May 2012
27 posts
8 tags
ENOUGH LADY BUSINESS: RECLAIMING THE WORD "WOMAN"
“Woman” is uncompromising. It is matter-of-fact. It is terrifyingly adult – it is hard for me at twenty-one to seriously call myself a woman. But that is what I am. … Paired alongside this consumerist obsession with the self and an unwillingness to engage with the more difficult complexities of sexism comes a relentless cynicism towards anything unrelated to Beyonce. The headlines of a...
May 30th
5 tags
“I am the witness, I am the only witness of myself. This crust of words, these...”
– Antonin Artaud, from “The Nerve Meter”.
May 29th
16 notes
“A god’s old age is fresh and green.”
–  Virgil’s Aeneid, VI:304. (via caveofhypnos)
May 29th
2 notes
6 tags
May 28th
65 notes
6 tags
THE CASE AGAINST VINTAGE
There was a time in my more immediately-naive youth in which a good ninety percent of my wardrobe was culled from vintage sources. I told myself that I was green, I told myself that I was quirky; in reality, all I was doing was regurgitating the past in some awful amalgamation of supposed alternativity that really just made the Baby Boomers proud. “Just like Twiggy!” my parents cooed when at...
May 27th
2 notes
“For what is more delightful than leisure devoted to literature? That literature...”
– Cicero (via wwnorton)
May 26th
164 notes
Oh, Smithies.
overheardatsmith: Class of ‘37 Smithie: I am not interested in dinner, I keep telling you, all I want is a damn drink!
May 26th
52 notes
(I don’t know what to do about this habit of writing about the living, although to be perfectly honest I’ve long since ceased thinking it was a problem because of course I write about them as they live inside me, rather than as they really are.) Stanislav Lvovsky
May 25th
6 notes
WHERE ARE ALL THE WOMEN WRITERS?
Art cannot be truly revolutionary when it mimics the politics of the mainstream. Female writers, continue writing, continue fighting. And male writers – ignore us at your peril. READ MORE
May 24th
3 notes
“It sometimes happens, disconcertingly, at any rate with a practitioner like...”
– T. S. Eliot, “The Art of Poetry, No. 1”, The Paris Review.
May 23rd
2 notes
4 tags
“I dreamed of you, last night, and send a Carnation to indorse it—”
– Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Susan Gilbert, c. 1876 (via proustitute)
May 22nd
125 notes
6 tags
May 22nd
55 notes
5 tags
May 19th
Allow me a moment to brag: Straight A’s for my last semester at Smith. YES!
May 16th
4 notes
1 tag
“I remember every single spot of light that ever gouged a shadow beside your...”
– Zelda Fitzgerald (via nostorybook)
May 12th
46 notes
1 tag
May 11th
401 notes
2 tags
“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I...”
– Emily Dickinson
May 11th
6 notes
1 tag
May 11th
4 notes
8 tags
BRIEF THOUGHTS ON SELF-EFFACEMENT
Lately I have been thinking of what a priest once told a distraught Anne Sexton: “God is in your typewriter.” I think of this whenever I sit down at my computer with the intention to write. I reread Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist,” a story, most literally, of starvation. And something more, though – the body dwindling into nothing, all in the pursuit of one specific perfection, a mastery of art. In...
May 11th
1 note
5 tags
“All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to...”
– T.S. Eliot
May 10th
9 notes
4 tags
“A kiss on the forehead” Marina Tsvetaeva A kiss on the forehead—erases misery. I kiss your forehead. A kiss on the eyes—lifts sleeplessness. I kiss your eyes. A kiss on the lips—is a drink of water. I kiss your lips. A kiss on the forehead—erases memory. 1917
May 10th
12 notes
6 tags
Completing my student loan exit counseling; under “Discharge / Forgiveness,” they warn me to pay back my loans, while acknowledging “there are a few situations in which your loan may be discharged and your repayment obligation cancelled or forgiven.” The first situation? “You die.”
May 7th
1 note
6 tags
“It has been more than four years since the US economy first entered...”
– Paul Krugman, from “How To End This Depression”, The New York Review of Books.
May 5th
1 note
4 tags
“The poems deluged me. They came at me like wild bees.”
– Anna Kamienska, from A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook.
May 3rd
4 notes
4 tags
May 3rd
4 notes
4 tags
May 3rd
5 notes
10 tags
I WILL NOT VOTE FOR OBAMA AGAIN
Of course I remember Election Night 2008 – I was eighteen and it was my first, and my entire house was crowded into our Smith College living room, not a Republican among us. We waited, tense, worried that our efforts – all the campaigning, all the sloganeering – would come to naught. We who had come of age during the Bush years: what we wanted, and what we had been promised, was “change.” When it...
May 2nd
2 notes