MARGINALIA by BILLY COLLINS

Via Brain Pickings

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive –
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” –
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page –
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil –
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet –
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

Picktchas!

I'm thinking about the pleasantly cool weather, not our gloomy economic landscape.

Butternut lasanga

Beautiful butternut lasagna :)

Dullstroom

Brie and Raspberry Pizza

I made a caramelized onions, brie, raspberry and rocket pizza for my food challenge.

After much thought, I realized that a 20-day food challenge would be absurd, so the challenge has changed to a 20 dish food challenge :)

Day 1

I started a 20-day challenge to cook 20 different dishes I've never made before. (Note: TAKING FOOD & HOME KINDA PICTURES OF CHOW IS FREAKEN HARD, so I'm snapping raw)

Today I made filo pastry corn and feta samoosas :) thought it would take a short time, but all the rolling and pasting got tedious after samoosa 10. About the taste... it's really not bad seeing that it was my first attempt at filo pastry and triangular food.

Sadurdagen

Rusties

 

Another Sunday

Another Sunday, another blog post. This is just my accessories crush that I'm a little a lot obsessed with... Ajson Serwus

Weekend

Took a trip with my new camera and T all in the name of fun, food, relaxation, some gambling and a bit of swimming with the sharks (at uShaka Marine which shrank my baby balls... eek).

Dishes

Start of a new week, end of a chaotic one...

Sunday

Happy Sunday

pics from

Just two nights, as I sipped a glass of cuvee and made sure my pots simmered to perfection, I got online to find this song to play for my lover. Why? I don't know. All I know is that I was hungry for her voice and when I found it... I played it till I was full. She was my childhood diet and I thank my father for playing her.

 

Fear

Fear is the most amazing emotion of all because it makes you truly present, and when you are truly present, thats nirvana. It’s pure love. 


- Marlene Martha Marcy May

Lady crush

The Comedy Central office calmed down this afternoon (or maybe it's just my desk) and I finally had a chance to check out other websites... look at what I discovered: Ashley Madekwe's enviable style and her blog. 

Peach

Sam Nhlengethwa pieces have been haunting me for the last few nights. Hovering over my laptop, I stare at his prints on Google image wishing to have one own my wall... and me of course.

Nikita

Losing yourself

All men fear death. It's a natural fear that consumes us all. We fear death because we feel that we haven't loved well enough or loved at all, which ultimately are one and the same. However, when you make love with a truly great woman, one that deserves the utmost respect in this world and one that makes you feel truly powerful, that fear of death completely disappears. Because when you are sharing your body and heart with a great woman the world fades away. You two are the only ones in the entire universe. 


You conquer what most lesser men have never conquered before, you have conquered a great woman's heart, the most vulnerable thing she can offer to another. Death no longer lingers in the mind. Fear no longer clouds your heart. Only passion for living, and for loving, become your sole reality. This is no easy task for it takes insurmountable courage. But remember this, for that moment when you are making love with a woman of true greatness you will feel immortal. 


- Midnight in Paris

Vacay

Dance

Spent a day with my father (Fanie Jason) a week ago. He galloped with me to ballet class where he did is thing.

 

 

Diego

 It was Diego Rivera's 125th birthday yesterday, so this is a day old wish sent up and beyond the blogosphere.

They were such a volatile couple, passionate about each other and art. In a way, they romanticised obsession.