Wednesday, March 28, 2012

The more I grow, the more I feel like a child.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Running On Ceilings

Longing long locks for a while now. The way the waves concealed my torso while two pieces I cut to make weightless framed my face...I want to recreate the image even if the moment has crystallized but when I look into the mirror the body of waves takes up less space on my back while the pieces around my face that I tuck cruelly behind my ears are too long and frazzled at the edges. Time has flipped everything but who gave it the right while people are deemed foolish for wanting to perform the reverse?

Saturday, March 17, 2012

why do we call them stories if what we feel is real

"I looked up at him. I noticed for the first time the lines around his eyes, how his left one seemed to droop into a crevice. Above my father, the branches of the live oak played against each other and then were stilled. I looked at my father for a long time like that, his face framed by those branches and the blue sky beyond."
-Ana Menendez, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

It's amazing how someone can write something based on their father, and if there is love there, the reader will always be filling the space where words end with an image of his own father, so what you get in that moment is the sketch of a figure that is simultaneously parent to both. Reader and author become related, connected, by the strange alchemy of words. 

What did I say about worlds being intertwined

     "He led her around the dance floor lined with chaperones, and when they turned he whispered that he wanted to follow her laughter to the moon. 
      She laughed again, the notes round and heavy as summer raindrops, and Máximo felt his fingers go cold where they touched hers. The danzón played, and they turned and turned, and the faces of the chaperones and the moist warm air--and Máximo with his cold fingers worried that she had laughed at him. He was twenty-four and could not imagine a more sorrowful thing in all the world. 
      Sometimes, years later, he would catch a premonition of Rosa in the face of his eldest daughter. She would turn toward a window or do something with her eyes. And then she would smile and tilt her head back, and her laughter connected him again to that night, made him believe for a moment that life was a string you could gather up in your hands all at once."
-Ana Menendez, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

Spring or Something Like It

While I was running, my eyes landed on gold letters embossed on a black mailbox. The picture plane jutting in time with my stride made them read like Gatsby. I ran to the end of the block and did a three sixty, slowing to run in place when leveling with the mailbox. Gazety, it read. Russian for newspapers. It's so funny how our worlds are intertwined.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Library

Refuge among the stacks. The cadence of cars travels
Inside, in tune with the displacement of air around my
knees. Books near and far, cascading; Conspiring,
Angles inclining, surrounding
me.

If my index finger were a silkworm, I'd make a glistening trail across the spines.

lan·guor

lan·guor/ˈlaNG(g)ər/
Noun:
  1. The state or feeling, often pleasant, of tiredness or inertia.
  2. An oppressive stillness of the air.

Friday, March 9, 2012

Matryoshka World

Staring between frames, into that invisible gutter separating the panels of paintings, I stumbled on the feature of museums that I find so wonderful. Consider this: even if you don't like or can't connect with every painting you see, just the fact of walking into the box that is a museum and alternating your attention between its sides is like time travel. At any one point in time, the wall in front of you is a more or less two dimensional surface but contained within that surface are whole worlds of indiscriminate time periods piled into neat little frames, worlds you can access merely by fixing your gaze.

Reading a book is another activity often likened to entering a different world, and with this in mind bookshops are magical by default. That said, the experience of exploring a bookstore is unique still. While with a museum, the interaction between the viewer and the work, the emotional passage through time and space, transpires within the same moment, a bookshop functions on the teasing aspect. You don't experience the books while you are browsing; everything hangs on the anticipation--studying all those spines, seeing the dust leap from them and gather in little clouds you must dismantle to get to the next shelf... Indeed, the electricity in the air, does it emanate from the books or is it a projection of your own excitement? No matter the cause, the atmosphere crackles.

So while the paintings and the literature fizzle with the secrets from within their distinct worlds, the universes which contain them--museums, libraries--are not without their own charms. 

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

What is it about

the striking sensational difference in the experiences of pressing a heart with a lead point into paper versus trapping a bracket and a number 3 in a text box that is in turn trapped within the dimensions of an LCD screen?

Deemed part of the tech-saavy generation, I fill my head with nostalgia and surround my body with the likewise physical--books--fingers running across the variable surfaces in attempt to appreciate their minute differences. Cherishing the fine grain and cool planes, wondering how all that can be pushed into oblivion by a single screen, I am like those "nineteenth-century travelers" who could not adapt their perceptual modes from the accustomed travel by carriage to travel by train (Schivelbusch).

I mean it's like I said before, no romance is lost on me because I see the beauty in it, the preservation and the possibility, the magic of holding worlds within a single screen but even though the novelty of riding in a horse-drawn carriage on a snow-strewn winter eve was made possible by their obsolescence in the realm of practical transportation, I don't want the same thing to happen to books and paper. I don't want them to become a thing of legend, though perhaps as artifacts they would draw the awestruck expressions that they deserve from a public that only recognizes a good thing once it is gone.

What I want is a happy harmony, like where we are now but without the feeling of foreboding. For people to hold on to one while embracing the other, but for the fearful grip that now characterizes the former to be replaced with a doting one.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Spring Wishlist

new cute workout clothes
more glittery, velvety things
things with mesh
things with lurex running through them
more black clothes but this time dresses in crisp fabrics that would feel cooler against the skin in summer
bikinis
black bookshelf
light box
velvet pillows
vintage earrings
pretty lace bras and bralettes
crystal barrettes for when my locks again reach mermaid lengths, even if it won't be for a while but let's just call it an investment

Spring Break

Torn between the prospects of finally sleeping in tomorrow versus the routine waking up at an indecent hour and extracting myself from the comfort of the sheets, only to have the satisfaction of looking down at my warm bed, bathed in the blue tint of morning, and for once having the choice to crawl back into it. I wish I was better at weighing pros and cons.

The sound of rain has a beautifying effect on both alternatives. Waking up organically to the pitter patter on the window, eyes adjusting smoothly to a muted atmosphere is lovely, but then tricking yourself into believing you still need to wake up and go out into the rain makes the realization that you can stay in that much more powerful...the realization that you are free to submerge yourself under the covers and eventually savor breakfast and read a book or watch a film in bed, or write, or write about writing, and all the while around you the sound of rain belting out its unique melody against the glass.