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[lisareadsthings]

So real

[lisareadsthings]

The great blue heron patiently stalks its prey. In the blink of an eye, it lunges in and pulls out a stick, yuck!

[lisareadsthings]

Per bell hooks: We must engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have meaningful chances of survival… yes, yes! But I don’t know how. How do we examine the legacy of colonization when the basic facts of its construction are disputed in the minds of its beneficiaries? Even that which wasn’t burnt in the 60s – by British officials during the government-sanctioned frenzy of mass document destruction. Operation Legacy, to spare the Queen embarrassment. The more insidious act, though less sensational, proved to have the greatest impact: a deliberate exclusion and obfuscation within the country’s national curriculum. Through this, more than records were destroyed. The erasure itself was erased. With breathtaking ease, the facts of Britain’s non-war twentieth-century history have been unrooted, dug out from the country’s collective memory. Supplanted. Vague fairytales of benevolent imperial rule bloom instead. How can we engage, discuss, even think through a post-colonial lens, when there’s no shared base of knowledge? When even the simplest accounting of events – as preserved in the country’s own archives – wobbles suspect as tin-foil-hat conspiracies in the minds of its educated citizens?

Natasha Brown, Assembly

[lisareadsthings]

The answer: assimilation. Always, the pressure is there. Assimilate, assimilate… Dissolve yourself into the melting pot. And then flow out, pour into the mould. Bend your bones until they splinter and crack and you fit. Force yourself into their form. Assimilate, they say it, encouraging. Then frowning. Then again and again. And always there, quiet, beneath the urging language of tolerance and cohesion – disappear!

Natasha Brown, Assembly

[lisareadsthings]

This kind of thinking leads to undoing. Or else, not doing, which is the slower, more painful approach to coming undone.

Natasha Brown, Assembly

[lisareadsthings]

I feel. Of course I do. I have emotions. But I try to consider events as if they’re happening to someone else. Some other entity. There’s the thinking, rationalizing I (me). And the doing, the experiencing, her. I look at her kindly. From a distance. To protect myself, I detach.

Natasha Brown, Assembly

[lisareadsthings]

“You know, it’s not because I haven’t thought about it. About changing things. But it always seems like there’s no time or money to patch the holes. Just enough to keep tossing water overboard.” -Travis Baldree, Bookshops & Bonedust

[lisareadsthings]

“Every book is a little mirror, and sometimes you look into it and see someone else looking back.”  ― Travis Baldree, Bookshops & Bonedust

[lisareadsthings]

Santa Ghus and Friendo-lph

[lisareadsthings]

There were so many books on so many shelves, I knew I could live to be old without coming to the end of them. The sound of the pages turning was the sound of magic. The dry liquid feel of paper under fingertips was what magic felt like.

Emma Donoghue, Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins

[lisareadsthings]

“Keep your heart infinitesimally small and sorrow will never spy it, never plunge, never flap away with your heart in her claws.”

Emma Donoghue, Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins

[lisareadsthings]

“So then she took me home, or I took her home, or we were both somehow taken to the closest thing.”

Emma Donoghue, Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins

[lisareadsthings]

Pieper’s leisure is something closer to a state of mind or an emotional posture—one that, like falling asleep, can be achieved only by letting go. It involves a mixture of awe and gratitude that “springs precisely from our inability to understand, from our recognition of the mysterious nature of the universe.” It opens onto, and finds peace in, chaos and things larger than the self, the way you might feel when looking at an enormous cliff face—or a sunrise, for that matter. As “a form of silence…which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality,” true leisure requires the kind of emptiness in which you remember the fact of your own aliveness.

- Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

[lisareadsthings]

“Images and experiences are the leisure time counterpart of time management self-help. The same individual who is encouraged to buy time from others instead of having a mutual support network is also encouraged to consume periodic experiences of slowness instead of acting in ways that might reclaim her time—or help others reclaim theirs.”

- Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

[lisareadsthings]

“I doubt burnout has ever been solely about not having enough hours in the day. What first appears to be a wish for more time may turn out to be just one part of a simple, yet vast, desire for autonomy, meaning, and purpose.”

- Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Clock

[lisareadsthings]

I never want to hear conservatives go on about repressive censorship in China, North Korea, and Iran ever again

[lisareadsthings]

Nice, she thought. No. I'm certainly not nice. The best you could say of me is that I'm interested.