new Märchen

"While sifting through Von Schönwerth's work, Eichenseer found 500 fairytales, many of which do not appear in other European fairytale collections. For example, there is the tale of a maiden who escapes a witch by transforming herself into a pond. The witch then lies on her stomach and drinks all the water, swallowing the young girl, who uses a knife to cut her way out of the witch."

More at The Guardian.

Read "The Turnip Princess," one of the new tales, here.

absolutely amazing, if confirmed

"Living plants have been generated from the fruit of a little arctic flower, the narrow-leafed campion, that died 32,000 years ago, a team of Russian scientists reports. The fruit was stored by an arctic ground squirrel in its burrow on the tundra of northeastern Siberia and lay permanently frozen until excavated by scientists a few years ago."

More here.

Persona (1966)

The Doctor: I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being - not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert.

(The lighting in this scene is just perfection.)

Sylvia Plath

The Eye-Mote


Blameless as daylight I stood looking
At a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown,
Tails streaming against the green
Backdrop of sycamores. Sun was striking
White chapel pinnacles over the roofs,
Holding the horses, the clouds, the leaves

Steadily rooted though they were all flowing
Away to the left like reeds in a sea
When the splinter flew in and stuck my eye,
Needling it dark. Then I was seeing
A melding of shapes in a hot rain:
Horses warped on the altering green,

Outlandish as double-humped camels or unicorns,
Grazing at the margins of a bad monochrome,
Beasts of oasis, a better time.
Abrading my lid, the small grain burns:
Red cinder around which I myself,
Horses, planets and spires revolve.

Neither tears nor the easing flush
Of eyebaths can unseat the speck:
It sticks, and it has stuck a week:
I wear the present itch for flesh,
Blind to what will be and what was.
I dream that I am Oedipus.

What I want back is what I was
Before the bed, before the knife,
Before the brooch-pin and the salve
Fixed me in this parenthesis;
Horses fluent in the wind,
A place, a time gone out of mind.

pockets full of stones

Of course, my favorite songs from the new Florence album are about drowning. (The poem in my ms. that's been giving me the most trouble is about drowning.)






(this one is clearly Woolf-inspired...)

She keeps coming to LA, and I keep missing her because the show sells out before I know about it, and then everyone sells "extra" tickets on craigslist for double the face value. I can't let this happen next time she's coming to town.

best cake ever

I don't know if I could bring myself to stick a knife in a cake this awesome.

I meant to post this before

I reviewed Nick Flynn's The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands for the current issue of Pebble Lake Review. Click here to read it.