Happy Birthday Walt Whitman!

O ME! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless--of cities fill'd with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light--of the objects mean--of the struggle ever renew'd;
Of the poor results of all--of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest--with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring--What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here--that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

Yawp!

Arts & Crafts: Balthus

Golden Days by Balthus

Despite not receiving any art training, Balthasar Klossowski de Rola began painting in 1924 when he was 16. Because his parents and brother were artists, he grew up among some of the finest artists and writers of his time. He and his mother were friends of Rainer Maria Rilke, with Rilke acting as a sort of mentor to Balthus, writing text to accompany his art.

Balthus is best known for his images of sexualized adolescent girls. Golden Days was painted between 1944 and 1946. Balthus often took many years to finish paintings.

More than one of my stories was influenced or inspired by the paintings of Balthus. Here is Posh Spice in a recent interpretation of Golden Days.

From: A Night Without Armor

P.S.

I wrote you those nice
poems only because
the honest ones
would frighten you

Jewel

From: On The Road

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'"
literary quote
Jack Kerouac

From: "Two Suns in the Sunset"

"I think of all the good things that we have left undone."
music quotes
Pink Floyd

From: "Beneficence"

"I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predacious sequence of chance events, but shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed upon us and unappreciated."
quotes from literature
Vladimir Nabokov

From: Walden

"What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate."

written by Henry David Thoreau literary quotes

Found on Writer's Almanac

"I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,

and it was miserable, for that was how I thought
poetry worked: you digested experience and shat

literature."

From "Mingus at the Showplace"
William Matthews

From: Wintergirls

"Jennifer stands with her back to Dr. Marrigan and me and asks her husband some lame questions about the garbage pickup tomorrow and his socks in the dryer, little homey details to remind Wife Number One who wears the diamond ring around here."

Laurie Halse Anderson

Found: Good Advice

"To thine own self be true."

William Shakespeare

Saturday Morning Grammar Fun

I laughed and laughed at this blog Apostrophe Abuse. It's like one of my co-editors, with visuals.

From: "Posters"

"He gets his courage from the can;
it makes him feel like a man,
because he's loving all the ladies,
but the ladies don't love him at all.

'cause when he's not drunk,
he's only stuck on himself,
and then he has the nerve
to say he needs a decent girl."

Jack Johnson

Found: Truth

"We are the people our parents warned us about."

Jimmy Buffet

From: Audrey, Wait!

"I vowed to keep it together until I was safe at home with my stereo, Bendomolena, and the saddest, most dramatic mix CD I could come up with. The Smiths were already going to figure in heavily, I could tell. Sixteen, clumsy, and shy, that’s the story of my life. Word, Morrissey. Total word."

Robin Benway

From: Zen in the Art of Writing

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."

Ray Bradbury

Happy Birthday, Salvador Dali.

The Tower, 1934

"[W]hen you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape"

Federico García Lorca

From: Crank

From "Okay, Over the Last Few Years"

"As for Dad, well, truth be told, his love
of drugs surpassed his love of family."

Crank
Ellen Hopkins

From: That Summer

"...Sometimes the people you choose to believe are wrong."

"He loved you," I told her. "He still does, I think."

"He doesn't love me," she said, crossing her arms against her chest. "He might still love me as I was at fifteen, when I didn't know any better. When I trusted everyone. I'm not that person anymore." She started walking, holding aside the branches so I could get through. "He's just a boy, Haven. He was the first to really hurt me, but he's just a boy. There were a lot of them."

"Not like him," I said softly, although I knew that after today I'd never see him, or that summer at the beach, the same way.

"Maybe not," she said as we came to the car. "But maybe that isn't so bad. You can't love anyone that way more than once in a lifetime. It's too hard and it hurts too much when it ends. The first boy is always the hardest to get over, Haven. It's just the way the world works."

Sarah Dessen

From: "Karma Chameleon"

"Every day is like a survival.
You're my lover, not my rival."

Karma Chameleon
Culture Club

From: Crank

Not My Type

No shirt
hot bod.
His, that is.
So why did
I break out in
a sweat.

No shoes
barefoot,
bare chest, with
a bare, baby face
to make the
angels sing.

Nothing
but ragged
cut-offs,
hugging a
tawny six-pack,
and a smile.

No pin-up
pretty boy
could touch
a smile that
zapped every cell.
He was definitely

not my type.

Ellen Hopkins

From: Someone Like You

“…I deserved better. I deserved I love yous and kiwi fruits and flowers and warriors coming to my door, besotted with love. I deserved pictures of my face in a million expressions, and the warmth of a baby’s kick under my hand. I deserved to grow, and to change, to become all the girls I could ever be over the course of my life, each one better than the last.”

Sarah Dessen

From: "A Quick Trip Through My Adolescence"

"...I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette."

Lester Bangs