April 2013
1 post
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January 2013
7 posts
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“We are the young women who have dutifully read our theory, and this is the...”
– Today on CASE Magazine, I write on Tumblr feminisms, the academic third wave, and why Lady Gaga Is Not A Feminist Icon.
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Books Read (A Recent List)
The Scientists, Marco Roth Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl, Tiqqun What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation, editors of n + 1 What We Should Have Known: Two Discussions, editors of n + 1 P.S.1. Symposium: A Practical Avant-Garde, editors of n + 1 N + 1, Issue One, various N + 1, Issue Two, various Draw It With Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment, editors...
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“The literature of Massachusetts seems to reflect this fear. It is a literature...”
– Our own Rhian Sasseen on Boston’s offbeat literature. (via millionsmillions)
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December 2012
2 posts
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FALL (HOMAGE TO BAS JAN ADER)
Empty air. And then -
Half-awake. I am trying not to fall asleep. I am trying not to drift away. I am trying not to fall asleep. I do not want to dream.
Late nights. Though I do not want to sleep, I wish that I could fall. Instead of falling I am watching: Youtube flickers out across my screen, a link and then another link, and this is a different sort of descent. I love the sidebar; I love...
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November 2012
3 posts
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MICROFICTION #1: THE MURDERESS
Rhian Sasseen
I dream of wolves these days. I dream of men these days. I dream of nothing, only teeth.
The fur found its way studded through my fingertips.
There was a cry. In the corner of the room stood the crib. In the corner of the crib lay the baby. Red was the mouth and stubbed were the teeth; the child cried louder, louder still. Nothing, said the mother; the mother said nothing. A...
“Women are the internet, and the internet is women. How else to explain male...”
– The Intellectual Situation (via nplusonemag)
October 2012
9 posts
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“Every word written is a victory against Death.”
– Michel Butor (via mythologyofblue)
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WOMEN OF THE WORLD, UNITE
I cried when I read former Amherst student Angie Epifano’s account of being raped. I texted my little sister, thick in the middle of application season, and she told me that this had changed her mind about applying to Amherst. I closed the window. And then I thought: thank God I went to Smith.
Immediately I felt ashamed. This is not a helpful response, I chided myself – women are assaulted and...
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from The World Doesn’t End Charles Simic
We were so poor I had to take the place of the bait in the mousetrap. All alone in the cellar, I could hear them pacing upstairs, tossing and turning in their beds. “These are dark and evil days,” the mouse told me as he nibbled my ear. Years passed. My mother wore a cat-fur collar which she stroked until its sparks lit up the cellar.
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September 2012
12 posts
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At Full Moon Ester Naomi Perquin
I can see him, silhouette of
a man in his bathroom window.
By that light he works on apace.
Rubs lather into his cheeks
and then with a razor
shaves the wolf from his face.
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THE END OF WORDS
“The justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.” - Glenn Gould
Enough of thinking, enough with thought: the end of words. Why is...
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Watch“What’s A Girl Doing Here?”, Diana Diroy.
Fantastic short documentary on female cab drivers.
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OLD PEOPLE AND THE INTERNET
Gone was the youthful danger that Facebook once promised. “Isn’t it weird?” an old roommate asked early in the summer, reflecting back on this transition. “The stuff we’d post on each other’s walls - we’d just openly talk about drugs and alcohol and whatever. Everyone had a party album - that was what Facebook was for.” No one on my feed posts party...
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The Encounter Ezra Pound
All the while they were talking the new morality
Her eyes explored me.
And when I rose to go
Her fingers were like the tissue
Of a Japanese paper napkin.
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There is no piece of music whose history is so divided into “before” and “after” by one performer as the history of the “Goldberg” Variations is divided into before and after by Glenn Gould. And few artists have been so good at presenting a self-image and making it central to their art. But Gould went further: he imprinted his image of himself onto Bach. This is a good measure of Gould’s...
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Benign Jennifer Barber
The thought
of more waiting rooms
recedes, along with the need
for bravery.
Small things matter again:
a cardinal
in the winter pine,
the wristwatch I misplaced.
At night I get into bed
with The Death of Ivan Ilych
and read of his
last three days,
his struggle in the black
sack he imagines surrounding him —
unable to wholly fit
or work free of its grip,
he...
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Jackson Pollack painting, 1951, Hans Namuth and... →
“I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.” - Jackson Pollack
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August 2012
7 posts
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Explicit Violence | Lidia Yuknavitch | The Rumpus →
I consider myself a success story. Because I am alive I mean, and because I think writing and books and art are the reason. As a writer, I’m not so sure I see much difference in the storylines for women and girls who enter the field. I see that some art is rewarded for being “universal,” and it is written by men. Other art is deemed confessional. Or sentimental. Or too subjective. And it is...
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PUSS 'N' RIOTS
I suppose the upside is that we’ve never seen the word “pussy” appear so many times in the pages of our national news sources.
The downside? – How about everything else?
I am referring, of course, to the recent sentencing of Pussy Riot, the Russian political art collective, and the orgy of self-congratulatory support that has erupted from Western liberaldom in the aftermath of their trial. The...
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WatchCeline and Julie Go Boating
Saw this yesterday at a local theater; highly recommended.
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“I hate that moment when all faces turn toward me and when, with a single rapid glance, they identify and dismember me. Whenever that occurs, I take stock of myself and I always wind up with a guilty conscience.” - from The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir.
theparisreview:
I tried, and each attempt was a fiasco. I yearned, but every love of mine was wrong. I needed, and the shame was overwhelming. I failed, and so I hated being young.
—Jonathan Galassi, “Young”
July 2012
14 posts
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“I know what I am doing here: I am telling of the instants that are thick and drip with blood.” - Clarice Lispector, from Água Viva.
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What Kind of Times Are These Adrienne Rich
There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is...
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“Did love begin that way, with the wish to go on talking?”
– The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf. (via happinessisasolid)
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The Public Garden Robert Lowell
Burnished, burned-out, still burning as the year
you lead me to our stamping ground.
The city and its cruising cars surround
the Public Garden. All’s alive—
the children crowding home from school at five,
punting a football in the bricky air,
the sailors and their pick-ups under trees
with Latin labels. And the jaded flock
of swanboats paddles to its...
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Modesty Antonia Pozzi
If a word of mine
pleases you
and you tell me
even just with your eyes
I open wide
in a joyful smile -
but I tremble
like a young mother
who even blushes when
a passerby tells her
her little boy is handsome. 1 February 1933
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PROVEN TECHNIQUES FOR AN EMPTY DREAMSCAPE
412 LinkedIn connections. 746 Twitter followers. A profile on every social media site; a resume stuffed with a long list of internships, paid and unpaid. Sunday morning brunches; a closet filled with H&M professional wear. Sentences that begin, “During my summer co-op…”
These are the markers of success for a particular breed of ambitious youth. They are ambitious in name...
