Architect’s Watercolor by Arthur Sze

Architect’s Watercolor

An architect draws a watercolor

depicting two people about to

enter a meeting room, while

someone

on the stairway gazes through windows

at a park, river, skyscrapers

beyond; he does not want to be

locked

like a carbon atom in a benzene

ring but needs to rotate, lift off,

veer along wharves and

shoreline. In the acoustics of

this space,

he catches a needle bounce

off a black granite floor, wanders

from a main walkway, encounters

prickly pear burned purple in wind.

In the ocean gusts before dawn,

he yearns for a Mediterranean spray

where sunlight tingles eyelashes,

where sand releases heat

under the stars. In the atrium,

two violinists launch fireworks

of sound that arc, explode, dissolve

into threads of melodic charm.

Here slate near a pool of water

absorbs sunlight, releases ripples

into the evening; and in this space,

each minute is encounter:

he steps out and makes

footprints on a sidewalk dusted with snow.

Via Literary Hub

A run-on sentence on Gabriel García Márquez’s delirious novel The Autumn of the Patriarch

Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch isn’t so much a novel as it is a delirium, a swamp fever, a sun-bleached hallucination stretched across centuries, a beast that coils and uncoils, bloated with its own rot, a thing that does not begin or end but only festers, looping back on itself in great, heaving tides of unpunctuated or undepunctuated or mispunctuated thought, García Márquez dragging us under, drowning us in the mind or minds of the titular dictator, a paranoid consciousness so swollen with its own power that it warps reality itself, a man who reigns forever and is always dying, whose past rewrites itself with every breath, whose power is infinite and yet always slipping, slipping, slipping through his fingers like the stolen sea, parceled off and shipped to Arizona, because why not, because what is truth if not what he declares it to be, because when you have lived for centuries, when your general is served up at a Thyestean feast, when your nation’s children are disappeared to an island, never to return, when the cattle are branded with your mark, when the very hour itself is subject to your whim, then nothing is real, nothing but the fear, the violence, the rape, the predation, the endless grinding machinery of power that must sustain itself, and so we cycle, we spiral, we convulse through six sections, six deaths, six endless iterations of his reign, six grotesque confirmations that absolute power is an ouroboros swallowing its own tail, devouring itself, erasing itself, until nothing is left but the silence of his ruin, the empty palace where his corpse will be found again and again, where his legacy is nothing but absence, and translator Gregory Rabassa—mad saint, linguistic necromancer—renders it all in English without breaking the spell, his translation a relentless incantation that doesn’t just mimic the novel’s crushing, hypnotic cadence but becomes it, suffocating, pressing, forcing you to inhabit the mind of this eternal, rotting god-tyrant, this cosmic mistake, this doomed and doom-dealing beast whose power, no matter how total, will crumble, will fade, will rot, will vanish into nothing, just like everything else.

Via  Biblioklept

April

 

On Tyranny

Read more: the art room plant: Nora Krug

via everlasting blort

Library In The Earth

Burrowed in a corner of the KURKKU Fields in Kisaru, Japan is a library destined to serve the farmers during their downtime in bad weather. Designed by architect Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP, Library in the Earth occupies a space that was once a natural valley filled with construction debris, leaving only flat, dry land above.

Photography © Koji Fujii / TOREAL

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Jennie's Boy by Wayne Johnston

Thriller writer Linwood Barclay will champion Jennie's Boy by Wayne Johnston on

Canada Reads 2025. The debates take place March 17-20.

A Book Wheel

via swissmiss

Ideas of Heaven

 

“Many years before, it is true, on a visit to the poet laureate, Alfred Austin, as they sat with others on the lawn in the afternoon, it was suggested that each person should tell his idea of heaven: ‘Austin’s idea was to sit … in a garden, and while he sat to receive constant telegrams announcing alternately a British victory by sea and a British victory by land’; ‘mine’, said Blunt, ‘was to be laid out to sleep in a garden, with running water near, and so to sleep for a hundred thousand years, then to be woke by a bird singing, and to call out to the person one loved best, “Are you there?” and for her to answer, “Yes, are you?” and so turn round and go to sleep again for another hundred thousand years’.” — Edith Finch, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, 1938

Via Futility Closet

The Self

 

Football

via Biblioklept

Medical History - Nicole Sealey

 

Number Of Books Banned By Schools In Each US State

The map above comes from from PEN America, which tracks book bans and fights censorship in public schools and libraries across the country.

Brilliant Maps

Still Here

 

How Our Love Ends

 

Descriptions Of Things And Atmosphere - F. Scott Fitzgerald

These descriptions taken from the notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald are a testament to his enormous talent:
• “The island floated, a boat becalmed, upon the almost perceptible curve of the world.”
• “The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead.”
• “Farther out in the water there were other lights where a fleet of slender yachts rode the tide with slow dignity, and farther still a full ripe moon made the water bosom into a polished dancing floor.”
• “It was a cup of a lake with lily pads for dregs and a smooth surface of green cream.”
• “A region of those monotonous apartment rows that embody the true depths of the city — darkly mysterious at night, drab in the afternoon.”
• “Spring came sliding up the mountain in wedges and spear points of green.”

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via  Futility Closet