Venus Comb

What does the summer smell like to you?

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:35:02 -0700

Absolutely dry air, and maybe hot cut grass or dust, the scent blowing over me with the Santa Ana winds. Water accidentally inhaled. Sometimes a thunderstorm, and then petrichor, the scent of the dust after rain. If I’m in the desert, then creosote, the flower that’s most fragrant in the rain. If you have a dried sprig, you can cup your hands around it and breathe on it, and you’ll smell the desert after a storm…

And I know who you are. Thank you for the beautiful question, lady. :)

Jake

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:14:58 -0700

Jake:

liceham:

Jake’s actually more educated than you’d expect – he knows who Satan is, and what it means when he wants to talk with you. Jake also knows that he doesn’t have the moral fiber necessary to resist the deal likely on offer.

Jake stands up, dusts himself off. “My soul, is it? What’re ya offering fer it?”

His cool demeanor weakens when he looks up. The man’s face does nothing, but the thousand eyes of the suit widen like something smiling. “I hardly need bargain for your soul – merely wait for someone to kill you.

“Here’s my offer: you don’t die today.”

Dear Tess, what is your favorite book by Toni Morrison and why? What do you like most about her writing? (I'm reading The Bluest Eye for class and I am curious!)

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:12:00 -0700

Dear Julia, I love so much of Toni Morrison’s work; she’s kind of my favorite. My favorite of her books so far is Beloved; it’s painful and breathtaking and beautiful, and the women in it are so important to each other, and it’s lyrical in a way that’s hard to come by. I love how out of order her writing is, while still making perfect sense, slipping in and out of poem and dream.

Read this!

Spores of bluefern growing in the hollows along the riverbank float toward the water in silver-blue lines hard to see unless you are in or near them, lying right at the river’s edge when the sunshots are low and drained. Often they are mistook for insects—but they are seeds in which the whole generation sleeps confident of a future. And for a moment it is easy to believe each one has one—will become all of what is contained in its spore: will live out its days as planned. This moment of certainty last no longer than that; longer, perhaps, than the spore itself.

On a riverbank in the cool of a summer evening two women struggled under a shower of silvery blue.

—Beloved, by Toni Morrison

Do you like The Bluest Eye, Julia? :)

If you could be anywhere else right now where would it be?

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:56:00 -0700

Curled up in sheets with a cloudy night pressing in on the windows, a green and gray world waiting for me when I wake, strong coffee, and some chance of rain…

For TMI Tues: Would you tell of a time when you were too cold, when the cold simply couldn't be warmed? Also, your approach to rollercoasters? :) Thank you!

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:53:00 -0700

Hi, CA! Once, when I was living in Indiana, there was an ice rain that began when I was about 20 minutes into my walk home. My friends were always telling me to call them if I needed a ride, but I mostly never did, so I kept walking until I got to a bus stop… but the bus never came. I called a few numbers, but it was one of those nights when no one could pick up, and I realized I couldn’t just stay out in the ice rain with no hat or scarf or umbrella, so I kept walking the rest of the hour home. When I did get there, I couldn’t warm up, and so I just sort of stayed that way, half-frozen and too exhausted to do anything properly. I actually wound up with bronchitis within a day or two, and wound up giving a presentation on heavy medication. Sometimes the cold is a little too much for me; I’m a desert girl.

I love roller coasters! Sometimes I cling to them for dear life, but they’re wonderful. Thanks for the questions, lady!

If you had a silly superpower, what would it be?

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:45:00 -0700

Hey, lady! The first things that come to mind don’t feel silly enough once I think about them! My first thought was instantaneously making dishes clean—you can guess what I’m doing—or else being able to call any book instantly to my hand. But the second one especially seems quite powerful. Perhaps being able to identify any plant and its properties the moment I see, touch or smell it.

Thank you for the question, darlin’! Welcome to tumblr!

What do you value most in other people? (Or, if that's too hard, which things, plural?)

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:38:00 -0700

Thank you so much for the question—it can be a difficult thing to think about, yes? Compassion is a wonderful quality, and probably my favorite in human beings—and everyone has it, in some measure, I feel—but I think I also value what makes people most themselves; the thing that they most love, and the reason they love it. I love seeing passion—quiet or not.

flowersinthewreckage asked you: I love TMI Tuesday with Tess :D...

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:41:40 -0700

flowersinthewreckage asked you:

I love TMI Tuesday with Tess :D Okay hmmmmm… If you could see yourself in a water color painting, what colors would you choose? Would they be vibrant? Would the painting be of you or something that embodies you?

I think I would choose something that seems true of me inside rather than outside—my outsides always change. But I so love the forest, and I so love blues and greens. I think these colors are vibrant, but they also soothe me—they’re gentle, which is what I want inside me, and for my world to be. Thank you for your beautiful question, Bri—and for the water color you sent me. <3

The Water and the Light - Watercolor by Michael David Sorenson

This water color always reminds me of you. It is so beautiful...

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:35:00 -0700

This water color always reminds me of you. It is so beautiful and calming. And the birds are gorgeous. And I think I recall you said once that you like shades of blue.

aseaofquotes: — Alphonse de Lamartine

Mon, 20 May 2013 22:30:24 -0700

aseaofquotes:

— Alphonse de Lamartine

centuriespast: Matchsafe, “Water Nymph and Horse”, ca....

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:34:03 -0700

centuriespast:

Matchsafe, “Water Nymph and Horse”, ca. 1900

National Design Museum

Like Daphne

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:17:41 -0700

Like Daphne:

Our backs against the brick wall, we sat on the wooden floor of the dance studio and talked about nothing. You pushed my hair off my neck where it stuck close with sweat, dabbed at my temples and forehead along the hairline with the back of your hand.

Gold squares of light from the windows touched the floor and reflected in the big mirror, and where the edges of the mirror were cut at an angle, rainbows got loose and wandered over the dark red bricks. The two of us took up a tiny piece of the mirror. I’d crossed my legs underneath me and you had one of your hands in my lap and were playing with the black laces of my jazz flats. In the mirror it wasn’t clear what you were doing, which made my skin slowly begin feeling hot. But mostly I was looking at me all in black, and you in a white blouse and jeans, and how we both had our hair down and perfectly straight, so we managed to look like we go together, but still nothing alike.

You reached further across me and pulled my ballet practice skirt out of my bag and began running your hands under the see-through black cloth, your hand moving lightly against my knee as you stroked. So soft. And I nodded, and said it was like Daphne. You put your head on my shoulder and didn’t say anything. We began playing with each other’s fingers through the cloth and listened to my dance teacher closing the blinds and beginning to lock up.

And as we were walking back to my house the sun was lower in the sky, and I could feel the cement under my shoes and your arm rubbing along mine, smooth as glass, and the leaves everywhere were like Daphne. They were so thin, and the light behind them showed through the leaves, like tinted glass, or like colored paper held up to a soft light bulb.

I first saw Daphne in a museum in another country. I stood looking up at her fingers turning into leaves, perfectly smooth white stone, perfectly sharp and perfectly soft at the same time, and I remember hearing a man talk about how she turned into a tree to escape someone, the man in the statue. A god, I think, who wasn’t good at no. But mostly I stopped listening, because I had to get as close as I could to her fingers. Where her fingers were changing into leaves, the stone was cut so thin that light shone through them. Light, falling through stone. I’d had no idea something like that could be real. She reached for light and her fingers changed and filled with it.

We walked home, and I was dazed, looking everywhere and seeing the things like Daphne—mostly leaves and flowers with the sunlight through them. And we got home and settled into other things. Then days later, when I thought we were talking about something else, you looked up at me, all of a sudden, and said, Diaphanous. The ballet skirt. And I looked down at you where you were lying over an open math book, and smiled back at you.

And saw one more thing. Light gets inside your eyes, San, a kind of shimmer, when you smile at me. Light falling through, colored and clear.

What you call sins, I call the great spirit of love—in all its...

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:46:08 -0700

What you call sins, I call the great spirit of love—in all its forms.

Letters from Vincent van Gogh to his brother,...

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:43:48 -0700

Letters from Vincent van Gogh to his brother, Theo.
via: blue-voids

Photo

Mon, 20 May 2013 01:11:00 -0700

Hi, darlings!!!

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:17:47 -0700

I’d like to do a brand new tmi tuesday this week, because I so miss thinking about all those beautiful questions—I’ve been going through my tmi tuesday tag—and I wonder, if you have any, if you could drop them off sometime? Anything pretty, or about writing or books, or anything just wonder-y, really. Anon is back on for good.

Hope everyone is doing well—

Monet Refuses the Operation

Sun, 19 May 2013 01:45:09 -0700

Monet Refuses the Operation:

by Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

wasbella102: Antique ship’s logbook 1797

Sun, 19 May 2013 01:40:49 -0700

wasbella102:

Antique ship’s logbook 1797

"All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was."

Sat, 18 May 2013 22:30:13 -0700

“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”

- Toni Morrison

fleurdulys: Sappho - Gustave Moreau 1893

Sat, 18 May 2013 12:55:40 -0700

fleurdulys:

Sappho - Gustave Moreau

1893