Anne Carson's Short Talks

Because there are tons and tons to read on the Internet, I usually find it hard to pry myself off its clutches whenever access is free. And although it is completely acceptable in this age to get most if not all of one’s reading materials online, there is also a part of me that feels guilty for the volumes and volumes of books that I have promised myself I would find the time to read, but keep putting off. So I do it one little step at a time.

This weekend, I intentionally left my laptop in the Makati apartment when I went home to Valenzuela so I wouldn’t be tempted to go online. I admit to allowing myself to check my mails a couple of times though through my phone but that was it.

So my reading list for the weekend included a compilation of old American essays (actually titled The Best American Essays 1992), wherein the first was by Anne Carson (who is actually Canadian but well, they probably meant “American” in the broadest sense. In fact when you think about it, who gave the US citizens monopoly of that word?).

Here are some quotes from her Short Talks (my O friends would love this one):

Short Talk on Walking Backwards

My mother  forbade us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.

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Light Years and Love Lost in the Oleanders by Alane Rollings

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Other

I found an old tattered piece of paper stuck between the pages of an old journal while I was home in Valenzuela and going through forgotten things. I suddenly remembered how much I wept over these lines at a time when I was young and heartbroken. I'm posting it here for old time's sake. And because it really is such a good poem.


Light Years and Love Lost in the Oleanders
By Alane Rollings

Does my voice reach you? You are
as silent as a star and as incompanionable.
And I have done my research on these things.
I have spent many hours with the delicate turquoise amphibians
who live under sundials. They outnumbered me.
I was barely in touch with the sky, then.
I spent my days waiting for that one bit of good news
that would turn my life around.
You. Your charms, your hesitations. No one needs to tell me
how well everyone remembers you.
But have I told you about my arms, my half-healed embraces?
The disarray of my life is no longer too personal to share,
though I still can’t remember much of what I did before,
who I went out with, how much I missed.
I’m told I spent the days reading the exotica painted on cigar boxes,
and the nights over small distress messages on computer printouts.
Anyway, I’m sorry if you got the idea that I was in control.
Wasn’t I running out of the room to cry or be sick or something
when I saw you? I remember a light unwinding over my head,
and other kindnesses I’d never have done for myself.
I noticed the distance in your voice, your eyes.
You gave me gin and ginger for my stomach,
and if there was nothing to celebrate, we were
deliberate about it, like those accustomed to their own fragility.
Your astonishing stories floated in like graceful fleets,
and I did believe you had beautiful ancestors with beautiful titles.
Don’t ever tell anyone how you do it.

I think now that I understand
the things some women make their happiness of—
the water that waits in seashells, questions that silence themselves—
I no longer tell people about you
hoping to make them think more of me.
And I will not come to you anymore for sedatives,
you from whom I borrowed my life.
I will offer you green silence and solitude
and a belief in everything.
I remember a little more now. I was a long way off.
I had nightmares in dead languages and sailboats in my backyard
that ran off to sea night after night
looking for stars that had fallen light years and light years ago.
So you see why I can’t let you pass through my life.
I suppose that you, too, have escaped in every direction,
have heard the swish of nickel and iron beneath you,
and you are no more flattered by my attraction than the center of the earth is.
But I am looking for the glare that lives
in gardens deeper than mirrors. I am hoping
that you will complete my past. Give me silent embraces,
the quiet transitions that love will put us through,
and I will only wish I’d also known you
when you were young and waiting under the lime trees
for one sweet word to fall.
I'd have been the kind of girl
you'd have bothered with.

Weekend Goal

So I was hanging out at the Mindstorm office, leafing through an old issue of Time Magazine... It's weird but everything I do now has to be related to China somehow. I couldn't help but leaf through Time and see if I could find anything on China that I might be able to use some time in the future. It feels like I learned so much about China these past two and a half months than at any time in my life.

But that's not really the point of this entry. I got sidetracked as early as the second sentence. So going back, I was leafing through Time and I saw a blurb about Miranda July's book. I didn't even know she has a book. I greatly enjoyed two films that I saw by her so that got me excited. Plus the blurb said, "The lives of misfits told in quirky, almost unbearably intense short stories." And then I suddenly missed writing.

Following that was a conversation with Artie how we also want to write intense stories. Unbearable ones, too. Sigh.

So I'm gonna try and write a short story this weekend. Hopefully, an unbearably intense one. I owe myself that much.

identity theory

http://www.identitytheory.com/
"a literary website, sort of" is its way of describing itself. I love it for the stories and nonfiction articles in it. I love one of the stories I read titled "The Certainty of Things." I'm going right back to explore it more now.