Morning Rain Membrane

The water on the window

rolls down the long glass pane,

and taps against the barrier

of my peaceful morning.

Inside is dry and known,

the rain a membrane like a womb.

It beats irregular over the noise

creating space and clarity.

To be able to choose

to go to a room

with pouring rain an amenity

No silence, only raindrops

no noise, only rain

would be the ultimate luxury.

Nietzsche on Truth

 "What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins." -Friedrich Nietzsche

Cactus

...she rode through the cactus rising up from the ground. Earlier this morning, in town, she had seen the women in the carriage with her curled hair and white gloved hand hanging listlessly out the window. What a life she imagined the woman must have. What a life. The hooves tapped on the dry ground, hollow and vast...
that night, as she lay under the big sky, she thought about what it might be like in a fluffy bed with soft white sheets. She closed her eyes to imagine it. Almost wishing herself there. But when she opened her eyes, she looked up at the bright, glimmering stars. They sparkled down on her like a thousand well-wishing angels. And she knew she wouldn't change places for anything...

Sunday reflections

In case these notes aren't clear
some resources:
-book covers
-audio books
-translations
-proper nouns that become adjectives
-the act of taking notes
-diagrams and doodles to recall an idea or a concept
-Capsule Biographies (specifically by Borges who could apparently sum up the life of an author in two paragraphs more eloquently and efficiently that the average biographer with 200 pages of text)
some thoughts:
-what defines the literature of an era is how it is interpreted in that era- Kafka on the shelf and in your hands and in your mind in 2010 is literature in 2010. Kafka on the shelf and in your hands and in your mind in 1922 is literature in 1922.
is this even a point worth stating?
-Instead of music as background mood making noise, how about the spoken word? Phrases, poetry, a short story, a series of words independent in meaning but harmonious in their oratory effect.
-not being afraid to have someone read over your shoulder

Friday Event (+ early reflections)

what keeps you going?

and if you had to make decisions everyday about questions that were going to be more than what kind of cereal to buy but more like will women wear the green or the red? Will they wear the bouclé or the felt?
how refined does something have to be to be refined? How much can you leave up to the wearer? or do you over-refine it so that no matter what the wearer does she can't help but be refined?

reading Kafka and going to hear a talk about Borges (this is the event: American University of Paris organized lecture given by Suzanne Jill Levine, translator, scholar, and author...most recent project the 5 book penguin series The Master Works of Borges), it was mentioned that they had both become adjectives: Kafkaesque, Borgesian

because their oeuvre had transcended their medium and come to represent a school of thought

what kept them going? The constant digging and searching into the questions in their lives and in their heads. The pain of being a thinker is trying to make sense of those thoughts in the context of words and meaning. And so the exercise of putting them down is the most gratifying thing for them to do. To make sense of those thoughts, or to try to work them out and watch them become more clear and evolve as they grow and add more experience to their thoughts and theories.

I don't know

more on Ms. Levine:
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