January 2010
24 posts
“‘Depressing’ isn’t a word I would use to describe my music. But there is some sadness in it — there has to be, so that the happiness in it will matter.”
—Elliott Smith
Lion Face Boy
Seabear
“Lion Face Boy” - Seabear
“We are more different now than when we were kids, but that’s the way old friends work, I think. With new friends, what you have in common is more circumstantial: colleges, jobs, hobbies, acquaintances-of-the-hour. What old friends share goes deeper than that. Your lives can branch off in completely different directions, but always you share that knot of a past - heartbreaks and sleep overs and screened-in porches - and the raw, peculiar memory of yourself which, in part, belongs to them.”
—Elise Juska
Don't Watch Me Dancing
Little Joy
“Don’t Watch Me Dancing” - Little Joy
“There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.”
—Maya Angelou
The End
Ellie Goulding
“The End” - Ellie Goulding
http://elliegoulding.co.uk
http://www.myspace.com/elliegoulding
“Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.”
—a letter from Sylvia Plath’s to her sister
"We Are Always Too Late" by Eavan Boland
Memory
Is in two parts.
First the re-visiting:
the way even now I can see
those lovers at the café table. She is weeping.
It is New England, breakfast time, winter. Behind her,
outside the picture window, is
a stand of white pines.
New snow falls and the old,
losing its balance in the branches,
showers down,
adding fractions to it. Then
The re-enactment. Always that.
I am getting up, pushing away
coffee. Always I am going towards her.
The flush and scald is
to her forehead now, and back down to her neck.
I raise one hand. I am pointing to
those trees, I am showing her our need for these
beautiful upstagings of
what we suffer by
what survives. And she never even sees me.
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
—David Foster Wallace
"Look At The Birds" by Li-Young Lee
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born
out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, Friend, open
at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.
“They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
—Edgar Allan Poe
Die Young
The Sweet Serenades
“Die Young” - The Sweet Serenades
“Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night’s sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too.”
—Lemony Snicket
“The birds have started to sing. They’re so so easy to please. The sun comes up and they think they’re in heaven.”
—Sy Safransky (via wherewolves)