What follows are twelve things I’ve read or reread lately (and which may, on some level, speak to one another), and for which I’m grateful:
Dean Young:
Some things, like sewer pipes, we want to go only in one direction. But art that is at odds with itself, its own being, that contains seeds, signs, slashes of its own demise, embodies the conflicts of what it is to be alive.
(from The Art of Recklessness)
Bruce Eric Kaplan:
I’d love to, but I have a million lonely ritualistic things I need to do.
(June 9, 2003, New Yorker cartoon)
Catherine Wing:
Sorrow be gone, be a goner, be forsooth un-sooth, make like a suit and beat it, vamoose from the heavy heavy, be out from under the night’s crawlspace, call not for another stone, more weight more weight, be extinguished, extinguish, the dark, that which is deep and hollow, that which presses from all sides, that which squeezes your heart into an artichoke-heart jar and forbids it breathe. . . .
(from “A Small Psalm,” Enter Invisible)
Jamaal May:
Stop me if you haven’t heard this one:
The first man to pull a gun on me said it was only a joke,
but never so much as smiled. The second said
this is definitely not a joke, and then his laughter crackled
through me like electrostatic—funny how that works.
(from “The Gun Joke”)
David Rees:
A: Did you have a good vacation, under God?
B: I did, thanks, under God. Are you ready to have a nice war with Iraq under God?
A: As ready as I’ll ever be, I guess, under God. Do we really have a choice under God?
(July 11, 2002, from Get Your War On)
Miranda July:
Inelegantly and without my consent, time passed.
(from “How to Tell Stories to Children,” No one belongs here more than you)
Lydia Davis:
Nearly every morning, a certain woman in our community comes running out of her house with her face white and her overcoat flapping wildly. She cries out, “Emergency, emergency,” and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed. We know she is making it up; nothing has really happened to her. But we understand, because there is hardly one of us who has not been moved at some time to do just what she has done, and every time, it has taken all our strength, and even the strength of our friends and families, too, to quiet us.
(“Fear,” The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis)
Louise Glück:
As I turned over the last page, after many nights, a wave of sorrow enveloped me. Where had they all gone, these people who had seemed so real?
(from “A Work of Fiction,” Faithful and Virtuous Night)
Loren Goodman:
An! ode of! Buses and! the! future
Is! slipping into! itself like! a! red sleeve
(from “The Future,” Famous Americans)
Barack Obama:
“Slamming the door in the face of refugees would betray our deepest values. That’s not who we are. And it’s not what we’re going to do.”
(Tweeted on November 18, 2015)
Hannah Sanghee Park:
So—
Would you go back then?
And then—
And then?
Even then—and even then—
—and even—even, then.
(from “Preface to Fear/False Spring,” the same-different)
Wislawa Szymborska:
The world—whatever we might think when we’re terrified by its vastness and our impotence, embittered by its indifference to the individual suffering of people, animals and perhaps even plants (for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain?); whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets that we’ve just begun to discover, planets already dead, still dead, we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world—it is astonishing.
(from her 1996 Nobel Lecture)