sunset strip
Do i like this bar because it's healthy?
Or do i like this bar because it genuinely tastes like a Bakewell Tart in condensed form?
...
Hello, the latter, you taste awesome.
...
If you'd asked me to eat either of these things a few years ago i would have made this face at you:
Taste buds are weird.
Oh, i'm sorry, i forgot to breathe for 2 minutes and 32 seconds.
Excuse my delirium-induced suffocation.
Inara: So, would you like to lecture me on the wickedness of my ways?
Book: I brought you some supper. But, if you'd *prefer* a lecture, I've a few very catchy ones prepped. Sin and hellfire. One has lepers.
They took our Shepherd from us and it's not okay.
My heart is in pieces.
See ya, space cowboy.
Stay shiny.
'after Gwendolyn Brooks
I. 1981
When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we
cruise at twilight until we find the place the real
men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool.
His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we
drift by women on bar stools, with nothing left
in them but approachlessness. This is a school
I do not know yet. But the cue sticks mean we
are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk
of smoke thinned to song. We won’t be out late.
Standing in the middle of the street last night we
watched the moonlit lawns and a neighbor strike
his son in the face. A shadow knocked straight
Da promised to leave me everything: the shovel we
used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing
his rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin.
The boy’s sneakers were light on the road. We
watched him run to us looking wounded and thin.
He’d been caught lying or drinking his father’s gin.
He’d been defending his ma, trying to be a man. We
stood in the road, and my father talked about jazz,
how sometimes a tune is born of outrage. By June
the boy would be locked upstate. That night we
got down on our knees in my room. If I should die
before I wake. Da said to me, it will be too soon.
II. 1991
Into the tented city we go, we-
akened by the fire’s ethereal
afterglow. Born lost and cool-
er than heartache. What we
know is what we know. The left
hand severed and school-
ed by cleverness. A plate of we-
ekdays cooking. The hour lurk-
ing in the afterglow. A late-
night chant. Into the city we
go. Close your eyes and strike
a blow. Light can be straight-
ened by its shadow. What we
break is what we hold. A sing-
ular blue note. An outcry sin-
ged exiting the throat. We
push until we thin, thin-
king we won’t creep back again.
While God licks his kin, we
sing until our blood is jazz,
we swing from June to June.
We sweat to keep from we-
eping. Groomed on a die-
t of hunger, we end too soon.'
The Golden Shovel
All hail the secondhand book.
And low, low prices.
Surprise gifts from the one i call father/dadmonster/fuckface*
The man knows me well.
And yes, i will be keeping the tiny jar.
For what purpose? God knows but it's teeny and must be mine.
* if i'm not calling you horrendous things then i'm probably not very fond of you...
'The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.'
Perhaps the World Ends Here
'Wasp came to, her knife-hand sticky with silver. She had been gripping the harvesting-knife in her sleep, her fingers on the blade. She sat up fast, not knowing where she was, and lightheadedness made her regret it instantly. She dropped back on her elbows until her vision cleared.
She was lying on a mossy slope tending down toward a black pit of a pond around which gory-looking lilies grew. A breeze blew up from the water, smelling of copper, limes, and carrion. A lonely pale willow overhung the pond, and the breeze set its fronds clicking together. Closer, Wasp would find that they weren't made of leaves at all, but whiplike plaits of tiny bones.'
Archivist Wasp
(Page 151-152)
Rating: 3/5
'When I turned to look over my shoulder, a male nurse and a middle-aged guard could be seen hurrying over, their faces grave. I looked at my wife's exhausted faec, her lips stained with blood like clumsily applied lipstick. Her eyes, which had been staring fixedly at the gathered audience, met mine. They glittered, as though filled with water.
I thought to myself: I do not know that woman. And it was true. It was not a lie. Nevertheless and compelled by responsibilities which refused to be shirked, my legs carried me towards her, a movement which I could not for the life of me control.
"Darling, what are you doing?" I murmured in a low voice, picking up the hospital gown and using it to cover her bare chest.
"It's hot, so . . . " She smiled faintly ‑ her familiar smile, a smile which could not have been more ordinary, and which I had believed I knew so well. "It's hot, so I just got undressed." She raised her left hand to shield her forehead from the streaming sunlight, revealing the cuts on her wrist.
"Have I done something wrong?"
I prised open her clenched right hand. A bird, which had been crushed in her grip, tumbled to the bench. It was a small white-eyed bird, with feathers missing here and there. Below tooth-marks which looked to have been caused by a predator's bite, vivid red bloodstains were spreading.'
- Han Kang
The Vegetarian
(Page 52)
Rating: 3.5/5
The day trembled on the edge of extinction. The houses slept in darkness. Downtown, night lights in the hardware store and the Foreman Funeral Home and the Excellent Café threw mild electric light onto the pavement. Some lay awake ‑ George Boyer, who had just gotten home from the three-to-eleven shift at the Gates Mill, Win Purinton, sitting and playing solitaire and unable to sleep for thinking of his Doc, whose passing had affected him much more deeply than that of his wife ‑ but most slept the sleep of the just and the hard-working.
In Harmony Hill Cemetery a dark figure stood meditatively inside the gate, waiting for the turn of time. When he spoke, the voice was soft and cultured.
"O my father, favor me now. Lord of Flies, favor me now. Now I bring you spoiled meat and reeking flesh. I have made sacrifice for your favor. With my left hand I bring it. Make a sign for me on this ground, consecrated in your name. I wait for a sign to begin your work."
The voice died away. A wind had sprung up, gentle, bringing with it the sigh and whisper of leafy branches and grasses and a whiff of carrion from the dump up the road.
There was no sound but that brought on the breeze. The figure stood silent and thoughtful for a time. Then it stopped and stood with the figure of a child in his arms.
"I bring you this."
It became unspeakable.'
'Salem's Lot
(Page 114)
'There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.
In some shorter, simpler mental shorthand, these thoughts passed through his brain. The night before, Matt Burke had faced such a dark thing and had been stricken by a heart seizure brought on by fright; tonight Mark Petrie had faced one, and ten minutes later lay in the lap of sleep, the plastic cross still grasped loosely in his right hand like a child's rattle. Such is the difference between men and boys.
- (Page 342-343)
'At three in the morning the blood runs slow and thick, and slumber is heavy. The soul either sleeps in blessed ignorance of such an hour or gazes about itself in utter despair. There is no middle ground. At three in the morning the gaudy paint is off that old whore, the world, and she has no nose and a glass eye.'
- (Page 520-521)
It finally happened.
I found a Stephen King novel i genuinely love.
It only took three previous attempts and of course the one that finally gets me is about vampires.
Because it's me... the undead fanatic.
Rating: 4/5
Rewatching Nightcrawler and oh man, not only is it just as fucked up and mesmeric as the first time around but the music still annihilates me.
I cannot bloody wait to hear what James Newton Howard magics up for the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them score.
Also Pawn Sacrifice which i've meaning to watch for far too long.
Bobby Fischer's fascinating.
Infernum
'When she comes back, from college, I will see
the skin of her upper arms, cool,
matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old
soupy chest against her breasts,
I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment,
her sleep like an untamed, good object,
like a soul in a body. She came into my life the
second great arrival, after him, fresh
from the other world—which lay, from within him,
within me. Those nights, I fed her to sleep,
week after week, the moon rising,
and setting, and waxing—whirling, over the months,
in a slow blur, around our planet.
Now she doesn’t need love like that, she has
had it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk,
and then, when she’s fast asleep, I’ll exult
to have her in that room again,
behind that door! As a child, I caught
bees, by the wings, and held them, some seconds,
looked into their wild faces,
listened to them sing, then tossed them back
into the air—I remember the moment the
arc of my toss swerved, and they entered
the corrected curve of their departure.'
First Thanksgiving
This band.
This goddamn band.
'Nothing is nothing, although
he would call me that, she was nothing.
Those were his words, but his hand was lifting
cigarettes in chains and bridges
of ash-light. He said he didn't want his body to last.
It wasn't a year I could argue
against that kind of talk, so I cut the fowl
killed on the farm a mile out—brown and silvery, wild—
and put it over butter lettuce, lettuce then lime.
I heated brandy in the saucepan, poured a strip of molasses
slowly through the cold, slow as I'd seen
a shaman pour pine tincture over the floor
of my beaten house.
She seemed to see my whole life
by ordinance of some god
who wanted me alive again.
Burnt sage, blue smoke. Then sea salt shaken
into the corners of violent sadness.
She wrote my address
across her chest
to let everything listening know
where my life was made.
We waited, either forgetting what we were
or becoming more brightly human in that pine,
in her trance, in the lavender I set on the chipped sills,
not a trance at all but my deliberate hand cutting
from the yard part of what she required.
Now wait longer, she said, and I did as I would
when the molasses warmed over the pot enough
to come into the brandy,
to come into the night
begun by small confessions—
that this was just a rental, and mine just a floor,
that the woman he loved was with another man,
his mother mad, his apartment haunted in the crawl space.
Then I told of the assault at daybreak between
the houses. Heat, asphalt, all of it and my face toward
the brick school where the apostolate studied first-century script
and song. There must have been chanting,
as it was on the hour.
What we said was liturgy meant only for us
and for that night. Not for anyone else
to repeat, live by, believe. Never that.
Our only theories were inside of our hands,
flesh and land, body and prairie.
I reached to smoke down his next-to-last,
which he lit and made ready.
The poultry like a war ration
we ate all the way through.
What we wished, we said.
What we said, we found that night
by these, and no other,
means.'
November Philosophers
I know they're bad movies.
But goddamn, i can't help but love them all.
Supernatural movie trash, my truest of true loves.
He won't let me sleep.
'Show's over, folks. And didn't October do
A bang-up job? Crisp breezes, full-throated cries
Of migrating geese, low-floating coral moon.
Nothing left but fool's gold in the trees.
Did I love it enough, the full-throttle foliage,
While it lasted? Was I dazzled? The bees
Have up and quit their last-ditch flights of forage
And gone to shiver in their winter clusters.
Field mice hit the barns, big squirrels gorge
On busted chestnuts. A sky like hardened plaster
Hovers. The pasty river, its next of kin,
Coughs up reed grass fat as feather dusters.
Even the swarms of kids have given in
To winter's big excuse, boxed-in allure:
TVs ricochet light behind pulled curtains.
The days throw up a closed sign around four.
The hapless customer who'd wanted something
Arrives to find lights out, a bolted door.'
November
When song meets mood.
I'm the girl that can't control her emotions when there's a soar in music.
I don't know when this happened but it happened hard.
And this fucking destroyed me.
And this fucking destroyed me.
Edyrn with His Lady Dwarf Journey to Arthur's Court
(Camelot / Lord Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King)
I can't recall a single time i've told someone i'm an Elvis fan and they haven't gifted me with this face:
I understand this face.
I've made this face.
But then i heard Too Much and all was altered:
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