May 2012
7 posts
1 tag
"Head, Heart" by Lydia Davis
Heart weeps. Head tries to help heart. Head tells heart how it is, again: You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday. Heart feels better, then. But the words of the head do not remain long in the ears of the heart. Heart is so new to this. I want them back, says heart. Head is all heart has. Help, head. Help heart.
(via: hateshiploveship)
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Stages, by Herman Hesse (via a young Joseph...
As every flower fades and as all youth
Departs, so life at every stage,
So every virtue, so our grasp of truth,
Blooms in its day and may not last forever.
Since life may summon us at every age
Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor,
To find new light that old ties cannot give.
In all beginnings dwells a magic force
For guarding us and helping us to live.
.
Serenely let us move to...
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The New Yorker's Book Club's live chat with Lydia... →
A very neat, brisk exchange between Davis and her fans.
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Dennis Kelly opens the Stückemarkt →
On finding impetus to start work on a new play: “…if this was the last thing I ever got to say to another human, if the moment I wrote the last word my life was ended – what would I say?”
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WatchSufficient Self, by Andrea Zittel
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"These things I know for sure" Andrea Zittel
It is a human trait to organize things into categories. Inventing categories creates an illusion that there is an overriding rationale in the way that the word works.
Surfaces that are “easy to clean” also show dirt more. In reality a surface that camouflages dirt is much more practical than one that is easy to clean.
Maintenance takes time and energy that can sometimes impede...
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A Letter from Sweden, by Susan Sontag →
Susan Sontag wrote this highly critical essay on Sweden and its people in 1969 after having spent a year living in Stockholm, working on film projects. She depicts a nation of socially anxious, repressed and pathologically non-confrontational people, living in a highly conformist society with strangely scattered political activism.
February 2012
1 post
1 tag
December 2011
5 posts
1 tag
Some Questions for a Statistician
Do people with ‘asbestos hands’ tend to live longer?
Are there certain lifestyle diseases they face an increased risk of developing?
Generally speaking, are they contented, more productive people? Or are they prone to frustration and nervousness?
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“It came to me when I was reporting the mad uproar over Bill Henson’s photographs...”
– David Marr, Panic, 2011 (via literarypiano)
November 2011
9 posts
Militarization of Campus Police, by UC Davis... →
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Window, Fidgeting, Typing.
I am fidgeting as I type, tapping and wriggling, and touching and picking at different parts of my body. It is very unbecoming.
If I stop fidgeting what happens is I immediately look up and out of the window onto the garden, and then I also stop typing.
It is like an equation:
I fidget as I type
I can stop fidgeting if I look out the window / If I stop fidgeting I will immediately look up...
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An Important Lesson
I said: I wish that after the laundry was done it could just stay done for a couple of days.
She said: No, it doesn't work like that.
October 2011
10 posts
“What a great poem teaches you, and it’s not intellectual at all, is the...”
– W. S. Merwin (via proustitute)
“Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is...”
– Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (via whiskey river)
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The Google Alphabet, at the NY Times →
NY Times’s Capote to my Infamous?
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Google Alphabet
A is for Amazon.com
B is for Best Buy
C is for craigslist
D is for Dictionary.com
E is for eBay
F is for Facebook
G is for Google
H is for Hotmail
I is for Internal Revenue Service
J is for JetBlue
K is for Kohl’s Department Stores
L is for Lowe’s Home Improvement
M is for MapQuest
N is for Netflix
O is for Orbitz Travel
P is for Pandora Radio
Q is for Famous Quotes at...
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Lydia Davis interviewed on Bookworm, which is on... →
An interview on Varieties of Disturbance. A quiet sort of interview during which Davis reads a number of stories.
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How It Is Done, by Lydia Davis
There is a description in a child’s science book of the act of love that makes it all quite clear and helps when one begins to forget. It starts with affection between a man and a woman. The blood goes to their genitals as they kiss and caress each other, this swelling creates a desire in these parts to be touched further, the man’s penis becomes larger and quite stiff and the woman’s vagina moist...
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Standing for a stout man to reclaim a window seat,
far below he sees: withered clouds and brownish peaks.
‘I had forgotten you, ground.’ He picks up his book
to read. The stout man is shifting in his seat.
‘The weekend is retreating, and the plane is flying south,
but I am still here.
‘Now is this plane and that man, but it is always these hands
(one is holding the other), tonight:...
“More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque...”
– Michel de Certeau
September 2011
4 posts
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“However, with this crisis also come opportunity: the field for imagining new...”
– From the foreword to Sign Wars: The Culture Jammers Strike Back, by David Cox.
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“The public relations industry has managed to virtually hijack the entire...”
– From the foreword to Sign Wars: The Culture Jammers Strike Back, by David Cox.
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Circumnavigation
Where we disembark, the train station’s walls have been cut away at eye-level, revealing a composition of world-renown. A clutch of cumulus clouds riveted, top-left, complements a dazzling blue sky.
Sydney’s glare has contracted my pupils to reptilian dots, but I move closer, stopping to tip my hat to the view. It returns my gaze and coos across the bay, insouciant: “Here I am.”
Blooming with the...
August 2011
5 posts
1 tag
The Silken Tent, by Robert Frost
She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love...
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“…in the state of mind in which we ‘observe’ we are a long way...”
– From Within a Budding Grove, vol. 2 of À la recherche du temps perdu, by Marcel Proust
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“Monsieur…you are still young; you should profit by your youth to learn two...”
– M. de Charlus, in Within a Budding Grove, vol. 2 of À la recherche du temps perdu, by Marcel Proust.
P. 401
WatchSun Bear, Zoo Negara, Kuala Lumpur, 2009, by Kelly Hussey-Smith.
“I think there are two things going on; gay activists, of course, couldn’t...”
– Damning tangent: Dennis Altman on Gore Vidal on the sex bit.
July 2011
6 posts
1 tag
The Only Sound
After the train’s fluorescent lights, its squeaks, damp smells, and people either talking or not talking, the muffled nighttime is welcome.
What is not welcome is the sound of each of my footsteps on the wet bitumen as I walk home. The only sound.
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, if there is one.
conceptual art (also concept art)
noun
art in which the idea presented by the artist is considered more important than the finished product, if there is one.
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A Metaphor Using One Thousand Pebbles
On the beach at Brighton in the south of England the shore is made up of countless pebbles. Beneath the weight of your feet they squeak and the give is more than on soft sand, so that to walk even the distance from the promenade to the water’s edge feels like a trial of uncertain outcome: each single step is not quite fulfilled to its assumed potential, and you begin to feel your mass is hanging...
June 2011
11 posts
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Time Wasting
He wakes up 50 minutes after he had intended, and when he checks his phone the alarm he set last night didn’t go off and wasn’t set. To save time, he thinks, he does not make his bed.
There are a number of things he does before he puts the kettle on, which should be the basic act: he walks up and down the house a couple of times, realises his flatmate is at work, and then he pulls out from the...
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My Phone Is Not Working
I dropped my phone, and the result is that its microphone doesn’t work, but its speaker, and everything else, works perfectly fine. This means that when someone calls me, I can hear them speak, but they are not be able to hear me.
I don’t like talking on the phone very much, so I have been content with this arrangement for over two months now. I still answer most calls I receive and it is quite...
Looking Through the Bushes: The Disappearance of... →
“Pubic hair signals our capacity to make life, the way we know we are no longer girls and boys. It is an evolutionary relic, its function to conduct plumes of sex pheromones into the atmosphere that signal a female’s readiness to reproduce and critical information about male and female genetic qualities. Ovulating strippers get twice the tips as those who are having their periods....