MADAME CLAIREVOYANT

therumpus: amandamakesthings: With only thirty minutes left...

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:40:06 -0400

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.

“There were tides in the new earth, long before there was an...

Sat, 18 May 2013 10:01:36 -0400

“There were tides in the new earth, long before there was an ocean. In response to the pull of the sun the molten liquids of the earth’s whole surface rose in tides that rolled unhindered around the globe and only gradually slackened and diminished as the earthly shell cooled, congealed, and hardened” —Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

therumpus: What are your Rumblr editors reading this week?...

Sat, 18 May 2013 09:58:15 -0400

therumpus:

What are your Rumblr editors reading this week? Well…

Molly: I am still reading Alison Stewart’s First Class and it keeps getting better. It’s part DC history, part chronicle of black education systems, part tribute to Stewart’s parents, part survey of Dunbar’s (America’s first black public high school and, for decades, its best) storied graduates. I love the attention Stewart pays to class issues, too, a topic sometimes neglected in otherwise triumphal histories of black Americans. Maybe a novel next week!

Claire is probably sleeping off her jetlag.

Lucy: I am reading Herbert Gold’s Lovers & Cohorts: Twenty-Seven Stories. I’ve been in a missing-San Francisco funk and much of Gold’s work is set there, so the tales are both tonic and torture. Isolation, wandering, bohemia: all those little needles to the heart are here.

I definitely was sleeping off my jetlag. Embarrassing!

In case you were wondering! I’m reading The Sea Around Us byRachel Carson. It’s about the science of the ocean, but it reads like poetry, or the creation myth of some weird aquatic religion. It’s stunning; it is making me very emotional about the ocean, to a degree that is maybe a little comical.

Tonight the babies are listening to Destiny’s Child and being THE CUTEST EVER; one of them...

Sat, 18 May 2013 00:50:23 -0400

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 all of his Myspace girlfriends, one of them is wearing leopard print booty shorts and literally rolling on the floor laughing.

"She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 09:57:55 -0400

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking.”

- Angela Carter, “The Lady of the House of Love” from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (via awritersruminations)

REMEMBER WHEN I had to help my old work (…Americorps) run trainings for “commercial...

Fri, 17 May 2013 09:54:44 -0400

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 businesses.”

jenjmay: One time a stranger emailed me and asked if I would...

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:55:00 -0400

jenjmay:

One time a stranger emailed me and asked if I would write “as if” in my hand writing so she & her best bud could get matching Clueless tattoos. Obviously I did it but I don’t think they ever got the tattoos. Or they never sent pix.

"Her attention wandered. She had heard it all before. I, I, I—he went on. It was like a vulture’s..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 05:43:33 -0400

“

Her attention wandered. She had heard it all before. I, I, I—he went on. It was like a vulture’s beak pecking, or a vacuum-cleaner sucking, or a telephone bell ringing. I, I, I. But he couldn’t help it, not with that nerve-drawn egotist’s face, she thought, glancing at him. He could not free himself, could not detach himself. He was bound on the wheel with tight iron hoops. He had to expose, had to exhibit. But why let him? she thought, as he went on talking. For what do I care about his “I, I, I”? Or his poetry? Let me shake him off then, she said to herself, feeling like a person whose blood has been sucked, leaving all the nerve-centres pale. She paused. He noted her lack of sympathy. He thought her stupid, she supposed.

“I’m tired,” she apologised. “I’ve been up all night,” she explained. “I’m a doctor—”

The fire went out of his face when she said “I.” That’s done it—now he’ll go, she thought. He can’t be “you”—he must be “I.” She smiled. For up he got and off he went.

”

- The Years, Virginia Woolf (via autobeguileddd)

amandamakesthings: Close! The screening is on Sunday! LOOK AT...

Tue, 14 May 2013 13:41:01 -0400

amandamakesthings:

Close! The screening is on Sunday!

LOOK AT THIS, too good, I want to see it so much. If I were rich I would give Amanda so much money to make movies, it’s a weird thing that I think about actually all the time, every time I pass a movie theater, every time I see movie ads in the subway.

"When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 13:04:12 -0400

“When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal; each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water. This is our inheritance…”

- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

jenjmay: another collage I love this one. This ghostly knife...

Tue, 14 May 2013 12:51:35 -0400

jenjmay:

another collage

I love this one. This ghostly knife arm!

1. Your horoscopes are beautiful and perfect; 2. Your Northeast blogging/NH blogging in on point; 3. Is that Hatchetface as your icon?

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:47:46 -0400

Horoscopes and New Hampshire and Hatchetface, this is the best message. Thank you!!

(It is Hatchetface! She is such an angel; she’s maybe my favorite John Waters character? In my dreams I am as weird as she is and as good as she is.)

THE MANARCHIST SAYS: “Cinco de Mayo, another holiday that loses it’s revolutionary...

Sun, 05 May 2013 13:53:25 -0400

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.”

"There was always a hounding to master the arts of knitting and darning (from my aunts and..."

Fri, 03 May 2013 13:40:25 -0400

“There was always a hounding to master the arts of knitting and darning (from my aunts and grandparents, not my mother). Once I shocked them mightily by saying that I would THROW THINGS OUT when I grew up. And I have.”

- On “Dear Life”: An Interview with Alice Munro

queertunes: Aye Nako “Molasses” It is getting so warm and...

Fri, 03 May 2013 03:45:00 -0400

queertunes:

Aye Nako

“Molasses”

It is getting so warm and great in Brooklyn and that means that this song gets stuck in my head everywhere I go

ONE OF THE BABIES JUST ASKED ME TO HELP HER TAKE SELFIES, I am dying of happiness, “I want it...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 23:33:00 -0400

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?”

The Pevear/Volokhonsky Hype Machine and How It Could Have Been Stopped or At Least Slowed Down

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:56:40 -0400

The Pevear/Volokhonsky Hype Machine and How It Could Have Been Stopped or At Least Slowed Down:

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 asked me to check the Russian texts because they could not believe any great author would have written what P&V produce.

Lol ~great authors~ lol ~glorious works~ Dostoevsky is a beautiful high-strung weirdo and everyone knows his prose is a total muddle, who cares, not the point

(Also don’t care about definitive translations, sorry; also maybe their Tolstoy translations are terrible? (Don’t know/don’t care!))

therumpus: The Rumblr’s in-house astrologer, Madame...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:49:25 -0400

therumpus:

The Rumblr’s in-house astrologer, Madame Clairevoyant, presents her latest dispatch from the stars:

Today’s image was made specially for Madame Clairevoyant by Jen May.

Featuring John Waters, Mavis Gallant, Laura Mvula, spooky eyeballs.

"Sentimental Rousseau, who could weep over a progressive idea, distributed his many natural children..."

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 16:12:58 -0400

“Sentimental Rousseau, who could weep over a progressive idea, distributed his many natural children through various poorhouses and workhouses and never gave a hoot for them. A sentimental old maid may pamper her parrot and poison her niece. The sentimental politician may remember Mother’s Day and ruthlessly destroy a rival. Stalin loved babies. Lenin sobbed at the opera, especially at the Traviata.”

- Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (via courfgayrac)

Terrible lighting, I don’t even care, look at this tiny...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 14:01:04 -0400

Terrible lighting, I don’t even care, look at this tiny angel who will not get off my lap