while i am waiting, you could do me a favour

I want to know who you are. People talk about a voice calling in the wilderness. All through the Old Testament a voice, which is not the voice of God but which knows what is on God's mind is crying out. While I am waiting, you could do me a favour. Who are you?

"Short Talk On Who You Are," Anne Carson

[Chicago Avenue and Damen Avenue]

was you ever bit by a dead bee

I was, I was—by its posthumous chomp,
by its bad dab of venom, its joy-buzzer buzz.
If you’re ever shanked like the chump
that I was, by the posthumous chomp
of an expired wire, you’ll bellow out prompt
at the pitiless shiv when she does what she does.
Was you? I was. By its posthumous chomp,
by its bad dab of venom, its joy-buzzer buzz.

"Was you ever bit by a dead bee?", Hailey Leithauser

[Ukrainian Village]

writers who do not write

"I often wonder about the people who linger over trash baskets at the corners of the city's sidewalks. One sees them day and night, young and old, well dressed, in rags—often with shopping bags—picking over the trash. They pick out newspapers, envelopes. They discard things. I often wonder who they are and that they're after. I approach and cannot ask them. Anyway, they scurry off. Some times I think they are writers who do not write. That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all."

"Speedboat," Renata Adler

[Damen Avenue below Division Street]

rainward

[Chicago Avenue looking toward Michigan Avenue]

angels depart

[North Avenue west of Western Avenue]

in the damages

God, my dear, is in the damages.

"30 Delft Tiles," Mark Doty

[Damen Avenue below Chicago Avenue]

after a while

The rain, after three days of uninterrupted sovereignty, had stopped for the time. The sky cleared after a while and the stars came out.

"The Man Who Killed Dan Odams," Dashiell Hammett

[Chicago Avenue at Damen Avenue]

hard to explain to anyone

The startling reality of things
Is my discovery every single day.
Every thing is what it is,
And it's hard to explain to anyone
how much this delights me
And suffices me.

To be whole, it is enough
simply to exist

~ Pessoa

[Ukrainian Village above Augusta Boulevard.]

where you're to sleep

Here's where you're to sleep
The sheets are still clean
They're only been slept in once.

"The Impact of the Cities," Bertolt Brecht

[Damen Avenue above Haddon Street]

after each sudden swerve or rubbery squeal

just terribly, but humorously sang
Jonathan Richman's 'Stop This Car' after each sudden

swerve or rubbery squeal. Once they discussed
the pros and cons of having sex

with Bob Dylan–or a Bob Dylan look-alike–in a Buick
while listening to 'From a Buick 6'.

Black fumes billowed from the exhaust, and by a species
of dead reckoning they charted, in a road atlas, detours

and punctures, losses and gains–all
the time wondering whether (as Van Morrison once

sang) to 'Hardnose
the Highway' were the same as to live.

"They Drove, Mark Ford

[Milwaukee Avenue below North Avenue]

i've never had the right words to describe my life

"Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in 'sadness,' 'joy,' or 'regret.' Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, 'the happiness that attends disaster.' Or: 'the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy.' I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.' I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants' as well as for 'the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.' I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever."

"Middlesex," Jeffrey Eugenides

[Damen Avenue above Haddon Street]

that lost year's first snow

The little petit-larceny punk from Damen and Division and the dealer still got along like a couple playful pups... Their friendship had kindled on a winter night two years before Pearl Harbor when Sparrow had first drifted, with that lost year's first snow, out of a lightless, snow-banked alley onto a littered and lighted street.

"The Man With The Golden Arm," Nelson Algren

[West Chicago Avenue east of Damen Avenue]

float backwards

People kissing stop to sigh then kiss
again.
Doctors sigh into wounds and the bloodstream is changed
forever.
Flowers sigh and two noon bees
float backwards.

"Guillermo's Sigh Symphony," Anne Carson

[Damen Avenue at Augusta Boulevard]

beauties have come

Be silent! Spring is here! The rose is dancing with its thorn.
Beauties have come from the Invisible to call you home.

"Give Me Ecstacy," Rumi, trans. Andrew Harvey

[Chicago Avenue west of California Avenue]

they ask themselves

"Some men are above the law."
"But how do they know who they are?"
"They ask themselves."

"Pickpocket," Robert Bresson

[Damen Avenue below Augusta Boulevard]

i want to hear the true story, essentially

“The notion that anything can be invented wholly and these invented things are classified as fiction and that other writing, presumably not made up, is called nonfiction strikes me as a very arbitrary separation of things. We know that most great novels and stories come not from things that are entirely invented, but from perfect knowledge and close observation. To say they are made up is an injustice in describing them. I sometimes say that I don’t make up anything—obviously, that’s not true. But I am usually uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling me the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially."

~ James Salter, Paris Review Interview No. 133

[Damen Avenue below Division Street]

i like to watch the man mix

I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar—that's wonderful.

"The Long Goodbye," Raymond Chandler

[Damen Avenue below Division Street]

dispelling the sordid gloom

dispelling the sordid gloom of our subway decor

"Chicago: City on the Make," Nelson Algren

[Chicago Avenue Red Line]

fade like the darkness itself

"Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn't comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny. No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation. Alcohol's job is to replace creation. I've spent whole summers at Neauphle alone except for drink. People used to come at weekends. but during the week I was alone in that huge house, and that was how alcohol took on its full significance. It lends resonance to loneliness, and ends up making you prefer it to everything else."

~ Marguerite Duras

[California Avenue below Chicago Avenue]

understand it all

Someday, we will fall down and weep, and understand it all, all things.

"Crime and Punishment," Fyodor Dostoevsky, as translated by Terrence Malick

[Damen Avenue above Haddon Street]