stumbled upon this cool poster on a music blog. courtesy of The Black Apple and Tsururadio
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Friday, June 18, 2010
Marginalia by Billy Collins
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."
Friday, June 11, 2010
quick music post
i've only heard this one song from The Middle East, but i can't get the part at the end with a group sing-a-long out of my head! also, anything with a glockenspiel/xylophone makes my heart go pitter-pat. :)ugh, the lyrics are so sad though! i guess it's about their grandmother dying of cancer. but the lyrics are beautiful and heartfelt, and they do not make you pity. i think my favorite lyrics are these:
and you'll find somebody you can blame
and you'll follow the creek that runs out into the sea
and you'll find the peace of the Lord.
first photo shoot!
this is my debut as a photographer. i have known for a long time that photography was something i wanted to learn how to do. and of all things to photograph, people are what i want to take photos of. so i was so pleased that my friends who are having a second child allowed me to use them as photographic guinea pigs! they have the most precious 2 year-old, Jackson, and the parents are Kristi and Eric. they make great photographic subjects, so I was very lucky. even Jackson smiled when we asked him to! these are some of my favorites from the shoot. the top is my favorite of just Kristi and Eric.
this is my favorite of Jackson and his mommy.
this is my favorite of the three of them!
this is my favorite of a series with jackson on eric's shoulders.
ha! i love Jackson's face in the one above!
this is a good one holding her belly together!
and she is so beautiful in this one. what a gorgeous pregnant lady!it was such a pleasure photographing them. enjoy!
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
summer music
there's lots of great stuff out there that i'm enjoying--if i were a better writer, i think i would want to become a music blogger, because i just love listening to new music and sharing it!
this first music post is for an album that won't be out until the fall (august 24, 2010 to be exact), but i stumbled upon it and absolutely love it! this is S. Carey, the drummer from Bon Iver, coming out with his debut album All We Grow on Jagjaguwar records. this song is so beautiful. He has a whole orchestra of instruments that play along with him (clarinets, vibraphone, flutes, piano, drums... just to name a few i can pick out), which totally melts my heart since i'm a former trumpet player/band nerd. check out this beautiful song called "In the Dirt".
and now for something completely different! this is a solo act from San Francisco. i love that it actually makes you feel like your drifting off into space. crank it loud!
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