House of Fortitude

- Samuel Beckett / Molloy

"I tried to think of something else, but it was too late, I was already thinking. I tried to stop thinking, but I couldn't. I tried to get up, but I couldn't. I tried to sleep, but I couldn't. I tried to cry, but I couldn't. I tried to pray, but I couldn't. I tried to die, but I couldn't. I tried to think of something else, but it was too late, I was already thinking. I tried to stop thinking, but I couldn't. I tried to get up, but I couldn't. I tried to sleep, but I couldn't. I tried to cry,...

- Alice Walker

“HELPED are those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.
HELPED are those who love the entire cosmos rather than their own tiny country, city, or farm, for to them will be shown the unbroken web of life and the meaning of infinity.
HELPED are those who live in quietness, knowing neither brand name nor fad; they shall live every day as if in eternity, and each moment shall be as full as it is long.<...

- Dylan Thomas / Under Milk Wood

"And high above, in Salt Lake Farm, Mr Utah Watkins counts, all night, the wife-faced sheep as they leap the fences on the hill, smiling and knitting and bleating just like Mrs Utah Watkins.

UTAH WATKINS (Yawning)

Thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, forty-eight, eighty-nine...

MRS UTAH WATKINS (Bleating)

Knit one slip one
Knit two together
Pass the slipstitch over...

FIRST VOICE

Ocky Milkman, drowned asleep in Cockle Street, is emptying his ch...

- Herman Hesse / Trees

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their ...

- Dylan Thomas / Under Milk Wood

Llaregyb Hill, that mystic tumulus, the memorial of
peoples that dwelt in the region of Llaregyb before the
Celts left the Land of Summer and where the old wizards
made themselves a wife out of flowers.

SECOND VOICE

Mr Waldo, in his corner of the Sailors Arms, sings:

MR WALDO

In Pembroke City when I was young
I lived by the Castle Keep
Sixpence a week was my wages
For working for the chimbley-sweep.
Six cold pennies he
gave me Not a fart...

- Dylan Thomas / Under Milk Wood

"ROSIE PROBERT (Softly)

What seas did you see,
Tom Cat, Tom Cat,
In your sailoring days
Long long ago?
What sea beasts were
In the wavery green
When you were my master?

CAPTAIN CAT

I'll tell you the truth.
Seas barking like
seals, Blue seas and green,
Seas covered with eels
And mermen and whales.

ROSIE PROBERT

What seas did you sail
Old whaler when
On the blubbery waves
Between Frisco and Wales
You were my bosun?...

- Dylan Thomas / Under Milk Wood

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Ha...

- William C. Faulkner / Absalom, Absalom!

“You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to ...

Poll 3.

The other day, I uploaded a little "film" consisting entirely of footage captured on my phone that I typically take merely for memories (and IG stories every now and then). Is this something that interested you and you might want to see on a monthly basis or so?

- Lemony Snicket / The Beatrice Letters

"I will love you with no regard to the actions of our enemies or the jealousies of actors. I will love you with no regard to the outrage of certain parents or the boredom of certain friends. I will love you no matter what is served in the world’s cafeterias or what game is played at each and every recess. I will love you no matter how many fire drills we are all forced to endure, and no matter what is drawn upon the blackboard in a blurring, boring chalk. I will love you no matter how many ...

- Luis Alberto Urrea / The Hummingbird's Daughter

"On the cool October morning when Cayetana Chávez brought her baby to light, it was the start of that season in Sinaloa when the humid torments of summer finally gave way to breezes and falling leaves, and small red birds skittered through the corrals, and the dogs grew new coats.

On the big Santana rancho, the People had never seen paved streets, streetlamps, a trolley, or a ship. Steps were an innovation that seemed an occult work, stairways were the wicked cousins of ladders, and g...

- John Barth / The Sot-Weed Factor

"Ebenezer shook his head in a matter not clearly affirmative or negative. "That is a part of it, Henry; you go at such a pace, I have no time to think things through as they deserve! I cannot collect my wits e'en to think of all the questions I would ask, much less explore your answers. How can I know what I must do and where I stand?"

Burlingame laid his arm across the poet's shoulders and smiled. "What is't you describe, my friend, if not man's lot? He is by mindless lust engendered a...

- Thomas Pynchon / Gravity’s Rainbow

"Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from...

- Albert Goldbarth / Little, Big

Words I’d like to get in a poem,
hemoglobin and chifforobe and ombudsman and mahogany.
Meanwhile, a friend is studying the maha¯yuga,
the “Cycle of Cycles,” 4,320,000 years,
and its relationship to subvibrations of charm
or salsa or stodginess or whatever other
qualities are being ascribed this afternoon to the spectral
stipples of quantum physics. Another friend is formidably
gaga over cetology, and if she could would happily spelunk
the living gull...

Late summer 2024 (BTS)

I know that some humans out there enjoy the silly little stories I post on IG. With that in mind, I thought I'd explore making something similar for Patreon. Is this something that people might enjoy more of? Perhaps a monthly video with snippets of footage taken on phones? Let me know if you are interested in this kind of thing.

If there is interest, I will look into the practicalities of it. It turns out that Patreon doesn't allow 18+ creators to upload video directly and I have yet...

- Malcolm Lowry / UNDER THE VOLCANO

To-night, as ages hence, people would say this, or shut their doors on them, turn in bereaved agony from them, or toward them with love saying: "That is our star up there, yours and mine”; steer by them above the clouds or lost at sea, or standing in the spray on the forecastle head, watch them, suddenly, careen; put their faith or lack of it in them; train, in a thousand observatories, feeble telescopes upon them, across whose lenses swam mysterious swarms of stars and clouds of dead dark ...

- Albert Goldbarth / Fang

1.
They both remember the throat
is silver riverined
in the deep beet-color of blood,
a shockingly lovely expanse
the spent – the loser – wolf displays
below the aimed jaws of the victor wolf:
these two that have been battling
to the death, and yet now that the death
is a gift, an admission, the victor
turns from its completion, neurally-wired
for what the PBS narrator stops just short
of calling pity or mercy. He goes on to flashing 2024-10-15 10:32:57 +0000 UTC View Post

Print Discounts

As a member, you are entitled to a 50% discount if you would like a print of one of my photographs. Almost any photograph of mine is available for print, whether you've seen it here, on IG or elsewhere. (There are a few exceptions of work lost during a rather unfortunate hard drive failure a couple of years ago, not helped by my rather sloppy backup system) If you are interested, drop me a line and I will upload the photograph you want to my shop and send you a promo code. I might be ever so ...

Poll 2.

Today's post is an example of a perhaps slightly odd and bold experiment from yesteryear that I never even thought of making public. I wonder whether subscribers here appreciate seeing these kinds of posts or not. Let me know?

Albert Goldbarth / The Book of Speedy

1.
The far trees bristle up like a hairbrush.
Overhead, the sky is a wan blue.
Two clouds look as if they’re sharing
cellular material through a mutual wisp. I suppose
we could speak of the sex of clouds,
their combinative ways,
their freight, their fume-edged separations. We
could speak of ourselves through anything
really, any mask or mannequin our happenstance provides,
komodo dragon, moray eel,
laser surgery, pee from a rocketsh...

- Annie Dillard / Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.”

- Annie Dillard / Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“Think of a globe, a revolving globe on a stand. Think of a contour globe, whose mountain ranges cast shadows, whose continents rise in bas-relief above the oceans. But then: think of how it really is. These heights are just suggested; they’re there .... when I think of walking across a continent I think of all the neighborhood hills, the tiny grades up which children drag their sleds. It is all so sculptured, three-dimensional, casting a shadow. What if you had an enormous globe that was...

- Albert Goldbarth / Photographs of the Interiors of Dictators' Houses

It's as if every demon from hell with aspirations

toward interior design flew overhead and indiscriminately

spouted gouts of molten gold, that cooled down

into swan-shape spigots, doorknobs, pen-and-inkwell sets.

A chandelier the size of a planetarium dome

is gold, and the commodes. The handrails

heading to the wine cellar and the shelving for the DVDs

and the base for the five stuffed tigers posed in a fighting phalanx:

gold, as is the ...

- Albert Goldbarth

“Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you’re tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.

Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren’t alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You a...

Poll 1.

Partly because I just want to try out this poll feature and partly because I am curious:

How would you feel if during the first couple of months, I also uploaded old work every now and then so they can finally be seen in their full, uncensored glory (and larger copies of it too)?

- Roland Barthes / A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“I cannot write myself. What, after all, is this "I" who would write himself? Even as he would enter into the writing, the writing would take the wind out of his sails, would render him null and void -- futile; a gradual dilapidation would occur, in which the other's image, too, would be gradually involved (to write on something is to outmode it), a disgust whose conclusion could only be: what's the use? what obstructs amorous writing is the illusion of expressivity: as a writer, or assumin...