My sir, you smell like you took a fat sh*t and splashed Brut all over your crack and called it good. #afterparty #ofsorts

As Jimmy Boggs used to remind us, revolutions are made out of love for people and for place. He often talked about loving America enough to change it. 'I love this country,' he used to say, 'not only because my ancestors' blood is in the soil but because of what I believe it can become.' Love isn't just something you feel. It's something you do everyday when you go out and pick the paper and bottles scattered the night before on the corner, when you stop and talk to a neighbor, when you argue passionately for what you believe in with whoever will listen, when you call a friend to see how they're doing, when you write a letter to the newspaper, when you give a speech and give 'em hell, when you never stop believing that we can all be more than what we are. In other words, Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after. -Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (2011)

Black and white photo portrait of Grace Lee Boggs, by Robin Holland

"Love isn't just something you feel. It's something you do everyday...Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after."

-Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015), The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the 21st Century
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

"The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality."

-James Baldwin, from Notes on the House of Bondage (The Nation, 1980)
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

a title page from Berger's Confabulations. "How to Resist A State of Forgetfulness"

"Those who are ready to protest against, and resist, what is happening today are legion, but the political means for doing so are for the moment unclear or absent.

How to wait in this state of forgetfulness?”

John Berger, from "Confabulations (2016), his final book
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

Gustave Flaubert, Novembre (Verbe) - book cover with small etching of a tree in autumn rain

"Est-ce que, pour toi, les jours de soleil en hiver sont aussi tristes ? Quand il fait du brouillard, le soir, et que je marche seule, il me semble que la pluie traverse mon coeur et le fait tomber en débris."

-Gustave Flaubert, “Novembre" (1842)
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

In fairly predictably PotT fashion, we have had a bit of a technical hitch with the "ad-free" feed.

We've temporarily granted ad-free subscribers access to the PotT: Extra Tyne feed until we can rectify the problem.

You can listen to George and Luke Edwards in Brussels! #apology #ofsorts #NUFC

"Ten Dispatches About Endurance in Face of Walls” (October 2004) I The wind got up in the night and took our plans away (Chinese proverb) #everynightapoem #ofsorts

The wind got up in

the night and took our plans away

-John Berger,
"Ten Dispatches About Endurance in Face of Walls”

#everynightapoem #ofsorts

Sketchbook stuff, to prove I'm am artist of sorts

#art #ofsorts

film still - close-up of Yuddy (Leslie Cheung)'s face, with back of Lizhen (Maggie Cheung)'s head - "Becaue of you, I'll remember that one minute"

the original dialogue:

「因為你我會記住這一分鐘。從現在開始我們就是一分鐘的朋友，這是事實，你改變不了，因為已經過去了。」

「(我不知道他有沒有因為我而記住那一分鐘，但我一直都記住這個人。)」

阿飛正傳 。王家衛 Wong Kar Wai, Days of Being Wild, 1990
#everynightapoem #ofsorts
always read love poems in hard times

“Don’t be afraid of the clocks, they are our time, time has been generous to us.

We are synchronized, now and forever.
I love you.”

-Félix Gonzáles-Torres (1957-1996)
Letter to Ross Laycock, 1988
#everynightapoem #ofsorts #clocks

Glenn Ligon, Double America, 2012. Installation at the National Gallery, neon tube lettering with the word America and upside down and mirrored

To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

-James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963.
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

two pages from Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Text on page says "and sailed back over a year/ and in and out of weeks/ and through a day". Illustration on right is the young boy Max in a monster suit, in a sailboat across seas, with a full moon overhead, and a palm tree in the gulley between the pages

"But the wild things cried, 'Oh please don't go –
we'll eat you up – we love you so!' And Max said, 'No!’"
–
"and sailed back over a year
and in and out of weeks
and through a day"

#mauricesendak, #botd in 1928.
It's Max's look of stoic resignation that I love so much.

#everynightapoem #ofsorts

A nine-grid sequence of scenes from Chungking Express(1994)

Every day I buy
a can of pineapple with an expiration date of May 1
because May loves pineapple
and May 1 is my birthday.
I tell myself
that if she doesn’t come back
by the time I’ve bought 30 cans,
then our love will expire too

Chungking Express 重慶森林
dir. Wong Kar Wai
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

Fallen blossoms on rainy steps

“Let it pass; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Sensible Thing”
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

War creates two categories of persons: those who outlive it and those who don’t. Both carry wounds. -Anne Carson (from Norma Jeane Baker of Troy) #everynightapoem #ofsorts @chowleen.bsky.social

War creates two categories of persons: those who outlive it and those who don’t.
Both carry wounds.
-Anne Carson
(from Norma Jeane Baker of Troy)

#everynightapoem #ofsorts
@chowleen.bsky.social

Turkish Süper Lig table

I am consoled and amused at the fact that the 4th placed team in the Turkish Süper Lig is clearly from Yorkshire. #humour #ofsorts

Happiest Moment If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English-language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.

and he would have to say the happiest of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.

-Lydia Davis, “Happiest Moment”

(tonight’s #everynightapoem #ofsorts is a story I'll be reading with my students in our #storyworlds seminar tomorrow; it's a longtime @amitava.bsky.social favorite, too)

Ten Dispatches About Endurance in Face of Walls (October 2004) 1 The wind got up in the night and took our plans away. (Chinese proverb)

The wind got up in

the night and took our plans away

-John Berger, “Ten Dispatches About Endurance in Face of Walls”
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.

John Berger, most beloved, passed away on January 2, 2017.

"What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried...With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.”

#everynightapoem #ofsorts

Why is one compelled to write? To set oneself apart, cocooned rapt in solitude, despite the wants of others. Virginia Woolf had her room. Proust his shuttered windows. Marguerite Duras her muted house. Dylan Thomas his modest shed. All seeking an emptiness to imbue with words. The words that will penetrate virgin territory, crack unclaimed combi-nations, articulate the infinite. The words that formed Lolita, The Lover, Our Lady of the Flowers. There are stacks of notebooks that speak of years of aborted efforts, deflated euphoria, a relentless pacing of the boards. We must write, engaging in a myriad of struggles, as if breaking in a willful foal. We must write, but not without consistent effort and a measure of sacrifice: to channel the future, to revisit childhood, and to rein in the follies and horrors of the imagination for a pulsating race of readers.

"Why is one compelled to write? To set oneself apart, cocooned, rapt in solitude, despite the wants of others."

-Patti Smith, Why I Write
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

Work Schedule, 1932-1933 -Henry Miller Miscellanea COMMANDMENTS 1. Work on one thing at a time until finished. 2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring." 3. Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand. 4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time! 5. When you can't create you can work. 6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers. 7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it. 8. Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only. 9. Discard the Program when you feel like it-but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude. 10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing. 11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

A December work schedule.

"Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand."

(I find its aspirations touching, given what we know of the actual contour of Henry Miller’s lived days)
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

Cover of Gustave Flaubert, Novembre. Pale yellow background with small center woodblock print of a wintry tree

"Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins."

-Gustave Flaubert, 'November' (trans. Andrew Brown)
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

photograph of rain-puddled street covered in fallen leaves, Durham, NC

"Est-ce que, pour toi, les jours de soleil en hiver sont aussi tristes ? Quand il fait du brouillard, le soir, et que je marche seule, il me semble que la pluie traverse mon coeur et le fait tomber en débris."

-Gustave Flaubert, “Novembre" (1842)
(translation below)
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

"I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art."
-Toni Morrison
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

On Hedonism Beauty makes me hopeless. I don't care why anymore I just want to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead-calm sea. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.

Desires as round as peaches bloom
in me all night, I no longer gather what falls

-Anne Carson
[“Short Talks” From Plainwater]

#everynightapoem #ofsorts

"and sailed back over a year
and in and out of weeks
and through a day"

Remembering Maurice Sendak, #botd in 1928.
from Where the Wild Things Are - my favorite page in the book. It's Max's look of stoic resignation that I love so much.

#everynightapoem #ofsorts

#MerMay: Caduceus as a mana...tea. I'll show myself out. #criticalrolefanart #ofsorts

"Yet I could not erase all possibility of hope, for hope lies in the future. I could not rely on my own present evidence in its lack, to refute his assertion that it might exist one day."

-Lu Xun, from Preface to Call to Arms, 1922.
#everynightapoem #ofsorts #救救孩子

You mentioned spring's delaying — I blamed her for the opposite.

I would eat evanescence slowly.

-Emily Dickinson
letter to Elizabeth Holland (ltr 318)
#everynightapoem #ofsorts #march1

"It is a very plum plum."

-Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
#everynightapoem #ofsorts