February 2011
9 posts
6 tags
“Be obscure clearly.”
– E.B. White
Feb 25th
1 note
6 tags
Feb 25th
7 tags
"The Language" by Robert Creeley
“The Language” Locate I love you some- where in teeth and eyes, bite it but take care not to hurt, you want so much so little. Words say everything. I love you again, then what is emptiness for. To fill, fill. I heard words and words full of holes aching. Speech is a mouth.
Feb 14th
1 note
6 tags
Feb 13th
6 notes
4 tags
The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us →
This Adam Gopnik piece is one of the most insightful, even-keeled discussions/syntheses I’ve read about the timeless debate over whether new fangled things like the Internet are an asset or detriment to our lives. Do yourselves a favor and read it if you have a few moments. 
Feb 10th
6 tags
"no picnic" by D.A. Powell →
  no picnic plain cloth cast upon the cool banks, the mere warbling frogs/ an interrupted repast, uninterrupted pile of leavings/ the parallax of bodies which are and are not ours/ uncomfortable shift, uncomfortable shuffle….
Feb 7th
6 tags
Feb 6th
15 tags
"Idle Doodles by Famous Authors" →
I particularly enjoyed Sylvia Plath’s doodle  of her nightmare of getting chased by a hot dog and a marshmallow.
Feb 5th
3 notes
4 tags
Feb 1st
January 2011
17 posts
7 tags
Jan 30th
1 note
9 tags
“I have this experience when I interview someone, if it’s going well and we’re...”
– Ira Glass, The New Kings of Nonfiction
Jan 29th
6 notes
4 tags
President of the Poetry Foundation, John Barr, in...
Like the Jurassic shrew, poetry may seem an unlikely candidate to survive the next comet, let alone inherit the earth. Yet like that first of all mammals, poetry has proven itself agile among the feet of dinosaurs. Indeed it has been the animal that always escapes. Able to live on next to nothing—a scrap of paper or, before there was paper, in the ear alone—it survived as remembered words, a...
Jan 28th
5 tags
Jan 27th
5 tags
“I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect...”
– Happy Birthday, Virginia Woolf.
Jan 25th
5 tags
“I do not like to write—I like to have written.”
– Gloria Steinem Sing it, sister. Especially on a day of excruciating writer’s block.
Jan 25th
8 notes
5 tags
Jan 24th
6 tags
"We Were Love" by Yaedi Ignatow →
We were love or love was suddenly remembering us the way two lines cross and the nearest necessity you know nothing about, finds you…..
Jan 19th
5 tags
Programmed for Love →
MIT ethnographer Sherry Turkle discusses the potential dangers of social technology. If you’re interested in reading more, here’s an older interview from Frontline.
Jan 18th
4 tags
“I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by...”
– Marianne Moore
Jan 18th
6 tags
Jan 13th
685 notes
6 tags
“Appearance should be a source of pleasure, not of shame. Individuals should be...”
– Deborah L. Rhode, The Beauty Bias
Jan 11th
17 notes
4 tags
“any good poem, any great symphony, any good Coleman Hawkins riff, makes the...”
– Philip Booth
Jan 10th
3 tags
Jan 10th
5,112 notes
4 tags
"You've Been Verbed" →
Why do we keep turning nouns into verbs? 
Jan 10th
5 tags
live set from The Weepies →
The Weepies on NPR’s Mountain Stage. I’m still not over this delightfully thoughtful duo.  
Jan 8th
1 note
4 tags
"P.S." by Franz Wright
I close my eyes and see a seagull in the desert, high, against unberably blue sky. There is hope in the past. I’m writing to you all the time, I am writing with both hands, day and night.
Jan 8th
December 2010
34 posts
6 tags
the inspiration for my tumblr name: "The Layers"... →
“The Layers” I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray….
Dec 31st
4 tags
“We have art so that we shall not die of reality.”
– Nietzsche
Dec 30th
7 tags
ListenFrom NPR’s Weekend Edition, a short piece...
Dec 26th
5 tags
Dec 24th
4 tags
Dec 21st
6 tags
The 10th Annual Year in Ideas from NYT Magazine →
Dec 21st
4 tags
“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” -Virginia Woolf”
– (via kellymccaleb)
Dec 20th
17 notes
4 tags
Dec 20th
5 tags
Dec 17th
4 tags
Dec 17th
5 tags
Dec 17th
6 tags
“Food is all those substances which, submitted to the action of the stomach, can...”
– Brillat Savarin from The Physiology of Taste via the epigraph from one of my favorite novels of 2010,  Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake 
Dec 15th
3 tags
Dec 15th
6 tags
"The Same Thing" by Ada Limón  →
Dec 15th
3 tags
Dec 13th
4 tags
“He ran lengths of string between the pole and the sticks, and taped to the...”
– George Saunder, Sticks Read the full story here. It’s amazing; only two paragraphs yet it encapsulates a life. (via enormouschanges)
Dec 10th
2 notes
6 tags
"Meditation at Lagunitas" by Robert Hass →
“All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea…”
Dec 10th
4 tags
Dec 10th
6 tags
“…the role of a story is to maintain the soundness of the spiritual bridge...”
– Haruki Murakami in the NYT op-ed “Reality A and Reality B”
Dec 10th
6 tags
Dec 10th
3 notes
4 tags
Dec 10th
4 tags
Dec 9th
4 tags
“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings...”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald (via recycled-words)
Dec 7th
73 notes
3 tags
Listennothing like the ultimate scrooge singing a...
Dec 7th