nicci's journal

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It's been a while since I poster; I don't take pictures of myself as often as I perhaps should. This one turned out well!



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Now playing: Loudon Wainwright III - Thanksgiving (Folk Alley (( All Folk. All The Time. )))
http://foxytunes.com/artist/loudon+wainwright+iii/track/thanksgiving

Hi. I'm new. And this is my self-portrait.



♥

♥ Yesterday was Constance's birthday party. Arrived about an hour late and made my way through Magda's house, following the sound of screaming into the garden where a scene of unbridled carnage was under way with adults chasing after children, children chasing rabbits and, in the corner, a little fence behind which were two rabbits, a gerbil, an ill-looking sheep and a pot-bellied pig.

♥ Rebecca looked as though she had eaten a tiramisù and only just checked the fat units.

♥ Thank God have got cappuccino to help self through aftermath of hell of buying cappuccino when late. Is bizarre how cappuccino queue thing gives whole areas of London appearance of war- or communism-torn culture with people standing patiently in huge queues for hours as if waiting for bread in Sarajevo while others sweat, roasting and grinding, banging metal things full of gunge around, with steam hissing.

♥ Bloody, bloody, bloody. Have spent all day in changing rooms of Oxford Street trying to squeeze my breasts into bikini tops designed for people with breasts either arranged one on top of the other in the center of their chests or one under each arm, with the harsh downlighting making me look like River Café frittata.

♥ Arrived v. late owing to typical motorway signpost debacle (if war today, better, surely, to confuse Germans by leaving signposts up?).

♥ Very black. All my life I have had the feeling something terrible was about to happen and now it has.

♥ Was completely overcome. Was the best present I had ever had in life.

"Thank you, thank you, I can't thank you enough," I said emotionally, on the verge of flinging my arms round him, and taking him roughly against the bars.

~~Bridget Jones the Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding.

The Intruder
by David R. Slavitt


He broke in, picking the lock, or having stolen
a key, and he knew the code to disarm the alarm,

some homeless guy, a crazy street-person, harmless
you’d think, but you’re wrong: he likes it here, and he stays.

He rummages through my closets and dresser drawers
and tries on my clothing, which happens, of course, to fit him.

He runs my comb through his hair. He uses my toothbrush.
He lies down on my side of the bed for a nap.

He has settled in. In the mornings, he sits at my place
and has his coffee and toast, reading my paper.

He borrows my car and drives to meet my classes;
during my office hours he meets with my students.

We don’t look at all alike, but he’s living my life.
I try to signal my friends with whom he dines

or my wife with whom he is sleeping: "This isn’t me.
He’s an impostor. How can you not have noticed?

He’s old! He’s nasty. Also, he’s clearly crazy!
How can he fool you this way? And how can you stand him?"

They pay me no mind, pretending not to have noticed.
Could they somehow be in on this together?

But what is his purpose? Was he also displaced
from apartment, job, and wife? Did that turn him desperate?

And must I go out now myself to find a victim,
break into his house, and begin living his life?

"I am choosing to write this book to my sons. They are little boys now and they will never know what they came from through me, unless I tell them. It is not written for them to read now but when they are grown and the pains and joys have tousled them a little. And if the book is addressed to them, it is for a good reason. I want them to know how it was, I want to tell them directly, and perhaps by speaking directly to them I shall speak directly to other people. One can go off into fanciness if one writes to a huge nebulous group but I think it will be necessary to speak very straight and clearly and simply if I address my book to my two little boys who will be men before they read my book. They have no background in the world of literature, they don't know the great stories of the world as we do. And so I will tell them one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest story of all - the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness. I shall try to demonstrate to them how these doubles are inseparable - how neither can exist without the other and how out of their groupings creativeness is born. I shall tell them this story against the background of the county I grew up in and along the river I know and do not love very much. For I have discovered that there are other rivers. And this my boys will not know for a long time nor can they be told. A great many never come to know that there are other rivers. Perhaps that knowledge is saved for maturity and very few people ever mature. It is enough if they flower and reseed. That is all that nature requires of them. But sometimes in a man or a woman awareness takes place - not very often and always inexplainable. There are no words for it because there is no one ever to tell. This is a secret not kept a secret, but locked in wordlessness. In utter loneliness the writer tries to explain the inexplicable. And sometimes if he is very fortunate and if the time is right, a very little of what he is trying to do trickles through - not ever very much. And if he is a writer wise enough to know it can't be done, then he is not a writer at all. A good writer always works at the impossible. There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights. And giving up the impossible he gives up writing. Whether fortunate or unfortunate, this has not happened to me. The same blind effort, the straining and puffing go on in me. And always I hope that a little trickles through. This urge dies hard."

"Someone just dumped a whole garbage can of orange peels out the window."

Teddy took in most of his head [from the window]. "They float very nicely," he said without turning around. "That's interesting.

"I don't mean it's interesting that they float.It's interesting that I know about them being there. If i hadn't seen them, then I wouldn't know they were there, and if i didn't know they were there, I wouldn't be able to say that they even exist.

"Some of them are starting to sink now. In a few minutes, the only place they'll still be floating will be inside my mind. That's quite interesting, because if you look at it a certain way, that's where they started floating in the first place.

"After i go out this door, I may only exist in the minds off all my acquaintances," he said. "I may be an orange peel."


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Teddy, Nine Stories, Salinger.

sorry if this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. this conversation about the orange peels goes on between other conversations for a few pages!

“A photograph is a portrait painted by the sun bathroom lights.”

I'm so sick of studying for finals I am going to throw up - so instead of doing that I decided to post a couple random pictures!




( Read more... )

And I was feeling just content enough to forget you Skeletons grow stronger when kept from the light. And I was feeling just content enough to forget you Skeletons grow stronger when kept in the rearview.

"All the emails I get these days start with but I've been so busy, and I don't understand how we can be so busy and then have nothing to say to each other."


"He was talking quite slowly, breathlessly, he said and the worst thing was, it was strange, the worse thing, more than the fear of what might happen to me, what they might do or how I might get out of it, the worst thing was thinking that nobody would ever know, that I would just be missing, disappeared, vanished.
He looked at me and he said can you imagine that?
He said can you imagine anything more lonely?"

Star Dust
By Frank Bidart

Above the dazzling city lies starless
night. Ruthless, you are pleased the price of one

is the other. That night

dense with date palms, crazy with the breath-
less aromas of fresh-cut earth,

black sky thronging with light so thick the fixed

unbruised stars bewildered
sight, I wanted you dazzled, wanted you drunk.

As we lie on our backs in close dark parallel furrows newly

dug, staring up at the consuming sky, light
falling does not stop at flesh: each thing hidden, buried

between us now burns and surrounds us,

visible, like breath in freezing air. What you ignore or refuse
or cannot bear. What I hide that I ask, but

ask. The shimmering improvisations designed to save us

fire melts to law. I touched the hem of your garment. You opened
your side, feeding me briefly just enough to show me why I ask.

Melancholy, as if shorn, you cover as ever each glowing pyre

with dirt. In this light is our grave. Obdurate, you say: We
are darkness. We are the city

whose brightness blots the stars from night.

When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness - and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.

I PROMISE that I will not post every day during my vacation.



This is me looking relaxed. But, when I look at this picture, all I can think is that I need to put "CLEAN OFF DESK" on my to-do list. :)