A scattering of mind (like rain
flung out small and squalled
against the random panes
attention turns to in its hunt
for some lasting fascination
that will hold its gaze and not allow
a second scene to come and slide
its heart away) is hard to stay
and even harder to abide.
—Ben Downing, “The Weather”
Art Credit Heidi Swanson
“If you chance to find an authoress occupied with her needle, express no astonishment, and refrain from exclaiming, ‘What! can you sew?’ or, ‘I never supposed a literary lady could even hem a handkerchief!’ This is false, and if expressed in words, an insulting idea. A large number of literary females are excellent needle-women, and good housewives; and there is no reason why they should not be.” Etiquette for dealing with the authoress, from 1854.
For more of this morning’s roundup, click here.
Nature harbors no opinions;
it is we who think of her.
We make sentience
of her indifference, and we communicate
by engineering, adjectives, and awesome
violence. When I arrive
at the island, my soul
will harbor no opinions.
I’ll stop my car
where sea-air and sand-light
become one perception,
all the world my affections, stitched together
by a muster of billboards, the dizzying gulls,
and a drawbridge open in prayer.
—Alan Michael Parker, from “The Island”
Art Credit Margarita Georgiadis
Writer and contributor Rachel Kushner talks with the Los Angeles Review of Books about her new novel, The Flamethrowers, mixing history with fiction, and why she became a writer.
“It has been said of Ulysses that, were Dublin ever obliterated, the city could be substantially rebuilt by consulting its pages. Along these lines, if all Europe were, God forbid, laid waste tomorrow, one might do worse than attempt to recreate it, or at least to preserve some sense of its historical splendor and variety, by immersing oneself in the travel books of Patrick Leigh Fermor.”
Part one of a visit with the British writer, scholar, and soldier.
Pictured: Patrick Leigh Fermor, center, with members of the General Heinrich Kreipe Abduction Team: Georgios Tyrakis, William Stanley Moss, Emmanouil Paterakis, and Antonios Papaleonidas.
These great washes of episodic light
across the walls—how facile
the reduction of passage to shape, and yet.
Once when I was burning
tracks away from home on hurried legs
the city appeared to me as a collection of boxes
in the streetlamps’ gloaming—
windows punched out of the dusk in proportion—
and complications resolved themselves
into simple desire.
Selfish but without remand.
Here I put what doesn’t reflect
a perfect symmetry.
—Melanie Rehak, from “Self-Portrait as the Liberal Arts”
Art Credit Vicky Moon
