Hail!

natural desire! Hail! happiness! divine happiness! and pleasure of all sorts, flowers and wine, though one fades and the other intoxicates; half-crown tickets out of London on Sundays, and singing in a dark chapel hymns about death, and anything that interrupts and confounds the tapping of typewriters and filing of letters and forging links and chains, binding the Empire together.

Hail happiness! or prayer; or denial; hail! in whatever form it comes, and may there be more forms, and stranger.


Virginia Woolf - Orlando, 1928

A Life of Crime

Writing incessantly about food is like writing porn. How many adjectives can there be before you repeat yourself? How many times can you write variations on the tale of the lonely housewife, temporarily short of funds, and the horny but hunky delivery boy who's not adverse to negotiating for that pizza? How many times can you describe a fucking salad without using the word "crisp"? So it's always a pleasure when I'm given the opportunity to write about something that doesn't involve food or chefs. I do have other interests. Crime is one of them.


Anthony Bourdain - The Nasty Bits

INTERVIEWER: What do you find the best time and place for writing?

KEROUAC

The desk in the room, near the bed, with a good light, midnight till dawn, a drink when you get tired, preferably at home, but if you have no home, make a home out of your hotel room or motel room or pad: peace. [Picks up harmonica and plays.] Boy, can I play!


Jack Kerouac - Paris Review, 'The Art of Fiction No. 41'

Heat

--> The heat descends. There’s something almost unnatural about it, freakish, atomic, condensed. Summer here’s a short season, but the orchards and vineyards grow lush fast nonetheless soaking up the last bit of spring rain before the hot light stays long in the valley. Cherries ripen – I spent part of yesterday head in a laden tree, sketchily propped up on an old plank fence pulling the sun-warmed glowing coral and carmine fruit from far branches with fingertips, my arms sticky with juice and sunshine. The heat shimmers aromatic on the ground and I roll a cherry around on my tongue before squishing the warm sweet and sour pulp against the roof of my mouth. The lake shines blue and silver below me; the sun bakes my skin brown as dirt. I blink into the bright, and time sears along in a flash.

To write

is the joy and torment of the idle. Oh to write! From time to time I feel a need, sharp as thirst in summer, to note and describe. And then I take up my pen again and attempt the perilous and elusive task of seizing and pinning down, under its flexible double-pointed nib, the many-hued fugitive, thrilling adjective... The attack does not last long; it is but the itching of an old scar.

Colette - The Vagabond, 1911

Robert Creely

INTERVIEWER

I've heard a lot of stories about your fighting in those earlier days.

CREELEY

That's when the confusions of how to be with people became so heightened I would just spill. It had to do with drinking, which I did a lot of in those days. And pot. We were smoking pot pretty continuously by about . . . let's see . . . I first had use of marijuana in India, where I was in the American Field Service. We were in a barracks at one point—about forty men, all ages. I think almost everyone in that barracks was turned on almost all day long. We were in Central India. There was literally nothing to do. It was an incredibly awkward climate for us. I mean it was very hot and so we'd sit there sweating—drinking was impossible—and getting very damned sick. I had a friend from Southern California who suggested one day that there was an alternative. He said, “Try this.” There was nothing mystical. It was very, like, “Here, have an aspirin.” So the barracks switched and everything became very delightful. The food was instantly palatable and life became much more interesting. So much so that I remember returning from England on the Queen Elizabeth and this friend and I continued smoking a lot of pot on ship. In fact, we used to go into the toilet. A lot of people depended on this toilet, and he and I would get in there and turn on, then sort of sit around. Outside there'd be this great mass of people standing and waiting, banging to get in there. They thought we were homosexuals—a consideration aided by the fact that one night, I remember, I staggered back into the room where there were these tiers of bunks, and trying to get into my bunk I climbed into the wrong one. We used to get up on the boat deck too, which was restricted. That North Atlantic—it was absolutely silent and isolated, seeing that whole sea in a beautiful full moon. Just beautiful.

The Paris Review - The Art of Poetry No. 10, Robert Creely

Consider the Lobster

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

David Foster Wallace - 'Consider the Lobster' Gourmet Magazine, August 2004

Bones

The lambs were arranged over the coals head to toe head to toe the way you'd put a bunch of kinds having a sleepover into a bed. We kept a heavy metal garden rake next to the pit to arrange the coals as the passed and the ashes built up, moving the spent coals to the edges and revealing the hot glowing red embers. The lambs roasted so slowly and patiently that their blood dripped down into the coals with a hypnotic and rhythmic hiss, which sounded like the hot tip of a just-blown-out match being dipped into a cup of water. My dad basted them by dipping a branch of wood about as thick and long as an axe handle, with a big swab of cheesecloth tied at its end, into a clean metal paint can filled with olive oil, crushed rosemary and garlic, and big chunks of lemons. He then mopped the lambs, slowly, gently, and thoroughly, back and forth with soft careful strokes like you might paint your brand-new sailboat. Then the marinade, too, dripped down onto the coals, hissing and atomizing, it scent lifting up into the air. So all day long, as we did our chores, the smell of gamey lamb, apple-wood smoke, and rosemary garlic marinade comingled and became etched into our brains. I have clung to it for thirty years, that smell. I have chronic summertime yearning to build large fires outdoors and slowly roast whole animals. I could sit fireside and baste until sundown. Hiss. Hiss. Hiss.

Gabrielle Hamilton - Blood, Bones, & Butter

take me back to Giverny

summer

eat
drink
fuck
sleep
repeat
in the sun
in the dark
in the warm
in the ease

The Pale King

The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

David Foster Wallace

bible of the month

lethem-approved, chip kidd jacket.
neat, mixtape-y, here.

oh yes, i remember now

"Then suddenly Orlando would fall into one of his moods of melancholy; the sight of the old woman hobbling over the ice might be the cause of it, or nothing; and would fling himself face downwards on the ice and look into the frozen waters and think of death. For the philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy; and he goes on to opine that one is twin fellow to the other; and draws from this the conclusion that all extremes of feeling are allied to madness; and so bids us take refuge in the true Church (in his view, the Anabaptist), which is the only harbour, port, anchorage, etc., he said, for those tossed on this sea.
'All ends in death,' Orlando would say, sitting upright, his face clouded in gloom."

- Virginia Wolf, Orlando