You can read the full article online here, but call me crazy, I think lines like “the crowd revved its sweaty, leggy, beautiful engines and took off” just reads better in print.

The defining mark of literary journalism is the personality of the writer, the individual and intimate voice of a whole, candid person not representing, defending, or speaking on behalf of any institution, not a newspaper, corporation, government, ideology, field of study, chamber of commerce, or travel destination. It is the voice of someone naked, without bureaucratic shelter, speaking simply in his or her own right, someone who has illuminated experience with private reflection, but who has not transcended crankiness, wryness, doubtfulness, and who doesn’t blank out emotional realities of sadness, glee, excitement, fury, love. The genre’s power is the strength of this voice.

– Mark Kramer, “Breakable Rules for Literary Journalists“

Last evening, I ventured with my drunken friends into a place we’d never been, that was very reminiscent of a public radio dance party; pretty hipster kids in their skinny jeans and bizarre getups doing the hippy arm wiggle to an incomprehensible mix of surf music, delta blues, and trance, all under the glow of neon orange lights. I had on my jaunty straw hat, the rust-colored Chuck Taylors I purchased on Harvard Square, and felt very much like I needed to be with much cooler people who would drag me out to dance, much to my horror, to do the twist under the open air. Instead, I was with people who were shocked that these kids — children! — were listening to songs that they deemed retro, but which were part of my 40-year-old friends’ youth. I wanted them gone. [...] Better clothes, I wanted better clothes, and to be 25 pounds lighter, so I could mix in. But, instead, I watched in my jaunty hat, drank a watery beer, and drove people home and returned to my museum to sleep alone.

All this is to say — I use that phrase to make it seem as though there is any coherence to this message, when clearly there is not — that your plans sound lovely. Move to Minneapolis. Go home again. Get Otis the corgi. Live with your sister. Do all of that to re-group, re-discover everything about yourself that you always loved, but put aside for whatever reason. But don’t move into a museum of the past, don’t make monuments of things lost.

The sun, setting under a bank of clouds, has just now turned the very tops of the maple trees and the big walnut the most brilliant shade of gold. Already, you can almost see through the leaves, just little pieces of colored glass, which will, sooner than you think, fall down and crumple. In the few short minutes that I’ve taken to write this, the light has gone from gold to pink, and soon to black. Make the most of Indian summer. It’s a wonderful time to be alive.

Habit is the chief motive force. — Fyodor Dystoyevsky

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Featuring work by:

• Benjamin Blattberg!
• Peter Horan! (poetry blog)
• Deborah Blakeley!
• Myself!
• Dennis Conrow! (website)

Want in on the next prompt? They are unpredictable, haphazard, possibly careless. Email me. You can also read the first experiment of this nature, on waiting, here.

Knitting

When are you coming back to stand in front of the window?
(I heard you whistling last night. Cars pass me by all day,

waves circling the enormous globe.)
So much is left out, I’m knitting a pattern without

stitches, without needles, only long fingerbones
to carry yarn. There was something buried

the night I left Eau Claire for good, and I never knew
how it would grow. Now your childhood friends

are my students, I walk past houses you lived in
without my knowledge and your scent trails

from abandoned bakeries. Whole warehouses
have been invented to catalogue want like this.

I go on knitting night and day because I don’t know
any other thing. All unknits by darkness

into twine birds use piece by piece. What secret
name can I tell you? What adventure are you on tonight?

There is forgetting in the density of raw new wool,
yarn shop one block from your apartment,

the cheap scarf — you don’t value things
because you never make them. Moon over the whitening world

sharpens spindle, windowframe. The sash
is pulled, seam is set: without material, there is no map.

I’ve been trying to discern lately what makes a lovable poem to me, versus what actively irks me. I think the latter is mostly about ego. I have written your bad poetry, I think, and it took me five minutes with a Thesaurus. I don’t like thinking about those careless times. I know my tricks, and I hate to see you using them. Like most prejudices, apparently, it involves accusing you of being just like me.

Lovable, though, I don’t know. Your poem is something I’ll read in the middle of a fight. I will sneak it into malls and bus stops and it will make these places seem lovely, significant, normal, thank god.

Meanwhile, I became irked with said book club for a while. With few exceptions, it consisted mainly of a bunch of former English majors who never read the books.

“So! Did you read it?” I would charge each woman as she entered some living room. Not “what is your name, again” or “so you say you work in natural dentistry” or “hey, nice pants!” They were all just good friends who liked making good food together. At one point I overheard someone whisper, don’t tell Adrianne you didn’t read the book; you’ll make her really angry.

But lately we’ve been having some really lively conversations, and I’ve gotten to know some of the other awesome people in the group: farmers, yoga instructors, natural dentistry marketers. Our last meeting covered the first book of The Brothers Karamazov. We started by summing up the general glum plot-line of eternally drunk and essentially dislikable characters: the rape of the village idiot, the wife beatings, the cognac and vodka. And so far so good.

“So . . . am I the only one who found this really hilarious, or what?” I chirped brazenly. I searched the room for someone to meet my high-five. “Eh? Am I right? Hoo!”

Complete silence.

“Wait, what book are you talking about?” someone piped up, cautiously. “This book?”

“But still, tell me: is there a God or not? But seriously. I want to be serious now.”

“No, there is no God.”

“Alyoshka, is there a God?”

“There is.”

“And is there immortality, Ivan? At least some kind, at least a little, a teeny-tiny one?”

“There is no immortality either.”

“Not of any kind?”

“Not of any kind.”

“Complete zero? Or is there something? Maybe there’s some kind of something? At least not nothing!”

“Complete zero.”

“Alyoshka, is there immortality?”

“There is.”

“Both God and immortality?”

“Both God and immortality. Immortality is in God.”

“Hm. More likely Ivan is right. Lord, just think how much faith, how much energy of all kinds man has spent on this dream, and for so many thousands of years! Who could be laughing at man like that? Ivan? For the last time, definitely: is there a God or not? It’s the last time I’ll ask.”

“For the last time — no.”

“Then who is laughing at mankind, Ivan?”

From The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression:

I find the fact of the past, the reality of time’s passage, incredibly difficult. My house is full of books I can’t read and records to which I can’t listen and photos at which I can’t look because they are too strongly associated with the past. When I see friends from college, I try not to talk about college too much because I was so happy then — not necessarily happier than I am now, but with a happiness that was particular and specific in its moods and that will never come again. Those days of young splendor eat at me.

[...]Don’t make me remember, I say to the detritus of past pleasures. Depression can as easily be the consequence of too much that was joyful as of too much that was horrible. There is such a thing as post-joy stress too. The worst of depression lies in a present moment that cannot escape the past it idealizes or deplores.

I can’t really get over how beautifully this book is written. You know when you were younger, and you had your list of authors that you idolized — adults with whom you desperately wanted to be around some day, just so some of their wisdom and well-placed words could fall upon your ears, calling into attention lovely things, unusual things, putting-things-into-perspective things? Just their presence could be a comfort to you, knowing they were thinking their usual thoughts.

I haven’t felt that way about an author in a very long time.

In short, this video has kind of driven me insane. I keep trying to share it with other people the way it was shared with me — I explain beforehand that it was filmed on 35mm, with him singing live, and it was just one take — but nobody else seems to really dig it. “Meh,” they say. “Is this guy serious?” they ask. “I don’t really like how he’s not Prince,” they add.

The more I watch, the more difficult I find it to believe that you haven’t fallen in love with this. Seriously? Anyone? (Download the full-screenable mp4 here).

Dear Darkness — consider this
my last attempt

to reach you. My previous
few missives

having boomeranged back
unread, postmarks blurred

by the gloved hands
that tried carrying

them to your door.
Or, torn

by the machines.
I wish

you could see the water
here, so clear

you can see the bottom –
though that’s nothing

new for me. All afternoon
I let sun seep

my skin, steep me
like strong tea.

Despair,
if you’ve moved

I wish you would
send word

or ring.
How I would sing

like a kettle to keep you.