Jonathan Carroll's Blog, page 24

CarrollBlog 3.16

There is a giant difference between apologizing for your bad behavior and apologizing for how that behavior affects others. Saying 'I'm sorry for the shitty thing I did to you' is a lot more honest and brave than saying only 'I'm sorry that you feel bad.'

CarrollBlog 3.10

A blast from the past:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X81qwc...

CarrollBlog 3.9

"I want you to miss me. I want you to recognize me in your morning cereal and the voice of your favorite singer. I want you to wonder where I am when your fingers are stretched beneath your waistband, when you're lighting up, when you're tripping up the uneven step on your basement stairs. I want you to think of me when you look into your teacup and your rearview mirror. I want you."

Camryn Pulaski Day

CarrollBlog 2.28

After the Movie

by Marie Howe

My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie.

He says that he believes a person can love someone

and still be able to murder that person.

I say, No, that's not love. That's attachment.

Michael says, No, that's love. You can love someone, then come to a day

when you're forced to think "it's him or me"

think "me" and kill him.

I say, Then it's not love anymore.

Michael says, It was love up to then though.

I say, Maybe we mean different things by the same word.

Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist even in the

murderous heart.

I say that what he might mean by love is desire.

Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what is it?

We're walking along West 16th Street — a clear unclouded night — and I hear my voice

repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is action, I used to say

to him.

Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to look at

someone you want to eat and not eat them.

Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby.

Meister Eckhart says that as long as we love images we are doomed to

live in purgatory.

Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue saying goodnight.

I can't drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I've just bought —

again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and suck the stuff from

the hole the flip top made.

What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says.

But what I think he's saying is "You are too strict. You are

a nun."

Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him to think these things

of me even if he's not thinking them?

Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns clearer and colder.

Although the days, after the solstice, have started to lengthen,

we both know the winter has only begun.

CarrollBlog 2.23

I'll be in Poland (Warsaw and Krakow) from May 9-12 for the release of my new book there. Lots of appearances, signings, interviews, etc. Please come by and say hello if you're anywhere in the neighborhood. Trips to Poland are always a treat.

CarrollBlog 2.21

ANTILAMENTATION

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read

to the end just to find out who killed the cook.

Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,

in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.

Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,

the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one

who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones

that crimped your toes, don't regret those.

Not the nights you called god names and cursed

your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,

chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.

You were meant to inhale those smoky nights

over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings

across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed

coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.

You've walked those streets a thousand times and still

you end up here. Regret none of it, not one

of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,

when the lights from the carnival rides

were the only stars you believed in, loving them

for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.

You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,

ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house

after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs

window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied

of expectation. Relax. Don't bother remembering

any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign

on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

~Dorianne Laux

CarrollBlog 2.16

ANTILAMENTATION

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read

to the end just to find out who killed the cook.

Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,

in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.

Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,

the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one

who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones

that crimped your toes, don't regret those.

Not the nights you called god names and cursed

your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,

chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.

You were meant to inhale those smoky nights

over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings

across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed

coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.

You've walked those streets a thousand times and still

you end up here. Regret none of it, not one

of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,

when the lights from the carnival rides

were the only stars you believed in, loving them

for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.

You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,

ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house

after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs

window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied

of expectation. Relax. Don't bother remembering

any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign

on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

~Dorianne Laux

CarrollBlog 2.13

You Can't Have It All

by Barbara Ras

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands

gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger

on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.

You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look

of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite

every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,

you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,

though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam

that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys

until you realize foam's twin is blood.

You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,

so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,

glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,

never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you

all roads narrow at the border.

You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,

and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave

where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,

but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands

as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful

for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful

for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels

sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,

for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,

the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.

You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,

at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping

of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.

You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd

but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,

how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,

until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,

and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind

as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,

you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond

of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas

your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.

There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's,

it will always whisper, you can't have it all,

but there is this.

CarrollBlog 2.12

GOOD GIRL

by Kim Addonizio

Look at you, sitting there being good.

After two years you're still dying for a cigarette.

And not drinking on weekdays, who thought that one up?

Don't you want to run to the corner right now

for a fifth of vodka and have it with cranberry juice

and a nice lemon slice, wouldn't the backyard

that you're so sick of staring out into

look better then, the tidy yard your landlord tends

day and night — the fence with its fresh coat of paint,

the ash-free barbeque, the patio swept clean of small twigs —

don't you want to mess it all up, to roll around

like a dog in his flowerbeds? Aren't you a dog anyway,

always groveling for love and begging to be petted?

You ought to get into the garbage and lick the insides

of the can, the greasy wrappers, the picked-over bones,

you ought to drive your snout into the coffee grounds.

Ah, coffee! Why not gulp some down with four cigarettes

and then blast naked into the streets, and leap on the first

beautiful man you find? The words Ruin me, haven't they

been jailed in your throat for forty years, isn't it time

you set them loose in slutty dresses and torn fishnets

to totter around in five-inch heels and slutty mascara?

Sure it's time. You've rolled over long enough.

Forty, forty-one. At the end of all this

there's one lousy biscuit, and it tastes like dirt.

So get going. Listen: they're howling for you now:

up and down the block your neighbors' dogs

burst into frenzied barking and won't shut up.

CarrollBlog 2.9

Fans of WHITE APPLES-- it's finally here as an audiobook, read by Victor Bevine.

You can sample the book on the site:

http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B0076M...