lines for the fortune cookies

I think you’re wonderful and so does everyone else.
Just as Jackie Kennedy has a baby boy, so will you–even bigger.
You will meet a tall beautiful blonde stranger, and you will not say hello.
You will take a long trip and you will be very happy, though alone.
You will marry the first person who tells you your eyes are like scrambled eggs.
In the beginning there was YOU–there will always be YOU, I guess.
You will write a great play and it will run for three performances.
Please phone The Village Voice immediately: they want to interview you.
Roger L. Stevens and Kermit Bloomgarden have their eyes on you.
Relax a little; one of your most celebrated nervous tics will be your undoing.
Your first volume of poetry will be published as soon as you finish it.
You may be a hit uptown, but downtown you’re legendary!
Your walk has a musical quality which will bring you fame and fortune.
You will eat cake.
Who do you think you are, anyway? Jo Van Fleet?
You think your life is like Pirandello, but it’s really like O’Neill.
A few dance lessons with James Waring and who knows? Maybe something will happen.
That’s not a run in your stocking, it’s a hand on your leg.
I realize you’ve lived in France, but that doesn’t mean you know EVERYTHING!
You should wear white more often–it becomes you.
The next person to speak to you will have a very intriquing proposal to make.
A lot of people in this room wish they were you.
Have you been to Mike Goldberg’s show? Al Leslie’s? Lee Krasner’s?
At times, your disinterestedness may seem insincere, to strangers.
Now that the election’s over, what are you going to do with yourself?
You are a prisoner in a croissant factory and you love it.
You eat meat. Why do you eat meat?
Beyond the horizon there is a vale of gloom.
You too could be Premier of France, if only … if only…

Frank O'Hara, "Lines for the Fortune Cookies"

david archuleta, imagine

Brilliant.

today

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they've always talked about

still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They're strong as rocks.

Frank O'Hara, "Today"

creating myself

"Our existences precede our essences," as Sartre put it. I don't know what I'm here for until I've lived my life. My life, who I am, is not determined by God, by the laws of Nature, by my genetics, by my society, not even by my family. They each may provide the raw material for who I am, but it is how I choose to live that makes me what I am. I create myself.

Ludwig Binswanger

jate vs. skate debate

From E! Online's Watch with Kristin, a fan submission in support of "Skate" (the romance of Sawyer and Kate on Lost) in the great Skate vs. Jate Debate:


There is no explanation for what love is intended for. There are probably as many explanations about what real love is as there are stars in the sky. Look up love in any dictionary, any Internet search engine and you are sure to find an endless amount of answers. This is probably why Lost is such a pull for people, because it reminds us of the most vulnerable, confusing emotions of our humanity.

[. . .]
Kate made it clear: Sawyer types were for fun, Jack types are for life. Yet that was old Sawyer who called her Freckles, asked to see her naked and drank stale beer. New Sawyer tried to step up as leader (season three), told Kate to stay back (to keep her from harm in season three) and called her Kate (after he killed the original Sawyer in season three). Sawyer is another part of Kate that keeps her running spirit alive. They have both lived on the other side of the tracks, so they are immediately connected to that run. Sawyer was running to find someone while Kate was running away from someone. It's ironic that it took a flight down and an island to make them stay in one place.

Kate is good for Sawyer in that she makes him feel better, act better and definitely be better. Sawyer is good for Kate because his love is real, which is scary for her. He offered her his heart, and since they are isolated on this island, Kate has nowhere to run. She can run to Jack, but I get the feeling he knows what she's doing. Kate has to deal with this emotion, with this raw emotion of a man willing to give her any happiness with his life. This is why I believe Kate should be with Sawyer.

in his eyes

heartfelt and delicate

In January, the Centre for Recent Drawing art gallery in a London, England, suburb scheduled a series of 55 works by artist Jordan McKenzie, 40, called "Spent," even though they consist merely of canvases onto which he had ejaculated and covered with carbon sprinkles. McKenzie maintained that the works were "heartfelt and delicate." [The Sun (London), 1-10-08]

the apartment

I imagined myself living in a vast apartment, so vast that I could never remember how many rooms it had (I had known, in the old days, but had forgotten, and knew I was too old now to start again on such a complicated enumeration). All the rooms, except one, were used for something. The whole point was to find this last room. It was no harder, when all's said and done, than for the readers in Borges's story of "The Library of Babel" to find the book that held the key to all the others. Indeed, there is something almost vertiginously Borgesian in trying to imagine a room reserved for listening to Haydn's Symphony Number 48 in C, the so-called Maria Theresa, another devoted to reading the barometer or to cleaning my right big toe.

I thought of old Prince Bolkonsky who, in his anxiety as to the fate of his son, vainly searches all night long, from room to room, torch in hand, followed by his servant Tikhon carrying fur blankets, for the bed where he will be able finally to get to sleep. I thought of a science-fiction novel in which the very notion of habitat has vanished. I thought of another Borges story ("The Immortals"), in which men no longer inhabited by the need to live and to die have built ruined palaces and unusable staircases. I thought of engravings by Escher and paintings by Magritte. I thought of a gigantic Skinner's Box: a bedroom entirely hung in black, a solitary switch on the wall, by pressing which you can make something like a grey Maltese cross appear for a brief flash against a white background; I thought of the Great Pyramids and the church interiors of Saenredam; I thought of something Japanese. I thought of the vague memory I had of a text by Heissenbuttel in which the narrator discovers a room without either doors or windows. I thought of the dreams I had had on this very subject, discovering a room I didn't know about in my own apartment.

Selection from "The Apartment," a section from
Georges Perec's Species of Spaces and Other Pieces