care-tags.org

Poetry, novel excerpts, song lyrics, quotes, stuff which you wrote or that someone else did - if it's a clump of words that makes you feel something, share it in this thread. Feel free to include images or music that you feel connects with the words somehow.

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I'm still jamming on Fitzgerald:

Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.



Trainspotting:

The truth is that I'm a bad person. But, that's gonna change - I'm going to change. This is the last of that sort of thing. Now I'm cleaning up and I'm moving on, going straight and choosing life. I'm looking forward to it already. I'm gonna be just like you. The job, the family, the fucking big television. The washing machine, the car, the compact disc and electric tin opener, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance, mortgage, starter home, leisure wear, luggage, three piece suite, DIY, game shows, junk food, children, walks in the park, nine to five, good at golf, washing the car, choice of sweaters, family Christmas, indexed pension, tax exemption, clearing gutters, getting by, looking ahead, the day you die.

oh god this is going to be my favorite thread, I can just tell

Your peonies lean their vast heads westward
as if they might topple. Some topple.
- Donald Hall, from Weeds and Peonies

briefly, I considered starting a subversively well-read surfpunk band called Weed and Peonies, but it never panned out beyond a few tentative song drafts.

Infinite Jest was a seriously 10/10 novel.

I find myself quoting it more often than not. Vonnegut too.

This one probably sticks out the most for me in regards to Vonnegut.

"
The First Book

Warning from title page: Don't be a fool! Close this book at once! It is nothing but foma!
[ 118 ]

Verse 1: All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies. [ 4 ]

Verses 2-4 (?): In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.

And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely.

"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.

"Certainly," said man.

"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.

And He went away. [ 118 ]

Verse 5: Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.
"

I did a little sketch about this in one of my journals from a year back, the imagery of someone sculpting a man out of mud usually gives high school pseudo-intellectuals a huge boner.

If I had to have a quote tattooed on my body it would definitely be "Live by the foma...".

"It felt strange punching in the code at the gate and seeing how things were different and the same, how the trees had grown while the flowerbeds remained in a state of suspended animation, everything in perpetual bloom and clipped to within a millimeter of perfection. The gardeners saw to that. A whole battalion of them that swarmed over the place twice a week with their blowers and edgers and trimmers, at war with the weeds, the insects, the gophers and ground squirrels, and the very tendency of the display plants to want to grow outside the box."

from TC Boyle's Admiral

a friend said this to me earlier this week:

"she had generic eyes so i see her everywhere"

this really really got to me.

Dickensian Children
Roberto Bolaño

You admire the poet with nerves of steel Right?
Right In the same way you admire
the worker with savage hours and shopkeepers
who fall asleep at dawn counting gold
and 25-year-old girls who fuck all
night and the next day take three or four exams
at the university
It’s tough to understand the above I mean to say
wild animals hanging around the walls of my house
Owls and Dickensian children Lizards and hermaphrodites
painted by Moreau The suns of my two rooms
The buzz of footsteps that can harden at any moment
like a sculpture of dirty plaster The vacant
eyes of the saint riding his horse toward
the Dragon

also Charles Olsen merks

Really like Bolaño. The opening lines of "Prose from Autumn in Girona (Prosa del otoño en Gerona)" (from Tres), translated poorly by me:

A person—I should say a stranger—who caresses you, jokes around with you, is sweet to you and brings you to the edge of a cliff. There, the character cries Oh or becomes pale. As if he were inside a kaleidoscope and seeing the eye looking back at him. Colors arranged in a geometry alien to everything you're prepared to accept as good. This is how autumn begins, between the river Oñar and the hill of Las Pedreras.

The stranger is sprawled out on the bed. Through scenes empty of love (flat bodies, sadomasochistic objects, pills, and the faces of the unemployed) you come to the moment that you declare autumn and you discover the stranger.

In the bedroom, in addition to the reflection that sucks everything into it, you observe stones, yellow slabs of rock, sand, pillows with hairs on them, abandoned pajamas. Then everything disappears.

Original:

This Is Just to Say
William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Paul Celan might be my favourite poet. The above is a piece called Todesfuge (Death Fugue) and is probably his most famous poem. It's also the first i read and the lines 'We shovel a grave in the air' and 'scrape your strings darker you'll rise then as smoke to the sky' have always stayed with me.

He was born in Romania in 1920, and grew up in a Jewish family which resulted in both his parents dying in labour camps (Celan also spent time in a camp). Post WW2 he moved to Bucharest, Vienna, and finally Paris. He never really escaped the mental weight of being Jewish and German, and the events of the Holocaust (which the above poem is about). He committed suicide by throwing himself into the Seine in 1970.

His life was tragic but also incredibly interesting and moving. There's a brilliant by John Felstiner that i'd recommend if anyone is interested in reading more about him. It combines both poetry analysis and his story. Really good read.

Bright enfolding arch of sky

Where are words to voice my heart?

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

e e cummings

nn

hope this is an appropriate thread

Chapter One:

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.




Chapter Seven:

"What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?" cried Daisy, "and the day after that, and the next thirty years?"

"Don't be morbid," Jordan said. "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall."

God, what a book.

The Fish

She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes she has made today. Now the fish has been cooked, and she is alone with it. The fish is for her--there is no one else in the house. But she has had a troubling day. How can she eat this fish, cooling on a slab of marble? And yet the fish, too, motionless as it is, and dismantled from its bones, and fleeced of its silver skin, has never been so completely alone as it is now: violated in a final manner and regarded with a weary eye by this woman who has made the latest mistake of her day and done this to it.

- Lydia Davis

broken english

when my mother struggles to spell a word in english
I want to break the entire language
into little pieces
so the edges of these letters
will stop cutting her

This is quite well known in England and is one of my favourite passages at the moment.

If I should die think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.

-Rupert Brooke