Have. Want. Need. vol. XIX

Cloth-bound Penguin Classics, designed by Coraline Bickford-Smith.

Especially: Crime & Punishment

a collection for nichols.

Tonight.

have, want, need, vol. XVIII

reading natalie

she writes:
"It's so much better to desire than to have."
Thus spoke Anouk Aimée(b.1937), French luminary, actress, objet du désir.
An owned object ceases being desired the moment it is possessed. Although I agree with Ms. Aimée, I am also of the opinion that one can possess beautiful things that generate beauty, desire and intrigue. I've prepared a dreamlist of sorts, a constellation of things I love, things with soul, my sheetof "haves" and "desires". I leave it to you to discern the former from the latter.


the obvious, and only intersection.


any interior in which my reading chair finds itself.


my well-loved copy of illuminations. though there are SO many problems in this edition (down to the misspelling of the translators name), it remains dear.


my giant ammonite fossil ring. perhaps the only thing i bought myself while living in oxford.


kate bush. hounds of love. 1985.


my bloody valentine. loveless. 1991.


brian eno. another green world. 1975.



etro wraps. every day in fall, winter, spring, i adorn myself.


spectacles.



LePen. 0.3 MM porus point.


leather & paper journal from Cartoleria Pantheon (Roma).

discounting the jung volume, i like this.

et toi?

yesterday and thus far today, my life has consisted of
1.) listening to various covers of roxy music's "love is the drug"
2.) black coffee
and
3.) reading the best book ever:

tess

i went this endearing little book shop & was suddenly drawn to hardy's tess of the d'urbervilles. reading james wood's introduction, i know why i was suddenly so interested in the text: "When we read these words, we recognize Tess as one of a company of nineteenth-century heroines: Austen's Anne Elliot and Fanny Price; George Eliot's Dorthea Brooke and Gwendolen Harleth; James's Isobel Archer; Tolstoy's Anna Karenina; Flaubert'S Emma Bovary. [...] It is because these women are true characters that they seek to escape a world that merely characterizes them. But this Protestantism of the spirit, of the interior, carries the seeds of its own theological undoing, for once God is internalized, God may disappear altogether and become simply an appeal to the compass of one's own spirit. This is the anti-theological state Tess has reached [...]"

just put a window in your eye.

"It's not the shoes, though, that make the girl look so strangely, so weirdly dressed. No, it's the fact that she's wearing a man's flat-brimmed hat, a brownish-pink fedora with a broad black ribbon.
The crucial ambiguity of the image lies in the hat."
- Marguerite Duras, L'Amant

i am shaped to get in your way.

warum bin ich hier
und warum nicht dort?
[...]
wie kann es sein, daß ich, der ich bin,
bevor ich wurde, nicht war,
und daß einmal ich, der ich bin,
nicht mehr der ich bin, sein werde?
- peter handke

Über das Schöne und warum das Schöne schön ist:

Zong De An, Le Temps, 1998. Papier bleu. 82 x 180 cm.

"An den Ufern der Havel lebte, um die Mitte des sechzehnten
Jahrhunderts, ein Roßhändler, namens Michael Kohlhaas, Sohn eines
Schulmeisters, einer der rechtschaffensten zugleich und
entsetzlichsten Menschen seiner Zeit. -- Dieser außerordentliche Mann
würde, bis in sein dreißigstes Jahr für das Muster eines guten
Stattsbürgers haben gelten können. Er besaß in einem Dorfe, das noch
von ihm den Namen führt, einen Meierhof, auf welchem er sich durch
sein Bewerbe ruhig ernärte; die Kinder, die ihm sein Weib schenkte,
erzog er, in der Furcht Gottes, zur Arbeitsamkeit und Treue; nicht
einer war unter seinen Nachbarn, der sich nicht seiner Wohltätigkeit,
oder seiner Gerechtigkeit erfreut hätte; kurz, die Welt würde sein
Andenken haben segnen müssen, wenn er in einer Tugend nicht
ausgeschweift hätte. Das Rechtgefühl aber machte ihn zum Räuber und
Mörder."
-- Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas (1811)

morning.

[03.24.07]

KrisAtomic this morning... drank coffee, drank tea. am now reading Puse la frente entre las olas profundas, descendí como gota entre la paz sulfúrica, y, como un ciego, regresé al jazmín de la gastada primavera humana. I bent my head into the deepest waves, dropped down through sulfurous calm and went back, as if blind, to the jasmine of the exhausted human spring - Pablo Neruda, Alturas de Macchu Picchu

a much better cover.

[26 May 2006|08:18pm]

[ music | arthur russell- let's go swimming ] [edit] "once upon a time, I used to grind all night (grind all night) with that residue, that was Ipod white (yeeeeeah) i'm a boss, I got Juice like the magazine (jeah) and everyday I see Feds like a magazine (ha ha) psychopatic wordplay, schizophrenic flow (flow) i guess it's safe to say I got schizophrenic dough (daaaaamn)" - young jeezy, 'standing ovation", let's get it: thug motivation 101

enjoying this...

". . . my eyes are entirely grey with England . . . and you can't imagine how much of a physical desire it becomes to feed them on colour and crags-- something violent and broken and dry-- not perpetually sloping and sloppy like the country here."

- Virginia Woolf in a letter to Gerald Brenan, Christmas Day, 1922


"I think I mean that beauty, which you say I sometimes achieve, is only got by the failure to get it;
by grinding all the flints together; by facing what must be humiliation-- the things one can't do--
To aim at beauty deliberately, without this apparently insensate struggle, would result, I think, in
little daisies and forget-me-nots--simpering sweetnesses-- true love knots-- But I agree that we
must (we, in our generation must) renounce finally the achievement of the greater beauty: the
beauty which comes from completeness . . . . One must renounce, when the book is finished; but
not before it is begun."

- Virginia Woolf in a letter to Gerald Brenan, Christmas Day, 1922

[08.06.05]

[ music | the tear garden. ] "I come to give you this wretched carcass of mine, a gift to you; to look at, no great matter, but no beautiful body will give you such gains as it will." - Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus ♥ ---

[31 May 2005|11:51am]

[ music | gang of four. ] "She had been a big woman once but now her skeleton rose, draped loosely in unpadded skin that tightened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or a landmark above the somnolent and impervious guts, and above that the collapsed face that gave the impression of the bones themselves being outside the flesh, lifted into the driving day with an expression at once fatalistic and of a child's astonished disappointment, until she turned and entered the house again and closed the door." - Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

[29 Nov 2003|09:33pm]

[ music | neurosis & jarboe- within ] thus, and thus only, can law and morality exist. the precept of religion, 'give to caesar what is caesar's and to god what is god's' is not enough: the question is to settle what is caesar's, what belongs to the secular authority: and it is sufficiently notorious that the secular no less than the ecclesiastical authority have claimed almost everything as their own. this keeps me warm on the train...amongst those who could knock me over with a single stare and those in their fagin gloves.