an objectified extension.

You're looking into every hole, and you keep peering deeper, cause, surely, there has to be an end, but ...there isn't.

And that stumps you.

And there, there the artist has you.

Cause you can't figure him out, you can't just say, 'What a profound artistic statement,' and walk away.

You're unnerved, and he caught you off guard.

You weren't expecting this. I mean, come on, its modern art after all.

It has a visual genius to it that your mind can't even begin to decode.

You're not saying you loved it, it didn't even overwhelm you.

But you saw something there.
Something that wasn't here to start with.

And that's enough.

For now.