not elizabeth bishop

thought I’d try to learn about visual art / logically I started a blog with no pictures

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from Twitter

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Sara Nicholson, “What I Said, Where I Said It, and Why”

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Three consecutive pages from a manuscript of Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg!!!!

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Arda Collins, “Low”

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The Travels of Marco by Mark Levine

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As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate Moses more and more. He’s someone chosen by God to be God’s conduit and to represent and lead his people, and yet he is so far from perfect. In fact, he is full of rage. But much as he acts out and alienates himself, he can’t seem to slough off his duty, his “virtue,” to use that word again, his usefulness. I’m having trouble saying this concisely, and I’m not even sure the poem says it, but that’s the love story the poem is interested in: the way your human duty clings to you, as though it loves you back.

from an interview with Jessica Laser

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from “Evolution” Margaret Ross

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Mock Orange

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from Three Songs at the End of Summer

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John le Carré demonstrating a novel method of intimidating a journalist

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from October

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I will no longer repeat unspoken words. But in memory of that non-meeting I will plant a sweetbriar.

There the miracle of our meeting shone and sang, I did not want to go back to anywhere from there. Putting happiness before duty was my bitter joy.

I talked with someone I shouldn't have I talked for a long time. Let passions which demand an answer choke those who are in love, but we, my darling, are just souls at the edge of the earth.

Anna Akhmatova

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All the Singaporean students, including Joanne, had the same scholarship: full tuition plus a stipend, in exchange for which they had to work for the Singaporean government for some number of years after graduation. Joanne cut her own hair, didn’t like expensive clothes or makeup, and used liquid castile soap as shampoo. She used the stipend to buy a carbon road bike and a laptop with a built-in CD-ROM: treating these items with a kind of respectful ruefulness that seemed to embody her general attitude toward what the Singaporeans called their “bond.”

The most famous Singaporean at Harvard, Percival, was a vermilion-haired classics major who organized seasonal Eleusinian Mysteries where they did psychedelics and roasted a piglet. Most non-Singaporean people didn’t know that Percival was from Singapore. But he was often invoked by the other Singaporeans, as a symbol of what could happen because of your bond. In high school they had known him as a compliant, blazer-wearing math Olympian.

The Singaporean students’ arrangement struck me at first as somehow extreme and archaic. But the more I learned about everyone’s situation, the more it seemed that everyone had a “bond”; it was just less formal, and not legally enforced, and came from their parents and not a whole country. (…)

But my parents were the only ones I knew who never acted like I owed them money for being alive, or talked about kids being “spoiled” or “selfish,” or said that I had to be a doctor, or took other adults’ side over mine. I was so grateful that sometimes I sat in my room and cried.

from Either/Or

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from Alphabet by Inger Christensen. Book-length abecederian where the section line counts grow according to the Fibonacci sequence lol. This is the E section