May 2013
18 posts
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“Thousands of feet above the earth, the air is crowded with living creatures,...”
– Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us
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“Then I took my spot. Extended my thumb. Tried to catch the attention of female...”
– Bhanu Kapil, “Notes to Stop the Car (A-L)”, in Incubation: A Space for Monsters (via adornoble)
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Watchtherumpus:
amandamakesthings:
With only thirty minutes left until launch, thirteen-year-old Beatrice stirs up trouble in the freighter starship her mother pilots.
Written, directed, and edited by Amanda Gotera. Starring Nya Garner and Fazia Begum Rizvi.
This film was shot on 16mm Kodak 500T. All effects are practical.
If you watch one thing today, make this it.
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Tonight the babies are listening to Destiny’s Child and being THE CUTEST EVER; one of them just told me a story about wearing a bear costume and getting crazy on 4loko, one of them told me I should stop working here and be a “covergirl” (“seriously, you could! you look like you’re eighteen!!!”, oh great thanks), one of them asked me for advice about dealing with...
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“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors...”
– Angela Carter, “The Lady of the House of Love” from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (via awritersruminations)
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REMEMBER WHEN I had to help my old work (…Americorps) run trainings for “commercial revitalization professionals,” remember when I said I thought it was weird that nobody ever ever ever mentioned the people who lived in the neighborhoods they were talking about, remember how my boss looked at me, so shocked, and said “but this isn’t about people, it’s about...
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“Her attention wandered. She had heard it all before. I, I, I—he went on. It was...”
– The Years, Virginia Woolf (via autobeguileddd)
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“When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a...”
– Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us
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skullsjawsteethclaws asked: 1. Your horoscopes are beautiful and perfect; 2. Your Northeast blogging/NH blogging in on point; 3. Is that Hatchetface as your icon?
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THE MANARCHIST SAYS: “Cinco de Mayo, another holiday that loses it’s revolutionary meaning when marketed to white people. That being said I will probably drink a margarita today.”
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“There was always a hounding to master the arts of knitting and darning (from my...”
– On “Dear Life”: An Interview with Alice Munro
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ONE OF THE BABIES JUST ASKED ME TO HELP HER TAKE SELFIES, I am dying of happiness, “I want it to look like I’m like, looking up, can you do that?”
April 2013
40 posts
5 tags
The Pevear/Volokhonsky Hype Machine and How It... →
Too cheerful to translate Dostoevsky well?I have no idea how Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonskyâs translation of The Brothers Karamazov came to be regarded as definitive. Let me rephrase t…
I’m laughing so much at this Morson article she cites here. So boring, so gross: Their translations take glorious works and reduce them to awkward and unsightly muddles. Professional writers have...
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“Sentimental Rousseau, who could weep over a progressive idea, distributed his...”
– Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (via courfgayrac)
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A few years ago, the noted writer and essayist John Berger made a plea, “Against the Great Defeat of the World,” in response to a letter issued by Zapatista leader Subcommandante Marcos. In this letter Marcos outlined several dimensions of the culture of globalization which comprise, in his words, the “Fourth World War Against Humanity.” In his communiqué, Marcos...
humanthesaurus asked: I just wanted to stop in and say thank you for writing Madame Clairvoyant horoscopes every week. I know they're made up, but they're always so affirming of my right to feel my feelings, process my emotions, and eat pizza. That's some support I don't always get from other sources, so it means a lot to hear even from an internet stranger. I look forward to them every week, and I...
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johnmartinbell:
No professionalism, no careers.
“To the last we will have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems...”
– J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)
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HIGH ALERT
whateverjeanne:
Pluto is the planet of upheaval and transformation, when it goes retrograde the focus is on self reflection.
KILLING ME
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“[Renaming is] also a profound expression of power, a way for a new group of...”
– PANK Blog / The Lightning Room with Molly McArdle
Simon Jacobs asked me a bunch of questions about my story “The Wearied Cords” (which appeared in PANK’s December issue) and I did my best to try and answer them!
(via mollitudo)
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ugggh
sylvides:
Wanting the punt the notion of “natural”, or “real” beauty into a backyard where no-one will go, because everyone’s afraid of it.
Read More
“When we talk of “natural beauty” we’re talking about artifice stripped down to more artifice. When we talk about a beauty that is “natural”, it’s shitty writing—shorthand for a type of winsome, soft-focus beauty that evokes a certain...
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some names of the children killed by U.S. drones...
anneboyer:
Noor Aziz | 8 | male Abdul Wasit | 17 | male Noor Syed | 8 | male Wajid Noor | 9 | male Syed Wali Shah | 7 | male Ayeesha | 3 | female Qari Alamzeb | 14| male Shoaib | 8 | male Hayatullah KhaMohammad | 16 | male Tariq Aziz | 16 | male Sanaullah Jan | 17 | male Maezol Khan | 8 | female Nasir Khan | male Naeem Khan | male Naeemullah | male Mohammad Tahir | 16 | male Azizul Wahab | 15 |...
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“…history is not simply a science, but also and not least a form of remembrance....”
– Walter Benjamin (via spiritandteeth)
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To witness this feels formal, as if you’ve almost ceased to be. Not yet dead but not alive. Mind and body caught midmotion in the unfathomable.
There’s nothing more to learn here. Virgil picks you up and lowers the two of you down Satan’s ladder-legs, turning mid-Earth to push against gravity up toward the opposing pole. When you arrive at the other side you wonder: How can it...
teen dramas with women leads: a list
seeyoutrying:
10 Things I Hate About You
Awkward
Being Eve
Beyond the Break
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Caitlin’s Way
Felicity
Freaks and Geeks
Friday Night Lights (arguable)
Gilmore Girls
Instant Star
Joan of Arcadia
Make It or Break It
My Mad, Fat Diary
My So-Called Life
The Nine Lives of Chloe King
Popular
Pretty Little Liars
The Secret Circle
Twin Peaks (arguable)
Veronica...
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“And you’re wondering again, as you have at every turn, how do you write the...”
– Introduction, Inferno by Dante Alighieri, a translation by Mary Jo Bang (via renegade-centigrade)
I truly cannot even deal with how good this translation is, I’m only like 20 pages in, I don’t care, it is so beautiful, it is gold, it is the text equivalent of heavy metal music
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“When I first started working on citizenship, older people would say to me, “How...”
– Lauren Berlant, Interview, via bint battuta. (via caricapapaya)
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“The codex, which is the ancestor of the book, was invented 2,500 years ago, and...”
– Michael Herrmann, owner of Gibson’s Bookstore, Concord, N.H. (via housingworksbookstore)
“And they’ve actually done something that’s really hard to do in Concord. They did something cool.”
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“I have a very visual memory, like staring hard at things, or the wrong things, toward a different reality or a way out of the one I was in. I think of the slate walls and the graveyards and the elms and the sky filled with rain the color of irises. My memories are about surfaces more than events — is that true? It is true in the novel I am writing, a novel of the “race riot” — a phrase...
iinventedeverything:
omg, people feminists keep saying “i didn’t agree with her “politics” but she was still a woman” or some shit—they keep calling what she did her “politics.” her “politics.” what a neutral kind word. as if her “politics” were really just her “feelings” on something, rather than a very real set of consequences from her policies that had devastating repercussions for women...
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johnmartinbell:
“But whether these domestic pets or uninvited animal companions were seen as magical is another matter. These creatures may have been the only friends these lonely old women possessed, and the names they gave them suggest an affectionate relationship. Matthew Hopkins’ victims in Essex county included Mary Hockett, who was accused of entertaining three evil spirits each in the...
