©2012 YGM. All Rights Reserved.

How much of seduction  is personality? Maybe intellect = magic/obfuscation. Could charm cover a multitude of shifting lines? Think Terry Pratchett’s elves in Lords and Ladies. How without glamour they are just vaguely fox-faced beings with pointy ears and  little substance. How much does mind matter?

©2012 YGM. All Rights Reserved.

A man seems to be defined by the person that loves him; does this mean that a woman is defined by the person she loves?

I have to think about this. Will get back to you.

©2012 YGM. All Rights Reserved.

©2012 YGM. All Rights Reserved.

We hate to be the ones to say it, but the end of the summer romance is nigh, dear readers. As August becomes September, a noticeable chill lingers in the air; the cold creeps in slowly, hardening hearts and delivering sang-froid to young and old alike. In preparation, we suggest you arm yourselves with our modest arsenal of literary quotes that can be administered whenever you feel the time is right. Good luck, and let us know in the comments section what quotes have helped you get through a difficult breakup.

 

1. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

For the perpetual adolescent:

“I’ve seen men like you in Doris Day films, but I never thought they existed in real life…The men who can’t commit, who can’t say ‘I love you’ even when they want to, who start to cough and sputter and change the subject. But here you are. A living, breathing specimen. Incredible.”

2. Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano

When you’re putting out the fire:

“[Their love] had burned itself out, like a forgotten candle in an empty room, leaving behind a ravenous discontent.”

3. “Search for Love” by D.H. Lawrence

For the cold-hearted ending:

“Those that go searching for love
only make manifest their own lovelessness,
and the loveless never find love,
only the loving find love,
and they never have to seek for it.”

4. Douglas Yates

When it’s been too tepid for too long:

“People who are sensible about love are incapable of it.”

5. Gertrude by Herman Hesse

When you’re caught in a Gaga-esque bad romance:

“Passion is always a mystery and unaccountable, and unfortunately there is no doubt that life does not spare its purest children; often it is just the most deserving people who cannot help loving those that destroy them.”

6. Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway

When you’re in Key West, musing to a polydactyl cat with a whiskey in one hand:

“If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it.”

7. Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut

For all the times when you said hurtful things:

“I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, ‘Please—a little less love, and a little more common decency.’”

8. “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop

When you need to steel yourself for the inevitable:

“Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.”

9. “Break It Down” by Lydia Davis

When your man’s got a cheatin’ heart:

“Maybe the truth does not matter, but I want to know it if only so that I can come to some conclusions about such questions as: whether he is angry with me or not; if he is, then how angry; whether he still loves me or not; if he does, then how much; whether he loves me or not; how much; how capable he is of deceiving me in the act and after the act in the telling.”

10. What My Lips Have Kissed: Love Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay

For tender-hearted lovers of lyrical poetry:

“Sweet love, sweet thorn, when lightly to my heart / I took your thrust, whereby I since am slain, / And I lie disheveled in the grass apart, / A sodden thing bedrenched by tears and rain.”

11. How Stella Got Her Groove Back by Terry McMillan

When you want to be the man who delivers a lengthy run-on sentence before he leaves:

“…being in your presence for any length of time depresses the hell out of me and I don’t need this shit who needs this shit so I’m like out of here.”

12. Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates

When you need to channel your inner Marilyn:

“I want to tell you that I love you
I want to tell you that I love you
I want to tell you that I love I love I love
I love but you do not.”

13. Rabbit Redux by John Updike

Get ready to get yelled at while you nurse your drink:

“That’s the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.”

14. Cheap Diamonds by Norman Mailer

For old souls with a lot of regrets:

“The old line ‘You deserve someone better than me’ in this case was not just an old line. She deserved someone who would love her and take care of her and he knew he never would.”

15. Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins

When you’re a Dionysian in an argument with the Apollonian mind:

“The difference between love and logic is that in the eyes of a lover, a toad can be a prince, whereas in the analysis of a logistician, the lover would have to prove that the toad was a prince, an enterprise destined to dull the shine of many a passion.”

16. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

When you need to talk some sense into a rich girl:

“Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can’t even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? … The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, because the clouds let him; they don’t wrap him up. They let him keep his head high, free.”

17. The Ragged Way People Fall Out of Love by Elizabeth Cox

Sometimes honesty is the best policy:

“I don’t love you anymore … It comes down to that, I think.”

18. Waiting by Ha Jin

When your man won’t get a divorce:

“We can’t continue to be like this. Who am I? Your fiancée or your concubine?”

19. Angle of Repose by Wallace Earle Stegner

When you’ve violated the Sixth Commandment:

“I think, don’t you, that a girl with any delicacy of feeling couldn’t bring herself to marry a man indirectly responsible for her father’s death. No matter how much she was in love with him.”

20. Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

When you need some perspective:

“In her opinion, the parrots were annoying arrogant. You could buy the most beautiful one in town, she observed, but that won’t make it love you. You could feed it, care for it and exclaim over its loveliness, but there was nothing to guarantee that it would stay home with you.

There had to be a lesson in there somewhere.”

21. Eight White Nights by André Aciman

When you’re thinking of cutting off a relationship before it even begins:

“Would I still feel this way on leaving the party tonight? Or would I find cunning ways to latch on to minor defects so they’d start to bother me and allow me to snuff the dream till it tapered off and lost its luster and, with its luster gone, remind me once again, as ever again, that happiness is the one thing that in our lives others cannot bring.”

22. A poem by Otomo no Yakamochi featured in Written on the Sky: Poems from the Japanese by Kenneth Rexroth

When the bed has been cold and empty for too long:

“Better never to have met you
in my dream
than to wake and reach
for hands that are not there.”

23. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

When you’re a swarthy visitor from Charleston in the presence of a spirited lady:

“I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new.  What is broken is broken — and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.

24. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

When you’re having a Lord Henry moment:

“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”

25. How To Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu

When you’ve seen too much, too young:

“You see, at the beginning we weren’t fighters. We weren’t yellers or throwers, even if we eventually came to be. It would take time and much deeper wounds for us to get to that point.”

26. You Think That’s Bad by Jim Shepard

Just when you think you’ve figured someone out, you realize you had no idea how bad it could get:

“She thought she’d put up with however many years of stonewalling for a good reason, and she’d just figured out that as far as Castle Hubby went, she hadn’t even crossed the moat yet.”

27 . Indignation by Philip Roth

At your first year of college, when your world explodes:

“I think you’re a wonder. You’re beautiful. You’re mature. You are, I admit, vastly more experienced than I am. That’s what threw me. I was thrown. Forgive me.”

28. The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta

When you’ve lost too much already to keep it up:

“Every minute we were together, I felt like I was wandering in the dark through a strange house, groping for a light switch. And then, whenever I found one and turned it on, the bulb was dead.”

29. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

Best written in a letter while hungover, preferably sealed with a kiss:

“None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.”

30. Dimanche and Other Stories by Irene Némirovsky

When détente isn’t possible:

“Love is just a peculiar, fleeting affair that isn’t very important, but in marriage there is always hostility between two different tribes of human beings. There are two opposing forces, who fight each other until one of them wins, and you and I, my poor old Alain, have been knocked out too easily.”

©2012 YGM. All Rights Reserved.

I only went online tonight because I needed to read this again. It will be tattoo number 4 (cued after The Poem) but I have no idea where on the mountain of spattered bio-butter it will be placed.

I want to devour poetry. I miss how sated/hungry good writing makes the mind. I’m reading Infinite Jest again* and I realise, again, that as much as I wish it not so, I will always be the reader and not the read. Maybe if I read enough the words will migrate and make a paragraph or two in the spongy bits of my abused sack of meat. Maybe they will multiply and pour, regimented line after line, from my fingertips.

Instead I use the few natives I have for extensive navel gazing**. There is a section in IJ where Schtitt explains self and tennis*** and the following struck home: “You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place…life’s endless war against the self you cannot live without.”

Ugh…it’s like prodding a broken molar with a tongue that does not belong to you. I cannot stand the idea of living an examined life. However, I also know that every day I don’t tidy the dirty rooms of my soul is another closed door to potentially finding the one thing that could make it sound habitat.

Or I would have to deal with the rot…wanna guess which I’ll end up doing?

Oh, I discovered an awesome song/band:

*Always again. It is the best novel ever written and smarter people than I have swum the length and will probably spend the rest of their lives plumbing the depths. It is funny as Four Rooms’ 3^rd room (bellhop with whore corpse and room ablaze…may not sound it but I wet myself) and made all the more poignant and fubar for knowing that DFW succumbed to self euthanasia in the end. Oh, and lordy me the footnotes…

**Hey, it made John Mayer famous. Well that and the genius guitar work.

***I’m not going into it now, DFW takes 3 (admittedly dense and heavily annotated) pages to explain a philosophy that anyone who has ever played an individual sport (e.g. tennis, swimming or small calibre shooting) will have a twisty aha moment about.

©2012 YGM. All Rights Reserved.

So here is someone who can.

©2012 YGM. All Rights Reserved.

Life is about to get interesting. I shall update soon.

1. Word of the day: dawn – TheSage: 2. first light of day (noun), 2.  become clear or enter one’s conciousness or emotions (verb)

2. Insight of the day: Posting at dawn is something that will likely not happen again soon and is only done to avoid the very emo-ness of the previous ancient post.

3. State of the pool: Fizzy water of life

4. Joys of the day: Coffee, definitely coffee.

5. Awesomest lines: I’ve gottten almost all my Terry Pratchett books back so here’s a Mort quote:

” I USHERED SOULS INTO THE NEXT WORLD. I WAS THE GRAVE OF ALL HOPE. I
WAS THE ULTIMATE REALITY. I WAS THE ASSASSIN AGAINST WHOM NO LOCK
WOULD HOLD.
“Yes, point taken, but do you have any particular skills?”

– Death consults a job broker

I will post soon, promise /grin

©2012 YGM. All Rights Reserved.

I am a bit lost. Not so lost as not to just at least look at the bloody soul-Garmin, but my rugged individualism* forbids such a thing. I am not sure where my life is going, and that is a daunting, yellow bellied thing.

I’ve been reading. Krugaza-san, without you I would be lost. You give me words that speak directly to the self in me I very rarely give attention**. You were right. Perhaps not something you often hear but still something you should hear. You have given me a book that has its strangely beautifully skeletal fingers insinuated into my spine. Marrow to marrow.

Tim Winton has stolen my breath and used it to shape words that I’ve felt, and known, but have never had the talent, nor the drive, to speak.

Page 4 of Dirt Music: “…Still, you had to admit that it was nice to be without a body for a while; there was an addictive thrill in being of no age,with no gender, with no past. It was an infinite sequence of opening portals, of menus and corridors that let you into brief, painless encounters, where what passed for life was a listless kind of browsing. World without consequence, amen. And in it she felt light as an angel.”

My connection is fubarring me. But whatever, here’s to writing for the first time in weeks, without the hope of reaching another mind. Into the void we go, with the soundtrack of Donnie Darko, echoing in the background***.

Before Dirt Music I was reading an Ursula Le Guin, Voices. In it she speaks so eloquently of books and their import. In one day I’ve managed to read words that enliven me. It’s been awhile. As you know, I love mind candy but I’ve been shaken out of this sodden horse blanket funk I’ve been in.

If you’ve ever flirted with despair you would understand the severe suckiness of not being able to trust your mind. For some stupid reason people seem to understand hormones as something a menopausal woman experiences instead of the thing it truly is. Hormones are the carriers of every reaction in your body. Good, ugly, or bad.

So, when those sons of bitches decide to mope, you are, to put it sweetly, marooned in an endless sea of despair. Yeah, I said it. Despair. In all of its joy draining bleh-ness. It saps hope, joy de vivre and dammit-I’m-alive-so-screw-you. It happily quaffs your endorphins and dribbles love down it’s pocked chin while trying to clumsily feel up the hapless wench who serves it.

*It’s a family saying, only barely disguising a genetic mess up of socially stunting proportions.

**I am after all, like most humans, a strange sheep-tortoise hybrid. Why deal with life, and it’s terrifying twists and turns when in stead, you hide. Hide and follow. Meeeehhhh, bitch, meeeeh.

***Something to which I am hurrying.

©2012 YGM. All Rights Reserved.

As a matter of fact, I love it so much that I want to get an iPhone or some such thing just so that I will never ever ever be without my preciouses* and I loathe cellphones.

1. Twitter

I’ve briefly told you about my love for Twitter. My love is now of the obsessive sort where I would follow it everywhere, go albino a la The Bodyguard and send it 160 character love letters with glued newspaper letters.

Now that you know it is mine, all MINE…ahem…if you actually want to know what it is: Twitter is a micro blogging site where you can follow clever/entertaining/informative folk in your lines of interest. They (and you) update sms length strings of text about what you are currently reading/doing/find interesting.

I use it primarily to find out more about my work. It is an incredibly useful filtering tool. People who like what I like, and who know more than I do, give me links to information which just about rock my world and keep me from blogging.

Do try it. And add me if you want to know more about the sheer awesome that is SEO, social media strategy and other generally prod buttock internetty things.

2. Google Wave

This relationship is in the idiot 14 year old first kissathon stage**. Gwave is all awkward limbs, and tripping anxiety but anyone with half a brain can see the superstar adult it will be. I figure if I marry it early it won’t know better and leave me when it hits the Big Time.

What it is: other than the above and previously mentioned post, it is a collaboration tool which mashes instant messaging, email, file sharing and brainstorming all in one. You can have private waves or public ones…take a moment to really think what that means for spreading ideas…

/gooseflesh…let me know on Twitter what your Gwave address is and we’ll play together.

3. Feedly

This is a brand, spanking new love. Our eyes met across the Firefox Add On page and that the immediate attraction had us gravitate towards each other, never losing eye contact, and start a conversation about all the things I love. It was a bit scary how Feedly knew so much about me*** but it felt like coming home****.

What it is:

Firefox Addons say: “A magazine-like startpage. A fast and stylish way to read and share the content of your favorite sites and services. Provides seamless integration with Google Reader, Twitter, Delicious, YouTube and Amazon.”

I love almost all things Google but the reader was clumsy and daunting to say the least – I follow a lot of sites – but this…this is just gorgeous. This is from one of the sites I would shell out cash money to read:

Mashable: “Feedly takes the concept of the homepage and takes it to the next level by providing a real-time summary of the most relevant content available on the web based on your interests, your reading patterns, and recommendations from your friends. You can take your different profiles, bookmarks, and accounts from sites like Twitter (), Yahoo Mail, GMail () and Friendfeed (), and apply them to your Feedly.”

I’ll give y’all a proper YGM soonish.

*LOTR reference fully intended.

**I’ve mostly no idea what I am doing but even so the fumbling is wonderful.

***Not kidding…if it wasn’t so awesome it would be very scary. A cookie miner/history trawler program of some kind? Hmmmm.

**** Where home=drool inducingly pretty and convenience maximized lay out.

©2012 YGM. All Rights Reserved.