Passion Task Commonplace Book

from “A Fond Farewell” (Elliott Smith)

chris — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 20:23:30 +0000

from “A Fond Farewell”

Good and evil matched perfect, it’s a great romance
I can deal with some psychic pain
If it’ll slow down my higher brain
Veins full of disappearing ink
Vomiting in the kitchen sink
Disconnecting from the missing link

This is not my life
It’s just a fond farewell to a friend
It’s not what I’m like
It’s just a fond farewell to a friend
Who couldn’t get things right
Fond farewell to a friend

I see you’re leaving me and taking up with the enemy
The cold comfort of the in-between
A little less than a human being
A little less than a happy high
A little less than a suicide
The only things that you really tried

This is not my life
It’s just a fond farewell to a friend

–Elliott Smith

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Post tags: elliott smith, lyrics, music, songs

Tags: elliott smith, lyrics, music, songs

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“Old Verses Come to Mind” (Leonardo Sinisgalli)

chris — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 20:19:57 +0000

“Old Verses Come to Mind”

Look, I’m taken by the story of a rose
erased by snow (a living sign
your cigarette’s burning tip).
Look, the umbrellas on the Spanish Steps
climb out of sight in the dark.
If our steps sink deep
we’ll find peace in the kingdom
where no one’s waiting for us.

–Leonardo Sinisgalli (trans. by Ruth Ferrarelli)
found in I Saw the Muses

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Paralyzing Thinking

chris — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:51:31 +0000

The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralyzing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.

–Alain de Botton

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Michael Dirda on the Seduction of Reading

chris — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:08:36 +0000

Amid such an internal tohubohu, is it any wonder that I think fondly of the man of one book, the hedgehog who–in the phrase made famous by Isaiah Berlin–knows one big thing and doesn’t need to know any other? In very low moments I sometimes think that a passion for omnivorous reading has seduced me into a lifetime of one-night stands, while the less promiscuous have managed to find a single true and more fulfilling love. But it’s too late for me and my kind to change now, n o matter how much we may year for those carpet slippers and one or two well-worn volumes. How, after all, can I resist that flashy new thriller or sloe-eyed biography, let alone the new novel that promises hitherto unimagined pleasures? Sirens all. Of the reading of many books there is no end.

–Michael Dirda
from “The One and the Many”

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Joel Lovell on George Saunders

chris — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 14:56:53 +0000

It’s the trope of all tropes to say that a writer is “the writer for our time.” Still, if we were to define “our time” as a historical moment in which the country we live in is dropping bombs on people about whose lives we have the most abstracted and unnuanced ideas, and who have the most distorted notions of ours; or a time in which some of us are desperate simply for a job that would lead to the ability to purchase a few things that would make our kids happy and result in an uptick in self- and family esteem; or even just a time when a portion of the population occasionally feels scared out of its wits for reasons that are hard to name, or overcome with emotion when we see our children asleep, or happy when we risk revealing ourselves to someone and they respond with kindness — if we define “our time” in these ways, then George Saunders is the writer for our time.

–Joel Lovell
from “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year”

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Reading is Everything (Nora Ephron)

chris — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 14:51:22 +0000

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

–Nora Ephron
from I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

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Galileo on the Immense and the Imperceptible

chris — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 14:48:59 +0000

To our natural and human reason, I say that these terms ‘large,’ ‘small,’ ‘immense,’ ‘minute,’ etc. are not absolute but relative; the same thing in comparison with various others may be called at one time ‘immense’ and at another ‘imperceptible.’

–Galileo Galilei
found in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

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What Family Is

chris — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 18:31:18 +0000

“You’ll see one day when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it’s gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It’s like you feel homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist. Maybe it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I don’t know, but I miss the idea of it, you know. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place.”

–from Garden State

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“To the One Who is Reading Me” (Jorge Luis Borges)

chris — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 18:04:56 +0000

“To the One Who is Reading Me”

You are invulnerable. Didn’t they deliver
(those forces that control your destiny)
the certainty of dust? Couldn’t it be
your irreversible time is that river
in whose bright mirror Heraclitus read
his brevity? A marble slab is saved
for you, one you won’t read, already graved
with city, epitaph, dates of the dead.
And other men are also dreams of time,
not hardened bronze, purified gold. They’re dust
like you; the universe is Proteus.
Shadow, you’ll travel to what waits ahead,
the fatal shadow waiting at the rim.
Know this: in some way you’re already dead

–Jorge Luis Borges
(translated by Tony Barnstone)

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“Music Box” (Jorge Luis Borges)

chris — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 17:43:31 +0000

“Music Box”

Music of Japan. Parsimoniously
from the water clock the drops unfold
in lazy honey or ethereal gold
that over time reiterates a weave
eternal, fragile, enigmatic, bright.
I fear that every one will be the last.
They are a yesterday come from the past.
But from what shrine, from what mountain’s slight
garden, what vigils by an unknown sea,
and from what modest melancholy, from
what lost and rediscovered afternoon
do they arrive at their far future: me?
Who knows? No matter. When I hear it play
I am. I want to be. I bleed away.

–Jorge Luis Borges
(translated by Tony Barnstone)

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