House of Fortitude

- Arkaye Kierulf / Textbook Statistics

On average, 5 people are born every second and 1.78 die.
So we’re ahead by 3.22, which is good, I think.

The average person will spend two weeks in his life
waiting for the traffic light to change.

Pubescent girls wait two to four years
for the tender lumps under their nipp...

- James Joyce / Finnegan's Wake

Well, you know or don't you kennet or haven't I told you every telling has a taling and that's the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing! My branches lofty are taking root. And my cold cher's gone ashley. Fieluhr? Filou! What age is at? It saon is late. 'Tis endless now senne eye ...

- Mikhail Bulgakov / The Master and Margarita

"Heaving himself out of the barrel the fawn man, covered in salt-herring juice, staggered past the salmon counter and followed the crowd. There was a tinkling and crashing of glass at the doorway as the public fought to get out, whilst the two villains, Koroviev and the gluttonous Behemoth, disap...

- Samuel Beckett / Waiting for Godot

Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot, a mysterious figure who has promised to visit them. They engage in a series of nonsensical conversations while waiting.

Vladimir: At least we have each other.

Estragon: That's something.<...

- Samuel Beckett / Molloy

"I tried to think of something else, but it was too late, I was already thinking. I tried to stop thinking, but I couldn't. I tried to get up, but I couldn't. I tried to sleep, but I couldn't. I tried to cry, but I couldn't. I tried to pray, but I couldn't. I tried to die, but I couldn't. I tried...

- Alice Walker

“HELPED are those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.
HELPED are those who love the entire cosmos rather than their own tiny country, city, or farm, for to them will be shown the unbroken web of life a...

- Dylan Thomas / Under Milk Wood

"And high above, in Salt Lake Farm, Mr Utah Watkins counts, all night, the wife-faced sheep as they leap the fences on the hill, smiling and knitting and bleating just like Mrs Utah Watkins.

UTAH WATKINS (Yawning)

Thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, forty-eight, eighty-nine...
...

- Herman Hesse / Trees

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great...

- Dylan Thomas / Under Milk Wood

Llaregyb Hill, that mystic tumulus, the memorial of
peoples that dwelt in the region of Llaregyb before the
Celts left the Land of Summer and where the old wizards
made themselves a wife out of flowers.

SECOND VOICE

Mr Waldo, in his corner of the Sailors Arms, sings: 2024-10-24 09:03:00 +0000 UTC View Post

- Dylan Thomas / Under Milk Wood

"ROSIE PROBERT (Softly)

What seas did you see,
Tom Cat, Tom Cat,
In your sailoring days
Long long ago?
What sea beasts were
In the wavery green
When you were my master?

CAPTAIN CAT

I'll tell you the truth.
Seas barking like
seals, Blue seas and gre...

- Dylan Thomas / Under Milk Wood

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are b...

- William C. Faulkner / Absalom, Absalom!

“You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs...

Poll 3.

The other day, I uploaded a little "film" consisting entirely of footage captured on my phone that I typically take merely for memories (and IG stories every now and then). Is this something that interested you and you might want to see on a monthly basis or so?

- Lemony Snicket / The Beatrice Letters

"I will love you with no regard to the actions of our enemies or the jealousies of actors. I will love you with no regard to the outrage of certain parents or the boredom of certain friends. I will love you no matter what is served in the world’s cafeterias or what game is played at each and ev...

- Luis Alberto Urrea / The Hummingbird's Daughter

"On the cool October morning when Cayetana Chávez brought her baby to light, it was the start of that season in Sinaloa when the humid torments of summer finally gave way to breezes and falling leaves, and small red birds skittered through the corrals, and the dogs grew new coats.

On the ...

- John Barth / The Sot-Weed Factor

"Ebenezer shook his head in a matter not clearly affirmative or negative. "That is a part of it, Henry; you go at such a pace, I have no time to think things through as they deserve! I cannot collect my wits e'en to think of all the questions I would ask, much less explore your answers. How can I...

- Thomas Pynchon / Gravity’s Rainbow

"Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be...

- Albert Goldbarth / Little, Big

Words I’d like to get in a poem,
hemoglobin and chifforobe and ombudsman and mahogany.
Meanwhile, a friend is studying the maha¯yuga,
the “Cycle of Cycles,” 4,320,000 years,
and its relationship to subvibrations of charm
or salsa or stodginess or whatever other
q...

Late summer 2024 (BTS)

I know that some humans out there enjoy the silly little stories I post on IG. With that in mind, I thought I'd explore making something similar for Patreon. Is this something that people might enjoy more of? Perhaps a monthly video with snippets of footage taken on phones? Let me know if you are...

- Malcolm Lowry / UNDER THE VOLCANO

To-night, as ages hence, people would say this, or shut their doors on them, turn in bereaved agony from them, or toward them with love saying: "That is our star up there, yours and mine”; steer by them above the clouds or lost at sea, or standing in the spray on the forecastle head, watch them...

- Albert Goldbarth / Fang

1.
They both remember the throat
is silver riverined
in the deep beet-color of blood,
a shockingly lovely expanse
the spent – the loser – wolf displays
below the aimed jaws of the victor wolf:
these two that have been battling
to the death, and yet now...

Print Discounts

As a member, you are entitled to a 50% discount if you would like a print of one of my photographs. Almost any photograph of mine is available for print, whether you've seen it here, on IG or elsewhere. (There are a few exceptions of work lost during a rather unfortunate hard drive failure a coup...

Poll 2.

Today's post is an example of a perhaps slightly odd and bold experiment from yesteryear that I never even thought of making public. I wonder whether subscribers here appreciate seeing these kinds of posts or not. Let me know?

Albert Goldbarth / The Book of Speedy

1.
The far trees bristle up like a hairbrush.
Overhead, the sky is a wan blue.
Two clouds look as if they’re sharing
cellular material through a mutual wisp. I suppose
we could speak of the sex of clouds,
their combinative ways,
their freight, thei...

- Annie Dillard / Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word g...

- Annie Dillard / Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“Think of a globe, a revolving globe on a stand. Think of a contour globe, whose mountain ranges cast shadows, whose continents rise in bas-relief above the oceans. But then: think of how it really is. These heights are just suggested; they’re there .... when I think of walking across a conti...

- Albert Goldbarth / Photographs of the Interiors of Dictators' Houses

It's as if every demon from hell with aspirations

toward interior design flew overhead and indiscriminately

spouted gouts of molten gold, that cooled down

into swan-shape spigots, doorknobs, pen-and-inkwell sets.

A chandelier the size of a planetarium dome

is go...

- Albert Goldbarth

“Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you’re tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.

Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inc...

Poll 1.

Partly because I just want to try out this poll feature and partly because I am curious:

How would you feel if during the first couple of months, I also uploaded old work every now and then so they can finally be seen in their full, uncensored glory (and larger copies of it too)?

- Roland Barthes / A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“I cannot write myself. What, after all, is this "I" who would write himself? Even as he would enter into the writing, the writing would take the wind out of his sails, would render him null and void -- futile; a gradual dilapidation would occur, in which the other's image, too, would be gradua...