A Psalm of Life from (and for) my grandpa
11 Nov 2011 9 Comments
in poetry
My grandfather Lauren Lee Alley passed away yesterday. Going through his old things, my father found a small note in his former happy place — the garage. Written, front and back on the small piece of yellow paper, in grandpa’s all-caps printing were two verses of poetry. As his grand-daughter I was surprised because, as far as I was concerned, grandpa was not known for being particularly poetic nor flowery of verse. As an english major, I was delighted and immediately got to researching. What I found was a poem written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Turns out Longfellow was inspired to write this poem by one of those deep, late night conversations that, for me, are usually spurred by close friendships and glasses of wine. He and fellow professor at Harvard spent an evening “talking of matters, which lie near one’s soul — and how to bear one’s self doughtily in Life’s battle: and make the best of things.” The next day, Lonfellow wrote “A Psalm of Life.”
I found this piece particularly pitch perfect, given the recent events. I also want to take this chance to thank my Grandfather for leaving it behind for me to find and to take comfort in:
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Every thing’s better with Lifefinder
25 Jan 2011 2 Comments
in literature, silly Tags: aaron
From the man that brought you “No, he doesn’t wear The Precious” I give you one of Aaron’s pointless-yet-funny fake ad placements…
So many things to do, how will you keep track? … Use Lifefinder!
Lifefinder’s patented usage of contraband Russian technology will make you smart. People will laugh harder when you tell a joke when you use Lifefinder. There is even a new app to manage your new Lifefinder life on your mobile device.
Does your tiny robot have a cord coming out of it? If you answered “no” then it is probably a mobile device and you should probably get the mobile device app by Lifefinder.
Does your neck hurt? Lifefinder didn’t do that to you — Lifefinder only makes shit easier, bitch. Can’t find the keys to your spouses car? Lifefinder has already searched the Internet to find them!
Do you sometimes feel an overwhelming urge to type and show strangers your vacation pictures? Are you currently, or were you recently, drunk and possibly in college? So is Lifefinder! … Drunk on the power to make your life better.
Lifefinder wants you to be your own best friend. Lifefinder will then move in and become your new bff making you irrelevant and tired of yourself. Have you ever wondered why you aren’t as cool as Lifefinder? Maybe Stacy would rather hang out with Lifefinder than with you. You should have invited Lifefinder to your mom’s birthday party.
You really underestimated Lifefinder, didn’t you.
Now you are all drunk again and drunk-texting Lifefinder repeatedly, and Lifefinder is totally just not replying, and you know Lifefinder is just making fun of you and reading your texts outloud to it’s friends.
Lifefinder … Now with unauthorized access to your webcam!
Using your laptop? Lifefinder knows. It is posting your porn searches on Facebook. Lifefinder can help you finish your report this weekend, but it isn’t going to. Did you want a little coffee this morning to help shake off that hangover? Well to damn bad. Lifefinder drank it all while going through your underwear drawer. It took video off it, and now everyone knows about those panties you only wear when it’s the first day of your period.
Lifefinder …. Because you may be on the same cycle.
You know Lifefinder is hoping you won’t notice the extra eBay purchases it made last month. Need to get to the airport? Lifefinder can give you a ride, with a smile. Need a ride home from the airport, too? Lifefinder will be laughing with it’s friends and eating YumYum donuts when your flight arrives.
When you text Lifefinder it may respond, but it will probably end with the response with “lol.” And the lol will be ON YOU!
Lifefinder doesn’t even have to try… Want directions to your job interview? Lifefinder already printed them for you and made you a peanut butter and jelly sack lunch for after. Of course, Lifefinder spilled a beer and bottle of Elmer’s non-toxic glue on the directions, making them illegible, and got hungry and at your sandwich.
Does your thumb hurt from too much texting? So does Lifefinders thumb. Quit whining. Did you lose your cell phone charger? Borrow lifefinders! Like you always do.
You will never be as smart as Lifefinder, even if Lifefinder pulls some strings and gets you in to it’s alma mater… which was Oxford, by the way.
Lifefinder … Because it’s just better.
Radvent: reading!
14 Dec 2010 6 Comments
in literature, radvent
Did you like to read as a child? Do you read more or less now?
Did I like to read as a child? Are you kidding me! That was, like, one of the ONLY things I did as a child! Reading was my favorite freaking thing to do.
My dad and I used to read together at bedtime. I remember sharing laughs and bonding together over Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn — my dad and Mark Twain working together to instill in me this love of literature. Did he have any idea that I’d grow up to major in American Literature at the same college he attended? I don’t know, but he certainly wasn’t surprised when it happened. 
And yes, I still read now as much as I did when I was younger. Of course there was that brief period of time during college where I read more than I’ve EVER read in my life — I had, at times, five or six books that I was reading at once — novels, poetry, art history books, etc. It was nuts. But now, back to normal, I have one book that I read at a time. Usually, I just get to read it at night since I work all day long.
The bookshelf on my side of the bed.
Oh wait, I just lied…
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Why Blog, indeed?
03 Apr 2009 Leave a Comment
My favorite author, Glen Hirshberg (pictured left. photo taken from his Facebook page because I hate his “author” photo), has started a blog and I couldn’t be happier about this. After already consuming everything he’s published, I get a thrill every time he posts something new because, to me, even reading a single Hirshberg-written paragraph is like a starving person getting a morsel of food. Of course I could really go for a nice big steak, but I’ll take a few french fries instead to tide me over until the main course arrives.
Anyway, his newest blog gave me a “happy spurt” for several reasons — The first was because it was perfect timing, I’d been having a rough day and very few things help me forget about life’s problems more than reading something of his. (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read The Snowman’s Children to get my mind off of something. Not to mention the fact that I happened to be reading American Morons when Aaron was attacked by a shark. That got me through some harrowing hospital times.) The second was because he mentions ME in the blog, first, before the rest of the huge list of people who support him. (I’m wondering if the list was written in order of annoyance.) And the third was because he blogged about blogging, and for some reason, I love when people do that. It’s so Postmodern.
Hirshberg writes, “Why blog? Why, especially, about something so grueling, nonsensical, and potentially even humiliating as trying to sell a book you somehow decided was worth 14 years of your life?” Or, in my case, why blog especially when it’s about something so uneventful as my life, or the lives of many other people that sat down and started to write a blog? He calls it “chattering into the void” which is a really apt way of describing things like blogging and Twittering. And it’s both what I love and hate about doing both of those things.
I hate void-chattering because it feels exactly like that, mindless and pointless chattering into the ether. There’s no instant response, unlike a conversation. But I love it because, if I’m lucky, I can get several responses, sometimes from people I didn’t even know read anything that I write! Or like the reason Glen gave in his blog, “Well, when’s the last time you were likened to a bighorn sheep, for starters?” Turns out one of his readers creatively and apparently quite accurately compared him to a bighorn sheep in a comment on another one of his blogs.
Blogging can be lame mindless and un-inspirational chatter, but it can also be a means of connectivity, of idea exchange and a revealer of surprising facts about you and the world that surrounds us.
So blog-on Glen. And as much as I may inspire you, you’ve also inspired me (and many others) more than you will ever believe with all your void-filling “chatter.”
For Art’s Sake
18 Jul 2005 Leave a Comment
in literature Tags: oliver, photography
This was an attempt to mimic modernist writers such as Eliot or Joyce’s Ulysses [Proteus] and was part of my final project in my final project in one of my english classes at USC. i still don’t know what I got on that assignment.
Jesus. My right had always feels like it is being slowly electrocuted on the first song. I can’t feel anything and my hand is locking up. Shit. I’m loosing rhythm, quasi presto, but I can’t help it. Sweat in my eyes, can’t stop to wipe it away. Now I know what headbands are really for. These people seem like they actually give a shit. Whatever. What? Maybe they are just here because it’s an image thing. Nothing better to do? Does anyone understand what is behind all of this? Or do they just want to bob their heads? It should be about the music not the people. Turning my back like Miles Davis. Artur for Arthur’s sake. I could skip out on my own concert too. Okay, lock in now with the drums, give it to them. Have I been locking in this whole time? God I hope so. Whatever. I probably have been. Oh damn, we forgot to rehearse this part more. Oh well, no one probably noticed. That’s not an excuse. The music should always be as perfect as it can be. Dolce cantabile. Because why else are we here? Remember Arthur. Remember Miles. He’s dragging. Don’t do that you idiot. This song is so lame; only three stupid chords. Bored. He needs to start caring about the feeling of that solo. It sounds so amateurish. Ooo, bad tempo for this song guys. Ritenuto. This is fun. I need to play professionally but I don’t want to do this as a profession.
"heroes are rare"
16 Feb 2005 2 Comments
in literature Tags: quotes
“Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden…. I wonder why. …. Perhaps life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or; it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”
Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines.
21 Nov 2004 1 Comment
in poetry
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write for example, ‘The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.’
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to a pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another’s. She will be another’s. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
-Pablo Neruda
(i love this poem, it’s so saddly beautiful… just thought i’d share cuz i’m in that mood)
when do you think is the time to love somebody the most?…
23 Aug 2004 1 Comment
in literature Tags: quotes
“There is always something left to love. And if you ain’t learned that, you ain’t learned nothing…. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain’t through learning- because that ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t belive in hisself ’cause the world done whipped him so! When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.”
-A Raisin In The Sun, Hansberry
"you are so beautiful and I am a fool to be in love with you"
27 Jul 2004 Leave a Comment
in literature, poetry
Nightclub
by Billy Collins
You are so beautiful and I am a fool
to be in love with you
is a theme that keeps coming up
in songs and poems.
There seems to be no room for variation.
I have never heard anyone sing
I am so beautiful
and you are a fool to be in love with me,
even though this notion has surely
crossed the minds of women and men alike.
You are so beautiful, too bad you are a fool
is another one you don’t hear.
Or, you are a fool to consider me beautiful.
That one you will never hear, guaranteed.
For no particular reason this afternoon
I am listening to Johnny Hartman
whose dark voice can curl around
the concepts on love, beauty, and foolishness
like no one else’s can.
It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette
someone left burning on a baby grand piano
around three o’clock in the morning;
smoke that billows up into the bright lights
while out there in the darkness
some of the beautiful fools have gathered
around little tables to listen,
some with their eyes closed,
others leaning forward into the music
as if it were holding them up,
or twirling the loose ice in a glass,
slipping by degrees into a rhythmic dream.
Yes, there is all this foolish beauty,
borne beyond midnight,
that has no desire to go home,
especially now when everyone in the room
is watching the large man with the tenor sax
that hangs from his neck like a golden fish.
He moves forward to the edge of the stage
and hands the instrument down to me
and nods that I should play.
So I put the mouthpiece to my lips
and blow into it with all my living breath.
We are all so foolish,
my long bebop solo begins by saying,
so damn foolish we have become beautiful without even knowing it.
–
It’s funny now, 5 years after posting this, I think this poem is saying something completely different than I thought it said then. 
Somewhere I Have Never Traveled, Gladly Beyond, by E.E. Cummings
21 Jul 2004 Leave a Comment
in literature, poetry
Somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond
by E.E. Cummings
somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility; whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
–
When I posted this on my Myspace blog all those years ago it reminded me of a boy I was dating. It was something about the last stanza. Of course when I read it then the poem struck such a chord in me, it was as if Cummings had seen inside my soul and reproduced it in poetry. And now, sadly, as I’ve grown and forgotten about my past loves, I can’t even remember why it touched me so. All I remember now is that I burst into tears when I read that last stanza.
Aloha there, I'm Megan Finley. I'm a 30-something girl, living in Los Angeles with that guy I married and our rescued pets. I work online (a LOT) for the 
