Friday, August 8, 2014

Karl Ove Kausgaard - Essentialism,Fiction and Writing

What I was trying to do, and what all writers try to do - what on earth do I know? - was to combat fiction with fiction. What I ought to do was affirm what existed, affirm the state of things as they are. In other words revel in the world outside instead of searching for a way out...

from A Death In The Family(My Struggle 1)
Trans. Don Bartlett

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

30




A Lady Who Thinks She Is Thirty by Ogden Nash

Unwillingly Miranda wakes,
Feels the sun with terror,
One unwilling step she takes,
Shuddering to the mirror.

Miranda in Miranda's sight
Is old and gray and dirty;
Twenty-nine she was last night;
This morning she is thirty.

Shining like the morning star,
Like the twilight shining,
Haunted by a calendar,
Miranda is a-pining.

Silly girl, silver girl,
Draw the mirror toward you;
Time who makes the years to whirl
Adorned as he adored you.

Time is timelessness for you;
Calendars for the human;
What's a year, or thirty, to
Loveliness made woman?

Oh, Night will not see thirty again,
Yet soft her wing, Miranda;
Pick up your glass and tell me, then--
How old is Spring, Miranda?