This is on my mind today:
Knowledge is not wisdom: cleverness is not [either], not without awareness of our death, not without recalling just how brief our flare is.
– Euripides
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The Cleverness Trap
1 MayLagerfeld Gives Great Advice
25 MarThis morning I remembered reading this recently from Karl Lagerfeld, the king of quotables:
You cannot have the butter and the money for the butter.
A Good Rule
24 MarAn amusingly earnest excerpt from one of my notebooks, written five years ago or more, that I just found the other day:
Try not to set up a structure where your hope is one side, and human nature is on the other. Your odds of winning that are not good.
License to Ill
17 MarEvery once in a while, someone you care about has the courage to call out a crutch of yours that you don’t really see. If you’re lucky, they do it with panache rather than malice.
In its most sophisticated form, rare because it takes both insight and courage, the person gives you the gift of contrasting what you did/said with what you could have done/said. They hand you a better you, right on a platter.
I’ve been dishing out these moments left and right lately, and last night got dished to.
Do not shrink from these moments. Smile sheepishly. Nod. Grow.
And be grateful that you have someone like that around.
His Irksome Aunt
16 MarChristina Nehring:
The presence of the inessential weakens the power of the essential. Love is not about micromanaging your partner’s quotidian concerns: her noisy co-workers and his irksome aunt; her brassiere sizes and his starched shirts. “Leave this touching and clawing,” exclaims Emerson. Forget this petty detail! Let your love be to you “a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance…not news, not pottage. I can get politics and chat and neighbourly conveniences from cheaper companions.”
The Fast and the Slow
16 MarSo many conversations with Koo about what I will very broadly call “romance” end up talking about time. We’re in agreement on most things, though we tend to diverge in the short run due to his patience and my intensity, which makes our advice to each other fairly amusing. For instance, in one personal email, Koo referred to time as “an ineluctable motherfucker”.
While there’s much to be said, perhaps it all boils down to this:
Some things have to feel like they’re happening too fast in order to be felt at all. Other things must be earned slowly or they’re not real.
Pick Your Poison
11 MarTwo great 19th century thinkers:
“It seems that it is madder never to abandon one’s self than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive and a slave, than always to walk in armor”
– Margaret Fuller
And:
Go farther
Go further
Go harder
Is that not
Why we came? and if not,
Then why bother?– Jay-Z, Mr. Carter
Hello There, 2010
23 JanIt’s a little late for my first post of 2010, but allow me to introduce myself to you, 2010, my name is Gunny Scarfo.
Last year shortly after New Years I wrote about how much had changed since the previous year. I like that post a lot, so let’s try that again.
One year ago, I was still sorting through a multitude of emotions about the breakup with JLG. It was before Alice Miller’s work on grandiosity had time to sink in, before time with GM, before the book project, before the articles were published, before Grza took off to London, before the raw financial brutality of those three months in Spring, before evening music, before Koo’s book was published, before Vindication of Love, before Haneke, before Stefan, before Laguna Beach 2, before the Friday Night Lights obsession, before the streetshots on this blog, before S-Dot, before Chi, before Polen, before the killer Thanksgiving with Jabes/Koo/Claudia, before Rob Liddell un-necklaced my greatest albatross, before the Kindle, before the secret new One Method which is not called the One Method and which no one knows about yet but will end up leaking at some point in 2010, and before the new Braeside traditions.
Most of all, it was before the Me Lifestyle move, before the IRS resolution, and before moving back to my most beloved Brooklyn. In those final three, I’ve felt my entire life shift into a new gear. 2009 was a year of big highlights and really, really painful lowlights.
But above all, it was the year I learned what humility and serenity were.
Man on Extremely Small Island
17 Dec
Well, this is a special day. Jason Koo’s first book, which won the 2008 De Novo Prize, came out this week and you can buy it through Amazon.
Since he has a reputation for being something of a rockstar at his readings, my guess is that this book is going to do pretty well in both popular and critical regard. It’s pretty exciting to hold a bound collection of his poems in your hand, and the Trent-Thibodeux-designed cover is just absolutely sick.
This book really has everything in it. No, I mean literally: there’s a hippo, there’s baseball, there’s limousines, there’s baking cookies, there’s sex, there’s text messaging, there are gorgeous lines about “the trees / tossing their heads in the wind like conductors” and “take on the pain of sunlight in your eyes”, there’s highly skilled use of profanity, and everything else.
I’m not alone when I say that this is the poetry you’ve been waiting for.
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