Storm

As happens with me
at periods of electrical disturbance
and crepitating lightning,
I had hallucinations.

— Vladimir Nabokov, "Lolita"

Nonfiction

The best sentence I read today (from a nonfiction piece by Aaron Gilbreath, "Cupid Carries a Switch," in the new Gargoyle #55):

Then one day I thought, Either I peed myself, or I smell a change in the air.

Billy Collins Action Poetry

Forgetfulness

Listening

Parthenia's silences outlasted
her sentences every time,
and carried greater weight.

How will their tongue survive
in a modern world, where the talkers
rush to trample every pause?

— Barbara Kingsolver, "The Lacuna"

U.S. poets laureate

Question in high school academic bowl: Robert Penn Warren was the first, and Joseph Brodsky and Rita Dove have also held this position.

Answer given by student: Prime minister of Russia.

Frida (my 100th posting)

"I think an artist has to tell the truth,"
she said finally.

"You have to use the craft very well
and have a lot of discipline for it,

but mostly to be a good artist
you have to know something
that's true.

These kids who come to Diego
wanting to learn, I'll tell you.
They can paint a perfect tree,
a perfect face, whatever you ask.

But they don't know enough
about life to fill a thimble.

And that's what has to go in the painting.
Otherwise, why look at it?"

— Barbara Kingsolver, "The Lacuna"

Landscaping

The waterway behind the house
is the color of putrid blood.
Dead leaves float in the brown,
stagnant water like debris
from an explosion.
Green and brown coconuts
bob like decapitated heads.

– Patricia Cornwell, "Predator"

History

Bookish nerd confirmation: I am fascinated and enjoying "Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements" by Dwight Garner. Yes, a history of book ads. Interesting to see attempts at selling classic books before they became classics.

Eternity

Eternity and poetry.

History

Making History. Or not.

Tru

True story: Truman was magical.

Non-magic

Daylight was here,

and with it had come

the world of appearances

and lies and acting like

everything was fine.

— Lev Grossman, "The Magicians"

Sustenance

I never thought of my books

as being special,

only necessary.

— Jonathan Safran Foer, "Extremely

Loud and Incredibly Close"

Fog

Mists moved ahead of him

like deer through the trees.

— Charles Frazier, "Cold Mountain"

Michael

 Apparently, I was a pack-rat as a child because I'm finally making it through the last of the old boxes of stuff I recovered on recent visits to the old homeplace. Came across an old composition book with an early endeavor at fiction writing. Maybe I should've been a music critic. This scene is of a TV personality giving a review of an album that recently came out. Excerpts: "... Michael Jackson has now released another album called Thriller. Can Mr. Jackson top his past success? I must say that it is doubtful. However ... he may once again have four top ten singles ... I'll even go so far as to say that the Thriller album may sell over four-million copies."

Lemonade

When life
gives you lemons
you squeeze them,
hard.
Make invisible ink.
Make an acid poison.
Fling it in their eyes.

— Austin Grossman, "Soon I Will Be Invincible"

Goals

Once you get past
a certain threshold,
everyone's problems
are the same:

fortifying your island
and hiding the heat
signature from your
fusion reactor.

— Austin Grossman, "Soon I Will Be Invincible"

Masquerade

Wearing a cape
doesn't do much
for your social life.

— Austin Grossman, "Soon I Will Be Invincible"

Mist

The mist
hung like
blindness
around
the house.

— Neil Gaiman, "Coraline"

Bradbury

Perhaps he had experienced only
the Ray Bradbury kind of childhood
so many smalltown kids had,
or at least remembered having;
the kind where the real world
and that of dreams
sometimes overlapped,
creating a kind of magic.

— Stephen King, "Hearts in Atlantis"

Living

It's so awful
it's kind of nice.

— Richard Yates, "Revolutionary Road"

Tears

Tears leave a permanent mark.
If you cry, people like Dad
can find you whenever they want to.
You'll never be able to hide.

— Alice Hoffman, "Skylight Confessions"

Life

There's just one thing
stronger than death, Roxy,
and that's love.

— Louise Shivers, "Here To Get My Baby Out of Jail"

Clouds

I don't know anything
as spellbinding as a fire

except maybe clouds
on a day when the wind

moves them along so fast
that they change shapes

constantly and the eye
can's leave for fascination.

— Louise Shivers, "Here To Get My Baby Out of Jail"

Not-there

The silence
in the room
came alive,
like the positive space
in a Chinese landscape painting,
or the words left out of a poem.

— Mark Salzman, "Lying Awake"

Alive

"You were never ... alive."
"I was ... alive," he says feebly. "Alive?"

"No, you weren't," I say. "You know what I mean."

"What was I, then?" he asks.

"You were just" — I pause,
look out over the expanse
of white carpet into
a massive white kitchen,
white chairs on a gleaming tiled floor
— "not dead."

— Bret Easton Ellis, "The Informers"

Smile

"Turn that frown upside down," Sheldon says.

"What would that get me —
an upside-down frown, what?"

— Bret Easton Ellis, "The Informers"

Bar

The atmosphere in the Cafe Bongo
is perpetually criss-crossed
by so many silent messages
that, were they visible,
the whole dive would be
rainbow-colored spiders' webs
from floor to ceiling:
red strands of lust,
blue longings, waitings, and hopings,
tingling yellow signals that it's time
to take the first step — permission's
been covertly asked and covertly granted —
and, naturally, there has also to be
some coal-black thread
of contempt and disappointment
and outright hatred.

— Johanna Sinisalo, "Troll: A Love Story"

Divine

The key to transcendence
is language itself.
Creation takes place
through words,
a series of "And God Saids"
bringing each new stage
of life into being.

Language is God's divine power
made manifest in the world.

— Myla Goldberg, "Bee Season"

Intimacy

"You ask me for intimacy,"
Marie was telling her husband
of 22 years, Clem — and,
unavoidably, the therapist
and four other couples in the room —
"the same way you ask
if I'd like croutons on my salad."

She spoke slowly, deliberately,
each word chipping out of her mouth
like an ax striking wood.

— Laurie Abraham, New York Times Magazine article Aug. 12, 2007

Repeat

Repetition
is important

in the training
not only of animals

but also of humans.

— Yann Martel, "Life of Pi"

Roar

A tiger
is a fascinating animal
at any time,
and all the more so
when it is
your sole companion.

— Yann Martel, "Life of Pi"

Hope

You might think
I lost all hope
at that point.

I did.

And as a result
I perked up
and felt much better.

— Yann Martel, "Life of Pi"

Repeat

Repetition
is important

in the training
not only of animals

but also of humans.

— Yann Martel, "Life of Pi"

Glass

She was young enough
not to see a glass as
half empty or half full,
but as a beautiful object
into which anything
might be poured.

— Alice Hoffman, "Skylight Confessions"

Thoughts

Clouds rolled in,
white and profoundly blue,
massed like great
intense thoughts
in a clear and joyfully
humming mental field.

— Mary Gaitskill, "The Bridge"
(Zoetrope: All-Story, Summer 2005)

Gone

After I read it —
"killed in action" —
and handed it back,
the whole damned English language
just flew away in the air
like a flock of blackbirds.

For a long time
neither one of us moved.
The daily sounds of the world
went on, sparrows in the barn lot,
somebody's bull way off,
the wind in the eaves,
but around us was
this awful, awful silence
that didn't have one word in it.

— Wendell Berry, "Stand By Me"
(Atlantic Fiction Issue 2008)

Look

The muscular contraction
in both the Wheelers' faces
was so slight that
the subtlest camera in the world
couldn't have caught it,
but Mrs. Givings felt it like a kick.
-- Richard Yates, "Revolutionary Road"

ISO

In search of Great Poets
Something to think about from critic David Orr ...

Truth

You couldn't lie
when you were naked,
but there were
a thousand kinds
of truth.

-- Lynn Abbey and Robert Asprin, "Catwoman: Tiger Hunt"

Memory

The dead
are so easy
to misquote.

-- John Updike, "My Father's Tears"
(from The New Yorker, Feb. 26, 2006)

Wishes

Be careful
what you wish for. ...
Wishes are brutal,
unforgiving things.
They burn your tongue
the moment they're spoken
and you can never take them back.
-- Alice Hoffman, "The Ice Queen"

Kiss

They'll never know
it's actually possible
for a boy
to be so boring
you'd agree
to kiss him
just to get him
to shut up.
-- Alice Hoffman, "Dear Diary"
(from "Local Girls" collection)

Spouse

"Tell me about your wife,"
Emily's voice said in the gloom.

"I love her,"
Chase said immediately.

"Of course you do,
but that's not what I asked.
Tell me about her."

-- Tiffany Drever, "Lesser Waterways"
(in Glimmer Train, Summer 2001)

Sky

The sky in the west
looked like the white
of a bloodshot eye.
-- Stephen King, "Bag of Bones"

Semblance

As he saw it,
civility would restore good feeling,
and the semblance of love
would be enough

to get by on
until love itself could be rediscovered.
And if there was never anything

more than semblance --
well, that would have to do.
He could manage with that.

--Alice Munro, "Silence"
(New Yorker, June 14&21, 2004)

Violence

Bloodstain
on chest
like map
of violent
new continent.
-- Alan Moore, "Watchmen"

Faces

It's funny, but certain faces
seem to go in and out of style.

You look at old photographs
and everybody has a certain look
to them, almost as if they're related.

Look at pictures from ten years later
and you can see that there's a new kind
of face starting to predominate,
and that the old faces are fading away
and vanishing, never to be seen again.

-- Alan Moore, "Watchmen"

Family

One day
you will do things
for me that you hate.
That is what it means
to be a family.
-- Jonathan Safran Foer, "Everything Is Illuminated"

Home

They say
you know
Georgia
when you
come to it,
for it's nothing
but red dirt
and rough roads.
-- Charles Frazier, "Cold Mountain"

Grief

That was the curse
of being a dummy.
You were always
being surprised
by grief,
because you
could never remember
the important things.
-- Richard Bachman, "Blaze"

Pale

A fat man lay
wrapped in a white sheet
in a recessed berth,
looking as pale
and flabby as a maggot.
-- Michael Swanwick, "The Scarecrow's Boy"
(Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct/Nov 2008)

Drive

Untrimmed thorns
and sapling limbs
clutch at the car
with intermittent shrieks
that embarrass you.
-- Wells Tower, "Leopard"
(New Yorker, 11-10-08 issue)

Mad

Crouching
like an assassin,
she delivered
calculated,
scalding,
phosphorescent
anger.
-- Robert Stone, "Bay of Souls"