Bookends on sleep
Barry, Adam Sandler's character Punch-Drunk Love: "I don't know if there is anything wrong because I don't know how other people are."
Roger Ebert's review of Punch-Drunk Love:
He has darkness, obsession and power. His world is hedged around with mystery and challenge. Consider an opening scene, when he is at work hours before the others have arrived, and sees a harmonium dumped in the street in front of his office. It is at once the most innocent and ominous of objects; he runs from it and then peeks around a corner to see if it is still there.
"Ode" by Maureen N. McLane, in Slate's newsletter: "I was afflicted and afflicted you. / Be careful what you wish for / you warned. I was not careful / nor in the end thank god were you."
Horace's Odes, Book IV, Ode 1, the ode referenced at the beginning of McLane's poem, turning up in some reading before work today and confirmed by posters in Slate's Fray, John Connington translation:
Ah! but why, my Ligurine,
Steal trickling tear-drops down my wasted cheek?
Wherefore halts this tongue of mine,
So eloquent once, so faltering now and weak?
Now I hold you in my chain,
And clasp you close, all in a nightly dream;
Now, still dreaming, o'er the plain
I chase you; now, ah cruel! down the stream.
Same lines, Joseph P. Clancy translation:
But why, ah Ligurinus, why
does a tear now and then run trickling down my cheek?
Why does my tongue, once eloquent,
fall, as I'm talking, into ungracious silence?At night I see you in my dreams,
now caught, and I hold you, now I follow as you
run away, over the grassy
Campus Martius, over flowing streams, with your hard heart.
Same lines, Richard Howard, New Translations by Contemporary Poets:
Then why, Ligurinus, why
do my eyes sometimes fill, even spill over?
Why, sometimes, when I'm talking
do I suddenly have nothing to say? Why
do I hold you in my arms
in certain dreams, certain nights, and in others
chase you endlessly across
the Field of Mars, into the swirling Tiber?
Text after a headline Jess found on a website this morning: "Nutritionexpertsurgeparentsto leadthe way tohealthfuleating."
Wilco song the text made me think of after listening to a Tweedy+Wilco bootleg over the weekend: Nothing'severgonnastandinmyway(again).
Tweedy lines from the same boot that had been running through my head earlier in the morning: "Dear employer, your escalators / Are very dangerous on the way down" jumping to the closing, repeating "That's the reason that I quit / The reason that I quit."
Lines from the same song I like now that I've read them this afternoon: "Dear employer, I heard a story / When you were just knee-high, higher than I / You built the wings, the propeller too / With balsa wood and glue you made it fly."
