solace

"may I not squander the astonishments" --jorie graham

tree lighting up

i acknowledge that this content is inappropriate for november

Advocate-Signet Dinner of the Past

2011

Durham, North Carolina, 2011

 Photos from my hometown and my house.

Foods for sadness

 Totto Ramen, Manhattan

If you're too sad to eat normal food, here are some fail-proof options:

1. Greek Gods honey flavored yogurt With 47% your daily value of saturated fat per serving, to accompany your breaking heart on its way down

2. Totto Ramen If you can manage to drag yourself from your bed up to Hell's Kitchen, this is the best sad-person soup I've ever had

2. Green and Black's Milk Chocolate with toffee Pace Bernachon, this one has such a sticky, dulce-de-leche-ish high-pitched taste that just tastes like something you could eat even when you're too sad to eat (and it tastes uncannily just like the Carrefour organic milk chocolate that they sell in Italian Carrefours)

Josef Albers in VES, 2011

Doing Josef Albers color studies in one of my painting classes was one of the happiest times of my life, and one of the saddest to remember.
Some of the assignments: make one color look like two different colors by placing it on different backgrounds. Make two different colors look like the same color. Make two different colors seem transparent where they overlap. For all these tasks, we had thousands of different sheets of colored paper to choose from.

Outpost, Bed-Stuy, August

from "New Year"

how many times at my schoolgirl’s desk:
what’s beyond those mountains? which rivers?
is the scenery nice without tourists?
am I right, Rainer, rain, mountains,
thunder? it’s not a widow’s pretension—
there can’t be just one heaven, there’s bound to be
another one, rainier, above it? with terraces? I’m judging by the Tatras,
heaven has to look like an amphitheater. (and they’re lowering the curtain.)
am I right, Rainer, God’s a growing
baobab tree? not a Louis d’or?
there can’t just be one God? there’s bound to be
another one, rainier, above him?

--from "New Year" by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Caroline Lemak Brickman (full text here)


Marina Tsvetaeva wrote this after Rilke died. For the last year of Rilke's life, the two poets had exchanged passionate letters, but they never met.

Goodbye Podere Campriano, February 2013

Kitty and others, Shakespeare and Company, Paris

Many more posts about tumbleweeding and Shakespeare and Company listed here.

 I made our Fete de la Musique poster