After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my 
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas 
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my 
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your 
sun rising swiftly from the right my 
sun rising swiftly from the left your 
moon rising slowly from the left my 
moon rising slowly from the right until 
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together, 
all our cities twin cities, 
all our states united, one 
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Sharon Olds 

I spent some time today reading Hemingway's gorgeous memoir, A Movable Feast. I breezed through it in college, really appreciating it now.

A particularly lovely paragraph:

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in American would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cezanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cezanne was probably hungry in a different way. 

Nice interview with Tish Pearlman.

Interesting development, reported in Publisher's Lunch today:

Big Publishers Move to Broad Delay of eBook Releases

With delayed publication dates the only real weapon in publishers' arsenals in fighting back against the $9.99 price point for high-profile new releases in ebook form, experimentation is getting ready to turn into policy in the year ahead. The WSJ reports that Simon & Schuster will delay ebook releases for about 35 "leading titles" early next year, and Hachette "has similar plans in the works." Meanwhile, we're aware of at least one other big six publisher contemplating the same kind of policy for the first quarter of next year.

S&S ceo Carolyn Reidy tells the Journal: "The right place for the e-book is after the hardcover but before the paperback. We believe some people will be disappointed. But with new [electronic] readers coming and sales booming, we need to do this now, before the installed base of e-book reading devices gets to a size where doing it would be impossible."

Hachette ceo David Young adds: "We're doing this to preserve our industry. I can't sit back and watch years of building authors sold off at bargain-basement prices. It's about the future of the business."

More

What Is Seized

In the wedding photos they wear white against the murky dark of trees. They are thin and elegant. They have placid smiles. The mouth of the father of the bride remains in a short, straight line. I don't know who took these pictures. I suppose they are lies of sorts, revealing by omission, by indirection, by clues such as shoes and clouds. But they tell a truth, the only way lies can. The way only lies can.

Another morning, I heard my parents up early in the bathroom, my dad shaving, getting ready to leave for school.

"Look," he said in a loud whisper. "I really can't say that I'll never leave you and the kids or that I'll never make love to another woman--"

"Why not?" asked my mother. "Why can't you say that?" Even her anger was gentle, ingenuous.

"Because I don't feel that way."

"But ... can't you just say it anyway?"

At this I like to imagine that my parents met each other's gaze in the medicine cabinet mirror, suddenly grinning. But later in the hospital bed, holding my hand and touching each of my nails slowly with her index finger, my mother said to me, "Your father. He was in a dance. And he just couldn't dance." Earlier that year she had written me: "That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist their every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It's like painting scenery."

These are the things one takes from mothers. Once they die, of course, you get the strand of pearls, the blue quilt, some of the original wedding gifts - a tray shellacked with the invitation, an old rusted toaster - but the touches and the words and the moaning the night she dies, these are what you seize, save, carry around in little invisible envelopes, opening them up quickly, like a carnival huckster, giving the world a peek. They will not stay quiet. No matter how you try. No matter how you lick them. The envelopes will not stay glued.

Excerpted from Self-Help.

Listen. 

Bernard Descamps. View the gallery. 

Be Near Me

Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Translated by Naomi Lazard

Be near me now,
My tormenter, my love, be near me—
At this hour when night comes down,
When, having drunk from the gash of sunset, darkness comes
With the balm of musk in its hands, its diamond lancets,
When it comes with cries of lamentation,
                                             with laughter with songs;
Its blue-gray anklets of pain clinking with every step.
At this hour when hearts, deep in their hiding places,
Have begun to hope once more, when they start their vigil
For hands still enfolded in sleeves;
When wine being poured makes the sound
                                             of inconsolable children
                      who, though you try with all your heart,
                                             cannot be soothed.
When whatever you want to do cannot be done,
When nothing is of any use;
—At this hour when night comes down,
When night comes, dragging its long face,
                                             dressed in mourning,
Be with me,
My tormenter, my love, be near me.

Limits

There is a line of Verlaine I will never remember

There is another street I can no longer walk down

There is a face in the mirror I have seen for the very last time

There is a door that is closed until the end of the world.

Among the books of my library (I am seeing them now)

There are some that will never be read.

This summer I will be fifty: 

Death consumes me, constantly. 

 ---Jorge Luis Borges