Winter: SPADES
Day 274: Ace
And down he hastened into that Eden of poisonous flowers.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
Day 287: King
I don’t know whether the blueprint pushes the action
ahead or follow it, but I have often composed with diagrams.
-Kitasono Katue, oceans beyond monotonous space
Day 299: Queen
Sweet Songs don’t last too long /
On broken radios.
-John Prine, “Sam Stone”
Day 310: Jack
Even Blake’s “poetic genius” (Los) couldn’t accomplish its embodiment alone. The story itself demands a woman’s “weaving” ….
-Jack Clarke, From Feathers to Iron
“Held you for a little while” is from Leonard Cohen’s “My Oh My”
Day 320: 10
… or we may send over the earth a wave
of electricity traveling at any rate we desire,
from the pace of a turtle up to lightning speed.
- Nikola Tesla, “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy”
Day 329: 9
You got news for me / I got nothing for you.
-John Prine, “Quiet Man”
Day 338: 8
I mean, you must take living so seriously /
that even at seventy, for example, /
you’ll plant olive trees
-Nazin Hikmet, “On Living”
For more than forty years, Israel has uprooted
over one million trees … in Palestine.
-Sonja Karkar “Heritage uprooted” The Electronic Intifada
Day 345: 7
Or the onset of snow; who hears this now?
-Edgar Anderson, Landscape Papers
Day 351: 6
Romanticism and technology…are mirror images of each other, both being products of man’s dominance over nature ….
-Walter Ong, “Romantic Difference and Technology”
Day 356: 5
Let us carve beautiful birds, /
send our souls to fly away.
-Gary Lawless, “Caribou Sutra”
“starved for love” is from Maggie Jaffe’s “Comrades, Mayakovsky”
Day 359: 4
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice,
a continual extinction of personality.
-T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
Day 362: 3
“Two hearts that beat as one,” I said.
“T-wo-ha, ha, ha,--two-ha, ha, ha, …”
- James Thompson, The Killer Inside Me
Day 365: Deuce
… everything that lives,
Lives not alone, nor for itself….
- William Blake, The Book of Thel