Charlotte Eriksson's Blog, page 12
December 28, 2023
acertainkindofwoman:
“You will need to let go a million-and-one times in the next few years. Make...
“You will need to let go a million-and-one times in the next few years. Make sure you let go for good. Don’t wait on text messages. Don’t find a way to make people linger and wait in the loss of you. It’s selfish to hold onto a person when you’ve already gotten the clarity that tells you to let them go. That person is supposed to go out there and love someone different. They’re supposed to mess up with someone else. They’re supposed to kiss someone else and buy flowers for someone else.”— Hannah Brencher (via miracles-and-distances)
“Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they…
“Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.”
virginia woolf
May 2024 be the year I get back to tweeting poetry at 6am from new cities and new coffee shops.
May 2024 be the year I get back to tweeting poetry at 6am from new cities and new coffee shops.
December 24, 2023
“Lord, I confess I want the clarity of
catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I…
“Lord, I confess I want the clarity of
catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can
dance in.
I want an excuse to change my life.”
― Franny Choi
“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think…
“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you’ve not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I’d starve to death before I’d sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.”
― Woody Guthrie
December 23, 2023
“I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or…
“I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.”
― Hermann Hesse, Peter Camenzind
December 21, 2023
theglasschild:
i’m not trying to be cute, i’m trying to be...
i’m not trying to be cute, i’m trying to be honest.
i said that to a boy i was writing a song with the other day but he seemed to prefer something cute than honest
blah blah
i just find it tiring. pretty things everywhere singing cute things, like,
i’d rather tell you a truth that is ugly and dirty
then a lie that would make me cute.
i don’t think i’m really happy yet and sometimes i think money will make me happy but does no money really make me unhappy?
sometimes i want to become something that no one thinks is cool
so i could become really great at it and be the best at something and i wouldn’t really care that no one thinks it’s cool because i would be great at it.
i don’t need people to see me anymore. i can play you my music, but i don’t need you to like it. i don’t need you to read my words or watch my speeches. i just want to do it. whatever. I can be something else but i’m gonna keep writing anyway.
can you become really really great at something if you don’t need anyone else to think you’re really really great?
like, i want to be a really really great writer, but i don’t need you to agree with me.
do you think Bukowski cared? do you think Anais Nin would have stoped writing her diary if someone told her she’s not a good writer? or Petrarch, do you think he would have stopped writing his 366 sonnets, to write himself out of heartbreak, if someone told him he had no future career as a writer?
No, he wrote cause he needed to and that’s the only reason he’s studied and researched in every literature course on the planet 646 years after his death.
Yeah, i do this. learn meaningless details about great writers because i find them great and think maybe one day i can be one of them. write something really really great and be studied by people who prefer something honest than pretty.
i don’t think very many pretty things make me feel a lot but the truth always does. i also don’t think i’m really very happy yet but writing always made things better. it won’t make me any money but does no money really make me unhappy if i at least can write every day?
i think i’ll be happier writing with no money than not writing with a lot of money.
– Charlotte Eriksson, i’m not trying to be cute
Art by Thomas Saliot
He liked writing, disliked having to start each thought himself.
Used my starts to various ends, for…
He liked writing, disliked having to start each thought himself.
Used my starts to various ends, for example in a pocket I found a letter he’d begun (to his mistress at that time)
containing a phrase I had copied from Homer: ’εντροπαλιζομενη is how Homer says
Andromache went
after she parted from Hektor—"often turning to look back"
she went
down from Troy’s tower and through stone streets to her loyal husband’s
house and there
with her women raised a lament for a living man in his own halls.
Loyal to nothing
my husband. So why did I love him from early girlhood to late middle age
and the divorce decree came in the mail?
Beauty. No great secret. Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty.
As I would again
if he came near. Beauty convinces. You know beauty makes sex possible.
Beauty makes sex sex.
Anne Carson · The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001)
