Help Yourself
I know you’ll help us when you’re feeling better and we realize that it might not be for a long, long time
But we’re willing to wait on you
We believe in everything that you can do if you could only lay down your mind
I want you to try to help yourself
Take the time to take apart, each brick that sits outside your heart
And look around you
There’s people everywhere
And though they don’t always show it they’re just as scared
And we’d be more prepared if you just pulled on through
I want you to try to help yourself
Oceans of water underneath our feet
Terrible design
Dusty rooms you cannot sweep
Clouding up your mind
I know you’ll help us when your feeling better and we realize that it might not be for a long, long time
But we’re willing to wait on you
We believe in everything that you can do if you could only lay down your mind
I want you to try to help yourself
~Sad Brad Smith, Help yourself
Brothers Karamazov
Rosewater said an interesting thing one time about a book that wasnt ascience fiction. He said that everything there was to know about life was in the Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Doestoevsky. ‘But, that isn’t enough any more’said Rosewater.~Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
Zadie on Clooney
What is Clooney saying? A sentence he began sparklingly with Ocean’s 11 (2001) , which stumbled at intolerable cruelty (2003), and grew lamentable at oceanstwelve (2004 ), having seemed almost to make sense with confessions of adangerous mind (2002,) now reaches its conclusion with the impressive goodnight and good luck and the rigorous Syriana . I judged too quickly, thinking him one of those actors who prideshimself on making the big bad boys in order to fund the small good ones — a kind of vanity tax uponthe audience, whereby the pointless shoot –em- up is the prize we supposedlypay for the chilly little chamber piece about divorce. Clooney is not that actor. He doesn’t make sterile,unlovable vanity projects . In an cultural climate that ridicules and is repulsed by intellectual and moral commitment, in his way he pursues what with this lawless executive producer and the front-of-the- shop ‘face’ of syriana , he has now created an unprecedented scenario: the most popular actor in Hollywood is also the man whowants us to agitate the most . Something like this has happened only oncebefore , with Marlon Brando, an actor whose personal feelings and self regard overran all his most serious ambitions . Clooney appears to have no such tragic flaw. He is making real American films instead of american products; he ishelping real American films to get made. Zadie Smith on George Clooney
Sharks
nce, off the hump of Brazil I saw the ocean so darkened with blood it was black and the sun fainting away over the lip of the sky.We’d put in at Fortaleza, and a few of us had lines out for a bit of idle fishing. It was me had the first strike. A shark it was. Then there was another, and another shark again, ’till all about, the sea was made of sharks and more sharks still, and no water at all. My shark had torn himself from the hook, and the scent, or maybe the stain it was, and him bleeding his life away drove the rest of them mad. Then the beasts took to eating each other. In their frenzy, they ate at themselves.You could feel the lust of murder like a wind stinging your eyes, and you could smell the death, reeking up out of the sea. I never saw anything worse… until this little picnic tonight. And you know, there wasn’t one of them sharks in the whole crazy pack that survived.
~Lady from Shanghai.
Gossip - Standing in the way of control
Your back’s against the wall
There’s no-one home to call
You’re forgetting who you are
You can’t stop crying
It’s part not giving in
And part trusting your friends
You do it all again
And I’m not lying
Oh oh oh oh ohh Oh ohh
Oh ohh Oh oh oh oh ohh Oh ohh
Standing in the way of control
You live your life
Survive the only way that you know
I’m doing this for you
Because it’s easier to lose
And it’s hard to face the truth
When you think you’re dying
It’s part not giving in
And part trusting your friends
You do it all again
But you don’t stop trying
Oh oh oh oh ohh Oh ohh
Oh ohh Oh oh oh oh ohh Oh ohh
Standing in the way of control
You live your life
Survive the only way that you know
Oh ohh Oh oh oh oh ohh Oh ohh
Oh ohh Oh oh oh oh ohh Oh ohh
Standing in the way of control
We live our lives
Because we’re standing in the way of control
We will live our lives
Because we’re standing in the way of control
We live our lives
Because we’re standing in the way of control
We will live our lives
Your back’s against the wall
There’s no-one home to call
You’re forgetting who you are
You can’t stop crying
It’s part not giving in
And part trusting your friends
You do it all again
You don’t stop trying
Oh oh oh oh ohh Oh ohh
Oh ohh Oh oh oh oh ohh Oh ohh
Standing in the way of control
You live your life
Survive the only way that you know
~ Gossip Standing in the way of control
Aimlessness….
“There is a tendency in the middle of the writing of a novel for the writer to feel adrift, lost floating aimlessly in a rough uncharted ocean of words. You are too far from the beginning to feel the enthusiasm that set you on your way all those words ago and too far from the end to see the land of your completed tale where you may rest finally.
There are so many obstacles between you and your completed manuscript. Do not let this sense of aimlessness stop you from finishing. From my own limited experience, and of the many writers to whom I have spoken, I am convinced that this feeling is normal. While feeling it is no guarantee that your novel will be artistically, critically or commercially successful, neither is it a sure sign of failure.
When this feeling is engulfing you, remember the novels that have had the biggest effect on you as a reader. Look at those novels. Take them from your shelves. Flick through their pages. Remember the characters, settings, plots. Remember how they have made you feel. Perhaps the manuscript on which you drift aimlessly now will come to be such a book for people you have never met. Dwell on this, that this could happen. Take a deep breath and go back to your page. Perhaps there is someone who needs you to tell this story.”
Elliot Perlman
Habitation
Marriage is not
a house, or even a tent
It is before that, and colder:
the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back, where we squat
outdoors, eating popcorn
where painfully and with wonder
at having survived
this far
we are learning to make fire.
~Margaret Atwood
A Radically Condensed History of Post Industrial Life
When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed very hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.
The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.
~David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
A poem of Friendship
We are not lovers
because of the love
we make
but the love
we have
We are not friends
because of the laughs
we spend
but the tears
we save
I don’t want to be near you
for the thoughts we share
but the words we never have
to speak
I will never miss you
because of what we do
but what we are
together
~Nikki Giovanni
Realtor
When I met you,
I didn’t know what to do. I was tired,
I was hungry,
I fight. Now I’m away,
I write home everyday and I see you on the TV at night.
(Chorus)
You can see that life’s for us to talk about.
You can leave whenever you want out.
Whoa. You don’t relate to me,
no girl,
you don’t respect me,
no girl,
no girl. Oh yeah.
When I met you,
I didn’t know what to do,
but I noticed that I didn’t really feel.
Now you’re away,
you write home everyday. I don’t beg,
I don’t borrow,
I steal.
(Chorus)
You don’t think that life’s for us to talk about.
You can leave whenever you want out,
you want out. Well,
you don’t relate to me,
no girl. You don’t respect me,
no girl. (you can leave when ever you want out)
And you don’t relate to me,
no girl. And you don’t respect me,
no girl. (You can leave whenever you want out)
No you don’t relate to me,
no girl. And you don’t respect me,
no girl. No girl. Yeah.
~Realtor, Peter Yorn and Scarlett Johansson
Travel Thoughts
I thought, Let other people explain where I am. I imagined the dialogue:
“When will Paul be back?”
“We don”t know.”
“Where is he?”
“We”re not sure.”
“Can we get in touch with him?”
“No.”
Travel in the African bush can also be a sort of revenge on cellular phones and fax machines, on telephones and the daily paper, on the creepier aspects of globalization that allow anyone who chooses to get his insinuating hands on you. I desired to be unobtainable. Kurtz, sick as he is, attempts to escape from Marlow”s riverboat, crawling on all fours like an animal, trying to flee into the jungle. I understood that.
I was going to Africa for the best reason — in a spirit of discovery; and for the pettiest — simply to disappear, to light out, with a suggestion of I dare you to try and find me. Home had become a routine, and routines make time pass quickly. I was a sitting duck in my predictable routine: people knew when to call me; they knew when I would be at my desk. I was in such regular touch it was like having a job, a mode of life I hated. I was sick of being called up and importuned, asked for favors, hit up for money. You stick around too long and people begin to impose their own deadlines on you. “I need this by the twenty-fifth” or “Please read this by Friday” or “Try to finish this over the weekend” or “Let”s have a conference call on Wednesday.” Call me, fax me, e-mail me. You can get me anytime on my cell phone, here”s the number. Being available at any time in the totally accessible world seemed to me pure horror. It made me want to find a place that was not accessible at all: no phones, no fax machines, not even mail delivery, the wonderful old world of being out of touch. In other words, gone away. All I had to do was remove myself. I loved not having to ask permission, and in fact in my domestic life things had begun to get a little predictable, too — Mr. Paul at home every evening when Mrs. Paul came home from work. “I made spaghetti sauce . . . I seared some tuna . . . I”m scrubbing some potatoes . . .”The writer in his apron, perspiring over his béchamel sauce, always within earshot of the telephone. You have to pick
it up because it is ringing in your ear.
I wanted to drop out. People said, “Get a cell phone, use FedEx, sign up for Hotmail, stop in at Internet cafés, visit my Web site . . .” I said no thanks. The whole point of my leaving was to escape this stuff, to be out of touch. The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace. As Huck put it, lighting out for the territory. Africa is one of the last great places on earth a person can vanish into. I wanted that. Let them wait. I have been kept waiting far too many times for far too long.
~Paul Theroux , Dark Star Safari
+++
We travel I thought- for adventure and fun, to get away from the drudgery of our lives at home. We travel to court hardship and face the dangers and excitements that are themselves a kind of vacation and challenge for us. We meet people for whom our presence is nothing but opportunity, to take them out of the sadness and difficulty of their lives. The smiles exchanged on both sides have something fo s nervous edge.
Everything encountered on the road is just a getaway.It only really moves us if it comes very close to something that looks exactly like its opposite.
~Pico Iyer, No food, No rest, No…., By the seat of my Pants.
Trust
Trust
Oh we’ve got to trust
one another again
in some essentials.
Not the narrow little
bargaining trust
that says: I’m for you
if you’ll be for me. -
But a bigger trust,
a trust of the sun
that does not bother
about moth and rust,
and we see it shining
in one another.
Oh don’t you trust me,
don’t burden me
with your life and affairs; don’t
thrust me
into your cares.
But I think you may trust
the sun in me
that glows with just
as much glow as you see
in me, and no more.
But if it warms
your heart’s quick core
why then trust it, it forms
one faithfulness more.
And be, oh be
a sun to me,
not a weary, insistent
personality
but a sun that shines
and goes dark, but shines
again and entwines
with the sunshine in me
till we both of us
are more glorious
and more sunny.
~ D. H. Lawrence
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s sensual ecstasy.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
~WH Auden
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.