rt Sarah Breese
“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live”
-J.K. Rowling
2014 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 23,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 9 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Click here to see the complete report.
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New Web Series Alert: ‘East & West’ based on Gaskell’s North and South
Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South is one of my favorite romantic novels of all time, I consider it a successor to Pride and Prejudice, so obviously I’m interested in a webseries adaptation of it. It’s a little unassuming but very cute so far, and I’m dying of curiosity to see who they cast as Thornton. Also, as a third culture kid, I completely identity with Margaret’s culture shock here.
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Coffee Art
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Poetry: Overlooked Heroine, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus*
here was a splash quite unnoticed/ this was Icarus drowning
—William Carlos Williams
Bruegel chose the moment when young legs
closed like a pocket knife into the waiting sea.
Later, someone called it a mundane disaster;
said, “it couldn’t have been helped,” the flash
of a diving bird that turned out to be a boy.
I say this: Whatever suffering there was,
you brought it to the scene yourself.
You chose to be the shepherd who watched clouds
while a hawk studied sheep from the tree.
You chose to be the sleeping sailor, heavy
in the crow’s nest of that harbor ship,
or the fisherman too busy with his worms.
You must have known by heart the plodding path
walked by a horse wearing leather blinders.
And the ploughman, how did he greet tragedy?
Why, he had laid down his dagger and moneybelt
in the shade, and would not leave them unwatched.
He was no hero, he ploughed without swerving
and let one foot step soft into the turned furrow.
And there, in the field already ploughed,
was a spot on the ground, a pale mound
which proved upon closer inspection
to be the white skull of an old man, settling.
If he noticed either sinking body
the ploughman merely shrugged:
the Dutch have a proverb: De ploeg gaat over lijken
-Kathleen Heideman, DecomP Magazine
A poem inspired by Brueghel’s painting, to follow W.H. Auden’s much-loved classic “Musee des Beaux Arts“
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Poetry: The Coming of Light
Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light. You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves, stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows, sending up warm bouquets of air. Even this late the bones of the body shine and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath. -Mark Strand, Poets.org
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Cooking with Love
rt fox and fern
“If you are careful,’ Garp wrote, ‘if you use good ingredients, and you don’t take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp
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What kind of tea do you want?
“What kind of tea do you want?”
“There´s more than one kind of tea?…What do you have?”
“Let´s see… Blueberry, Raspberry, Ginseng, Sleepytime, Green Tea, Green Tea with Lemon, Green Tea with Lemon and Honey, Liver Disaster, Ginger with Honey, Ginger Without Honey, Vanilla Almond, White Truffle Coconut, Chamomile, Blueberry Chamomile, Decaf Vanilla Walnut, Constant Comment and Earl Grey.”
-“I.. Uh…What are you having?… Did you make some of those up?”
― Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life
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This Is the Poem That’s Going to Get Me Out of the Mines
This is one of my favorite prose poems of all time, a transcendentally self-mocking poetic creed that’s a delight from start to finish.
Jonathan did it. He teaches at a university in Washington now.
Or Oregon. I forget. But he said he gets fifty grand a year.
To teach creative writing. That’s like winning the lottery.
I make thirty grand and my lungs are turning into a collection
of twisted lies. I cough more than I think. I asked Jonathan
how he did it and he said he didn’t know. It was like God
napalmed him with luck. He got some award for a poem
about a goddamn lake and suddenly they pay him a thousand
dollars to read for fifty minutes in an auditorium filled
with students who don’t want to be there. I tell him to seriously
tell me how to do it and he said you have to make sure
there’s a lot of mist in the poem, that they can see the mist,
feel the mist, and then just go from there. He says that poets
love mist. They want so much mist in a poem that you can’t
see anything else other than mist and then from that mist
you have something really beautiful peek through and then
something really ugly peek through. But it can’t be too ugly,
he says, or you’re fucked. And he says don’t swear. He says
you want mist and beauty and a touch of ugly
-Ron Riekki, Juked
Coffee and Irony 