new blog: gezelliger.tumblr.com

Witty sarcasm is lovely

but there is also a place for genuine lack of irony.

absolutely lovely delightful beautiful music blog by one of my favorite people in the world

wimbomakers.tumblr.com

and while i'm being all nostalgic and all

 I might as well put these pictures up because I LOVE them and my parents in them.

Diaries

I used to start and never finish diaries.  After a certain number of weeks, months, or years of non-entries, I'd find the diary in a drawer or fallen behind the books of my bookshelf and uncomfortably read through what I'd written. 

 "Ugh. why did I devote so much time to that subject. It didn't turn out to be important.  I'll start a new diary and talk about actually important and relevant things that reflect who I am and life in general and this time the diary won't have Chad Michael Murray and Hillary Duff taped on the cover but it will be  _______ (Insert: [abstract and artsy] [dark and chic] [leather and sophisticated]

...and legit for my current tastes"

Sometimes I edited or commented on previous thoughts and noted the new date. I remember reading through my age 8 journal at age 10.  On one page, I drew an arrow and circled some original comments and wrote, "Valerie Wilder, age 10, year 1998, says that is stupid" Two years later I looked back again, crossed out both, and wrote, "Valerie now age 12 says who cares"

Take away points for the story:

1) Valerie did/does/probably always will analyze even the inane

2) Don't discard diaries (wave your heart-throb clippings in the air and smile. Whip them out at the dinner party) But 

3) Don't be afraid to change your mind (that is, unless you find yourself spinning in crossing-out circles. You do have to remain sane) Because

4) Although continuous and spread over time, the you you are now matters more than the you you were then but not as much as the you you will be, and does not detract from the you you always is, and that, dear future self, is fortune-cookie-quality wisdom. 

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misc lovely

Koto Bolofo

Jenny Holzer

Clouds Mud Joyce

Transcendence through the Material and Ethereal in Joyce’s Ulysses

"…my son, I caution you to keep the middle way, for if your pinions dip too low the waters may impede your flight; and if they soar too high the sun may scorch them”

Ovid, Metamorphosis  

If a philosophical spectrum stretched from earth to heaven, then the reader, upon reading Joyce’s Ulysses, would find John A.E. floating on the clouds, Stephen Dedalus drifting awkwardly a little below, Leopold Bloom just scraping the ground with his feet and Buck Mulligan squatting in the mud.  In his novel, Ulysses, James Joyce plays at the reconciliation of material and ethereal realms of art.  He represents the extremes of low and high philosophy through the sensual cynic Buck Mulligan and the Plato applauder A.E. while using Bloom and Stephen to mediate somewhat between the two, their names already alluding to the tendencies they represent.  “Dedalus” brings to mind Greek legend, myths and literary tradition itself perhaps.  The reader recalls the legend of an aerial boy with his head too caught in the clouds to heed his father’s advice.  Airy and high flown like the son of his namesake, Stephen Dedalus veers closely to A.E.’s Platonism.  Leopold Bloom, on the other hand, connotes a lower and more earthly existence: flowers, gardens, shrubs and plants, with their roots tangled in the ground.  Bloom’s name is itself a modification of his father’s original surname, “Virage”, meaning “flower”. The association is appropriate to Bloom who, although a sensual materialist like Buck, finds more beauty in the mud. 

MERCIFULLY by Marianne Moore

I am hard to disgust,
but a pretentious poet can do it;
a person without a tap root; and
impercipience can do it; did it.

But why talk about it--
offset by Musica Antiqua's
"Legendary Performance"
of impassioned exactitude.

An elate tongue is music.....
the plain truth--complex truth--
in which unnatural emphases,
"passi - on" and "divis - i-on,"
sound natural. Play it all; do
except in uproars of conversation.

Celestial refrain.....My mind
hears it again.  Without music
life is flat--bare existence.
Dirgelike David and Absalom. That.
       Let it be that.

This poem reminds me of the movie Annie Hall! I like Marianne Moore because she shows she can be overly eloquent but she doesn't take herself entirely seriously and she makes fun of people who do. 

Katie Melua

Nancy Bass

nancybassartist.com