Breakfast at the Bookstore with Brad and Nick #153

Daily Dose

From Chapters from Some Unwritten Memoirs, by Anne Thackeray Ritchie

AS

"As life goes on one grudges that time and chance alone should have separated people who would have been so happy with each other."

From Chapter VI, In Kensington

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From The Library Book, by Susan Orlean

THE MOST

"The most popular photograph in the library's photography collection is of a five-year-old elephant named Bimbo Jr. riding a surfboard. The picture ran in the Los Angeles Herald in 1962. According to the caption, Bimbo Jr. had 'the rare distinction of being the youngest elephant to perform this remarkable feat,' a peculiar sort of caption that implies that other elephants surf, too, and Bimbo's specialness was only his tender age."

From Chapter 7

Breakfast at the Bookstore with Brad and Nick #152

Daily Dose

From Look Alive Out There: Essays, by Sloane Crosley

HE WAS

"He was Man in Car, Man with Book, Man on Bus, Man in Hot Tub, Orgy Guy in Red Chair, Party Guy, Guy Wearing Glasses, Delivery Boy, and, perplexingly, Guy in Credits. He was the porn equivalent of Barbie, who can count astronaut, zookeeper, and aerobics instructor among her professional accomplishments."

From Relative Stranger

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From Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, by Stephen Jay Gould

HOMO SAPIENS

"Homo sapiens, I fear, is a 'thing so small' in a vast universe, a wildly improbable evolutionary event well within the realm of contingency. Make of such a conclusion what you will. Some find the prospect depressing. I have always regarded it as exhilarating, and a source of both freedom and consequent moral responsibility."

From Chapter IV, Woolcott's Vision and the Nature of History

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From E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany, revised and edited by George J. Firmage

BY THIS TIME

"By this time, surely, my worthy readers have doubtless decided that I myself am a salaried member of that branch of the circus which comprises 'the strange people.'"

From The Adult, The Artist, and the Circus

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From Native Guard: Poems, by Natasha Trethewey

MYTH

I was asleep while you were dying.
It's as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow
I make between my slumber and my waking,
the Erebus I keep you in, still trying
not to let go. You'll be dead again tomorrow,
but in dreams you live. So I try taking
you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning,
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
Again and again, this constant forsaking.
Again and again, this constant forsaking:
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
You back into morning, sleep-heavy, turning.
But in dreams you live. So I try taking,
not to let go. You'll be dead again tomorrow.
The Erebus I keep you in—still, trying—
I make between my slumber and my waking.
It's as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow.
I was asleep while you were dying.

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From Death Is Hard Work, by Khaled Khalifa, translated by Leri Price

AFTER ALL

"After all, as a general rule, corpses don't much care about where they're buried."

From Chapter One, If You Were a Sack of Cumin

Breakfast at the Bookstore with Brad and Nick #151

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From The Art of Leaving: A Memoir, by Ayelet Tsabari

CAVALIER

"It was that cavalier attitude toward my mortality, that youthful, blissful shortsightedness, that enabled me to live as recklessly as I did."

From Kerosene: A Love Story

Clerihew from a Dark Place

JAMES ELLROY

In My Dark Places
The author traces
That broken boy,
James Ellroy.

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From I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter, by David Chariandy

WOKE

"We woke to the stench of margarine burning in a pan, and one roommate jumped up to turn off the stove, another to open a window. Our dinner was ruined, our precious kitchen heat quickly disappearing, but my roommate with the shy-gentle eyes was laughing all the same. What was so funny? 'We made it here,' he explained."

From page 61

Cat Doodles for Anna

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From The Street, by Ann Petry

DESPITE

"Despite the lateness of the hour, groups of men were still standing in front of the Junto Bar and Grill, for the brilliant light streaming from its windows formed a barrier against the cold and the darkness in the rest of the street. Whenever the doors opened and closed, the light on the sidewalk was intensified. And because the men moved slightly, laughing and talking a little louder with each sudden increase in light, they had the appearance of moths fluttering about a gigantic candle flame."

From Chapter II

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From The Narrows, by Ann Petry

OUGHT NOT

"He supposed he ought not to look at this man who was walking about the room barefooted. But he couldn't help it. He had no corns on his feet, no bunions. His stomach didn't stick out, it was flat, absolutely flat; his waist was narrow and his shoulders were wide. The skin on his body was almost white, the forearms, and his face, tan by contrast. He made no sound as he walked, and Link thought, He's air-borne, light as air."

From Chapter 7

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Daily Dose

From There Are Girls like Lions: Poems about Being a Woman, from Chronicle Books

SIREN SONG

This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:

the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see beached skulls

the song nobody knows
because anyone who had heard it
is dead, and the others can’t remember.
Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me
out of this bird suit?
I don’t enjoy it here
squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical
with these two feathery maniacs,
I don’t enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.

I will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer. This song

is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can,
you are unique

at last. Alas
it is a boring song
but it works every time.

-- Margaret Atwood

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Daily Dose

From A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, by Christopher Alexander et al.

START

"Start by thinking about the front gardens which you know. They are often decorative, lawns, flowers. But how often are people sitting there?"

From III, Half-Hidden Garden

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From The Reckonings: Essays, by Lacy M. Johnson

LEARN

"I learn at this moment that there are some people who will believe I am lying about what men have done to my body no matter what evidence I present to the contrary. I also learn it is not my responsibility to convince them."

From Speak Truth to Power

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From The Complete Poems, by Paul Lawrence Dunbar

LOVE-SONG

If Death should claim me for her own to-day,
And softly I should falter from your side,
Oh, tell me, loved one, would my memory stay,
And would my image in your heart abide?
Or should I be as some forgotten dream,
That lives its little space, then fades entire?
Should Time send o'er you its relentless stream,
To cool your heart, and quench for aye love's fire?

I would not for the world, love, give you pain,
Or ever compass what would cause you grief;
And, oh, how well I know that tears are vain!
But love is sweet, my dear, and life is brief;
So if some day before you I should go
Beyond the sound and sight of song and sea,
'T would give my spirit stronger wings to know
That you remembered still and wept for me. 

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From The Kindness of Strangers, by Salka Viertel

AT DINNER

"At dinner the young people kept silent, while Aldous talked about cheese."

From Chapter 36

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From Milk of Paradise: A History of Opium, by Lucy Inglis

FULL

"America's prior record of assuring the full measure of individual rights and liberties of free people, let alone benevolent assimilation, is hardly something that could be expected to comfort the Filipinos."

From Chapter Seven, A New Addiction, Prohibition and the Rise of the Gangster

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From Speeches of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Orations Deserving of a Wider Audience, complied by Shaun Usher

BUT ARE

"But poets are the worst. Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic."

From We Just Don't Know, by Wislawa Szymborska

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From The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World, by Simon Winchester

NAMING

"The naming of units of measurement was of course one of the first orders of business in early civilization -- the cubits of the Babylonians were probably the first units of length; there were the unciae of the Romans, the grain, the carat, the toise, the catty -- and the yard and the half yard, the span, the finger, and the nail of early England."

From Afterword: The Measure of All Things

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Daily Dose

From Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, by Nancy MacLean

CHARLES KOCH

"At first it seems hard to imagine why a man who had so much would become consumed with a need to take down those who just wanted 'some more' for themselves 9in the immortal words of Oliver Twist). The answer, to the extent that one can be found in the mysteries of individual human personality, lies in a childhood in which fighting was a leitmotif and government was always the enemy."

From Chapter 9, Never Compromise

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From Migration: New & Selected Poems, by W. S. Merwin

MY FRIENDS

My friends without shields walk on the target

It is late the windows are breaking

My friends without shoes leave
What they love
Grief moves among them as a fire among
Its bells
My friends without clocks turn
On the dial they turn
They part

My friends with names like gloves set out
Bare handed as they have lived
And nobody knows them
It is they that lay the wreaths at the milestones it is their
Cups that are found at the wells
And are then chained up

My friends without feet sit by the wall
Nodding to the lame orchestra
Brotherhood it says on the decorations
My friend without eyes sits in the rain smiling
With a nest of salt in his hand

My friends without fathers or houses hear
Doors opening in the darkness
Whose halls announce

Behold the smoke has come home

My friends and I have in common
The present a wax bell in a wax belfry
This message telling of
Metals this
Hunger for the sake of hunger this owl in the heart
And these hands one
For asking one for applause

My friends with nothing leave it behind
In a box
My friends without keys go out from the jails it is night
They take the same road they miss
Each other they invent the same banner in the dark
They ask their way only of sentries too proud to breathe

At dawn the stars on their flag will vanish

The water will turn up their footprints and the day will rise
Like a monument to my
Friends the forgotten

Breakfast at the Bookstore with Brad and Nick #150

Daily Dose

From The Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson

O BEAUTY, PASSING BEAUTY!

O beauty, passing beauty! Sweetest sweet!
How can thou let me waste my youth in sighs?
I only ask to sit beside thy feet.
Thou knowest I dare not look into thine eyes.
Might I but kiss thy hand! I dare not fold
My arms about thee--scarcely dare to speak.
And nothing seems to me so wild and bold,
As with one kiss to touch thy blessed cheek.
Methinks if I should kiss thee, no control
Within the thrilling brain could keep afloat
The subtle spirit. Even while I spoke,
The bare word "kiss" hath made my inner soul
To tremble like a lute string, ere the note
Hath melted in the silence that it broke. 

A Caricature

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From On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan

PAINFUL

"His painful craving was building intolerably, and he was frightened by his own savage impatience and the furious words or actions it might provoke, and so end the evening."

From page 118

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From The Borrowers, by Mary Norton

MORE

"'There are more my size than yours,' he retorted."

From Chapter 9

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From The White Darkness, by David Grann

FELT

"The man felt like a speck in the frozen nothingness."

From Chapter 1, Mortal Danger

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