Friday, May 25, 2012

When I was ten years old, my father and I took a trip to Paris, leaving my younger brother and mother in London where she was filming a movie. My dad believed in one-on-one time with us, and sometimes that extended to a weekend away. We stayed at a great hotel and he said I could order whatever I wanted for breakfast (French fries). We went to the Pompidou museum, the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre - the usual spots. It was pretty great. On the plane back to London he asked me if I knew why we had gone, just he and I, to Paris for the weekend. I said no, but I felt so lucky for the trip. He said, “I wanted you to see Paris for the first time with a man who would always love you, no matter what.” From that time on, Paris was and continues to be very special to me. I lived there for five months in 1994 and I have made many trips back. These are the places in Paris I stay and eat and toast my dad.

- Gwyneth Paltrow

Monday, May 21, 2012

We Are Carved Like Marble

Snarl of crackling Earth: a sound like shovel scraping stone. An utterly sly, serpentine uttering unpleasing to the ear, but brought about by the rolling of four wheels onto the street perpendicular to the driveway, my father's rendition of "Honey, I'm Home", it could be wind chimes.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

"All the strands are interwoven, often in grotesque patterns, but everything echoes everything else..."
-Isaiah Berlin, The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture Under Communism

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

"The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together."
-T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

I am the son and the heir

Thunder outside and butterflies in my stomach put there by nothing in particular. Just as thunder seems to indicate an explosion when really no such event transpired, the butterflies too make noise, shift in their confining chamber like marionettes guided by a tangible force, but no. No such force exists, merely the absence of one and the corresponding longing.