February 2012
21 posts
7 tags
Feb 27th
1 note
2 tags
“Poetry is nothing but a certain astonishment before the world and the means for...”
– Andre du Bouchet, 1954.
Feb 27th
6 notes
5 tags
Feb 24th
4,272 notes
5 tags
Feb 24th
3 notes
3 tags
“A stone thrown into a silent lake is—the sound of your name. The light click...”
– (via proustitute)
Feb 24th
270 notes
12 tags
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...
Feb 21st
2 notes
8 tags
Feb 19th
2 tags
“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly...”
– Sylvia Plath, from a journal entry dated November 7, 1959.
Feb 15th
23 notes
4 tags
Feb 13th
10 notes
8 tags
“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,...
Feb 11th
53 notes
4 tags
Feb 10th
5 notes
9 tags
RE-TWEETING THE PRESIDENT →
A few brief thoughts on the phenomenon of the political twitter.
Feb 9th
1 note
4 tags
Feb 9th
13 notes
Feb 9th
197 notes
8 tags
Feb 8th
6 notes
4 tags
“They became like people about to go out to the theater.”
–  Mina Loy, from “Three Wishes.”
Feb 6th
3 tags
Feb 5th
38 notes
4 tags
WatchWatch
Ponytail, “Late For School,” as performed in a Queens laundromat. This looks like so much fun.
Feb 5th
2 notes
5 tags
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. -...
Feb 4th
3 notes
7 tags
“You cannot expect the Form before the Idea, for they will come into being...”
– Arnold Schoenberg
Feb 3rd
4 notes
4 tags
“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)
Feb 2nd
312 notes
January 2012
10 posts
I think I’ve been on Twitter maybe less than two weeks, but I already think I’m addicted.
Jan 31st
1 note
4 tags
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...
Jan 31st
3 notes
4 tags
Jan 27th
1 note
5 tags
LISTENING TO JOAN DIDION AT HARVARD BOOKS →
Jan 24th
1 note
3 tags
“I dreamt you naked in the creek Your skin all stars and crying gulls – Your...”
–  Bethany van Rijswijk, from ‘Water Hyacinths’. (via caveofhypnos)
Jan 17th
133 notes
4 tags
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...
Jan 16th
5 tags
“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.
Jan 14th
6 notes
5 tags
Jan 13th
15 notes
1 tag
“My question - that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide...”
– Leo Tolstoy in A Confession (1882)
Jan 10th
423 notes
3 tags
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…
Jan 6th
5 notes
December 2011
18 posts
4 tags
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.
Dec 31st
4 notes
4 tags
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....
Dec 29th
10 notes
1 tag
Dec 29th
77 notes
4 tags
“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)
Dec 27th
1,184 notes
4 tags
Dec 27th
109 notes
2 tags
“Cerebral Biographical Tortured-Genius Movies” This is the most specific and accurate suggestion list that Netflix has ever given me.
Dec 22nd
5 tags
WatchWatch
Yeah, this was essentially my summer - Ploughshares, Battlestar Galactica, and kale. How does Portlandia capture everything so perfectly?
Dec 22nd
2 notes
3 tags
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
Dec 20th
325 notes
7 tags
Dec 20th
3 notes
4 tags
Listen“I Wonder Why,” Dion & the...
Dec 20th
10 notes
2 tags
“Through the word - already a presence made of absence - absence itself gives...”
– Lacan
Dec 18th
17 notes
2 tags
“I simply want to be dead… no grove [ ] no dance no sound”
– Sappho, fragment translated by Anne Carson in If Not, Winter (via proustitute)
Dec 18th
127 notes
8 tags
“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...
Dec 17th
4 notes
4 tags
“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.
Dec 13th
205 notes
6 tags
Dec 12th
225 notes
7 tags
Dec 12th
20 notes
5 tags
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...
Dec 11th
10 notes
3 tags
“Writing is a deeper sleep than death. Just as one wouldn’t pull a corpse from...”
– Franz Kafka (via qbfquickbrownfox)
Dec 2nd
17 notes
November 2011
7 posts
4 tags
Nov 12th
3 notes