The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence. A coquettish, even cheerful nihilism. One recognizes the imperative of silence, but goes on speaking anyway. Discovering that one has nothing to say, one seeks a way to say that.

Susan Sontag (1967)
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

life; London; this moment of June.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
#everynightapoem #ofsorts #june

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree..."

...Sounds much more interesting than "Billy Butlin built a holiday camp."

#photography #architecture #OfSorts #Vernacular

#NotSoStately

#PleasureDome

#EveningSun

#GoldenHour

Verde que te quiero verde
(Green how I want you green)

Federico Garcia Lorca’s bedroom, in Granada

(📷 with thanks to another poet, Pedro Larrea)
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

“Don’t be afraid of the clocks, they are our time, time has been generous to us.

We are synchronized, now and forever.
I love you.”

-Félix Gonzáles-Torres (1957-1996)
Letter to Ross Laycock, 1988
#everynightapoem #ofsorts #clocks

"I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia."

-Vita Sackville-West
letter to Virginia Woolf
Milan [posted in Trieste], Thursday, 21 Jan 1926

#everynightapoem #ofsorts #epistolary #VitaSackvilleWest #VirginiaWoolf

You mentioned spring's delaying — I blamed her for the opposite.

I would eat evanescence slowly.

-#EmilyDickinson
letter to Elizabeth Holland (ltr 318)
#everynightapoem #ofsorts #march1

"It is a very plum plum."

-Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

@AlinaX

sensual
erotic charge
your fingers
close the circuit

#poem #OfSorts #NeedsEditing

"Avec ma main brûlée, j'ai le droit maintenant d'écrire des phrases sur la nature du feu.”

“With my burnt hand, I now have the right to write a few words on the nature of fire,” wrote Flaubert to his lover Louise Colet.

In Ingeborg Bachmann, the phrase reappears with a crucial excision. Writing from pain, but not asserting one's right to do so. “With my burnt hand, I write on the nature of fire.”
#everynightapoem #ofsorts
#translation #french #literature #flaubert #ingeborgbachmann #writing

The tango can be debated, and we have debates over it, but it still encloses, as does all that which is truthful, a secret.
-Jorge Luis Borges
#everynightapoem #ofsorts #borges #tango

#amlistening to this gorgeous performance of Piazzolla's Oblivion by the Bella Piano Trio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnSmp-yq8VE

[Borges’ sketch of tango dancers]

I call it a November-loneliness because there is a sort of demanding stillness in my heart...November never pauses, it listlessly seems to show off, don’t you think so?

-Katharine Mansfield, letter to Virginia Woolf, Nov 1921

#everynightapoem #ofsorts #epistolary #portrait
[Portrait of Katharine Mansfield by Anne Rice, 1918]

My words clear the ground.

-C. P. Cavafy, 1902 (t. Martin McKinsey)

I've been thinking of this a great deal. My students - elite, therefore by nature circumspect - are no longer so cautious and unwilling to act.
#everynightapoem #ofsorts
#cavafy #translation #writing
#china

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.
——
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings.

Ursula LeGuin, 2014
https://youtu.be/Et9Nf-rsALk
#everynightapoem #ofsorts
#ursulaleguin #writing

“Imagine an iron house, with absolutely no windows, indestructible, with many people asleep inside who will soon die of suffocation…Would you think you are doing them a good turn [by waking them before they perish]?”

“But if a few awake, you can’t say there is no hope.”

Lu Xun, from preface to “Call to Arms,” 1922
#everynightapoem #ofsorts
#china #literature #translation #LuXun
#救救孩子

In 1918 Lu Xun was already 37, hardly 'new youth.' But the revolutionary urgency of his prose defined the May4th generation.

In the preface to his short story collection 吶喊 (Call to Arms), he recounts being asked to write for "La Jeunesse," and he demurred, saying:

"Imagine an iron house..." (full quote in image and alt)

- Lu Xun, Preface to Call to Arms 魯迅，吶喊 序, 1922
#everynightapoem #ofsorts #savethechildren #china

Founded by Chen Duxiu (also co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party) in 1915, 新青年 La Jeunesse, later renamed 'New Youth,’ became the foundational journal of the New Culture Movement. This May 1918 issue was a first: all in vernacular Chinese.

Included in this issue of 'La Jeunesse' was, of course, the first publication of Lu Xun's 魯迅 "A Madman's Diary" 狂人日記, considered the inaugural work of modern Chinese literature.

「沒有吃過人的孩子，或者還有？」
#Chinese #literature #china
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

So, even though you have broken my heart yet again,
I wanted to say,
in another life,
I would have really liked
just doing
laundry and taxes with you.

#everynightapoem #ofsorts #film #favoritefilm

[1. Still of Ke Huy Quan as Waymond in #EverythingEverywhereAllAtOnce, dir. Daniels, 2022
2. Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh reunited at the Governors Awards in LA Saturday night]

I was looking for something else on Facebook and instead came across this old post. I wrote this in 2017 so the description of my novel-in-progress is out of date, but the post did make me smile. #introduction #ofsorts

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.
…
In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

Milan Kundera, “Slowness” (translated from the French by Linda Asher) ht Ardra Manasi
#everynightapoem #ofsorts #translation #memory