harry potter

I can talk about it now.

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Frank O'Hara to Larry Rivers:

You are worried that you don't write?
Don't be. It's the tribute of the air that
your paintings don't just let go
of you. And what poet ever sat down
in front of a Titian, pulled out
his versifying tablet and began
to drone? Don't complain, my dear.
You do what I can only name.

Well get started

From Seamus Heaney's commencement speech to the graduating class of 1996 from the University of North Carolina:

"Getting started, keeping going, getting started again -- in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others. So this rhythm is what I would like to talk about briefly this morning, because it is something I would want each one of you to experience in the years ahead, and experience not only in your professional life, whatever that may be, but in your emotional and spiritual lives as well -- because unless that underground level of the self is preserved as a verified and verifying element in your make-up, you are going to be in danger of settling into whatever profile the world prepares for you and accepting whatever profile the world provides for you. You'll be in danger of molding yourselves in accordance with laws of growth other than those of your own intuitive being."

(Thank you for sending this.)

Bring tap shoes and a song

Item found while making a half-assed attempt to clean my room:

(1) Fragment of newsprint stapled to a finger and a fraction of an ear: "characters, energy and personality a plus. Bring tap shoes and a song"

(2) Some ST article headline: "Fertility lost to the toys of the new age?"

(3) [Aside]: What am I to do with all that you have sent me?

(4) The contents of one pouch: a tiny lock and key, a larger lock and key, 50 pence and one blue bead

(5) A list written on office stationery: 1. Steve; 2. tax; 3. emails; 4. work.

In the mail

(1) A stone with a half-inch gash in it (made by a chainsaw, the note said);

(2) Last postcard from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY;

(3) A cloth card featuring an elephant.

Thank you.

You have a reservoir of optimism, he said

IRA statement

Eavan Boland

Pomegranate

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
                    It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.

- Eavan Boland

tchotchke

Just cause I felt like saying it.

Doorways

WN gives me a little statue of Ganesh from his backpacking trip to Vietnam and Cambodia. Ganesh! I say in delight. God of doorways! Yes, he says; and of escapes, too.

(A quick google tells me that Ganesh is the god of wisdom, intelligence, education, prudence. Also the god of luck and fortune, doorways, the household and writing. Also the remover of obstacles.)

Happy birthday Jianyi!

And happy fireworks to you too.

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"But if we were to allow ourselves to indulge in all the daydreams of inhabited stone there would be no end to it."

- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space