tuckova

ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things

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Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O’Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden

Category: THINKING

  • if you have to ask you can’t afford it

    And we are shopping again, hooray. The second-hand shops, the malls, the boutiques, every city has a shopping district, a store, clothes on the rack and sales tags telling you more than you need to know about each item. The doors hiss open and the store is warm inside, the security guard just nods, the…

  • baggage

    I'm not letting go, because I'm sad about it and I think I will still feel spots of regret for a while yet. Things I haven't even realized I'm missing yet, that sudden pang of desire, the realization that one thing is gone, and the whole loss comes back in. It's not an ocean of…

  • AT-510A, revised

    I open the door and you're there which is surprising and not. There's an awkward moment and I step back to let you in but you reach forward, your thumb along my jaw and it fits like it always did and my head tilts into your warm fingers like it always did; our palms and…

  • I know how it is.

    I know how it is, it's late at night and you're at your parents, sleeping in your old bed, the room that was yours and that your mother always intended to make into a craft room of some sort, she said so when you left for college, but then you were coming back, summers, working…

  • younger then than now

    Oh, this one I remember. Curly mop of copper hair and eyes that saw so much and could hold you still until everything around you faded. He was an artist, a photographer, a sweet heart. He took pictures of me, all eyelashes and cheekbones; I wrote him poetry. We traded scar stories, cooked together, played…

  • inlaid

    In 1994 we went to Telc for the first time; there's a beautiful castle there. This was before Western tourism had really hit the country and we pretty much had the run of the place (now it has the red ropes that all castles buy in bulk). We posed in embroidered chairs at the dining…

  • losing the plot

    I've always been good at seeing below the surface, the shadows in the water, the fingers of seaweed pulled and pushed by the tide. Human behavior, too, has generally been a matter of standing very still and just watching until the sparkles stop dazzling you and you see the fish that disperse and then swim back…

  • holding back the years

    The summer of 1986, and I'd already been through so much. Thinking of the fear I'd had so long. I remember thinking that I'd had plenty of experience with feelings and that I wasn't going to let myself feel anything again. Listen to the fear that's gone. I had just turned 18. Strangled by the wishes of pater, hoping for…

  • Poslušně hlásím

    A friend asked me what makes Czechs different from other nationalities. As I'm on the cusp of getting dual citizenship I've been thinking about that often. Because I like lists, I came up with three things. I told her that Czechs seem to think that a lot of negative things that make them unique are…

  • a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity

    You can make the joke about the people who think that Frankenstein was the monster, if you like. Although, in truth, he was. But this is you, now: creator and creation. You were always only pages away from putting yourself on an ice flow on the best of days, the horror of your wretched face…