spare me your post-everythings

'...for wherever I seat myself, I die in exile...' (Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room) -- A blog about modernist literature, fine arts and music.

[ukdamo]

The Sopot Pier (part II of the Polish Triptych)

Velid Beganovic

The train brakes and screeches and we climb down onto the land-d-d land land before we see the sea, always out of season, spitting fossils and amber.

I spot you inside the yellow on my palm, your youth caught in the resin of my old bark when I was a spruce, propelled into the future where I collect you again, unchanged but crystallised, and my mouth begins to kiss and lick you out of your splendid transparent grave, for us to walk on the pier again, and talk between the cries of gulls and wind slaps,

Then blue-ue-ue blue blue the sea stretching endless fractals in your eyes.

[borjen]

The Monk and the Goldfish — EcoTheo Collective

For Martin Běčák One day at dawn a monk woke up in his mountain cave and went down to a lake in the foothills to get some fresh water. H

[borjen]

'The Harbinger' / "Vjesnik"

[29-03-2024]

297x420 cm

V. B. Borjen

[borjen]

‘The age of romance was over. The age of realism had begun.’ - you know the sort of thing. Now of course writers themselves know very well that there is not a word of truth in all this - there are no battles, and no murders, and no defeats and no victories. But as it is of the utmost importance that readers should be amused, writers acquiesce. They dress themselves up. They act their parts. One leads; the other follows. One is romantic, the other realist. One is advanced, the other out of date. There is no harm in it, so long as you take it as a joke, but once you believe in it, once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader, or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody. … On the floor of your mind, then - is it not this that makes you a poet? - rhythm keeps up its perpetual beat. Sometimes it seems do die down to nothing; it lets you eat, sleep, talk, like other people. Then again it swells and rises and attempts to sweep all the contents of your mind into one dominant dance. –Virginia Woolf, A Letter to a Young Poet ____________________ Photo: Virginia Woolf and John Lehmann

[latibule-e-deactivated20231012]

— Margaret Atwood, from “Morning in the Burned House.”

[latibule-e-deactivated20231012]

— Czeslaw Milosz, from New and Collected Poems (1931-2001); “More than Efficient.”

[hluw]

Do not believe that man grows. No; he is born suddenly – a word, in a moment, penetrates his heart to a new throb. One scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood on to the ruggedness of the road.

Ghassan Kanafani, In a letter to his son Fayez

[cloudswamp]

speeches for dr. frankenstein, margaret atwood

[petaltexturedskies]

Anaïs Nin, from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. IV: 1944-1947

[borjen]

TELESCOPE

by Louise Glück

There is a moment after you move your eye away

when you forget where you are

because you’ve been living, it seems,

somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You’ve stopped being here in the world.

You’re in a different place,

a place where human life has no meaning.

You’re not a creature in a body.

You exist as the stars exist,

participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you’re in the world again.

At night, on a cold hill,

taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward

not that the image is false

but the relation is false.

You see again how far away

each thing is from every other thing.

----

🌿

This poem was love at first reading for me.

Now she exists as the stars exist.

(1943-2023)

Photo © Webb Chappell

[borjen]

Today marks 80 years since Virginia Woolf decided to end her life in 1941. For this occasion, I recorded this tiny but haunting short story published posthumously, in 1943. I like to think she too haunts her Monks House and other places she'd lived in, in a similarly gentle way. <3

[undr]

John Bulmer. Street scene in The Black Country, England. 1960

[agelessphotography]

Cinema in the outskirts of Naples, Italy, Thomas Hoepker, 1956

[luzfosca]

Bert Hardy . “The Pool of London,” 1949. From Getty Images/Bert Hardy Estate

[luzfosca]

Oscar Marzaroli. 'Street Games, Back Court, Gorbals 1964’. From The Marzaroli Collection

[borjen]

“THE ARRIVAL OF PULSARS”, V. B. Borjen

Just published in Déraciné literary magazine, Issue 7

Analog, taken in Prague with Praktica mtl3

[borjen]

“WORMHOLE HARMONICA”, V. B. Borjen

Just published in Déraciné literary magazine, Issue 7

Analog, taken in Prague with Praktica mtl3

[borjen]

“INTERIOR WITH THE MOON”, V. B. Borjen

Just published in Déraciné literary magazine, Issue 7

Analog, taken in Prague with Praktica mtl3