February 2012
21 posts
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“Poetry is nothing but a certain astonishment before the world and the means for...”
– Andre du Bouchet, 1954.
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“A stone thrown into a silent lake
is—the sound of your name.
The light click...”
– (via proustitute)
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THE AGE OF THE MOLE
Perhaps if my mother had been a better Catholic she would have kept me on track towards Confirmation, ignoring my tear-strewn face and heated opinions concerning the morality of abortion after she picked me up one day; as it were, she wasn’t and isn’t. Instead, she listened to my pleas and pulled me out of class, granting me a laptop for my thirteenth birthday that led to a very different kind...
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“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly...”
– Sylvia Plath, from a journal entry dated November 7, 1959.
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“Perhaps the link to pursue, then, is not the one between passion and truth, but between truth and death. Between being so knowing, and touching on the one thing that – as the cliché puts it – no one can ever know. Something untellable, but which has to be told, enters the frame when the subject of biography dies by her own hand, when death arrives too soon. And if that subject is a woman,...
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RE-TWEETING THE PRESIDENT →
A few brief thoughts on the phenomenon of the political twitter.
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“They became like people about to go out to the theater.”
– Mina Loy, from “Three Wishes.”
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WatchPonytail, “Late For School,” as performed in a Queens laundromat.
This looks like so much fun.
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and somewhere in a warm room
on a soft bed on white
sheets
a pretty young mother
is stroking her little child
sleep sleep sleep my little one
sleep my baby child
sleep sleep don’t listen
to the wind howling
the cars rustling
sleep tighter my little one
gather strength
you’ll need lots of strength
the working class needs brave strong tough fighters
there are difficult times ahead.
-...
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“You cannot expect the Form before the Idea, for they will come into being...”
– Arnold Schoenberg
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“I apologize to everything that I cannot be everywhere.
I apologize to everyone...”
– Wisława Szymborska, from “Under a Certain Little Star” (trans. by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire)
January 2012
10 posts
I think I’ve been on Twitter maybe less than two weeks, but I already think I’m addicted.
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FOUR DEAD WOMEN
In childhood, they had constructed a kingdom, albeit one in which the sky had already begun to crumple.
-
As always, Emma is the first to return, and as she is enveloped into her father’s hug all the old worries come back: all the same tremors, the same anxieties of the body. The house itself has barely changed, except for the soft, almost imperceptible groan of her mother’s oxygen machine...
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LISTENING TO JOAN DIDION AT HARVARD BOOKS →
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“I dreamt you naked in the creek
Your skin all stars and crying gulls –
Your...”
–
Bethany van Rijswijk, from ‘Water Hyacinths’.
(via caveofhypnos)
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BLUE BLOOMS OUR YOUTH
Self-promotion time: I just started a website where I will be blogging essays, criticism, and short fiction; right now I started it off by posting the first paragraph of the novel I am currently working on, which is called The Sibyl and is a retelling of the Roman myth of the sibyl set among a group of recent postgraduates quickly realizing their place in contemporary America’s decline and...
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“But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing...”
– Ludwig Feuerbach, Preface to the Second Edition of The Essence of Christianity, as quoted in Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.
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“My question - that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide...”
– Leo Tolstoy in A Confession (1882)
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The Common Online: Hello and Goodbye: Joan Didion... →
thecommonmag:
Author: Rhian Sasseen When I am old I will think of Boston as the city where I became young. No one knows this better than Joan Didion, to whom the East and West Coasts of America have always meant very different things. I first read Slouching Towards Bethlehem crouched inside a Smith…
December 2011
18 posts
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For posterity, I suppose, though all the real mediations go into my personal, paper journal:
2011 rather unexpectedly turned out to be one of the best years of my life. 2012 will be even better, according to my horoscope (I believe these things, okay?) A new life stage is beginning and I can feel it happening - everything is happening, it seems. I hope. We’ll see.
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Margaret Atwood On Writing
1. Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
2. If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
3. Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do....
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“Women cannot be expected to struggle alone against the forces of discrimination...”
– Benazir Bhutto in a 1995 speech in Beijing at the World Conference of Women. This is a beautiful speech, go read all of it. (via thepoliticalnotebook)
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“Cerebral Biographical Tortured-Genius Movies”
This is the most specific and accurate suggestion list that Netflix has ever given me.
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WatchYeah, this was essentially my summer - Ploughshares, Battlestar Galactica, and kale.
How does Portlandia capture everything so perfectly?
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How to Write an Important Novel
wwnorton:
“But can you?”
“Can I what?”
“Write an important novel.”
“Of course I can. All you have to do is cut out the plot and shove in plenty of misery.”
-P.G. Wodehouse, Ice in the Bedroom
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“I Wonder Why,” Dion & the...
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“Through the word - already a presence made of absence - absence itself gives...”
– Lacan
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“I simply want to be dead…
no grove [ ] no dance no sound”
– Sappho, fragment translated by Anne Carson in If Not, Winter (via proustitute)
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“Another major aspect of this contemporary paradigm is the acceptance of contests as being the only possible means by which to publish a book.
“I know people who have recently been in classes in MFA programs whose teachers stated very bluntly, “you must enter contests in order to publish.” This is unacceptable and writers as a whole should not accept this as fact. If the...
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“We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine....”
– Leo Tolstoy, in a letter to a friend on the advent of cinema.
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I identified myself passionately with Jo, the intellectual. Brusque and bony, Jo clambered up into trees when she wanted to read; she was much more tomboyish and daring than I was, but I shared her horror of sewing and housekeeping and her love of books. She wrote: in order to imitate her more completely, I composed two or three short stories … But the thing that delighted me most of all was...
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“Writing is a deeper sleep than death. Just as one wouldn’t pull a corpse from...”
– Franz Kafka (via qbfquickbrownfox)
November 2011
7 posts
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