“The theory of machinery is that it saves time, but Stanford himself noted of such machinery that “if you could limit man’s wants it might be called ‘labor saving,’ but as there are no limits to his wants, the machinery really increases the power of production.” That is, the industrialized world wants more goods, not more time, and so the machinery doesn’t increase freedom and leisure, it increases production and consumption.” — From Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows (via viafrank)
(via themadeshop)
seriously.
you can.
and you can’t.
“Over the long course
Everything but hope lets you go, then
even that loosens its grip.
There isn’t enough of anything
as long as we live. But at intervals
a sweetness appears and, given a chance,
prevails…”
— From Raymond Carver’s “The Author of Her Misfortune”
“Growing up poor is growing up hungry—even if you’re well-fed.” — Emily Moseley
Mrs. Midas
It was late September. I’d just poured a glass of wine, begun
to unwind, while the vegetables cooked. The kitchen
filled with the smell of itself, relaxed, its steamy breath
gently blanching the windows. So I opened one,
then with my fingers wiped the other’s glass like a brow.
He was standing under the pear tree snapping a twig.
Now the garden was long and the visibility poor, the way
the dark of the ground seems to drink the light of the sky,
but that twig in his hand was gold. And then he plucked
a pear from a branch - we grew Fondante d’Automne -
and it sat in his palm like a light bulb. On.
I thought to myself, Is he putting fairy lights in the tree?
He came into the house. The doorknobs gleamed.
He drew the blinds. You know the mind; I thought of
the Field of the Cloth of Gold and of Miss Macready.
He sat in that chair like a king on a burnished throne.
The look on his face was strange, wild, vain. I said,
What in the name of God is going on? He started to laugh.
I served up the meal. For starters, corn on the cob.
Within seconds he was spitting out the teeth of the rich.
He toyed with his spoon, then mine, then with the knives, the forks.
He asked where was the wine. I poured with shaking hand,
a fragrent, bone-dry white from Italy, then watched
as he picked up the glass, goblet, golden chalice, drank.
It was then that I started to scream. He sank to his knees.
After we had both calmed down, I finished the wine
on my own, hearing him out. I made him sit
on the other side of the room and keep his hands to himself.
I locked the cat in the cellar. I moved the phone.
The toilet I didn’t mind. I couldn’t believe my ears:
how he’d had a wish. Look, we all have wishes; granted.
But who has wishes granted? Him. Do you know about gold?
It feeds no one; aurum, soft, untarnishable; slakes
no thirst. He tried to light a cigarette; I gazed, entranced,
as the blue flame played on its luteous stem. At least,
I said, you’ll be able to give up smoking for good.
Seperate beds. In fact, I put a chair against my door,
near petrified. He was below, turning the spare room
into the tomb of Tutankhamun. You see, we were passionate then,
in those halcyon days; unwrapping each other, rapidly,
like presents, fast food. But now I feared his honeyed embrace,
the kiss that would turn my lips to a work of art.
And who, when it comes to the crunch, can live
with a heart of gold? That night, I dreamt I bore
his child, its perfect ore limbs, its little tongue
like a precious latch, its amber eyes
holding their pupils like flies. My dream-milk
burned in my breasts. I woke to the streaming sun.
So he had to move out. We’d a caravan
in the wilds, in a glade of its own. I drove him up
under cover of dark. He sat in the back.
And then I came home, the women who married the fool
who wished for gold. At first I visited, odd times,
parking the car a good way off, then walking.
You knew you were getting close. Golden trout
on the grass. One day, a hare hung from a larch,
a beautiful lemon mistake. And then his footprints,
glistening next to the river’s path. He was thin,
delirious; hearing, he said, the music of Pan
from the woods. Listen. That was the last straw.
What gets me now is not the idiocy or greed
but lack of thought for me. Pure selfishness. I sold
the contents of the house and came down here.
I think of him in certain lights, dawn, late afternoon,
and once a bowl of apples stopped me dead. I miss most,
even now, his hands, his warm hands on my skin, his touch.
by Carol Ann Duffy
“In conclusion, what have we learned here? Nothing. Except this: the world is a dangerous place, and it will eat one’s soul without the slightest provocation, and we’re all battered and bruised, until we can barely see straight, and we’re all going down together, but also celebrating along the way, and remembering to notice and celebrate one another’s goodness—above all else, and to hold our enemies close, but our friends even closer, because in them we will find stability and hope in this mad, mad world. And there we will know and find love, as well, which is nothing like the storybooks promised us, and we are glad for that.”
—from the summary paragraph in an email sent to me yesterday by Garin Williams (my sister’s husband, my niece’s and nephew’s father, my friend).
Photos from a shoot with Lexington-based photographer, Emily Moseley. She comes down to Nashville today to work with me and Will Gray!
She’s providing documentation for the music we’re makin’ :)
“Throat Shark Is Just Looking For A Good Time” by Christopher McMahon
[video]
Via David Dark’s twitter: one-star reviews of Bradbury’s, Fahrenheit 451
“…the feminist movement did call for, and then achieve, greater sexual freedom for women, and access to birth control and abortion as rights. But unintended consequences, and particularly economic forces, have played perhaps an even bigger role in arranging the new sexual landscape: certain moral barriers drop, and then capitalism rushes in with, say, Internet porn, stoking old desires and creating new ones…most young women in the real world are surely grateful for their sexual freedom, but they didn’t necessarily want it shaped by sleazy entrepreneurs. To paraphrase Marx, women make their own circumstances, but not under circumstances of their own making.” — Margaret Talbot, discussing women, sex, and options via HBO’s “Girls” in The New Yorker
This post is only going to resonate with those of you who currently view the world from a standpoint of Christian, Post-Christian, Anti-Christian, or Ante-(as in the game of Poker, and you know who you are) Christian. I spend a lot of time as an agnostic, some time as an atheist, and a sliver of time as a Hoper (i.e. one who is hopeful in regards—in my case, at least—to the Christian story having some truth within it. I use the term Hoper to differentiate myself from Believer, since a real faith, it seems, is too tricky for me to muster or master (and parenthetically within my parentheses: i am well aware that neither belief nor hope have in and of themselves any bearing on reality coinciding with what one believes or hopes).
Easter is a yearly marker of radical and muck-filled claim, and this Updike poem captures that claim well, causing the Hoper in me to lift up her head a bit, grateful for a life that might have angels in it, or at the sweetest least, a life that tells really good stories about them.
Seven Stanzas at Easter
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
— John Updike
“It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment.” — Clay Shirky
(via themadeshop)
Oh, sadness upon sadness. Adrienne Rich’s light has gone out.