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TIMESTAMP ROULETTE: Emma. (2020)

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from ml.books

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“I shall never forget the occasion where I was visiting a school as a writer and the whole place suddenly fell into an uproar because the school tomboy - a most splendid Britomart of a girl - had beaten up the school bully. Everything stopped in the staffroom while the teachers debated what to do. They wanted to give the tomboy a prize, but decided reluctantly that they had better punish her and the bully too. They knew that if, as a child, you do pluck up courage to hit the bully, it is an act of true heroism - as great as that of Beowulf in his old age. I remember passing the tomboy, sitting in her special place of punishment opposite the bully. She was blazing with her deed, as if she had actually been touched by a god. And I thought that this confirmed all my theories: a child in her position is open to any heroic myth I care to use; she is inward with folktales; she would feel the force of any magical or divine intervention.”

— Diana Wynne Jones (via intomyth)

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saturday reading 

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Ross Gay, from “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” in Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

[text ID: I am sorry. I am grateful. I just want us to be friends now, forever. Take this bowl of blackberries from the garden. The sun has made them warm. I picked them just for you. I promise I will try to stay on my side of the couch.]

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The weekend again: pink early evening light in the flat, long showers, a walk down to the river and back, small pleasures

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Anne Sexton, from A Self-portrait in Letters

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I’ve always said that the world is a different place for the heartbroken. It moves on a different axis, at a different speed. Time skips backwards and forwards fleetingly. The heartbroken might go through thousands of micro-emotions a day trying to figure out how to get through it without picking up the phone to hear that old familiar voice. In the land of heartbreak, moments of strength, independence, and devil-may-care rebellion are intricately woven together with grief, paralyzing vulnerability and hopelessness. Imagining your future might always take you on a detour back to the past. And this is all to say, that the next album I’ll be releasing is my version of Red.

Musically and lyrically, Red resembled a heartbroken person. It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end. Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past. Like trying on pieces of a new life, I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators. And I’m not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into this album, hearing thousands of your voices sing the lyrics back to me in passionate solidarity, or if it was simply time, but something was healed along the way.

Sometimes you need to talk it over (over and over and over) for it to ever really be… over. Like your friend who calls you in the middle of the night going on and on about their ex, I just couldn’t stop writing. This will be the first time you hear all 30 songs that were meant to go on Red. And hey, one of them is even ten minutes long.

Red (Taylor’s Version) will be out November 19.

https://taylor.lnk.to/RedTaylorsVersion

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Louise Glück, from “The Drowned Children”, Poems 1962 - 2012

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Sue Zhao

Instagram

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You be you, and I’ll be racing across the yard,

trying to catch robins to prove how tender I am with tender things.

— Paige Lewis, from “You Be You, And I’ll Be Busy,” in Space Struck

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Dalton Day, from Flood-Letting

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“I am inside you—I am you / or you are me. Let us say to one another: I am yours— and know finally that we will only ever be as much as we are willing to save of one another.”

— Natalie Diaz, excerpt of “exhibits from The American Water Museum”, in Postcolonial Love Poem

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“Liberal centrism tries to convince us the best solution to right-wing revanchism and its entanglements with anti-migrant xenophobia is a superficial antiracism, exemplified through the refrains of “racism is bad” and “hate is a virus.” Liberal antiracist analysis, obsessed with superficial representation and flag-waving, purposefully fails to interrogate the material structures upending racism. Instead, we are offered the shallow politics of humanitarianism, such as “Welcome refugees,” or liberal multiculturalism proclaiming “We are all from somewhere,” or commodifying platitudes such as “Immigrants build our economy.” Such moralizing discourses emphasize generosity toward “good” immigrants and refugees, for whom “buying power, respectability, assimilation, and nationalism are the price of welcome” into neoliberal citizenship.30 People from the professional class, proximate to the dominant race and caste, cisheteronormative, and without criminal records are selected and welcomed as an act of benevolence to serve racial-capitalist political economies.”

– Harsha Walia, Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

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Margarita Karapanou, tr. by Karen Emmerich, Rien ne va plus

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