Twice or thrice had I lov’d thee, Before I knew thy face or name; So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame Angels affect us oft, and worshipp’d be; Still when, to where thou wert, I came, Some lovely glorious nothing I did see. But since my soul, whose child love is, Takes limbs
All posts by Buffy
Virgil asked that Aeneid be destroyed upon his death. Augustus decided to save it for posterity. Kafka wanted a friend to burn a collection of manuscripts on his decease. The friend ignored the request. The Trial and The Castle resulted. Now to Nabokov. On his deathbed, Vladamir Nabokov asked his wife, Vera, to destroy a
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” – Virginia Woolf But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction – what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain. When you asked me
The Chekhov mood is that cave in which are kept all the unseen and hardly palpable treasures of Chekhov’s soul, so often beyond the reach of mere consciousness. — Constantin Stanislavski I’ve talked before about The Sister and how we’re really crushin on our Russians right now. She’s heavy on her Tolstoy and keeps reminding
I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts. The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds. The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things come in the first spit
Listening to The Temper Trap. Sweet Disposition. Beautiful. Apropos to nothing, I love that my sister loves Tolstoy. That we can talk about things that get lost in translation. And that we don’t have to explain why we are the way we are. Because we know. Even when we don’t. And I love her too.
Seen and unseen. Thought and not-thought. Henry sits down and looks out the window and tries to think, for just a moment, about what he doesn’t want to think about. About the thing he knows is there, but can’t quite work out. “Down the drain. Down the stairs. Out the door. Hit the floor!” It’s
I keep thinking about something Ezra Pound said. He was talking about his time in Paris and the ‘new art’. About Picasso and the ice-block quality. About planes and patterns and vortexes. And about how some people ridicule what they don’t understand because they don’t know what thought is like. They’re only familiar with argument
“Tamara was lonely and she saw the devil.” Before daylight this morning I read Chekhov’s short story A Doctor’s Visit. My favourite line referenced Lermontov. I have no particular interest in Lermontov’s devil or Tamara’s seeing of it…it’s the way the sentence is structured by Chekhov that makes it so wonderful and interesting. I can’t
“To a chemist nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist, he must lay aside his personal subjective standpoint and must understand that muck heaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that the evil passions are as inherent in life as the good ones.” – Chekhov
I’m exhausted. And my brain’s just not working right for me today. It wont sit still. I also keep tasting salt. I worry it’s some kind of aura, because that’s what it usually is. Every neurological episode I’ve ever had (my brain’s way faulty) has been proceeded by the inexplicable and lingering taste of salt
“It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees — this in itself
