HAYLR

[explore-blog]

Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.” And another thing. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than get old. And he did. He shot himself. A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence. Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren’t. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old. And that brings up the real proof of what a mess I have made of being a man.

Ursula K. Le Guin on being a man – the finest, sharpest thing I’ve read in ages 

(via explore-blog)

[haylr]

Fall 16.

The playlists I used to create monthly, I've retired to creating seasonally. And I use the term create loosely--I add songs I hear and like or songs I think of as they come to me. My monthly playlists captured brief, curated flashes of life-- the spring break escapism March, the verdant panic of April, break ups in August, the chimney smoke and football cheers of October, alternating holiday happiness and melancholia. In the change of a season, there is more story, an arc. But sometimes less of an arc and more of a swelling, burst, and drip, or a detonation and its aftermath silence.

I'm posting Fall 16 now even though Spring arrives. Winter officially ends in a week, and what I realize listening back to Fall is even as I hear the songs that soundtracked a time of profound stress and imagined futures made and broken, each song makes me happy now. Maybe a season is time enough to appreciate my experiences as incredible.

[haylr]

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

Eric Hoffer, via this month’s NatGeo. I hope I’m learned and a learner.

[psliterary-deactivated20190419]

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person.

Barbara Kingsolver (via psliterary)

One of my favorite professors told me if I wanted to be a good psychologist, I should read novels and watch films. I took his advice (on top of 5 years of training). Here's to hoping he was right.

[lovingsylvia]

So I kiss him, and there is the great dark sea ahead, and above the sheaves of yellow stars, shoals of cold bright pieces of light, and the great wind, blowing always cold gulps and gusts of air, big and soft in the tree leaves, hushing, miracles are happening, and I, strange and elated with a new wonder, child-like in my sudden power, look with eyes large in love and amazement at this intent lovely face so earnest, so close to mine.

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, diary entry no. 142 for “Friday - August 22″, 1952  (via h-o-r-n-g-r-y)

[haylr]

Missed opportunities.

It’s been a while since something I read compelled me to share here. Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan Novels are the something. I have been completely captivated by these books, the informality of the writing but the depth of what’s conveyed, and by the characters and living in their world. I highly recommend them. 

Here the narrator has an unexpected dinner with a old friend she loved, a love that never came to fruition, while her current fiancé sits beside her. How painful, even years later, not having her old love is. 

“We all got up. I didn’t know what to do, I uselessly sought his gaze, as a great sorrow filled my heart. End of the evening, missed opportunity, aborted desires. Out on the street I hoped that he would give me a phone number, an address. He merely shook my hand and wished me all the best. From that moment it seemed to me that each of his gestures was deliberately cutting me off. As a kind of farewell I gave him a half smile, waving my hand as if I were holding a pen. It was a plea, it meant: you know where I live, write to me, please. But he had already turned his back.”

End of the evening, missed opportunity, aborted desires. That’s one of those poetic short sentences I love, that holds whole worlds in it. 

[haylr]

Dark menace of the future.

Ms. Dix: Fear? Oh, don't do that. The dark menace of the future makes cowards of us all. And the past is a thing each of us must overcome, in her own way. Is that not so, my dear Baroness?

Mary: Have I disappointed you?

Ms. Dix: Have you disappointed yourself?

Mary: It has not been as I expected.

Ms. Dix: Oh, it never is. But we need places of healing and mercy, now more than ever, so you must fight through it. The hardship, the resistance, the futility. There is nothing here without you. 

[haylr]

Songs for a friend.

Sadness-->Anger-->Escapism-->Happiness-->Hopefulness.

We’ve all been there.

[soracities]

Everything, only for once. Once and no more. And we, too, once. And never again.

Rainer Maria Rilke, from ‘Duino Elegy (9)’  (via yukiones)

[haylr]

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. There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air.

Ol' F Scott via Nick Carraway

[haylr]

Oh! Come what may, sooner or later, in six months, ten years, they will be together, will be lovers, because Fate ordains it, because they were born for each other.

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert.

[haylr]

These two, too, from Middlesex.

"It was like autumn, looking at her. It was like driving up north to see the colors."

"So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love."

Perfect.

[haylr]

Empires die, like all us dancers in the strobe-lit dark.

I've been really interested in short, poetic sentences buried in long novels recently, like this one in The Bone Clocks.

[fortunenglory]

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.

Langston Hughes, Theme for English B (via fortunenglory)

[haylr]

More and more, it seems to me, our Southern people are so much better adapted to an appreciation of fine things than these shy, clumsy Yankees.

Thomas Wolfe. And ain't it the truth.

[haylr]

Music of the past six months: Everything must change and everything must stay the same.

I haven’t posted a starred tracks playlist since May, and I have cycled through a lot of music since then. Life happened, and privacy was more of a concern than self-disclosure. And here we are, on the other side of it all, maybe. Albums that have been on loop: Christopher Denny - If the Roses Don’t Kill Us (Listen to this NOW. Listen to it 10 times. Then 100 times.); How to Dress Well - What Is This Heart; Strand of Oaks - HEAL; Sturgill Simpson - Metamodern Sounds in Country Music; Benjamin Booker - Benjamin Booker; Alt-J - This Is All Yours; Spoon - They Want My Soul; Lydia Loveless - Somewhere Else; Cory Branan - The No-Hit Wonder. Here’s a smattering of the above, plus some other radio jamz, pop country singalong songs (sorry, not sorry, they make me happy), and some classic rock and country tossed in for good measure.

[haylr]

I wander throughout the stacks of that great library there like some damned soul, never at rest--ever leaping ahead from the pages I read to thoughts of those I want to read.

Thomas Wolfe again, on Harvard