only good

The Third Thing I'm Thankful For (of Ten):

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:48:01 -0500

Tetris. Period.

Ten Things I'm Thankful For, Thing the Second:

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:03:00 -0500

Blogs that make me want to do something, be something, think something differently—instead of buy something, have something, covet somethings endlessly.

Africa (Toto) - Perpetuum Jazzile Ten Things I’m Thankful...

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:17:00 -0500

Africa (Toto) - Perpetuum Jazzile

Ten Things I’m Thankful For, Volume One: Cover songs, choral arrangements, a cappella… pretty much anything. For that matter: schmaltz, cheese, earnest sentiment, that rare moment in which pleasure overpowers self-consciousness. Anti-irony (ugh!) and other odious, indispensable things.

Bas Jan Ader

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:46:57 -0500

Bas Jan Ader

“If I could wish, toss my penny into the fountain, or better—since wishes are...

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:35:41 -0500

“If I could wish, toss my penny into the fountain, or better—since wishes are beggars—toss in my three pennies, and name my nine and more wishes for myself as a writer, for my country’s writers, for our literature, what would they be? I’d wish, first of all, to be able to name my wishes, to be able to avow them openly: to name them, to claim them, the better to act upon them. I’d wish upon most of us more ambition, a larger sense of possibility. I’d wish for a sense of mission beyond identity politics—a wider healing. I’d wish as many of us were as interested in healing as in indicting, and if not able to name, at least willing to point, or if not able to point, at least willing to search for what could make our lives better than they are. I’d wish for a serious literature less willfully inarticulate to spiritual need, less deaf to spiritual summons, a literature that looks to what has long endured as well as to the novelties of the moment, a literature that seeks wisdom, that is unafraid to speak, without taking ironic cover, its full heart and mind.” — A.G. Mojtabai, “A Missed Connection.”

New year, new beginnings.

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:47:56 -0500

New year, new beginnings.

These days whatever you have to say, leave the roots on, let them dangle And the dirt Just to...

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 15:41:18 -0500

These days
whatever you have to say, leave
the roots on, let them
dangle

And the dirt

Just to make clear
where they come from
- Charles Olson

I will be starring as “glasses-wearing friend” in this missed connection posting until...

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:17:05 -0500

I will be starring as “glasses-wearing friend” in this missed connection posting until craigslist, like, removes it.

P.S. Also preserved for posterity.

P.P.S. I heard a rumor that this is a missed connection success story in the making.

Holy Ground - Ford Beckman Tulsa, Oklahoma (my hometown) is...

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 08:31:00 -0500

Holy Ground - Ford Beckman

Tulsa, Oklahoma (my hometown) is always showing up in the strangest places. Whenever I read an article set there I summon up the city so literally; it’s an experience unlike any other type of reading/remembering that I know. Like, I think I imagine a specific spot on Peoria, or maybe by the river—something like trees and houses from the window of my car, or browned out winter grass and the curve of a highway entrance ramp, or just that muted color palette that northeastern Oklahoma wears most of the year: grey-blue empty sky and grey-yellow grass set off by the grey-grey of concrete strip malls, endless parking lots, and crumbling streets. I love Tulsa, don’t get me wrong. But is it right to assume that the people I’m reading about would recognize the city I’m imagining? I certainly feel closer to them because of this assumed connection, whether or not it’s fantasy. I wonder when and if I will feel this way about New York.

Very often I email myself quotes with no attribution or explanation so that I can feel a sense of...

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 12:10:20 -0500

Very often I email myself quotes with no attribution or explanation so that I can feel a sense of rediscovery two months later when I take the time to track down their sources. Of course then sometimes the sources are lost.

“What more can we ask of a writer than that he draw us into the charmed circle of his obsessions?”

“The whole of social life rests on theological imagination, on acts of explicit or implicit worship of what stands beyond ourselves, of what we depend on. The connections we imagine ourselves into with other people and things weave around us with divine thread.”

“I found fun dip in one pocket and your NYPL card in the other.”

10 Principles That Might Make Your Work Better or May Make It Worse

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:19:39 -0500

10 Principles That Might Make Your Work Better or May Make It Worse:

This article is a little old, but it’s totally awesome. Its ideas are pointed but also malleable enough to apply to any sort of creative practice. They resonate a lot with thinking that I’ve been doing lately about writing and vulnerability. I particularly like:

8. Being too comfortable is dangerous.
9. There is nothing keeping you from doing the sort of work that you wish.

Domesticated - Amy Stein

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:38:10 -0500

Domesticated - Amy Stein

People lost at sea.

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:03:44 -0500

People lost at sea.

“You emerge victorious from the maze you’ve been...

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:55:04 -0500

“You emerge victorious from the maze you’ve been traveling in.”

I would like to say a word in praise of lapse. I would like to give thanks for moments when I cannot...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:26:16 -0500

I would like to say a word in praise of lapse. I would like to give thanks for moments when I cannot or will not feel grateful, when I find myself afield and gratitude feels unreasonable, far—flung away like folly or worse, like a feeling irredeemable, alien, and wrong. There is something to a thankfulness recovered from gloom. A gut-punch of gratitude at cooking and eating everyday food; at sorting, stapling, tidying, cutting sharp lines with new scissors; at walking alone for a long time on an unremarkable afternoon. Last weekend my love baked me a pie and the smell of its buttermilk custard rising was a lesson in life’s dearness. Walking home from the market through unseasonable sun that had brought with it a heavy smell of mildew from the previous day’s rain, I felt my heart warm to sun and damp: to a moment in the presence of gratitude but also to my many moments of exile from it. I felt myself open to words that I will hate tomorrow (note: these words). Open and suddenly kind to that part of myself that I often want to forget or destroy or to put away in its place with a sneer. Oh, how to turn the other cheek to one’s own impulses? How to remain grateful for the self that denies gratitude its forgiving grace? How to stay with this softness that tends so close to fear? I will start by giving thanks.

Some words I have been loving lately, definitions omitted.

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:17:00 -0500

semaphore
tenanted
ebenezer
amanuensis

Ramble on.

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:48:00 -0500

The Rothko Chapel, Houston 2007 - Thomas Struth

This afternoon, a post by a friend of a friend referencing Thomas Struth took me on an epic online ramble so personally resonant that I wanted to set it down here in narrative form. First I stopped at several NYT articles that have been illustrated by Struth’s photographs, including this fascinating piece from a few years ago on political theology and this feature on houses of worship that also function as art installations. One of the spaces featured in that second article is the Live Oak Friends Meeting House, a Quaker Meeting House designed by James Turrell that I’ve heard rapturously described by one of my closest friends, who lives in Houston and has, I think, a particular interest in sacred architecture (hi, Evan!). Turrell connects the function of the Meeting House to a piece of his at PS.1, Meeting, a piece that I first saw on a trip to that museum with Evan and his boyfriend Ryan (hi, Ryan!). We were there on a clear, colorless winter day at the end of December and opening the door into the room (what Turrell calls a “skyspace”) was a literal shock to the senses. PS.1 has a kind of mad-abandoned-hospital feel to it at all times—it inspires a delicious, excitable wandering—and opening onto the frigid outdoor evening air and the crowd of museum-goers, many of them lying on their backs on the floor, was a near perfect experience of surprise gratification. It was just as lovely and sudden a moment to come upon today, in the midst of a very different kind of wandering.

Considering what was already an overwhelming wealth of circuitous association, it was almost overkill to find Struth’s photo of the Rothko Chapel, another sacred/artistic Houston landmark that always makes me think of Evan. On a visit to him shortly after relocating to Brooklyn, my girlfriend and I loitered outside the chapel in the dusk, talking about the huge mistake we thought we’d made in moving an extra thousand miles away from such good friends and loved ones. Later I walked back in the deeper darkness to retrieve a scarf that I’d left behind, forgotten in haste or, more probably, in emotion.

I generally believe in a universe without consciousness or intentionality. I know I’ve now written two posts that smack of God or religion in a look-how-it’s-all-connected kind of way. (Also, admittedly, in a literal content kind of way.) Undoubtedly, undeniably I am tracing such lines because I’ve been spending time with others who are interested in doing the same—not just David Dark but Rebecca Solnit and Annie Dillard and Krista Tippett. I’m kind of embarrassed, not to be keeping such company, but to be nursing thoughts that would sound ridiculous to that sad girl carrying her recovered scarf and wondering, really, where she was going. The difference between her and me, there and here, is that I’m finding so much more pleasure in wondering lately, and in wandering. I’m having more moments of opening onto skyspace, of unanticipated pleasure in connection. It’s maybe even enough to make embarrassment feel irrelevant.

Having a moment here. Saving it for later.

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 14:22:00 -0500

Having a moment here. Saving it for later.

“Without a costly commitment to candor among family and potential friends, the possibility of...

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:04:00 -0500

“Without a costly commitment to candor among family and potential friends, the possibility of truthful conversation (a prerequisite for the formation of more perfect unions) begins to tragically diminish, and responsible speech that communicates what we’re actually thinking and believing becomes a lost art.” - David Dark, The Gospel According to America.

So David Dark is one of my newest favorite writers. His mind-bending insistence on a biblically-based world view oriented by a commitment to bewilderment has, well, bent my mind. It seems appropriate to the content of his writing that my context for reading it has often been a squirmy, unavoidable sense of self-questioning generated by the act of standing up on the train with a book subtitled “Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea.” (Standing as, I guess I should note, a visibly queer, atheistic, “East Coast liberal” style NYC transplant. In other words not someone you would necessarily expect to be hip to Jesus.) And yet I can’t stop reading his book even long enough for one day’s commute—it lays out one of the most challenging and exhilarating conceptions of American identity that I’ve run into in a long time.

Here’s the article where I initially saw Dark’s name, found courtesy of author Jessica Hopper, who wrote it and The Girls Guide to Rocking, which Dark reviews on his blog… here. I like the circularity, the overlap, the messy internet humanity of the little transaction that brought me to his book. Having spent some time recently with Dark’s view of America, I think he might like it too.

Further flight patterns.

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:38:06 -0500

Further flight patterns.