( via / via )

"...even when books do make it into English, they often do so through fragile, improvised, underfunded channels rather than through any stable literary infrastructure."

"Snail Paces

As I pry beneath crumbling bricks they come
to light, pale embryos unfolding. Slim
wands question space

touch-tentative. They lift small frills
to glide and teeter, balancing their shells
like the family china.
Or brace

on the hawser of themselves; the load stirs
and follows like a shadow. Each shoulders
his small world like a sack

and strains towards his half-an-inch horizon.
We are less to them than clouds across the sun.
Beneath the thrush’s block

we find them threshed out, littering our grass,
mute violated husks. Bend closer . . . Pass
down empty corridors,

intimate windings, moulded by the sheer
day-in-day-out of flesh. Mother-of-pearled,
the inner chamber of the ear."

—Philip Gross via

"The combination of fountain pens and paper embodies a balance that has been worked out over a long span of time by people who write a lot. This phenomenon is called 'tooth' by aficionados."

There was a time when i did all this & i will say, the very best thing about using a fountain pen is you can blend your own color of ink. I like a very dark red, almost black, or blue-green anything that’s down from bright. These affect the voice that emerges when you write with them.

"I toyed with withholding this, frankly, but the story did happen, witnessed by Saul Bellow and told to Berryman, who waited a decade to use it and sent the Song to Bellow with this dedication: ‘For Saul – excusez mon vol – but I warned you 10 years ago that if by some point you hadn't used this, I would'."