They arrived at the desk of the Hotel Duncan and Smithed in, twitchy as flea-drummed squirrels. Her coat was squared and cream, his patent shoes were little boats you wouldn’t put to sea in. People, not meaning to, write themselves in to the soap that your life is, rise or fall in the plot. Seems that they were fleeing from the 1980s much as a hummingbird flies from a flower’s bell. These were the times when wine was still a treat and not yet considered a common bodily fluid. You will have heard that the mind works much as an oval of soap turned between two hands. She went round the room seeking lights that could be off without desire becoming love. He spread his arms behind his head, a gesture of libido she misread as test of temperature. Every carpet has its weave and underlay, seen only by the maker, the deliverer and the layer. The year was a dog but the day was as good as a song that ends with a wedding, meat on the rib. Evening was folding over the grid, slick walkers with armfuls of books splendored in dusk’s ask. The song of the pipes was eerie as a face pressed to glass, as a basketball with a mouth and teeth. They lay in the glow of the times and talked of how people form a queue to exact or escape love. Each sigh has a sequel, she thought, then he did, then the whole hotel pulsed through that thought. Scandal has an inroad, but you must tunnel out; she rose and stood up counting, all hair and beauty. Though we do not hear them, beneath our own, our shadows’ footsteps clatter, they match our dread.

"1979" - Roddy Lumsen

“Can we incorporate and treasure and be nourished by that which we do not understand? Of course.”

Read Joy Williams’s Art of Fiction interview, now online in its entirety.

Pictured: Williams, with husband Rust Hills in Sagaponack, New York, ca. 1977.

#Wuxi #China

Happy Birthday Andy

Andy Warhol

Flowers, 1964

25 Evil Movie Mirrors

“Metaphor is a powerful thing, just like ambiguity is a powerful thing, and you know we use these forms to orient ourselves in an insecure urban landscape like New York City.” Astor Place, the setting of Rick Moody’s radio play “Alamo.”

A momentary rupture to the vision: the wavering limbs of a birch fashion the fluttering hem of the deity’s garment, the cooling cup of coffee the ocean the deity waltzes across. This is enough—but sometimes the deity’s heady ta-da coaxes the cherries in our mental slot machine to line up, and our brains summon flickering silver like salmon spawning a river; the jury decides in our favor, and we’re free to see, for now. A flaw swells from the facets of a day, increasing the day’s value; a freakish postage stamp mails our envelope outside time; hairy, claw-like magnolia buds bloom from bare branches; and the deity pops up again like a girl from a giant cake. O deity: you transfixing transgressor, translating back and forth on the border without a passport. Fleeing revolutions of same-old simultaneous boredom and boredom, we hoard epiphanies under the bed, stuff them in jars and bury them in the backyard; we cram our closet with sunrise; prop up our feet and drink gallons of wow!; we visit the doctor because all this is raising the blood’s levels of c6H3(OH)2CHOHCH2NHCH3, the heart caught in the deity’s hem and haw, the oh unfurling from our chest like a bee from our cup of coffee, an autochthonous greeting: there. Who saw it?

"Epiphany" - Joanie Mackowski

René Magritte (Belgian, 1898-1967), La bonne aventure, 1937. Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 54 cm.

One way to cry: because you really are a bastard. One way to place your hand on your lover’s breasts and dream: of distant things like the Louvre and a small apartment in a Paris suburb, and of so much solitude and so many books. One way to die: provoke one of the snipers in the morning’s early hours.

DNA by Mazen Maarouf, translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and Nathalie Handal - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics (via guernicamag)

“I have never written a single word dressed in anything but my birthday suit.”

—Witold Gombrowicz, who was born on this day in 1904.

The sill plays a cruel joke—thrones me. Frames me lording over lawn mower stripes—myself in a shallow trench. In grass blades. Myself persisting, despite a dickhead sun—me in chlorophyll. Early, I find myself swaying—me! in the black chokeberry, me! in the rabbit’s throat. Me, the rabbit. Me dancing out pellets. Out-dancing myself— my father’s pellet gun, the hawk. The joke is a bright belly full of dark hopping along my father’s garden & the joke small, between wrapped talons, is the hawking too, is the axe sun, swift, rising, this joy. This joy, it swallows itself far too soon!

"Bay Window Lauds" - Marcus Wicker