Tuppence for your thoughts

We could grow old together, you know? But we would be the kind of elderly people that hold intellectual discussion on park benches in the gloaming. On separate park benches I mean because our love is of the mind only and actually we never speak, we just feed the birds in tandem. Dip and scatter, dip and scatter. The old rhythm sounds monotonous to the mothers pushing perambulators. The children are lulled instantly to sleep by the crackle of seed and the cooing of satisfied pigeons. But it's a sham really, a disguise for the intimacy of our conversation, the Morse code of our throws, the ping of a sunflower shell, the plink of millet and cracked corn that means, I have seen the truth today in a loaf of sliced bread and in the pattern of cracks on a white wall. We look down, gum our dentures further into our mouths and hum.

For thirty-five years now I've been in wastepaper, and it's my love story. For thirty-five years I've been compacting wastepaper and books, smearing myself with letters until I've come to look like my encyclopedias--and a good three tons of them I've compacted over the years. I'm a jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to lean over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me. My education has been so unwitting I can't quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books, but that's how I've stayed attuned to myself and the world around me for the past thirty-five years. Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

-Bohumil Hrabal "Too Loud a Solitude," translated from Czech by Michael Henry Heim

New Andrew Bird

This is so great. Now if only I was in a position to go out and buy the CD.

Life like an animation, maybe

If there was film in our fingertips we could conduct an orchestra of live long days. Yes, I can see it now. Beautiful as god's breath they swirl out, those multifaceted heartstrings, shimmering coral, theophosphatic blue, knitting into a scarf of recollection, reality, the stuff of dreams, the stuff of now. Always behind the snapping beaks of scissors angling downwards, their beady eyes a fulcrum with destruction as its apple. But we would always outrun their greedy mouths. Oh that this twisted mind should be mined! I want it to delve deep and for that ore to be inexhaustible, to put the vor in voracious.

A Book of Hours: Hymns to the Goddess of Unreality

Pray eight times each day. Repeat.

Matins

Lauds

Prime

Tierce

Sext

None

Vespers

Compline

Whoso List to Learn Pro Tools

Had better have more patience than I do mostly but at last it's coming along. I set myself a silly project so that I would have something to work towards and lo, after some procrastination and crashing through the forest, it has come to fruition. Some mix levels could be better but on the whole I will call it a good first effort.

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Winter

The storm bashing its head outside my window is heavy with innumerable small deaths. I imagine the rain as a fleet of kamikaze droplets. Each dashes its insides to pieces against the glass leaving watery entrails smeared in rivers that slide and then run to the ground. Hard by in the woods full of the nodding of albino reads there are imaginary Squirrel Nutkins tumbling freely inside a cold coat made of winter. It is buttoned with the shells of chestnut and acorn, lined with decayed mushroom's chitinous rinds and stuffed full with the withered hands of dried leaves.