From: The Secret Year

"I want to call you. I just looked up your family's number. I'm pretty sure it's yours because the address is on the flats, near the Higgins Farm Bridge. Would you want me to call you? I feel so cut off from you. It seems crazy that I don't even know how you are. Sometimes I love the fact that nobody knows about us. We have this secret, so juicy I can feel my mouth dripping. Other times, like now, it seems stupid to hide this way.

It's later. I just talked to you. You didn't sound mad. Your voice felt good in my ear."

Jennifer R. Hubbard

A Rare Saturday Post

I loved the Daily Literary Quote so much, I had to immediately Web-nap it:

"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

Mary Oliver

Enjoy your weekends, bloggees!

From: "What Do Women Want?"

"I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath..."

You can hear Kim Addonizio read this poem aloud by visiting the Academy of American Poets Web site.

Loves her. Don't want to infringe on copyright though, so go read the whole thing. Read more from her book Tell Me at her author's Web site.

From: "Passer Mortuus Est"

"Death devours all lovely things...

After all my erstwhile dear,
My no longer cherished;
Need we say it was not love,
Just because it perished?"

from "Passer Mortuus Est"
Edna St. Vincent Millay

From: "Thirty-three"

Deep in thought, I forgive everyone
as the cluttered streets greet me once again...
Tomorrow's just an excuse away,
so I pull my collar up and face the cold
on my own.

...

For a moment, I lose myself
wrapped up in the pleasures of the world.
I've journeyed here and there and back again
but in the same old haunts I still find my friends.

Mysteries not ready to reveal,
sympathies I'm ready to return:

I'll make the effort.
Love can last forever...

"Thirty-three"
Smashing Pumpkins

From: "The Dead"

"She was walking on before him so lightly and so erect that he longed to run after her noiselessly, catch her by the shoulders and say something foolish and affectionate into her ear. She seemed to him so frail that he longed to defend her against something and then to be alone with her...

Like the tender fire of stars, moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illumined his memory. He longed to recall to her those moments, to make her forget the years of their dull existence together and remember only their moments of ecstasy. For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul or hers. Their children, his writing, her household cares had not quenched all their souls' tender fire. In one letter that he had written to her then he had said: "Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?"

Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne towards him from the past. He longed to be alone with her. When the others had gone away, when he and she were in the room in the hotel, then they would be alone together. He would call her softly:

"Gretta!"

Perhaps she would not hear at once: she would be undressing. Then something in his voice would strike her. She would turn and look at him...."

from "The Dead", a story in Dubliners, a short-fiction collection by James Joyce who said "One of the things I could never get accustomed to in my youth was the difference I found between life and literature."

From: "Black Boys on Mopeds"

"These are dangerous days--
To say how you feel is to dig your own grave."

Sinead O'Connor

Yep, I'm Going There.

I don't usually talk about that famous vampire saga because mentioning an opinion on it seems to polarize people. There's the raging beast made up of shrieking girls and this annoyed mob made up of critics and jealous guys, and in the middle are people like me. I loves it, but I'm not in love with it, you know?

Anyway, I am in love with the New Moon Soundtrack

Here's how we met: I heard the first notes of "Hearing Damage" when I went to see New Moon, and my audio-self couldn't turn away. I knew I must own the soundtrack as soon as possible.

At home I searched for the track list and saw "Thom Yorke," and I was all, Like Radiohead Thom Yorke?

I received a burned copy yesterday and have been ingesting almost every track ever since.

I've already added Lykke Li's CD Youth Novels (The title alone tells me I'll love it.) to my Christmas list. I love how "Possibility" sounds like what it means. I suppose all songs try to do that, but this one actually succeeds. She perfectly captures the feeling of the realization:

"There’s a possibility--
All that I had was all I'm going to get"

So there it is. My stance on the entire Twilight Saga and all that comprises it: decidedly positive. What say you about this massive international franchise?

From: A Room With A View

"Though you fly to Greece, and never see him again, or forget his very name, George will work in your thoughts till you die. It isn't possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal."

A Room With A View
E. M. Forster

Found: Hope

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace."

Jimi Hendrix

Found: Love

It's all you need.

From: Bloom

"I think the way I feel when I look at Evan comes from her. In pictures taken the day she married my dad, she was reckless, laughing, spinning around in circles. She looked like her world was him. She looked a kind of happy I can't even imagine.

I don't want that. I don't want to be like that. I don't want to feel the way she did because I know what happens when you do. You love with your whole heart, with everything, and you wake up one morning and kiss someone good-bye the way you always do except you mean it as good-bye forever."

Elizabeth Scott

P.S. I've been reading books on the Kindle, and I cannot believe the number of typos. Is this the standard for Kindle books? Were these mistakes most likely in the hard copies too?

Poetry Isn't Dead, or Quiet

Despite what the Debbie Downers would have you believe, people still write kick-ass poetry.

Want proof?

You can listen to Kim Addonizio read one of her best poems, "You Were," at poems out loud, which features poets reading poetry and other poem-related frackery.

Arts & Crafts: Writing and Painting

Occasionally, I like to slap a painting up here on the Booknapped, and offer a few facts about its artist or the period when it was painted. Perhaps pictures deserve their own blog like Artnapped or The Painter’s Almanac, but that will not do.

This excerpt from an interview with Ernest Hemingway explains the connection between painting and writing:

Interviewer: Who would you say are your literary forebears, those you have learned the most from?

Hemingway: Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgeniev, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant, the good Kipling, Thoreau, Captain Marryat, Shakespeare, Mozart, Quevedo, Dante, Virgil, Tintoretto . . . Goya, Giotto, Cezanne, Van Gogh . . . I put in painters, because I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers . . . I should think what one learns from composers and from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious.

Painters, writers, musicians: we are all telling stories, creating atmosphere, using perspective, pacing, and color to create feeling in our audience.

For instance, the image above this post titled Du Mourron pour les Oiseaux by Raymond Peynet, a French illustrator, offers a nice example of how big a part description of buildings should play in a love story. Translation in words: Not big at all.

You can see more art by Peynet at this site that wouldn’t let me copy its images. My favorite is this drawing. The saying at the bottom comes from the French idiom “On ne peut pas vivre d'amour et d'eau fraiche.” In English, “You can’t live on love and water alone.”

Apparently, this is what French people say to French children who don't want to work, just want to bang on the drum all day.

Something to Ponder

"Instant karma's going to get you."

-John Lennon

From: How to be Bad

“Jesse—“ she says.

“Tch,” I say. “hold your mouth still.” I use my pinky to smooth on a dab of strawberry “Lip Burst” and it’s unsettling, touching her in such an intimate way. It’s not like, Oh Mel, I want to kiss you. It’s just… oh, I don’t know. She’s so different from me.

E. Lockhart, Sarah Mlynowski, Lauren Myracle

From: "Take This Advice"

When your husband dies, vary your story.
Never settle for the uninteresting
truth. You, remember, were the woman
some fortune teller or drunken lover
said would die in white across an expanse
of grand piano - gunshot, bad drugs.
You are not one for the gentle common.

A decent man dies, his heart a fallen cake.
Tell it better....

...Tell his friends he died inside of you,
moaning his blood cry, making you cling, you
both far away eating berries, rubbing sticks.
Say he was often a surprising
lover, vigorous, and terrifying.
Just like that.
He was a passionate man, hungry but sure.

Tell no one he died in his sleep, gasping
for his share of air....

Gailmarie Pahmeier

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: 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