practice your galactics

from literary lovers


The rather inactive other half of my brain started working.

Thanks can be made to:

1)  The blatant need to address reality.

2) Back to school prep.

3) Researching for my articles forces me to look at the computer so subsequently I end up staring at the the paris review.  Reading The Paris Review is sort of like eating a hot fudge Sunday on a cool summer's night, on a park bench, with one spoon, sitting under the moon. NOT having to share with anyone. Yeah, it's that good.

Proof over here.

*new* life motto:

"Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material."

~John Steinbeck

(E.H for shoplimbs)

I often feel like failure is waiting on my doorstep. It could be like a parcel, and you know you want to open it, and it's what you've been waiting for, and it's everything you expected it to be. After all, you'd lusted after it, worked hard, waited patiently for the perfect day for it to arrive. For you to finally get it. Expectations are set and you can't expect to get everything you want. But if you don't get it, it's not that it wasn't deserved...it just wasn't meant to be. Maybe it works differently for you, but this is how it goes for me.

a place to dip your toes

The thought of immersing into  De Trevi or the Versailles Musical Garden's fountain below is rather alluring. On the last day's of summer, I'm looking back on my trip, missing each and every bit. 

(img from kennedy holmes)

summer is all about cool, calm & comfy.

cool breezes

calming colours

and comfy heels

say hello/goodbye x100 more times

and into the fall we'll go

work while you play

Tonight I'm rather excited. I'm treating myself to go view the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra in the park. I'll bike there with a decanter of wine, and my notebook. Pondering all the research and articles I must write for tomorrow's deadline.

I'll view my archaic textbook on newspapers and sippy-sipp to classical music while the sun sets.

Then I'll go home (happy headed) and write into the night.

And tomorrow, the cycle will continue with next week's news assignments.

My question is:

How do you successfully work while you play?

"Ms. Marant has undeniably good taste. Ultimately, however, she confirms my thesis that fashion consciousness isn’t about fashion as much as it is about consciousness."

~Cintra Wilson on Isabel Marant

She called her self a 'smitten kitten', and a lot of the time she was. It's not hard to be happy, or is it, really? You laugh, doubt, stir, shout out that you're in love. And this is a sure as the sky is not falling fact. It's the dreams that throw me off. The words I read. For oh lordy-oh-mighty man's sake; tell me, don't taunt; is this a mistake?

“I feel well when I am writing.”

-Anita Brookner (The Paris Review)

gone to the cosmos

Only when I'm gone. The significant thought of your absolute insignificance. What we all fear. Our smallness, the longevity of life. When you hold your hands up to the sky and the cosmos swallows them up. Chewing, and grinding your knobby little fingers. Life is big, but not your life. Life, the whole. The big picture. Fisheye sized dome like massive big giant life. Not yours.

for a certain little kiki

23 for kk.

berliner dom.

I fell in love with Berlin.

charlotte gainsberg 

is

my

hair inspiration.

when life doesn't go your way, roll with it

and when your roll of  film x2,x3,x4 exposes itself;

also you must roll.

"The fantastic takes on metamorphoses; it changes."

~j.CORTÁZAR

I’ve picked my grave; here is where I shall die. Let me crawl through the ivy, up towards the palatial sky. Dying with nobility- the modern day impossibility.

what girls do all summer.

we run around; deranged and untamed. just as bad as we did during the coldest months.

a sÜz & rL collaboration. 

(berlin july 11)

Here's to my summer that feels like fall

already, already

If love was audible ours would be gunshot thunder

the self help book

I've never been one to seek any sort of advice from the "self-help" section at the bookstore. Good thing the The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, a.k.a "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren doesn't really count.

I can't say for certain that it's been of assistance, but I intend it to be helpful. I'll update as I go along.  However I understand it's premise, as I've been led down the road to this book multiple times, which means it was meant to be. I had it in my cart on amazon earlier today when I came across it used today for under $3. 

Wikipedia is the best way to source and reference a reading list reference book, ah, is there many of these, and that's a twister!  There it's said that..

There are three types of knowledge: practical, informational, and comprehensive. He discusses the methods of acquiring knowledge, concluding that practical knowledge, though teachable, cannot be truly mastered without experience; that only informational knowledge can be gained by one whose understanding equals the author's; that comprehension (insight) is best learned from who first achieved said understanding — an "original communication".

Well I can't quite possibley think of a reason not to read this. Other than the fact that I bought four other books today. (The Great Wall of China, Life is Elsewhere, The Farewell Waltz, and Burmese Days. But I'll be putting everything except for The Real Life of Sebastian Knight on the back burner.

THIS FALL

I wish I was her.

Studying the common core instead of just a taste of it.

Channelling the paradigm of intellectual women.

From the Paris Review 1967:

Ici Susan Sontag

"I could answer that a writer is someone who pays attention to the world."

~

"Well, one never likes to be called anything. And the word makes more sense to me as an adjective than as a noun, though, even so, I suppose there will always be a presumption of graceless oddity—especially if one is a woman. Which makes me even more committed to my polemics against the ruling anti-intellectual clichés—heart versus head, feeling versus intellect, and so forth."

join the club.

Club Monaco's Fall "look" is killing me.

I'm seeking a traditional style; and whether or not I actually decide to break my bank and purchase one of these; regardless they are inspiration for what to seek while thrift shopping.

Fuckin' quality pieces.

don't forget (a single word, thought, place, person) that passes by. never  let it end.

Ciao bellas,

I've decided; 

I love you (all), but don't get ahead of yourselves.

summer is and was

And should be for love.

Not just being in love, but for rediscovery of things that you are enamored with. It's difficult in winter * particularly where i live* because you can damn near freeze sometimes. Vitamin C makes my attitude alter like nothing else. I soaked up the sun on the beaches of Nice, and in Italy. Also on a lazy day on a paddleboat in Prague. The little things, you know?

Amidst the rambling what I'm trying to say is I was able to enjoy life, experience, live, and not be nature morte, still life. Being in the light, in foreign countries unveiled loves I never knew of. Everything became potentially beautiful. 

the candy carousel and it's iron counterpart

Where I began

Belle Notre Dame

Across from the Pantheon

After 30 solid days of exploration (both of the self and of the world/ Europe), I'm home. Safer than I ever thought possible. I'm tired, after a 40 hour day (oh lovely timechange) and joyous reunions with my love and vin de Bordeaux. There is (too much) to say all at once. I don't know where to begin, but it will all come out slow and sweetly. 

Much of my downtime in Europe was spent rediscovering my love for reading. The city of Prague sparked it specifically, while visiting the "old haunts" of Kundera. We found a lovely little English bookstore where I scooped a lovely copy of Identity.  Among the assistance of other novels, this book opened my eyes to things I did not see. In people I met on my trip that I noticed were characters. More so they had the potential to become fiction. 

Today (my first full day home) I began training for my new job here. 

Needless to say, anticipating the upcoming year.  Why? Philip Roth in the Ghost Writer explains it best.

"I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again."