who'll text first?

[Huron Street east of Franklin Street]

endure

What is to give light must endure burning

~ Victor Frankl

[Dana Hotel, State Street at Erie Street]

next door

listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go

~e.e. cummings

[The Magic Alley]

to

To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!

"Three Sisters," Anton Chekhov

[Chicago Avenue east of Damen Avenue]

this huge blank garden like a piece of electricity

I have it from Virginia Woolf
who once spoke to me at a party not of course
about drowning of which she had no idea yet

—have I told you this story before?
I remember the sky behind her was purple she
came towards me saying Why are you alone

in this huge blank garden
like a piece of electricity? Electricity?
Maybe she said cakes and tea true we were

drinking gin

"Autobiography of Red," Anne Carson

[Chicago Avenue at Winchester Street]

endless jabberwockies

"Of course there’s going to be endless jabberwockies. That’s what’ll make it interesting.”

~ Helena Bonham-Carter

[Orleans Street at Huron Street]

see it and leave

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I'm not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

"Underworld," Don DeLillo

[Below North Avenue east of Milwaukee Avenue]

punk from damen and division

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


[Damen Avenue at Division Street]

we like simile

Metaphor is for poets, kids. We hard-boiled guys go for palpable factology. We like simile. Like or as. Like a dream. As if in a dream. Except the kind that exist out there in the Zeitgeist. You can put your meathooks on 'em. My dream is a condo in the clouds.

"In a Pig's Valise," Eric Overmeyer

[Chicago Avenue west of California Avenue]

searching for a magic door

Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace from which we have been dispossessed by a greedy swindler.

"More Stately Mansions," Eugene O'Neill

[Hoyne Street below Augusta Boulevard]

cold, bright eyes

[O]utside the snow beat evenly and monotonously against the window panes. Andrews pictured himself vaguely walking fast through the streets, with the snow stinging his face and the life of a city swirling about him, faces flushed by the cold, bright eyes under hatbrims, looking for a second into his and passing on; slim forms of women bundled in shawls that showed vaguely the outline of their breasts and hips. He wondered if he would ever be free again to walk at random through city streets.

"Three Soldiers," John Dos Passos

[Chicago Avenue west of Leavitt Street]

acquainted

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.

"Acquainted With the Night," Robert Frost

[Division Street east of Damen Avenue]

see her trembling lips

Parrot reflections, receding mimicries of words and movement. And the settling shapes were familiar in every detail. Again and again, repeated around him, twice on the couch, in the easy chair, close beside him—so close he could hear her breath and see her trembling lips.

"Upon the Dull Earth," Philip K. Dick

[Damen Avenue above Chicago Avenue]

the wind, the wind is blowing

There were three of us this morning
I'm the only one this evening
but I must go on;
the frontiers are my prison.

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing,
through the graves the wind is blowing,
freedom soon will come;
then we'll come from the shadows.

"The Partisan," Leonard Cohen

[Above Chicago Avenue east of Western Avenue]

butterfly's torn wing

On the white poppy,
a butterfly’s torn wing
is a keepsake

~ Basho

[Chicago Avenue west of Winchester Street]

a depression so profound

That's what writing is to me: a way of ­postponing the day when I won't do it any more, the day when I will sink into a depression so profound it will be indistinguishable from perfect bliss.

~ Geoff Dyer

[The Hand of Seth, North Avenue at Honore Street]

infamous

I am the ghost of an infamous suicide

~ Sylvia Plath

[Chicago Avenue east of Washtenaw Street]

candy baby

Candy, Candy, Candy I can't let you go
All my life you're haunting me
I loved you so
Candy, Candy, Candy I can't let you go
Life is crazy, I know baby, Candy baby

uou uou uou
Candy, Candy, Candy I can't let you go
All my life you're haunting me, I loved you so

Candy Candy Candy, life is crazy,candy baby

candy baby, candy, candy

"Candy," James Osterberg


[California Avenue below Chicago Avenue]

winnow the superfluous

As you get older, you should get impatient with showing off in literature. It is easier to settle for blazing light than to find a language for the real. Whether you are a writer or a bird-dog trainer, life should winnow the superfluous language. The real thing should become plain. You should go straight to what you know best... you want something that is drawn like a bow, and a bow is a simple instrument. A good writer should get a little bit cleaner and probably a little bit plainer as life and the oeuvre go on.

~ Thomas McGuane

[Chicago Avenue east of Damen Avenue]

physical effect

O what a physical effect it has on me
To dive forever into the light blue sea
Of your acquaintance!

"In Love with You," Kenneth Koch

[Chicago Avenue west of Damen Avenue]

slept

You slept in the earth
to avoid the stars.

"Photograph 3014: Execution of an Unknown Child, Frame 5," Simone Muench

[Rice Street at Damen Avenue]

of your smell

Record of your smell.
Sun-wet. Songfleck.

"Photograph 3014: Execution of an Unknown Child: Frame 6," Simone Muench

[Damen Avenue above Thomas Street]

i shout love

I shout love in a blizzard's
scarf of curling cold,
for my heart's a furred sharp-toothed thing
that rushes out whimpering
when pain cries the sign writ on it.

I shout love into your pain
when skies crack and fall
like slivers of mirrors,
and rounded fingers, blued as a great rake,
pluck the balled yarn of your brain.

I shout love at petals peeled open
by stern nurse fusion-bomb sun,
terribly like an adhesive bandage,
for love and pain, love and pain
are companions in this age.


"I Shout Love," Milton Acorn

[Winchester Street below Augusta Boulevard]

rain-rinsed hair, river tresses

Train track flutter girl; coriander lips and Prohibition ale. That empty mouth like a bottle on a man's neck. Marabou soft, doe's muzzle on a pomegranate split, ultraviolet. You might have to rid yourself of all the boys, mostly rapscallions. How they feel under hands: red fish, big branches caught in your rain-rinsed hair, river tresses. For your ankle, a thread of nine carat bone. While the crossbuck sign bells with danger, citronella girls smoke Parliaments with a felon; your campfire jaw, a kerosene swoon.

"The Train Track," Simone Muench

[Damen Avenue below Division Street]

heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss

What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

~ Rob Gordon (John Cusack), "High Fidelity," based on a book by Nick Hornby

[Thomas Street east of Damen Avenue]

zombie drunk from fermented peaches

Sweet Kristy of the culvert, the ankle turn, the verb imperfect, and sailors' notebooks. In this metropolis of binoculars and chicken bones, in this city black with chicken-wire alchemists and bloody gutters, she feigns a fever in her red brassiere, her lavender dress lilting across headlights of chrome sedans: skin livid-exquisite with light bulbs and batteries beneath sinister-shouldered men, zombie drunk from fermented peaches and her silk stocking smell. Sweet Kristy of the corset, born of Anne Boleyn and a bird collector, born of alum and blindfolds, born to unzip men's breath, their clamorous wrists with an alphabet on her breast, a switchblade pinned to her taffeta thigh. Where are you leading with your eyelets and hooks, catching men with clothespins and rain in the perfect sphere of your dance hall mouth.

"The Fever," Simone Muench

[Chicago Avenue west of Washtenaw Street]

but the juke had long stopped playing

Then he bought a drink for everyone in the place, but did not drink with a man of them; and when they had drunk he sent all of them out onto the street for keeps. He locked, the door, poured himself a shot, turned on the juke, and sat alone beside it, among the empty chairs, thinking of his own life and of all the days to come. When morning came he was still sober, but the juke had long stopped playing. Although he had drunk steadily all night, he had never felt soberer in his life. Moving like an old man, though he was barely forty, he put the chairs on the table and his cap on his head. Then he went to the register, punched out NO SALE, and closed his doors forever.

"The Face on the Barroom Floor," Nelson Algren

[Chicago Avenue east of Damen Avenue]

at your funeral

No more talk about the death of the novel; the novel will be at your funeral.

~ Richard Price

[Chicago Avenue west of Leavitt Street]

frumious

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!

"Jabberwocky," Lewis Carroll

[Chicago Avenue at Damen Avenue]

seeing snatches and staticky fragments

He approached the screen and stood about a foot away, seeing snatches and staticky fragments, flurries of trembling light. He walked around the screen several times. The gallery was empty now and he was able to stand at various angles and points of separation. He walked backwards looking, always, at the screen. He understood completely why the film was projected without sound. It had to be silent. It had to engage the individual at a depth beyond the usual assumptions, the things he supposes and presumes and takes for granted.

"Point Omega," Don DeLillo

[State Street west of Lake Street, now site of WIT Hotel]

working did to the trouble what gin did to the pain

"I am not sure what more I could tell you about these pieces. I could tell you that I liked doing some of them more than others, but that all of them were hard for me to do, and took more time than perhaps they were worth; that there is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic. I was in fact as sick as I have ever been when I was writing "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"; the pain kept me awake at night and so for twenty and twenty-one hours a day I drank gin-and-hot-water to blunt the pain and took Dexedrine to blunt the gin and wrote the piece. (I would like you to believe that I kept working out of some real professionalism, to meet the deadline, but that would not be entirely true; I did have a deadline, but it was also a troubled time, and working did to the trouble what gin did to the pain.) What else is there to tell? I am bad at interviewing people. I avoid situations in which I have to talk to anyone's press agent. (This precludes doing pieces on most actors, a bonus in itself.) I do not like to make telephone calls, and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through the call to the assistant district attorney. My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."

"Slouching Towards Bethlehem," Joan Didion

[Chicago Avenue at Damen Avenue]

they help to photograph thought

They say that I have a passion for 'camera angles'... To me the camera represents the eye of a person, through whose mind one is watching the events on the screen. It must follow characters at times into difficult places, as it crashed through the reeds and pools in Sunrise at the heels of the Boy, rushing to keep his tryst with the Woman of the City. It must whirl and peep and move from place to place as swiftly as thought itself, when it is necessary to exaggerate for the audience the idea or emotion that is uppermost in the mind of the character. I think the films of the future will use more and more of these 'camera angles,' or as I prefer to call them these 'dramatic angles'. They help to photograph thought.

~ F. W. Murnau

[Chicago Avenue at Winchester Street]

don't give a damn

I want everything we do to be beautiful. I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything, or that the client thinks it’s worth anything, or whether it is worth anything. It’s worth it to me. It’s the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.

~ Saul Bass

[Chicago Avenue at Damen Avenue]

relating a person to the whole world

Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.

~ Andrei Tarkovsky

[Damen Avenue below Augusta Boulevard]

if they would only purr

"Your Red Majesty shouldn't purr so loud,' Alice said, rubbing her eyes, and addressing the kitten, respectfully, yet with some severity. 'You woke me out of oh! such a nice dream! And you've been along with me, Kitty—all through the Looking-glass world. Did you know it, dear?'It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that, whatever you say to them, they always purr. 'If they would only purr for "yes," and mew for "no," or any rule of that sort,' she had said, 'so that one could keep up a conversation! But how can you talk with a person if they always say the same thing?' On this occasion the kitten only purred: and it was impossible to guess whether it meant 'yes' or 'no.'

"Alice Through The Looking Glass," Lewis Carroll

[Damen Avenue below Division Street]

adore explosions

All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.
"The Poet & The City," W. H. Auden

[Chicago Avenue east of Damen Avenue]

authentic primitive

Mingus seemed to be enjoying himself and we played an entire set. The most important night of my musical life, because I no longer had to think of myself as an impostor. If Charles Mingus got up to play with me, I must have been doing something right. I was no genius, but I was a musician. He had freed me, in a way. And there was a lesson in it, too. You don't have to be great to play jazz. It's okay if you're not great—good, strong, interesting music can be created by even a mediocre instrumentalist.

A year or so later, in another club, Mingus and I split a bottle of his favorite Pouilly-Fuissé after he had, once again, sat in with me. "What's going on, Charlie? You're the best bassist in the world and I'm a putzer."

"You are," he said expansively, "an authentic primitive. That is true." He leaned forward and lowered his voice. "But you swing."

"Dogs Bark, But The Caravan Rolls On," Frank Conroy

[Chicago Avenue east of Damen Avenue]

all around in the dark

Then it don't matter. I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look and wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build... I'll be there, too.

"The Grapes of Wrath," adapted by Nunnally Johnson from John Steinbeck

[Chicago Avenue at Damen Avenue]

At what precise moment had Peru...

From the doorway of La Crónica Santiago looks at the Avenida Tacna without love: cars, uneven and faded buildings, the gaudy skeletons of posters floating in the mist, the gray midday. At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up? The newsboys weave in and out among the vehicles halted by the red light on Wilson, and he starts to walk slowly toward Colemena... He was like Peru, Zavalita was, he'd fucked himself up somewhere along the line. He thinks: when? ... He thinks: there's no solution. He sees a long line at the taxi stop for Miraflores, he crosses the square, and there's Norwin, hello, at a table at the Zela Bar, have a seat, Zavalito, fondling a chilcano and having his shoes shined, he invites him to have a drink. He doesn't look drunk yet and Santiago sits down.

"Conversation in the Cathedral," Maria Vargas Llosa

[Damen Avenue above Haddon Street]

you cannot read me like an open book

Unrhymed, unrhythmical, the chatter goes:
Yet no one hear his own remarks as prose.
Beneath each topic tunelessly discussed
The ground-bass is reciprocal mistrust.
The names in fashion shuttling to and fro
Yield, when deciphered, messages of woe.
You cannot read me like an open book.
I’m more myself than you will ever look.

Will no one listen to my little song?

A howl for recognition, shrill with fear,
Shakes the jam-packed apartment, but each ear
Is listening to its hearing, so none hear.

"At the Party," W.H. Auden

[Chicago Avenue at Damen Avenue]

the strength of a majority is illusory

Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion—and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion—while truth again reverts to a new minority.


~ Soren Kierkegaard

[Chicago Avenue west of Winchester Street]

to show people

Anything I've ever accomplished as a writer, as somebody doing TV, anything I've ever done in life, down to, like, cleaning up my room, has been accomplished because I was going to show people that they were fucked up, wrong, and that I was the fucking center of the universe and the sooner they got hip to that, the happier they would all be.

~ David Simon
[Chicago Avenue east of Damen Avenue]

that still happens

I’m going to go next door and borrow a cup of sugar.
I don’t need a cup of sugar
I just need to know that still happens
because once it stops
we’re lost.

~ Dallas Clayton

[Division Street east of Leavitt Street; Damen Avenue above Chicago Avenue]

gaudy day

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

~ George Gordon Byron.

woke on a sudden manhattan

...hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices...

"Howl," Allen Ginsberg

[Ukrainian Village]