Saturday, March 28, 2009


I would have stayed but he had a doll collection and it made me uneasy.

Friday, March 27, 2009

Tuesday, March 24, 2009


I still think that the little girl should have turned out to be a robot.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Friday, March 20, 2009

"Spring would bring our first and just about only fish-shad. It would always be served for breakfast, soaked in salt water for an hour or so, rolled in seasoned cornmeal, and fried carefully in home-rendered lard with a slice of smoked shoulder for added flavor. There were crispy white potatoes, fried onions, batter bread, any food left over from supper, blackberry jelly, delicious hot coffee, and cocoa for the children. And perhaps if a neighbor dropped in, dandelion wine was added. With the morning feeding of the animals out of the way, breakfast was enjoyable and leisurely."

Edna Lewis,  The Taste of Country Cooking

Yes. She left Columbia Records for Atlantic and then she stole fire from heaven.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

"'You want a tale sweet lady and gentleman? Indeed I have told many tales, one more than a thousand, since that time when I first let young men tell me, myself, tales of a red rose, two smooth lily buds, and four silky, supple, deadly entwining snakes. It was my mother's mother, the black-eyed dancer, the often embraced, who in the end-wrinkled like a winter apple and crouching beneath the mercy of the veil-took upon herself to teach me the art of story-telling. Her own mother's mother had taught it to her, and both were better story-tellers than I am. But that, by now, is of no consequence, since to the people they and I have become one, and I am most highly honored because I have told stories for two hundred years.'
 
  Now if she is paid well and is in good spirits, she will go on.
 
 'With my grandmother,' she said, 'I went through a hard school. 'Be loyal to the story,' the old hag would say to me. 'Be eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story.' 'Why must I be that, Grandmother?' I asked her. 'Am I to furnish you with reasons, baggage?' she cried. 'And you mean to be a story-teller! Why, you are to become a story-teller, and I shall give you my reasons! Hear then: Where the story-teller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence. Whether a snotty lass understands it or not.'"

-Isak Dinesen, The Blank Page, from Last Tales

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Monday, March 16, 2009


One can't expect them to be able to remember anything. They are living on the surface of the EYE.

The woman ran her bath and dressed her until she was eighteen years old.

Radio silence. Nothing for weeks. And now she wants help with her living room.

She didn't care anymore. She made the robes out of newspaper.

We had been meeting for two years when I began to feel that I had to quit. It was becoming unseemly.

Friday, March 13, 2009


You fry the biscuits and then jam in the nozzle and fill the whole damn thing up with honey butter.
"One day at the spring festival, she met a man named Michael, a relative of friends. They couldn't marry because Michael had a wife in Italy. In order to live with him, Maria explained the following truths to her reasonable head:
1. This man Michael was tall with a peculiar scar on his shoulder. Her husband had been unusually tall and had had a scar on his shoulder.
2. This man was redheaded. Her dead husband had been redheaded.
3. This man was a tailor. Her husband had been a tailor.
4. His name was Michael. Her husband had been called Michael.

In this way, persuading her own understanding, Maria was able to not live alone at an important time in her life, to have a father for the good of her children's character, a man in her bed for comfort, a husband to serve. Still and all, though he died in her arms, Anna, the child, didn't like him at all. It was a pity, because he had always called her 'my little one.' Every day she had visited him, she had found him in the hallway waiting, or at the edge of his white bed, and she had called out, 'Hey, Zio, here's your dinner. Mama sent it. I have to go now.' "

-Grace Paley, Debts, from Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

"Forgotten Like This Parapluie Am I By You - Faithless Bernice!"


-Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, early 1920's

The accident is woven IN. It's part of the RHYTHM of the cloth.

Then the birds come, and they land on his shoulder in the carriage and they say, "There's blood within the shoe. There's blood within the shoe."

Sunday, March 8, 2009


Perhaps you need to re-calibrate your standards with reference to the current data..

Monday, March 2, 2009


Shrink the dots on all the "i"s. That way we'll know she's losing her mind.

Giuseppe's been delivering my groceries since the beginning of time. It's like a marriage.