The Store Stump

2011-05-30T17:37:00.000-07:00

my dear store stump-ians,

the time has come for some housecleaning, and I will be closing this chapter of blog history and moving over tumblr.

Please come visit me at my new address: storestump.tumblr.com

There are lots of new poems up and I hope to be posting a lot more writing from now on.
Thank you for the faithful following of this old blog - I have loved it dearly.

I hope to see you all at my new home,
yours,
z

2011-05-18T22:25:00.000-07:00

i've caught the butterfly wings of this day in my gut
skies washed with sun and smiles caught by their hair in between these teeth
everywhere chests are opened, voices unleashed
on my hips I carry these flutterings and swayings
the weight of a hundred windy tendrils of spring

your eyes are grayed and chasms open where you tread
I'd almost like to climb up away where your teeth, lips and crinkled eyes are huddled
in a cave under the floorboards of a house
somewhere inside

we climbed here once before and called this place Japan
"look how the rooftops shift and lean" you said
we had daisies in our hair then and only violins
in our young hands – catch me up now, your arms

they strain with a new awakening, we've held lakes in our fingers
leaked out them all, our guts
our fears, watering our feet; we've leaked out our hearts
and torn eachother into ribs and bones

now on sweet slopes we tunnel, soles warm with dirt
hold new light in our palms and break into this hilltopthe beeswax on your lips burning mine, bright hummingstrung between our collarbones.

Ryan with scissors

2011-05-18T22:18:00.001-07:00

the view from here is of a cut-up sky and semi trucks that ply the roads beneath, in the inner workings, the heart, the jungle, of this city. Here there are only comings and going and makings, warehouses upon warehouses with craft hidden behind crusted glass. On this second floor after three flight of dank carpet and cold walls, there is a white door from which strains notes, shy and foreign notes, like the forbidden door in each grimm's tale I was read at three. Here white walls, white celing, white white floor, one white chair, one mirror, and the tallest girl I know with trimmings on her fingers. Ryan with scissors is the kind of magician you love on sight and feel shy to ever burst upon again, with her white hair casting itself towards the floor in rivered lengths and her girafe legs so long they twin themselves incessantly unsure of themselves. Her father's career in 1960s with the As, her sister's habit of picking up street poets, they are mythologies under white iron fixtures and white lights. She only cuts in shapes that take my jawbone from its caves. A sudden torque of a wrist, flash of her knives, and the tickle of fallen hair on my arm.

2011-05-17T11:48:00.001-07:00

I’ve awoken from a late night with fearful tenderings, dead ache bones fishing to take hard medicine outside the cricket moon still crowing. We talked on the phone he asked am I Narcissus? I said if we’re going to talk Greeks, can I be Icarus? Only partly for the wings, but mostly for the red heart Matisse gave him in the falling. The dawn is bold and lionous, my bathroom tiled floor white and cold on bare feet and slumped limbs, a world of shakings, tremblings, to be in a body with gutted bones. The chickadee is calling outside the way it did when I was six and I hunted it in the back of our blue Nissan truck with binoculars. I hunted that sound, the chickadee dee dee, like Cherokee, because of the liquorish feel it left on my tongue. My limbs are stones in the early morning air the cold softness of the honed weight against the floor, Egyptian fossils, encased, alien. I’ll keep crouching here to belong to the bird’s legends, to adorn the tongue with home. To make mating calls. To watch that phone turn into beanstalks and bear its long green fruit. To give my faulty ticker with its animal beats to the red belly of the sun.

2011-04-27T21:02:00.000-07:00

completely mesmerized by the photography of mariam sitchinava

longings for the old short hair come back when I see these pics

plans for paris are underway & these days are all writing and furrowed brows

2011-04-21T19:42:00.001-07:00

Low Anthem - Ghost Woman Blues from Live & Breathing on Vimeo.

2011-04-13T15:52:00.000-07:00

When I first began to love God I thought I'd fallen in the ocean,

but I was only on the beach.

then i entered the water and was thrown back on shore

and then washed again by the waves.

God, why did i want this love?

and

what is this back and forth?

- Hafiz

2011-04-12T17:20:00.001-07:00

Low Anthem - Matter of Time from Live & Breathing on Vimeo.

2011-04-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

THIS.

2011-03-31T09:14:00.000-07:00

III

Buffalo Bill's

defunct

who used to

ride a watersmooth-silver

stallion

and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

Jesus

he was a handsome man

and what i want to know is

how do you like your blueeyed boy

Mister Death

- e e cummings

sounds of the day: here

2011-03-28T15:24:00.000-07:00

Don't surrender your loneliness
so quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you
as few human
Or even divine ingrediants can.
- Hafiz

a special treat for you all: a wonderful new EP for the spring growings:

Civil War by The Shepherds

back to the rainy streets and the classes! For all my reluctance, I am actually very excited about this next quarter: John Stuart Mills, Romantic Poets, French, Linguistics...

Missing: drawing, writing, and printing

other sounds: Fleet Foxes

2011-03-22T09:41:00.000-07:00

above: spring break

for your souls:

this

to do: Anis Mojgani at Powells at 8pm Monday the 28th!
I would recommend getting there really early because last time Jonathan Franzen was there, I was stuck on the floor beneath the talk in a huge line.

to watch: this

2011-03-19T11:04:00.000-07:00

the sky was lavender the last few days of class

its bewildering to find myself in fresh air with hours to do things like laundry and dishwashing

and how much i wish the coast weren't so tempestuous these days,

i need a good gust of wind in my hair

and this:

2011-03-04T21:31:00.000-08:00

sounds of today: here
vast skies, ponderings, and solo nights
this semester has been murder

2011-01-25T13:38:00.000-08:00

Is it like this

In death's other kingdom

Waking alone

At the hour when we are

Trembling with tenderness

Lips that would kiss

Form prayers to broken stone

T.S.E.

I'm supposed to be writing a paper - two in fact. But nothing doing. Too much schoolwork and my brain turns off and decides to read T.S.E. instead. My cherished humans, how are we still in January? I find myself longing for sky sky sky, birdsound, and spring growings.
I'm supposedly reading Pound right now, but how can you really enter into him, when the first lines you read are: "say this to the Possum: a bang, not a wimper/with a bang, not a wimper". especially as he goes onto talk politics and Mussolini hanging by his heels....its impossible to find him compelling, with this still echoing in your ears. As very young writer of ten years old, I used to take those words of T.S.E. and hold them in my mouth, shape them, whisper them to myself - all with little idea of their meaning in a fuller sense than the sounds they were. All I could feel is that they were sound with meaning, shade with color, and that they talked. talked wildly! Half my age ago I already knew that to make sound talk was all I could ever want.

pic of Jeff Gun art

2011-01-18T14:24:00.000-08:00

shudders of winter's fog, butterflies, and eternity today
to this sound

2011-01-11T17:25:00.000-08:00

Saw a train catch the night on FIRE.

its snowing

listening to this

and dreaming about such luxeries as appartments and summer;

summer now means figure drawing, photography, printing and music...everything that keeps me alive...

the one consolation is that we're studying printing rights and typography in 17th century england in ENG 430 this term.

pic from here

2010-12-17T12:03:00.000-08:00

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

- G. M. H.

A close family friend, a figure who stood on the front porch of my childhood memories, forever rolling a cigarette in his hands and laughing with my dad, has passed away this last week. I spent much of my time growing up in his house, curled on the couch watching the adults open bottles of wine, tell stories, and weave the life and faith I would take into my soul and make my own. And now watching him return to the earth, surrounded by candles and singing and tears and so much love, I feel that a bright flickering gift has been placed in my hands; they have wept and hugged me and let me be with them through all of life, the laughter and the death intermingled.

listen

2010-12-11T20:13:00.000-08:00

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.
...
That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive.
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

- Czeslaw Milosz

HERE.

2010-12-08T22:02:00.000-08:00

When he is king, they will clothe him in grave-sheets

Myrrh for embalming and wood for a crown

-Bethlehem Down

all things winter

listen

& delve here (thank you to a dear friend for this) & here

I am so very tired. And the earth itself is so very dark and dimmed.

2010-12-02T23:31:00.000-08:00

listen

things talking to me tonight:

the word "wyrd"
it means doom, destiny - and more. The wind in that 'w' whistles and whines down all the wooden rickety halls of time, houses of gods, hear it? and the y is a ÿ, a closed and weighty, earthy pull towards the d of end, death, destination. together they are all that is wild and wonderful about the ancient knowledge of man. that we carry our deaths in us, like rilke says. that it grows in us and we cherish it growing, so it becomes a great death, a death remembered, of meaning, and very much our own.
Something about the stark darkness and frigid cold of winter tears everything away so that I feel that wyrd and shake. It is frightening and deathly wonderful to touch it, a moment so present you wonder if you've ever really known anything real before. Except, you know you have because its familiar. Its all the shivering mystery of your wide-open childhood again.

stories
storytelling has been the human trove of identity for thousands upon thousands of years. It is partly what the winter is for. Find that book, that childhood voice echoing inside you, and return to the fabric of our past.
someone to listen to: Jay O'Callahan

pic from Abby Try Again

2010-12-01T21:14:00.000-08:00

The falcon hath born my make away

we're nearing the days of mystery. and velvet and keen depth of wintry and wild.
for your soul: this and this

sleep well, wistful ones, and gather yourself for the coming midwinter. and the breath-taking moments of solemn magic.

2010-11-24T21:10:00.000-08:00

feeling like this

and this

sometimes I wish we lived in black and white

the light is just so keen

photos above are completely this moment

and taken by the lovely sarah meadows - her newest exhibition is at PNCA right now

it wasn't safe to breath at all

2010-11-21T14:20:00.000-08:00

For I could not have shaken the touch of your breath on my arm.
For it has stayed in me, as an epithet,
I am sorry the worst has arrived,
For I'm on the floor,
In the room where we made it that last touch of the night
- s.stevens.

listen.

2010-11-20T09:24:00.000-08:00

Was standing about a foot from this last night

Friday night could not be more perfect.

Happy weekend, lovelies!

2010-11-10T21:40:00.000-08:00

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild gees, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

- Mary Oliver

I can't stop listening to the age of adz. I know its all indie to be into it, and hipster to avoid it, but for the moment i'm too swept off into the magic of his sound to care. it gives rainy days their wimsy and nights their seriousness tenderness.

2010-11-10T09:20:00.000-08:00

I want to run away to the land above (pics from here)

listen to this and have a wonderfully wet wednesday

2010-11-09T20:00:00.000-08:00

above: things that are talking to me. I'm fascinated by people's odds and ends...

2010-11-09T12:14:00.000-08:00

The earth braces itself for the feet

Of a lover of God about to

Dance.

The sky becomes very timid

When a great saint starts waving his arms

In joy,

For the sky knows its prized fixtures,

The sun, moon and planets

Could all wind up

Rolling so wild on the floor!

...

The day candle (sun) has forgotten the hour;

The whole world has gone joyously mad.

- Hafiz

I'm avoiding school with pure determination right now. After writing the most intense paper of my life, I deserve some pause to breath! And what air today! My windows are frosted with condensation and teary pathways, giving me streaky sights to the heavy trees outside. I'm completely in love with everything sweatery and especially anything indian/aztec-y. If only this life of a poor student wasn't so textile deprived!

sound of my soul: here

2010-11-03T14:27:00.000-07:00

this time is
of barbed quiet wound tight across our shivering skin.
of senseless air
and meaning dies quietly, dressed to the nines and alone.
I shouldn't mourn past selves and smiles
but how can I not feel their betrayal to the past
with sadness, washed and folded, weeping in its bottom drawer.

The sound of my sinking exhausted world to be found here (be sure to listen to all three parts). I found this info on wiki particularly effecting: In interviews, Stevens has stated that, in 2009/10, he suffered from a mysterious debilitating virus infection that affected his nervous system. He experienced chronic pain, and was forced to stop working on music for several months. He said: "The Age of Adz, is, in some ways, a result of that process of working through health issues and getting much more in touch with my physical self. That's why I think the record's really obsessed with sensation and has a hysterical melodrama to it."

The fall is painfully beautiful outside today. The colors are so vivid, I feel like I'm in a fevered state of consciousness, perhaps not helped by listening to sufjan 24/7 on no sleep.

2010-10-25T18:12:00.000-07:00

come closer.
come into this. come closer.
you are quite the beauty. if no one has ever told you that before know that now. you are quite the beauty. there is joy in how your mouth dances with your teeth. your mouth is a sign of how sacred your life truly is. come into this. true of heart come into this. you are true of heart. come closer. come closer. know that whatever God prays to He asked it to help Him make something of worth. He woke from His dreams scraped the soil form the spaces inside Himself made you and was happy. you make the Lord happy.
come into this.
come closer.
know that something softer than us but just as holy planted the pieces of Himself into our feet that we might one day find our way back to Him. you are almost home.
come closer come into this. there are birds beating their wings beneath your breastplate gentle sparrows aching to sing come aching hearts come soldiers of joy doormen of truth come true of heart come into this.
my heart was too big for my body so I let it go and most days this world has thinned me to where I am just another cloud forgetting another flock of swans but believe me when I tell you my soul has squeezed into narrow spaces. place your hand beneath your head when you sleep tonight and you may find it there making beauty as we sleep as we dream as we turn over when I turn over in the ground may the ghosts that I have asked answers of do the turning kneading me into crumbs of light and into this thing love thing called life. come into it!
come you wooden museums
you gentle tigers
negro farces in two broken scenes.
come rusting giants!
I see teacups in your smiles upside down glowing. your hands are like my heart. on some days how it trembles. let us hold them together. I am like you. I too at times am filled with fear. but like a hallway must find the strength to walk through it. walk through this with me. walk through this with me. through this church birthed of blood and muscle where every move our arms take every breath we swallow is worship.
bend with me. there are bones in our throats. if we choke it is only on songs.

- Anis Mojgani

2010-10-23T22:10:00.000-07:00

I could listen to this all day long. And To Have and Have Not is officially the best movie of all time! Its been a week of inbetweeness and a sort of suspended sense of now....pushing to finish school assignments and work, fighting a cold that triumphed in the end.

but there is life after a headcold!

And Sufjan Stevens on Friday.

I think I need ink on my hands again to remember how to breath. If only there were time for figure drawing in all this chaos of a fall.

2010-10-06T22:48:00.000-07:00

Wistful ones,
A tired hello before I hit the pillow.

MAGIC to be found here.

I miss Heaney this fall, and Rilke. There is no time, when Huizinga's seven thousand sources invade my days. Freedom finished. Quite brilliant, but not an easy read.

My brain is no longer forming words, so goodnight, city. This overworked student is headed for slumber.

All I Ever Needed Help With Was You

2010-10-02T21:48:00.000-07:00

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

I've lost my T.S.E. and its making me lonely. Rarely do I misplace books important as he is. As it is Saturday I am again writing, though the moment isn't very inspirational. Overworked would be the word I think, and under-eye dark-worry (can you tell I've been reading Anglosaxon? The kennings just keep coming....and alliteration, too, apparently).
Things I'm in love with:
food. pretty much any kind, because there is very little time, I've discovered, to fit it in between running five blocks to class (hefting a hundred-pound bag in the process), running five blocks back again, seven blocks sideways to honors (which involves demonstrating your smarts, preferably at highly audible tones for the benefit of your presumably deprived classmates), and then shimmying into business attire for evenings of semi-exhaustion as a fairy-tale (according to the oregonian - something I would have to contest. if you saw the amount of work involved you would agree with me) librarian.

Brits. They are quite lovely and well educated. And who else, when speaking of an author, would murmur confidingly to you over a dusty book, "mad as toast!"

Tender Loving Empire - discovered in the same week by myself, walking by it in downtown ptown, and also by a friend online. Oh Portland. Thank you for a having a real live etsy shop.

New Pornographers. I know its old news to all you young indies, and yes Sufjan Stevens has a new album out, but how can anyone tire of listening to this? It gets me through my many many hours of life right now.

It is way too late for me to be typing on here and not reading Montaigne or Huizinga or unknown Anglosaxon poets, so farewell my lovelies until next time.

2010-09-23T12:26:00.000-07:00

There are round rocks rolling in a cave

under my right collarbone.

I'm lifting boxes in the basement

as they sing to eachother,

touching and rolling and touching

and rolling away.

photography by Sarah Meadows

2010-09-18T13:37:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning gloriousness, dripping leaves, soft warm rain and morning tea amidst the early morning market shoppers. After a week of stress and exhaustion, there's nothing quite like a house full of big hearts, food, and laughter to bring a much-needed freedom and peacefulness.
On the music front, the big news is about our new Revels CD, recorded this last spring. It will be released October 12th, but you can pre-order from Amazon or Revels Inc.

Listen to a clip: here

On the book front, I met Johnathan Franzen this last week and am enthusiastically diving into The Corrections while I wait for Freedom to arrive in the mail.

As fall sets in, the prevalent mood has been of Nick Drake, rainy bike rides (so incredibly refreshing!), and an achy, poetic meditative quiet. Work is hard, rest is deep, and the passion for life grows somehow ever stronger.

photos above by Bloom Grow Love

2010-09-11T11:56:00.000-07:00

Work work work and sleep. Now I'm actually employed, posting on blogs is going to have to take a back seat. I'm thinking every Saturday, though, I'll try to get on here, even if just for a brief note. Above, Toast's new fall catalogue - haunting and delicious as always.

Coming up: Johnathan Frazen at Powells this Thursday!
Sounds of today: hearing these guys tonight at MFNW

2010-08-31T21:24:00.000-07:00

our first rain of the fall - sweet blessed wet wetness
the city, headaches, work and books

sound of today: here

and Anis Mojgani

goodnight, Portland.

photos from Bloom, Grow, Love

2010-08-28T16:39:00.000-07:00

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. As elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rust green iron table, saying: 'If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden...' I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.

- T.S.E.

2010-08-17T17:39:00.000-07:00

The sunlight's crawled across the walls
today – and weighted bells ring off
the hours in my mouth.
Some days the very air betrays,
leaves you tight and helpless
remembering
there is Someone you've been avoiding, looking
straight into your eyes.

2010-08-15T15:11:00.000-07:00

Only

That Illumined

One

Who keeps

Seducing the formless into form

Had the charm to win my

Heart.

Only a Perfect One

Who is always

Laughing at the word

Two

Can make you know

Love.

- Hafiz

loving this heat - especially these velvet evenings
sound of today: The William Byrd Festival - Compline tonight at St. Stephens in SE Portland
above: Bastille Day Photos Developed!
Typhoon on their bus before concert
&
Jared Mees (one would suppose) of Jared Mees & The Grown Children
leading the crowd enthusiastically, on his speaker

2010-08-08T17:18:00.000-07:00

back from Pendarvis farm (polaroids above from Typhoon in concert) and feeling very much at sea - who knew a music festival could feel so like home? The last two days of Pickathon have been a whirl of alfalfa breezes, endless fields, forest stages, hours of parking cranky drivers (Friday) and signing in bands and managers (Saturday) - eating fresh organic food with bamboo utensils (alone, a work of art), spontaneously applying henna, and meeting the best people you could ever wish to dance with in a barn. It was impossible to catch all the good music going on, but we definitely caught some spectacular moments, The Black Lillies, Typhoon, and Dr. Dog among them.

tomorrow: wisdom teeth removal
tonight: catch the portland poetry slam at backspace (7:30) if you can.

2010-08-04T09:06:00.000-07:00

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
- Wendell Berry

loving these photos (top two) from Bloom Grow Love - Sauvie Island last weekend looked very similar (holding my breath to get pic developed from that bicycling adventure). I want to live in a houseboat now, very badly. Writing often these days and attacking figure drawing with frustrated determination. Can't get this song out of my head and hopefully today will be for splashing in the water if those moody clouds clear.

2010-07-31T13:01:00.000-07:00

Last

Night

God
Posted
On the Tavern wall

A hard decree for all of love’s inmates

Which read:

If you heart cannot find a joyful work

The jaws of this world
Will probably

Grab hold of your

Sweet
Ass

- Hafiz

2010-07-29T22:08:00.000-07:00

I hold the lion's paw
Whenever I dance.

I know the ecstasy of the falcon's wings
When they make love against the sky

And the sun and moon
Sometimes argue over
Who will tuck me in at night.

If you think I am having more fun
Than anyone on this planet
You are absolutely correct.

- Hafiz

2010-07-20T14:36:00.000-07:00

sound of today: here

pics from here

2010-07-19T10:17:00.000-07:00

Figure drawing, swimming across the sandy river, excursions to Alberta (pics above) and the New Pornographers in concert Friday night.

sounds today: Typhoon and Grown Children.

2010-07-12T11:00:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I say to a poem,

"Not now,
Can't you see I am bathing!"

But the poem usually doesn't care
And quips,

"Too bad, Hafiz, No getting lazy –
You promised God you would help out

And He just came up with this
New tune."

Sometimes I say to a poem,

"I don't have the strength
To wring out another drop Of the Sun."

And the poem will often
Respond

By climbing onto a barroom table:

Then lifts its skirt, winks,
Causing the whole sky to
Fall.

- Hafiz

summer playlist: here

The beach was oh so windy with flying sand and freezing ocean this weekend, though it didn't stop the sun from giving us all vibrant burns. We built ourselves a fort and a fire and henna-ed, napped, and read sufi poetry - no matter the weather the ocean is perfect. For the week ahead, take a look at the Tin House Writers' Workshop Seminars and Readings at Reed, and the Bastille Day Celebration hosted by Pix on Saturday (Typhoon will be playing at 8:30pm).

photo from Summer Goals

2010-07-09T10:19:00.000-07:00

Your soul sometimes plays a note
Against the Sky's ear that excites
The birds and the planets.
...
An invisible wake was created
When God said to His beautiful dead lover,
"Be."
- Hafiz

Of course we chose the one overcast day in this jungle of heat to visit the ocean. But the ocean is magical under the clouds even so. In love with the poetry of Hafiz and the embracing summer evenings. And I've discovered figure drawings like a breath of sweet cool air. Be a child this weekend - paint your face and ambush your beloved humans in the tall weeds!

sound of this weekend: To Where We Drift by Firs of Prey

2010-07-04T19:42:00.000-07:00

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

- Wendell Berry

The ocean is exhilarating, even on the overcast wilder days; add a rodeo, rides, and good old American cowboys and the weekend is pretty near perfect. Happy Independence Day!
sounds of today: here

photos from Bloom Grow Love

2010-06-28T12:59:00.000-07:00

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

- Wendell Berry, The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

I've been dying to share the news with you all of the Winter Handmade Market coming this November, hosted by Abby Try Again and {Frolic!}, at the lovely Ace Hotel. The vendors will include Amanda Blake, Shanna Murray, Postal Press and Herriott Grace.

On another note, I'm researching messenger bags - particularly how to make them - and am hoping to hit the wide wild ocean this week while the weather is still good.

2010-06-26T12:47:00.001-07:00

If we believed that the existence of the world is rooted in mystery and in sanctity, then we would have a different economy. It would still be an economy of use, necessarily, but it would be an economy also of return. The economy would have to accommodate the need to be worthy of the gifts we receive and use, and this would involve a return of propitiation, praise, gratitude, responsibility, good use, good care, and a proper regard for the unborn. What is most conspicuously absent from the industrial economy and industrial culture is this idea of return. Industrial humans relate themselves to the world and its creatures by fairly direct acts of violence. Mostly we take without asking, use without respect or gratitude, and give nothing in return.

To perceive the world and our life in it as gifts originating in sanctity is to see our human economy as a continuing moral crisis. Our life of need and work forces us inescapably to use in time things belonging to eternity, and to assign finite values to things already recognized as infinitely valuable.

- Wendell Berry

rather in love at the moment with Berry and bicycles and bubbletea
soak in the sun, my lovelies, and have a good saturday
p.s. listen

photo from Paper Cameras

2010-06-23T15:47:00.000-07:00

streaming grey shadows spanning bright cement
&
cotton breezing; summer i think at last. thank god.

Lovejoy Bakers feels like Paris and Francois Hardy is the perfect compliment to every moment of this day. New favorites here and here.

Loving Bolt these days, and ever so delighted with the new Printing Studio on Alberta.

click photos for sources

2010-06-21T15:27:00.000-07:00

and I still don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
-Rainer Maria Rilke

summer overflows already, despite the wetness outside.
Latenight music, coffee, cameras, Le Care, sewing machines, crosswords, and live ensembles in the forest.

For summer larks, I recommend tracking down Fear No Music. They are usually to be found at The Old Church, if not conducting musical bicycles on Mount Tabor. Free Shakespeare in the Park is also about, provided you can survive the lovely precipitation we've been graced with.

here's to sun arriving soon: sound of today

2010-06-08T13:01:00.000-07:00

photos at last developed from trip to Seattle
off to pick up a turntable and soak in the tentative sun out that window

sounds of today here

2010-06-05T12:39:00.000-07:00

its been an out-of-focus kind of week
with way too much to do & too little energy
and rain rain rain wet rain

but its bright and breezy and melodious today
paper finished & summer officially here!

I've been planning for this and this
and for today: listen

2010-05-30T13:23:00.000-07:00

Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ' wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ' lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ' ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
- G. M. Hopkins

watch this

2010-05-27T09:11:00.000-07:00

"I heard the old, old men say,
'Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.'
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn-trees
By the waters.
'All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters.'
-W. B. Yeats

end of the year papers; grey grey thunder and rumblingness
and recording all finished

empty quiet in the house
and rather in love with Richard Avedon (who isn't?)

sounds of today here

2010-05-24T12:36:00.000-07:00

'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

'They called me the hyacinth girl.'

—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Od' und leer das Meer.
- T.S.E.

desolate and void the sea

sound of today: here

2010-05-22T18:18:00.000-07:00

trains. baggage. rain. records.

I brought back about 30 vinyls from the North - a completely spontaneous buy I couldn't be happier about. Successfully navigated the big northern S with only a dinky map and my highly imperfect sense of direction (that's a serious first). And after standing before a microphone all day today, home has never looked so good. I will post pictures from the travel as soon as they are developed. In the meantime, I suggest looking up some Denise Levertov to read.

2010-05-17T20:27:00.000-07:00

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup
- Wendell Berry

That's my new favorite quote & i'm putting it everywhere;
I'd like to letterpress it.

This week has way too much Shakesperian tragedies in it. But, the romance of travel is soon to be mine - and in a train no less! I haven't been in one since I was two. Maybe I'll take some Wendell B. with me...I'm dying to dive into this.

And for those of you who share my borderline obsessive-compulsive notebook lust, check this out.

Here's to the perfectly watery-wet-warm weather
and the words of Rilke:

You, God, who live next door –
If at times, through the long night, I trouble you
with my urgent knocking –
this is why: I hear you breath so seldom.
I know you're all alone in that room.
If you should be thristy, there's no one
to get you a glass of water.

I wait listening, always. Just give me a sign!
I'm right here.

2010-05-16T09:15:00.000-07:00

the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matched face
- G. M. Hopkins

I'm being stalked by Ezra Pound, no joke. He follows me around in a pickup truck in my dreams, his face shaded by a baseball cap yet still unmistakable, and it seems like everything I open these days - there he is! Did you know the Wasteland was dedicated to him by T.S.E.? Well, neither did I, 'til I innocently opened to the first page yesterday to find "to Ezra Pound" staring back at me.
But I figure if its got to be someone, Ezra Pound isn't all that bad.

Aside from Ezra sightings, this spring is glorious! I'm eagerly anticipating the arrival of Ron Hansen's Exiles in the mail - at last a good writer writing on George Manley Hopkins!

Sounds of today: here

2010-05-09T16:04:00.000-07:00

'Tis after teatime and I really shouldn't be on here - but! this beauty came to me today and I had to celebrate it by putting up some old photos and dancing a little jig in this actually warm (!) sunshine today.

2010-05-03T10:30:00.000-07:00

But I have that within which passes show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
- Hamlet

I'm rather in love with this play right now. I rather detest the rest of Shakespeare's tragedies, but Hamlet has such power and tangible emotion.

pictures above from a ramble with my Diana last spring

I'm rather excited about a new project: ISBN. The Informal Society of Books and Notions is a place for writers and readers to come together and share their thoughts while tackling a book together each month. After Hansen, there will be Berry and Dillard and McCarthy. Nothing makes the summer so good as good books. Come join us if you'd like to share the adventure!

2010-05-02T08:30:00.000-07:00

Dawn-sniffing revenant,

Plodder through midnight rain,

Question me again.

- Seamus Heaney

If you're here in ptown, visit the Crafty Wonderland at the Convention Center & say goodbye to Abby Try Again. She is moving away & we will miss her photography of Portland so very much!

above, latest bookplate letterpress project

it was a lot less planned than the last, but I don't mind the unfinished quality

especially that S

who knew it'd turn out that way?

thats the magic of wooden type - it tells its own story when pressed.

sounds of today here

2010-04-30T09:14:00.000-07:00

"The art of photography is deliciously impure:
its aesthetic triumphs and traditions are inescapably enmeshed in the messy world of work.”

- Peter Galassi

photography from last summer - oh for the sun

sounds of today: here

loving photographer Mikael Kennedy & his work

ampersands

Hamlet:

He is dead and gone, lady,

He is dead and gone;

At his head a grass-green turf,

At his heels a stone.

2010-04-24T17:40:00.000-07:00

O that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!

Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d

His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God!

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

- Hamlet, Shakey

Tightness twixt the eyes and that chilling quiet of an evening. Hamlet is haunting and somehow as inexplicably mesmerizing as the last time I read it four years ago. Anis Mojgani and bright skies and aching stares and gravel underfoot. I'm dying to go to the Portland Poetry Slam at Backspace, but so tired - limbs like liquid - and so all of you, if Anis will indeed be there, go for me.

woodcuts from here

2010-04-18T09:15:00.000-07:00

Painful back, blisters, and ink on everything! Above: pictures from printing yesterday. This is a letterpress weekend - bookplates to finish up & invites to print & Richard III to read; oh so proud of the creation coming forth: ISBN (Informal Society of Books & Notions) will soon arrive in Portland - more to be posted on that subject anon.

2010-04-11T14:14:00.000-07:00

Oh how the rain sounds light as a lover's word

and now and again she's afraid when the sun returns

- Iron & Wine

Above: the fruits of a very long 5 hours of printing yesterday: my first bookplate. Completely exhausted now of course and rueing the bygone time as I attempt to write a rather troublesome paper. But so in love with letterpress. Watch this & have a restful end to the weekend...

2010-04-07T21:37:00.000-07:00

I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.

I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.

- Czeslaw Milosz, Dedication

It is on nights such as this with darkening sky and skipping thuds of basketballs outside, that I can taste the coming summer evenings. Poetry and papers and headaches and tangible, pastel, rising quiet: the longing for something. What is it, that deep mover that pulls and turns us? It is mesmerizing how man in his own pattern, his own quirky Roman nose and narrow eyes, his own nervous fingers, writes out his own path to that Infinite. Gentle Being, move in me. Crow those piercing notes and have an end only when I'm quaking and crying and knowing.

pics above: Ian McKellen and Dylan

2010-04-06T15:19:00.000-07:00

our ears are too small
for our hearts to understand the humming of these sentences inside of us

- Anis Mojgani, The Branches are Full and These Orchards Heavy

too too chilly outside – and reading Titus Andronicus doesn't help. Eating my children in a pie is not how I would fancy passing my afternoon. These days I am in continuous reverberation; the voice of Anis Mojgani moves depths that only T. S. E. has ever touched in me. listen. On a completely different note, here for show and tell: Nerd Boyfriend. love it.

2010-03-26T11:20:00.000-07:00

She wore her yellow sun-bonnet,
She wore her greenest gown;
She turned to the south wind
And curtsied up and down.
She turned to the sunlight
And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbour:
"Winter is dead".

-AA Milne

The daffodils are covering our front walk and curtsying to the wind. We got our first taste of summer sun this week. How fitting that the farmer's market is newly opened! I have something a little different for you to listen to today. I sometimes think of Susanna Clarke as a new Edith Nesbit, although her novel Jonnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is far more complex than Nesbit's children's books. However, "The Dweller in High Places" is a short story of hers, as magical and decidedly English as The Railway Children, or others in that vein. Give it a listen here (its broken into two parts). I'm also in love right now with the photography from bugheart (pics above) and the approaching spring. I cannot wait for the sun to come out again.

2010-03-23T17:32:00.000-07:00

Above: the new collection of Penguin Classics designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith. Each book is stunning. See here for a closer look. I'm especially lusting after Dorian Grey and Crime & Punishment...I'm also dying to get my hands on Wendell Berry's new book Imagination in Place (review here). On another note, sun and the lingering notes of Iron&Wine have made these days of lazy break perfection itself: listen.

2010-03-14T09:12:00.000-07:00

Moving forward aint so easy this morning - I went to a 8:30 mass at what turned out to be 9:30. Sigh. On another note, reading Wolf Willow by Wallace Stegner - excelent. and I can't get enough of Justin Townes Earle. (see Crazy Heart by the way – That movie has a good old fashioned country soul). Off to art history - finals are the bane of my life. Ta ta!

photos from Sally Scott

2010-03-11T09:55:00.000-08:00

"Once place is as good as another, one use is as good as another, one life is as good as another – if the price is right. Thus political sentimentality metamorphoses into commercial indifference or aggression. This is the industrial doctrine of the interchangeability of parts, and we apply it to places, to creatures, and to our fellow humans is if it were the law of the world, using all the while a sort of middling language, imitated from the sciences, that cannot speak of heaven or earth, but only of concepts. This is the rhetoric of nowhere, which forbids a passionate interest in, let alone a love of, anything in particular"

- Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle

sounds of today here - a new cd is in the makings & there is so much music to learn.

Too much art history and rain today.

2010-03-09T17:40:00.000-08:00

The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves
The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,
And all that famous harmony of leaves,
Had blotted out man's image and his cry.
- W. B. Yeats

sounds of today here

images from Abby Try Again

2010-03-08T10:44:00.000-08:00

sound of today here

2010-03-01T11:32:00.000-08:00

longing for summer

2010-02-20T19:46:00.000-08:00

Quite a week. I caught the last hour of Breakfast at Tiffanie's last night (the only way I can tie in the pictures above with anything I might have to say; other than that she is a wonder). And spent four hours today setting type - disastrous - and printing - almost more disastrous - and enjoyed the experience tremendously. About a million and one things seemed to go wrong, but when you're working with your hands, the whole process, even the mishaps, are somehow satisfying. A possible book plate project is in the works, and sun sun sun! did you notice? its spectacular. Sounds of today here, and if you are in town tomorrow, go see this.
Ta ta

2010-02-15T18:45:00.000-08:00

"Art for me is a form of nourishment. I need the land. I need it"

- Andy Goldsworthy

I'd forgotten about this British sculptor and his earthfilled, weighty work. A documentary about him, "Rivers and Tides", is coming to Portland next weekend at the 5th avenue cinema...if you aren't around, its on youtube here. Watch it; you sense with him the same connection to his material that fine woodworkers and tradesmen have. He knows the land. And his art, although truly unique in its material and often temporary state, shares a likeness to Rothko in my mind: an almost shockingly pertinent exploration of color, form and texture. Rothko always asserted that through work such as this one can experience the Divine, and reducing it to color theory is missing the point completely. Goldsworthy's work is simple, almost primitive. Primitive like our own longing as children play in the mud, primitive like Seamus Heaney's fascination with wells:

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

If such primitive instinct is in us for connection, for pattern and color and form, it can only be part of Something real, that nourishes, that breathes into us. Just as Rothko's work is not just color, and Heaney's not just words, so is Goldsworthy's not just earth or environmentalism. Its deeper far than that and has the power to set a whole human, heart and perception and sensation, echoing.

2010-02-14T10:30:00.000-08:00

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
fall: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with the sky.
- R. M. Rilke

2010-02-11T11:56:00.000-08:00

A single event can awaken within us a stranger
totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I've been immersing myself in the world of bookplates recently as part of a letterpress project. From Tarkington to Clarke Gable, each one is a little piece of personality in its own right. Apparently Kipling was in the business of designing ones for his friends, too. For more, go here.

2010-02-06T19:08:00.000-08:00

From a trip to the puget sound, just newly developed. I'd give anything now for an expanse of water - space to breath. Listen to this and have a restful weekend.

pics by yours truly: full set here

2010-02-05T22:39:00.000-08:00

"There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought." This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings." - Wendell Berry

Art Hisory, rain, new jeans and oh so tired! Above is Jeremiah in the Romanesque fashion, so whimsically sweet next to his lions.

2010-02-04T11:00:00.000-08:00

MAST BROTHERS

2010-02-03T14:35:00.000-08:00

Find the shortest, simplest way between earth, hands and the mouth.
- Lanza del Vasto

In a 100-year-old factory in Williamsburg, NY, Rick and Michael Mast handcraft each chocolate batch from scratch, from grinding their own cocoa beans to wrapping each bar in their signature packaging. " The Mast Brothers Chocolate Factory is New York City's only bean to bar chocolate factory. There is a dedication to purity and an intensity of flavor in their chocolate which is very unusual." - The Selby

I feel that it must be greatly fulfilling to have one place, one pursuit, both simple; and to dedicate everything to them, thereby giving each action dignity. The most infinite artistry can be found the most simple. Leonardo da Vinci said something along that line, I believe. But it puts me in mind of Wendell Berry: “I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.”
Pictures from The Selby

2010-02-02T11:06:00.000-08:00

"The writer should never be afraid of staring.
There is nothing that does not require his attention"
- Flannery O'Connor

2010-02-01T16:09:00.000-08:00

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
- Leonardo da Vinci

Sounds of today: here
At my fingertips: typewriters (my new love), ink, letterpress, and too much art history.
Projects: this just finished. and designs inspired by this to be dreamed up soon.
For fun: valentine's day is in two weeks: send love on the net with these.
above: Mastroianni, Pollock, Dylan and Steinbeck. My four muses this week. (from the impossible cool)

2009-12-26T21:48:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas

images via Toast

2009-12-20T13:05:00.000-08:00

And the shortest day came, and the year died.
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow white world
Came people singing, dancing, to drive the dark away.

I caught these photos while driving home from the North. These are the days of mystery! Tomorrow is the Winter Solstice, when the darkness looms and the day is its shortest. It is time to carry that light inside, and prepare for the coming of our King.

2009-12-19T19:02:00.000-08:00

Above, your dose of cuteness for the week! This time of year is usually my favorite. But it seems somehow way too hectic this year. Time for the tao of tea, quiet, and misty cold mornings. If you're looking for a good book, try The Road. Although it is difficult and painful, I believe it is worth the strain. Cormac M. speaks the language of beauty.

2009-12-17T22:49:00.001-08:00

Then suddenly you're left all alone
with your body that can't love you
and your will that can't save you.

But now, like a whispering in dark streets,
rumors of God run through your dark blood.
- Rilke

As for things to make you shine - catch La Danse before it is gone from Cinema 21. Its haunting and provocative and incredibly beautiful.

photography by Saul Leiter (1950s)

2009-11-27T18:23:00.000-08:00

The crisp air is breathtaking. Above are just a taste of my rambles today with only my little cameraphone in hand. My new favorite haunt is the overcrowded, musty interior of a little junk shop on Hawthorne. Once upon a time there were places like this everywhere in Portland, but those days are long past and Really Good Stuff is one of the very few remaining. In fact, I don't know any place quite as deliciously junk-y.

2009-11-16T09:14:00.000-08:00

I saw the branches of a birch strung out against the wind today; allpulling, reaching, one way; and yellow yellow laughter against the lavender, or is it grey, flat hard sky. The spirits of Things talk today. They pull that weight in my middle - that watery black depth with rattling chain - seeking to be full. The song of the day is this. and above, photography by bloom,grow,love and a very old picture of coco chanel, because she is that beautiful.
go catch some thoughts as the skies darken and the days grow cold
before you know it, december will be here.

2009-11-02T11:28:00.000-08:00

Margaret, are you grieving
Over goldengrove unleaving?

The fall is all together too cold, but intensely beautiful. Above - a glimpse of the fruits of a recent caper abroad with cameraphone in hand. My Diana F+ reproaches me for my neglect, but alas, she lacks film so there is nothing to be done. I'm rather taken at the moment with coptic textiles, like this, the quiet strains of Elliot Smith, and the impressive life of this woman (not in reference to the movie, which was rather lacking).

All Hallows’ Eve

2009-10-31T12:34:00.000-07:00

2009-10-10T17:06:00.000-07:00

The Lovers

We're in the corner silences, in
tawdry, fuming sunsets of late
Saturdays and winsome
summer moons.

Between smiles sketched
you saw our bridge strung
hand to hand

and the way we burn it
with glinting teeth in
halﬂight, and disconcern.

Rarely do I put up a scribble of my own, but today seemed to call for it. I've discovered the swine flu isn't all that fun. Hopefully, you all are out there in the crisp air catching the first leaves.

photography above by Sarah Meadows

2009-09-30T19:56:00.000-07:00

cold

our first cold cold moment this fall
on the last of september.

A very merry michaelmass to all of you, one day late!
and for your soul: this

photography from Paper Cameras

2009-09-29T22:24:00.000-07:00

one of those rainy, cool and clear days when you don't really want to do anything, but listen to the water fall, and curl up somewhere warm with a little poetry and a somber thought or two.

gaelic, nerves, auditions, tiredness & rain, (2 solos), work, dance & a wedding
&
listen to this

pics from Bloom, Grow, Love

On A Sunday

2009-09-27T04:46:00.001-07:00

Watch!