out so early

“One summer morning at sunrise a long time ago I met a little girl with a book under her arm. I asked her why she was out so early and she answered that there were too many books and far too little time. And there she was absolutely right.”
~ Tove Jansson

[Chicago Avenue east of Damen Avenue]

blue nights

"Vanish. Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her. Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes. Go back into the blue... I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost... The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her."

"Blue Nights," Joan Didion

[Thessaloniki]

acquainted with the night

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.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

"Acquainted with the Night," Robert Frost

[Armitage Avenue looking east at Spaulding Street]

most delusive

‎



When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.

~ 
George Bernard Shaw

[Chicago Avenue west of Damen Avenue; Damen Avenue and August Avenue]

i just don't have the time

The odd thing about my life is that I have three full-time jobs and none of them really mix. In the theatre I'm known as a playwright. In Hollywood I'm known as a screenwriter. At the BBC I'm known as a writer of "quality TV drama". None of the people I work with know who the other people are or care. It's like bigamy. I have three jobs which I try to do all at once and it's sometimes hard to explain to people why I might be busy in LA or New Mexico or Shepherd's Bush next week, and therefore unavailable. In my house in Somerset where I write, I don't have a phone, TV or the internet. It's annoying, I admit, and it drives people crazy, but I just don't have the time.

~ Joe Penhall

[66 CTA bus, west of Western Avenue]

the only response

The only response
to a child’s grave is
to lie down before it and play dead

"Minor Poem," Bill Knott

[Damen Avenue at Chicago Avenue]

How little we know,
and when we know it!

"Like A Sentence," John Ashbery

[Chicago Avenue at Hoyne Avenue]

debauched irreparably by hollywood

"[I]nterspersed randomly throughout all of this, action shots from various poster advertisements for Technicolored and black-and-white movie epics wherein mayhem, sex, blood, torture, sadism, and skulduggery had reigned supreme—the bachelor's pad of a man who had been debauched irreparably by Hollywood..."

"A Fan's Notes," Frederick Exley

(Patio Theater)

[Chicago Avenue east of Hoyne Avenue]

a man with a fin-tailed car

"Some people have more gadgets than others. Naturally you consider a man with a fin-tailed car more successful than the man who's driving a model five years old. It's false to judge people that way."

~ Nelson Algren

[Western Avenue above Chicago Avenue]

a frenchman in chicago

[Sofitel]

so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope

“Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make. You can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for twenty years! And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there's no fate, but there is, it's what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead, or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain wasting years for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right, but it never comes. Or it seems to, but it doesn't really. So you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along, something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel cherished, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is is, I feel so angry! And the truth is, I feel so fucking sad! And the truth is, I’ve felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long, I’ve been pretending I’m okay, just to get along! I don’t know why. Maybe because... no one wants to hear about my misery... because they have their own. Fuck everybody. Amen."

The priest's monologue, "Synecdoche, New York," Charlie Kaufman

[Chicago Avenue east of Winchester Street]

slow as a cloud

One day
she fell
in love with its
heft and speed.
Tough, lean,

fast as light
slow as a cloud.
It took care
of rain, short

noon, long dark.
It had rough kin;
did not stall.
With it, she said,
I may,

if I can,
sleep; since I must,
die.
Some say,
rise.

"The Monosyllable," Josephine Jacobsen

[Chicago Avenue west of Damen Avenue]

the hand holds no chalk

"Its existence
Was real, though troubled, and the ache
Of this waking dream can never drown out
The diagram still sketched on the wind,
Chosen, meant for me and materialized
In the disguising radiance of my room.
We have seen the city; it is the gibbous
Mirrored eye of an insect. All things happen
On its balcony and are resumed within,
But the action is the cold, syrupy flow
Of a pageant. One feels too confined,
Sifting the April sunlight for clues,
In the mere stillness of the ease of its
Parameter. The hand holds no chalk
And each part of the whole falls off
And cannot know it knew, except
Here and there, in cold pockets
Of remembrance, whispers out of time."

"Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," John Ashbery

[Chicago Avenue west of California Avenue]

a bicycle that glitters like the wind

This girl
Waits at the corner for
This boy
Freewheeling on his bicycle.
She holds
A flower in her hand
A gold flower
In her hands she holds
The sun.
With power between his thighs
The boy
Comes smiling to her
He rides
A bicycle that glitters like
The wind.
This boy this girl
They walk
In step with the wind
Arm in arm
They climb the level street
To where
Laid on the glittering handlebars
The flower
Is round and shining as
The sun

"Girl, Boy, Flower, Bicycle," M. K. Joseph

[Chicago Avenue at Winchester Street]

some specific something that's no longer required

Necessity being one of invention's many mothers, I have a certain faith in our ability to repurpose almost anything, provided it becomes sufficiently necessary. Then again, I suspect we've abandoned cities in the past because they were too thoroughly built to do some specific something that's no longer required."

~ William Gibson, Scientific American, September 2011

[Damen Avenue below North Avenue]

sentence

"One can summarize a plot in one sentence, whereas it’s fairly difficult to summarize one frame." ~ Raymond Durgnat

[North Avenue east of Milwaukee and Damen Avenues]

every time you watch a movie

"Every time you watch a movie you become part of its moment, whenever it may have been, and you live the moment over again rather than simply remember it."

~ Steve Erickson on Monte Hellman

[Damen Avenue below Division Street]

a perpetual setting forth

"Barthes' preferred way of presenting his hypotheses was in the form of linked aphorisms, and, as Susan Sontag noted, 'it is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding.' The paradox, then, is that this man who liked first words (and adored paradoxes) offered his provisional findings as if they were the last word. Needless to say, this last word was always susceptible to further elaboration and refinement, to further beginnings. This is how Barthes' prose acquires its signature style of compression and flow, a summing up that is also a perpetual setting forth."

~ Geoff Dyer on Roland Barthes

[Sofitel]

days before the injury was expected

You might remember trying to read
The notes scrawled on the decaying leaves
Of the branches whizzing upwards
As you tumbled down the yawn
Between mountains, irresistible
As the urge to bandage your chest
Days before the injury was expected.

"And About Time," David Lehman

[Chicago Avenue west of California Avenue]

a minor light, a cooling star

"The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end."

"The Corrections," Jonathan Franzen

[Haddon Street at Damen Avenue]