Five Rings @cavatas - Tumblr Blog

"I'm in the service of something beyond me."

— Melanie De Biasio

#melanie de biasio #on writing #readings #favorite

“Not all writing is cursed, but surely all of it is haunted. Literature is a catacomb of past readers, past writers, past books. Traces of those who are responsible for creation linger among the words on a page; Shakespeare can’t hear us, but we can still hear him (and don’t ghosts wander through those estate houses upon the moors unaware that they’ve died?). […] Of all of the forms of expression that humanity has worked with—painting, music, sculpture—literature is the eeriest. Poetry and fiction are both incantation and conjuration, the spinning of specters and the invoking of ghosts; it is very literally listening to somebody who isn’t there, and might not have been for a long while. All writing is occult, because it’s the creation of something from ether, and magic is simply a way of acknowledging that—a linguistic practice, an attitude, a critical method more than a body of spells. We should be disquieted by literature; we should be unnerved.”

— Ed Simon, from his essay “Who’s There?: Every Story Is a Ghost Story”, published in The Millions, August 18, 2021

#ed simon #on writing #favorite

bainer

Visit Original Link

Bill Evans - Some Other Time (1958)

Too often, CD bonus tracks offer very little in the way of revelatory listening. This is an exception.

#bill evans #melody

"Good butter served at room temperature / Maldon sea salt in a small dish / Tough, tattoo-ed, secretly-sweet butchers that nod knowingly when you bring them your husband's recherche meat request / Ramps — if it's on a menu, I trust the kitchen / Handwritten menus / Any time a server tells me: "Excellent order" / The evocative names on heirloom-variety seed packets: "Grandma Hadley's lettuce;" "Jimmy Nardello peppers" / The butcher's blocky Sharpie handwriting on the brown paper parcel containing our lamp chops / A French market basket laden with the day's provisions: baguette, fromage, fruits de mer / The term fruits de mer / My husband's potager garden, and the way he ministers to it year-round / Candlelight and table linens / The sizzle of butter in a well-seasoned skillet, and the maillard that results / The bald love that goes into preparing a meal

— Jen Shoop, Things I find Randomly Chic: Food Edition

#jen shoop #appetite #rapture

elishanelsonfanacct

rothko: no.4, no.6, no.8. 1964

#paintings #mark rothko

archivezoya

Downs House (II) | Barry Downs | Vancouver, Canada

#architecture

"Stillness is the mother of discernment."

— Molesey Bridgette, The Queen Code

#molesey bridgette #persona

the-hearth-and-the-wild

There are experiences of landscape that will always resist articulation, and of which words offer only a remote echo - or to which silence is by far the best response. Nature does not name itself. Granite does not self-identify as igneous. Light has no grammar. Language is always late for its subject.

-Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks

#robert macfarlane #on linguistics #insp.

szobel

Kawai Gyokudō (1873 - 1957), Landscape.

#paintings #kwai gyokudō #japan

Calvin Klein, Spring, 1997

#style

parisisburningdown

“The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualize. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive instruments of discovery.”

— Anaïs Nin, from The Diary Of Anais Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947 (via violentwavesofemotion)

#theology #anaïs nin

geritsel

Gustave Doré - Mountainscape paintings, Scottish Highlands.

#paintings #gustave doré

"My heart is ruby It shines as I hurt What have I done? All walls fall like heaven I inhale the city I exhale beauty My love tangles and tangles I want nothing back I want nothing back I want nothing back and I want nothing bound

I am suffering, my resistance At your insistence I am steaming I wish we were dreaming I'm lost in the form of scheming I am wit, I am trapped The boundaries, they shiver The sky quivers—"

— Melanie De Biasio, And My Heart Goes On

#readings #melanie de biasio #rapture

“Houses have so much to say to me. For me, they are what Nature used to be to the poets—or rather, what the poets thought of as Nature.”

— Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

#antal szerb #readings #insp.