Lyric of the day

 Lyric of the day, because I’ve been chasing dreams lately

Simon&Garfunkel – America

Let us be lovers we’ll marry our fortunes together
I’ve got some real estate here in my bag
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner’s pies
And we walked off to look for America
Cathy I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
Michigan seems like a dream to me now
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I’ve gone to look for America
Laughing on the bus playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said be careful his bowtie is really a camera
Toss me a cigarette I think there’s one in the raincoat
We smoked the last one an hour ago
So I looked at the scenery she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field
Cathy I’m lost I said though I knew she was sleeping
I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They’ve all come to look for America
All come to look for America
America

Poem of the day

Djuna Barnes – From Fifth Avenue up

Someday beneath some hard
Capricious star—
Spreading its light a little
Over far,
We’ll know you for the woman
That you are.

For though one took you, hurled you
Out of space,
With your legs half strangled
In your lace,
You’d lip the world to madness
On your face.

We’d see your body in the grass
With cool pale eyes.
We’d strain to touch those lang’rous
Length of thighs,
And hear your short sharp modern
Babylonic cries.

It wouldn’t go. We’d feel you
Coil in fear
Leaning across the fertile
Fields to leer
As you urged some bitter secret
Through the ear.

We see your arms grow humid
In the heat;
We see your damp chemise lie
Pulsing in the beat
Of the over-hearts left oozing
At your feet.

See you sagging down with bulging
Hair to sip,
The dappled damp from some vague
Under lip,
Your soft saliva, loosed
With orgy, drip.

Once we’d not have called this
Woman you—
When leaning above your mothers
Spleen you drew
Your mouth across her breast as
Trick musicians do.

Plunging grandly out to fall
Upon your face.
Naked—female—baby
In grimace,
With your belly bulging stately
Into space.

Well, book of the day, actually. The book of repulsive women

3 o’clock in the night or the morning, 3rd of January

Three o’clock in the night or the morning. The unexpected hour. At the windows of the train, a line of fatigue-burned masks. In the seats, bodies dishevelled by a sleep that came by surprise. A woman’s voice recovering, in the darkness, the inflexions and the weight of all the things she isn’t speaking about as she speaks on the phone: “He topped up my pre-pay card when I told him I was out of credit…two euros and it’s just to talk to me, he says. I don’t know why he’s throwing money at me like that.” .

3 o’clock in the night or the morning, 1st of January

A couple of years ago I used to dream of running away. Home felt suffocating and I used to think in opposites; in runaway land, freedom and poverty were therefore inseparable and a place’s dirtiness was the mark of authenticity for the dreams I could chase there. I’ve more or less lost this obsession now that I’ve stopped thinking in binaries and managed to build ties and find freedoms in my home town; I can’t make up my mind whether this proves responsibility or jadedness, but it definitely feels like a resignation.

Still, I did manage to run away this New Year’s Eve. I spent it on the streets of Sibiu with some drunken acquaintainces and a couple of friends that dragged me away from the group and into a kebab place when they noticed I was becoming hypothermic. It was 3 o’clock in the night or the morning and after I warmed up enough for my brain to start working I realised I had found my way away from my home country to a place that truly belonged to the space of my old runaway dreams. This holiday was full of such magic moments. I’d almost forgotten their taste – at home, the real world gets lost in a bog of routine. It would do me good to remember to break out of this every now and then…with a bit of luck, next time I won’t need five days in a strange city to do that. Running away may be just a teenage fancy, but the need for magic is real.

Sections 1224-1225

Winter is here, the holidays are coming and I wish I had someone to get sincerely drunk with.

Poem of the day

Eleanor Wilner – Hunting Manual

The unicorn is an easy prey: its horn
in the maiden’s lap is an obvious
twist, a tamed figure—like the hawk
that once roamed free, but sits now, fat and hooded,
squawking on the hunter’s wrist. It’s easy
to catch what no longer captures
the mind, long since woven in,
a faded tapestry on a crumbling wall
made by the women who wore keys
at their waists and in their sleep came
hot dreams of wounded knights left bleeding
in their care, who would wake the next morning
groaning from the leftover lance in the groin,
look up into the round blond face beaming down
at them thinking “mine,” and say: “angel.”
Such beasts are easy to catch; their dreams
betray them. But the hard prey is the one
that won’t come bidden.

By these signs you will know it:
when you lift your lure
out of the water, the long plastic line
will be missing its end: the lure and the hook
will be gone, and the line will swing free
in the air, so light it will be without
bait or its cunning
sharp curl of silver. Or when you pull
your net from the stream, it will be eaten
as if by acid, its fine mesh sodden shreds.

Or when you go at dawn to check your traps,
their great metal jaws will be wrenched
open, the teeth blunt with rust
as if they had lain for years in the rain.
Or when the thunderstorm suddenly breaks
in the summer, next morning
the computer’s memory will be blank.

Look then for the blank card, the sprung trap,
the net’s dissolve, the unburdened
line that swings free in the air.
There. By day, go empty-handed to the hunt
and come home the same way
in the dark.

(listening to Katatonia)

Sunday morning. Sunday blogging. Sunday hangover. Aching muscles and a mind that won’t be pulled together. I really ought to be doing my homework, but I must have taken a wrong turn this morning… I went out on the balcony to glance at the sunrise and there was a certain clarity in the light, a meaningfulness of the buildings I don’t remember having seen for a couple of years. I knew that landscape better than I knew my own heart back then. Which isn’t saying much. I used to be such a fan of walls I had to spend years tearing some of the ones I’ve built apart. Crawling my way out of hiding places. Learning to take the heat. Yet today my head’s full of morning light, the music isn’t really reaching me and I’d get worried if I didn’t know this still, cool peace will dissappear with my hangover.

The first grapes of the year… (August 28, 2007)

…I received from the peasant woman that was sitting next to me in the railstation’s waiting room, yesterday night. Her train was only due in the morning and I reminded her of her drowned daughter.

“Hello, darkness, my old friend/Came to talk with you again” (July 29, 2007)

My favourite way of thinking is through fantasy; I’ll take a figment of an already-established story and make it grow until the themes and motives become apparent and my hazy questions become parts of a structure I can work with. There’s a downside, however; I’ve always been prone to getting lost in fairy kingdoms and falling in love with graven images, which makes it difficult to let go of a tale that has run its course.

Exam fun – June 26, 2007

One exam down, 5 to go. I’m terrified. Not because of the exams, they’re not that hard. The oral ones are, in fact, extremely easy. What scares me is what I hear when the future of the country opens its mouth. I finished writing my notes for my subject half an hour earlier, so I had plenty of time to watch people wrestle with words, try to beat ideas into submission only to come up with stuff like “Symbollism is a literrary current that appeared after romantism and deals with symbols”. I wish the system would aim at getting people to think more and memorise less; we’d still hear stupid stuff in the exam halls but they wouldn’t sound like:

Student(on the differences between historical novellas and fantastic novellas): Historical novellas have an author…..
Teacher: Don’t fantastic novellas have an author too?
Student: Well, yes, but there the author’s dreaming…

Maybe I shouldn’t get that worked up. After all, not everyone cares about literature. But I hate it when people spew up a mixture of undigested information, artificial cliches and natural stupidity, whether I’m in an exam hall or in a bar, and the school system does nothing but promote this kind of stuff.