"infants begin to see by noticing the edges of things. how do they know an edge is an edge? by passionately wanting it not to be."


"where does that hole come from? it comes from the lover's classifactory process. Desire for an object that he never knew he lacked is defined, by a shift of distance, as desire for a necessary part of himself. Not a new acquisition but something that was always, properly. his. Two lacks become one."



from Eros the bittersweet, by Anne Carson

The Way You Wish You Could Live In The Storm

I was traveling for six days - Boston, New York - cars, buses, trains. Little sleep, movies, late dinners, rivers. Let's have a song.



I'm exhausted, sick. My system always falls apart after whirlwind trips.

I haven't seen Noel in ten years, and have only spoken briefly, over email. We met when I was seventeen, he was twenty-one, at a party somewhere, the middle of the years when I was hellbent & a spiraling little oblivion. Noel was always kind to me. We didn't really stay in touch after that summer. So when we met for lunch, in New York, it was wonderful to find that 10 years later, he is as lovely and interesting as I'd remembered. Noel's a painter. You can see some of his work here

I went out to Brooklyn to see Angelica, also a painter, who I studied theater with at Syracuse. We sat in her garden, drank strong coffee, talked and talked and talked. Angie is, I think, the strongest female I know, in all ways. She welcomed me into her studio-- I hadn't seen her larger paintings. I was speechless.


Angelica, talking about her work

It's beautiful to see that the people I hold dear, who I am bound to in one way or another, have committed themselves to the act of making in the same way I have - that they've given making a space in their lives, a central space. Carry on, chickadees, carry on.

Very happy that yes, The Rumpus did publish my little essay on Gregory Orr. You can read it here.

Dreamy Sunday; after swimming, late lunch in a dimly lit Thai place with one of my oldest friends. I remember when he came out to me. We were 14 or 15, and he took me slowly by the wrist out of our friend's old mansion to stand in the dusk on the gravel driveway. I'd already known, of course, so it wasn't the information was the revelation, it was how much he trusted me.

Went to see Tree of Life last night. This is the summer of movies alone. Very needed. Writing a lot about movies these days. Tonight I'm watching A Prophet, directed by Jacques Audiard. Audiard has directed two beautiful movies in the past ten years, Read My Lips, and The Beat That My Heart Skipped -- I think I'm going to see the latter again soon, as I saw it in the theatre in Boston when it came out in 2005. I think Audiard is fascinated by brutality and beauty, how they can live so tightly knit together. He's a terrifically sensitive director.

Here are 9 poems Terrance Hayes thinks you should read, and he's right.

My fortune cookie today said "Necessity is the mother of risk."