September 2010
43 posts
2 tags
1 tag
“Gender can become salient in the environment in so many ways: an imbalance of...”
– Cordelia Fine, Delusions Of Gender
1 tag
“Culture is more than the aggregate of what Google describes as the ‘the...”
– Nicholas Carr, The Shallows
Evergreens
The year I admitted I was lonely I didn’t know what I was saying I said the nights are rough here they have minikins & clowns old postulates taking out the trash and you get lonely sometimes. I didn’t know how one thing leads to another like a smell under the house and then you’re talking about the payoff when you don’t even want to you want them to...
“In order to align what people know with what they do, we must try to reshape...”
– Kwame Anthony Appiah
1 tag
“Art is an inventory of missing”
– Frederic Tuten, Self Portraits: Fictions
“These days, you see a kid lying on his back and looking blank and you begin to...”
– Robert Paul Smith, Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing.
1 tag
Watch“What kind of honor is it to kill an unarmed woman?”
Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of The Honor Code, on using honor to end the practice of honor killings.
Frieda Pushnik (excerpt)
These are faces I love. Adrift with wonder, big-eyed as infants and famished for strangeness in the world they haven’t known since early childhood, they are monsters of innocence who gladly shoulder the burden of the blessed, the unbroken, the beautiful, the lost.
From Usher, by B.H. Fairchild
1 tag
2 tags
“No matter the view from the window, the style of the architecture, the color of...”
– Nicole Krauss, from Great House (Available on October 12, 2010)
1 tag
“Avoidance of attachment is the pursuit of invulnerability, the pursuit of an...”
– Robert T. Muller, Trauma and the Avoidant Client
1 tag
“It’s the way you use words. You both pick your words like you’re...”
– Suzanne Rivecca, Death Is Not An Option
1 tag
Danse Manhattanique (excerpt)
Let’s move to the jugular pulse of our lives, shake our asses to the sound of petty crime, a cash register opening, a libido humming in a nearby room. And when we return to our chairs, the dance floor, arid with our absence, let’s invent the brawl that starts at the bar — two men, say, who need the exercise, let’s conjure the bloodbeat, the contagion of violence, and slip...
1 tag
Cohabiting (Excerpt)
There’s not a nude in a museum or a person anywhere, taking a bath, nearly as naked as that French girl, stripped of all but her socks, head shaved, being spat upon by her own townspeople in one of history’s sunlit cobblestone squares.
Stephen Dunn, from The Insistence of Beauty
1 tag
“Assumptions lie behind the work of all writers. The writer is unaware of most of...”
– Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town, lectures and essays on poetry and writing.
2 tags
Soup Season
“Fall comes suddenly where I live. By late September the long summer seems to stretch eternally, pale blue and golden. Then one day we wake up to the cool hush of morning fog, the delight of wearing a sweater while making coffee. Damp air brings the scent of sage and eucalyptus. The evenings draw in. I love this time of year. Everywhere in the world the pace picks up-and in the kitchen it...
4 tags
WatchWho is Charlie Chan? (via The New Yorker)
1 tag
“If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words,” she...”
– Sherwood Anderson, The Teacher in Winesburg, Ohio
2 tags
In the House (excerpt)
I sense the aromas of sex, the delicate stale drift
of arguments and spite no amount of cleaning will solve. I know when love goes
it slips through all insulation, forgets your name, becomes sky.
Stephen Dunn
1 tag
“Before jumping to any ideologically reductive conclusion, we should pause and...”
– Yunte Huang, from the introduction to Charlie Chan
Dynagroove
Our social clock had gone berserk but those
groovy Eames and collectible lamps licensed
us to practice a kind of savage civility. Our vice
wasn’t noble or the avalanche of cocktails
with serene names suggestive of spy movies
or the imprudent idea of going further in snow.
We secretly wished for living rooms with such large
cushions. We might have survived it all, especially
the...
WatchAn animated scene from Stitches, the graphic memoir by David Small.
The music, String Quartet No. 2 composed by Morton Feldman, was a constant source of inspiration for David Small as he was working on the book.
1 tag
“Her scent blossomed in the car like heavenly polecat, like flowers manufactured...”
– Brad Watson, from “Ordinary Monsters” in the story collection Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives
“‘I seriously hated it when men used the term “make love.” It...”
– Suzanne Rivecca from Death Is Not An Option
3 tags
Overheard in Space
Overheard on Day 4 of Gemini VII, a 1965 manned NASA spaceflight. The crew, Frank Borman II and James Lovell, Jr., spent 13 2/3 days in space for a total of 206 orbits of Earth.
Mission Control: Do you notice in looking at him that his skin is moist?
Lovell: I'll let him answer that.
Borman: [silence]
Mission Control: Have you been sweating at all, Frank?
Borman: [silence]
Mission Control: Gemini VII, this is Carnarvon. Did you copy?
Borman: About sweating? I'd say, yes, I'm perspiring a little.
Mission Control: Very well. Thank you.
(from "Packing for Mars" by Mary Roach)
1 tag
“He knew, with a finality that crept upon him as imperceptibly as breathing, that...”
– Lan Samantha Chang, from All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (via italicsmine)
1 tag
“i was familiar with the little mating rituals of getting to know each other, of...”
– nicole krauss, great house. (via paperbackgirl)
1 tag
“You have to be the erect penis in your life.”
– Micah Toub, Growing Up Jung
1 tag
1 tag
“Stories. Like air, like food, like hope. I read them, I told them, and later I...”
– Frederic Tuten, prologue from Self Portraits: Fictions
2 tags
Death In Space →
In which way is it possible to have a ceremony and to store a dead body — a friend — with dignity, during a mission to Mars?
“It was a terrifying idea, the revival of my youth, the revival also of my...”
– Frederic Tuten, “Self Portrait with Icebergs” from Self Portraits: Fictions
3 tags
“Honor killing will only perish when it is seen as dishonorable.”
– Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code
1 tag
“Sometimes I looked at the man I married — the temperate mildness of him,...”
– ~ Suzanne Rivecca, “Consummation” from Death Is Not An Option
1 tag
I am grateful for the machine
“I spend hours at the screen now, and though I am grateful for the machine, it leaves me skeptical. I wish often for the weight, or at least the solidity, of a book, instead of the image of words on glass. The transience of the picture worries me, and I have caught myself calling back earlier pages, comparing them to my own memory to see if the text has been altered by the computer’s...
