March 2012
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“Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to...”
– Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
“In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable. And sometimes if...”
– John Steinbeck on writing (from The Paris Review)
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“Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An...”
– Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
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“There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult...”
– Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
February 2012
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"The Settlers" by Margaret Atwood
A second after the first boat touched the shore, there was a quick skirmish brief as a twinge and then the land was settled
(of course there was really no shore: the water turned to land by having objects in it: caught and kept from surge, made less than immense by networks of roads and grids of fences)
and as for us, who drifted picked by the sharks during so many bluegreen centuries before...
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"They Give Evidence" by Margaret Atwood
(After a room-sized installation by Dadang Christanto, 1996)
They give evidence in an empty room sixteen of them, eight men, eight women, four rows of four, unlucky number.
They are all bald, they are all naked, they all have wide shoulders, huge hands, strong legs, huge feet.
Their skin is greyish white, greyish brown, mineral colours, dusty and scarred as if they have been buried; as if they...
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"I Will Return" by Pablo Neruda
Some other time, man or woman, travler, later, when I am not alive, look here, look for me between stone and ocean, in the light storming through the foam. Look here, look for me, for here I will return, without saying a thing, without voice, without mouth, pure, here I will return to be the churning of the water, of its unbroken heart, here, I will be discovered and lost: here, I will, perhaps,...
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“What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense.”
– The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (via ageunknown)
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trentevolte:
Winnicott, on fantasy: “The subject says to the object: ‘I destroyed you,’ and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: ‘Hullo, object!’ ‘I destroyed you.’ ‘I love you.’ ‘You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.’ ‘While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.’ Here fantasy...
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“Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met.”
– Marguerite Duras (via journalofanobody)
hi mom ♥ (from s.)
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“Language is a darkness pulled out of us.”
– Stanley Plumly, from “Infidelity” (via literary verve)
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“The beginning of your program? Your Earth is spinning in the wrong direction.”
– astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, to Jon Stewart, on the graphic in the opening credits of “The Daily Show.” (via washingtonpoststyle)
also, the chest x-ray on the opening to scrubs is backwards… although apparently google tells me that was an intentional move to show the inexperience of...
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"VI" from One Hundred Love Sonnets, by Pablo...
In the forests, lost, I cut a dark stick and lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips: perhaps it was the voice of crying rain, a brken bell, or a torn heart.
Something that from so far away seemed seriously hidden to me, covere by the earth, a cry deafened by immense autumns, by the darkness of the leaves, humid and ajar.
But there, waking from the dreams of the forest, the hazel branch sung below...
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from: "The Muse as Medusa" by May Sarton
It is all fluid still, that world of feeling Where thoughts, those fishes, silent, feed and rove; And, fluid, it is also full of healing, For love is healing, even rootless love.
I turn your face around! It is my face. That frozen rage is what I must explore— Oh secret, self-enclosed, and ravaged place! This is the gift I thank Medusa for.
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“A story hangs suspended in time.”
– Laura Riding
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“… in contemporary story-writing, the question, where the author is, in a...”
– Laura Riding
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“When something is intellectually fashionable, it commands, if not respect, fear:...”
– Laura Riding
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“… although I feel myself ceasing to exist, I still am. I do nothing, there...”
– Laura Riding, “Eve’s Side of It”
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from: "How Cruel is the Story of Eve" by Stevie...
Yet there is this to be said still: Life woud be over long ago If men and women had not loved each other Naturally, naturally, Forgetting their mythology They would have died of it else Long ago, long ago, And all would be emptiness now And silence.
Oh dread Nature, for your purpose, To have made them love so.
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“I, for one, never had any illusions.”
– Laura Riding, “Eve’s Side of It”
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“…it is no fun to be travelling, no matter how comfortable the hotels and...”
– Laura Riding, “Eve’s Side of It”
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"The Birth of Venus" by Muriel Rukeyser
Risen in a welter of waters.
Not as he saw her standing upon a frayed and lovely surf clean-riding the graceful leafy breezes clean-poised and easy. Not yet.
But born in a tidal wave of the father’s overthrow, the old rule killed and its mutilated sex.
The testicles of the father-god, father of fathers, sickled off by his son, the next god Time, Sickled off. Hurled into the ocean. In all...
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“I am ugly, fat, conspicuous & dull…. I should like best of anything to...”
– Diary of Amy Lowell
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"Girl Without Hands" by Margaret Atwood
Walking through the ruins on your way to work that do not look like ruins with the sunlight pouring over the seen world like hail or melted silver, that bright and magnificent, each leaf and stone quickened and specific in it, and you can’t hold it, you can’t hold any of it. Distance surrounds you, marked out by the ends of your arms when they are stretched to their fullest. You can...
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"Ruin and Beauty" by Patricia Young
It’s so quiet now the children have decided to stop being born. We raise our cups in an empty room. In this light, the curtains are transparent as gauze. Through the open window we hear nothing— no airplane, lawn mower, no siren speeding its white pain through the city’s traffic. There is no traffic. What remains is all that remains. The brick school at the five points...
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"Guilt" by Leona Gom
Your mother giving you a set of dishes and all you said was but I move around so much and you can never forget her hurt face turning away. The best friend you accused of flirting with your boyfriend when all the time you knew it was him you just couldn’t face it. The argument with your father about not having seen him damned magazines then finding it in your room and never admitting...
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“The world does not reward honesty and independence, it rewards obedience and...”
– Noam Chomsky (via killer-butterfly)
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