--SOMETIMES THE BODY HAS TO GIVE SOMETHING UP

 

…I haven’t been writing much other than streams of poetry.  No short fiction, no work on the novel.  I need a productive day.  When you have one of those you feel the way you do when you’re done exercising, like you’ve accomplished something, like you pushed yourself even when your other self didn’t want to be pushed.

…But I have been reading quite a bit, in keeping with my new year’s resolution to get back to reading 100 books a year.  Here’s are some books I finished in the last week, all of them pretty stellar:

“History of a Pleasure Seeker,” James Mason
“People Like You,” Margaret Malone
“Hunts in Dreams,” Tom Drury
“A Sport and a Pastime,” James Salter
“The Tulip-Flame,” Chloe Honum
-“All Day, Talking,” Sarah Chavez

…It’s always a good feeling when you have new music to listen to.  Here’s what I got in the weekend:

Hinds—Leave Me Alone
Lucinda Williams—The Ghosts of Highway 20
Pete Yorn—Arranging Time
The 1975—I Like It When You Sleep

…And lastly, here are some things I like on a Wednesday:

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Picasso

“If a poem hasn’t ripped apart your soul, you haven’t experienced poetry.” Edgar Allan Poe

“But there is no such thing as secrecy.” Theodore Fontane.

“If slavery isn’t wrong, nothing is.” Abraham Lincoln

“And they wither with the wind, and they crumble in your hand.” Simon and Garfunkle, “Leaves That Are Green”

"Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it." Vladimir Nabokov

"Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.” André Gide