From me to you

Note to My Readers

Maybe you don’t read poetry.
Maybe this clear singing on paper
is a sound you have heard
only dimly, if ever,
muffled in the dull thuds of rhythm,
singsonged into a rhyming trance.

But my songs are more pennywhistle than opera,
more slow drum than symphony.
And if you’ve ever breathed in
the grey mist of a wet November
and thought it a fine day,

if you’ve ever wondered
what the mice must think,
or dreamt of speeches from the dead,

if you would swear
by all things holy
that stones hum to themselves
on hot, still days,

if beauty to you is
the cracked calluses of gnarled hands
and love, the sweetness of silence,

then you already know
what I do.

Renee Carter Hall

translation

Looking at the gaps between the words as you move from one language to another, and the way meaning disappears into the gaps — that experience is what I value most about translation. We operate all the time with language as if it says what we mean. It never does, but you don’t realize the flaccidity of that until you are actually trying to make one thing in one language into another language. It’s like being on a surface with a lot of cracks in it and looking down through the cracks to something like another world down there that you can almost see, almost express, but not quite. It’s frustrating in the sense that there’s an ideal understanding down there that’s not available but, on the other hand, it doubles reality because we don’t live in that ideal world, we live up here, and yet you can glimpse down through the cracks to that other thing.

Anne Carson
Interviewed by Kate Kellaway for The Guardian, Sunday 3oth October 2016

The bribe

on the lookout for adventure

We may say that all ages are dangerous to all people, in this dangerous life we live. But the thirties are a specially dangerous time for women. They have outlived the shyness and restraints of girlhood, and not attained to the caution and discretion of middle age. They are reckless, and consciously or unconsciously on the lookout for adventure. They see ahead of them the end of youth, and that quickens their pace.

Rose Macaulay
Dangerous Ages

Such truth as this…

The most intimate encounter you will ever experience is not with the naked body, but with the naked soul.

P

Pull your pants down – I know you’ve been stealing panties

Then I have a client – well, a lot of clients like this — who likes to wear women’s underwear and garters, thigh-highs and heels. They don’t go full cross-dresser. They just want to be the naughty boy who got caught wearing the panties. So we’ll do scenarios where we’re in the classroom and I’ll be Principal Hawn, and I’ll say, “Pull your pants down. I know you’ve been stealing panties out of the locker room,” and then I’ll spank the guy in the classroom. It’s like going back to a teacher maybe he fantasized about.

Hudsy Hawn
What It’s Really Like to Be a Professional Dominatrix

cunnilingus in Paris

You haven’t really lived until you experience cunnilingus in Paris on a wet April afternoon.