December 2010
Wishing all of you a Happy New Year!
I started this tumblr in February of 2010, and had no idea just how much it would transform my life. With only a few hours until 2011, my mind is overwhelmed with so many thoughts and memories, but most of all I’m just so grateful to have found tumblr because it’s introduced me to great writers, connected me to people all around the world, and made me feel less alone.
Thank you for...
Burning the Old Year by Naomi Shihab Nye
apoetreflects:
Letters swallow themselves in seconds. Notes friends tied to the doorknob, transparent scarlet paper, sizzle like moth wings, marry the air. So much of any year is flammable, lists of vegetables, partial poems. Orange swirling flame of days, so little is a stone.
Where there was something and suddenly isn’t, an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space. I begin again with the...
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“The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the...”
– Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being
What book (or books) do you really want to read...
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“Should I seek out some tree? Should I desert these form rooms and libraries, and...”
– The Waves, Virginia Woolf (via sketchofthepast)
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“I went out into the gentle rain & saw the rainbow. It deepens, it shone down...”
– Katherine Mansfield (via katherine-mansfield)
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“I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing,...”
– The Waves, Virginia Woolf (via sketchofthepast)
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My Dear Virginia
katherine-mansfield:
Please don’t talk of a triumph, even in jest. It makes me hang my head. I wish some day I might deserve your long generous letter - but the day is far off, I realise that. Thank you for it all the same. It came on Xmas day too, and so was a two-fold gift. I think of you often - very often. I long to talk to you. Here, at last then is time to talk. If Virginia were to come...
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“They thought death was worth it, but I
Have a self to recover, a queen.
Is she...”
– Stings, Sylvia Plath (via aplathaday)
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Meditation on a Grapefruit by Craig Arnold
To wake when all is possible
before the agitations of the day
have gripped you
To come to the kitchen
and peel a little basketball
for breakfast
To tear the husk
like cotton padding a cloud of oil
misting out of its pinprick pores
clean and sharp as pepper
To ease
each pale pink section out of its case
so...
“Perhaps some day I’ll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I...”
– Sylvia Plath’s unabridged journals (via sylviaplathismylove)
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Berck-Plage by Sylvia Plath
(I)
This is the sea, then, this great abeyance. How the sun’s poultice draws on my inflammation.
Electrifyingly-colored sherbets, scooped from the freeze; By pale girls, travel the air in scorched hands.
Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding? I have two legs, and I move smilingly.
A sandy damper kills the vibrations; It stretches for miles, the shrunk voices
Waving and crutchless,...
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One Need Not Be a Chamber to Be Haunted by Emily...
One need not be a chamber to be haunted, One need not be a house; The brain has corridors surpassing Material place. Far safer, of a midnight meeting External ghost, Than an interior confronting That whiter host. Far safer through an Abbey gallop, The stones achase, Than, moonless, one’s own self encounter In lonesome place. Ourself, behind ourself concealed, Should startle most; Assassin,...
“We are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
– Carson McCullers (via aperfectcommotion)
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Snow Blitz by Sylvia Plath (link) →
dorka:
In London, the day after Christmas (Boxing Day) – it began to snow: my first snow in England. For five years I had been tactfully asking ‘Do you ever have snow at all?’ as I steeled myself to the six months of wet, tepid grey that make up an English winter. ‘Ooo I do remember snow,’ was the usual reply, ‘when I were a lad.’ Whereupon I would enthusiastically recall the huge falls of crisp...
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Kindness by Sylvia Plath
Kindness glides about my house. Dame Kindness, she is so nice! The blue and red jewels of her rings smoke In the windows, the mirrors Are filling with smiles.
What is so real as the cry of a child? A rabbit’s cry may be wilder But it has no soul. Sugar can cure everything, so Kindness says. Sugar is a necessary fluid,
Its crystals a little poultice. O kindness, kindness Sweetly picking up...
reginebenedicte asked: Merry Christmas! XX
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“She has learned over the years that sanity involves a certain measure of...”
– The Hours by Michael Cunningham
reginebenedicte asked: Merry Christmas! XX
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“Morning light, no longer sending its signal across the world, but concentrated...”
– dorothy richardson, dimple hill (1938), in pilgrimage: volume 4 (p.476). (via modernistwomen)
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aubade:
Dylan Thomas, “Light Breaks Where No Sun...
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“You are dearer than anyone in the world to me - but more than anything else -...”
– Katherine Mansfield
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Books I Read in 2010
1. Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson 2. Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin 3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 4. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King 5. The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty 6. The Road by Cormac McCarthy 7. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy 8. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind 9. One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora...
What's the Best Book You Read This Year?
“But what I do believe with my whole soul is that one’s outlook is the climate in...”
– Katherine Mansfield (via katherine-mansfield)
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“She kept herself marvellously alive to all the changes that went on around her,...”
– Virginia Woolf (Moments of Being)
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“She kept herself marvellously alive to all the changes that went on around her,...”
– Virginia Woolf (Moments of Being)
“There are no two writers alike; no one will write the way you do. You are...”
– John McPhee, Los Angeles Times, February 2010 (via aroomofherown)
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“She…felt herself possessed of the true secret of life at last, which is...”
– Virginia Woolf (Moments of Being)
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“All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one...”
– Virginia Woolf
The Arrival of the Bee Box by Sylvia Plath
circusfolk:
I ordered this, clean wood box Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift. I would say it was the coffin of a midget Or a square baby Were there not such a din in it. The box is locked, it is dangerous. I have to live with it overnight And I can’t keep away from it. There are no windows, so I can’t see what is in there. There is only a little grid, no exit. I put my eye to the...
Happy Deathday Mr. Fitzgerald!
deadwriters:
Firstly, we would like to wish everyone a very Happy Winter Solstice!
Secondly, on this day in 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald died of heart failure in Hollywood, California. He was 44 years old.
Fitzgerald is naturally most remembered for his classic novels This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby. The publication of This Side of Paradise on March...
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“Even a map cannot show you
the way back to a place
that no longer exists.”
– from “Christmas, 1970” by Sandra M. Castillo
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lineone:
“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.”
The Road - Cormac McCarthy.
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tessa hadley reads bowen's 'the jungle' →
modernistwomen:
from the guardian short story podcast series, author tessa hadley reads elizabeth bowen’s story, ‘the jungle’ (1929).
