magicgoose123

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Writing advice from Alexander Chee

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“Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.”

— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays 

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“Eternal Presence” by John Wilson

Photographed by David Schafer

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“Pillars and crossbeams can be used to ram down a wall, but not to plug a hole, for this requires a different kind of tool. A great stallion can gallop a thousand miles in a day, but it cannot catch mice as well as a cat, for that requires a different kind of skill. Kites and owls can catch a flea or discern the tip of a hair on a dark night, but in the daytime they are blinded and cannot even make out a mountain range, for that requires a different inborn nature. So if someone says, ‘Why don’t we make only rightness our master and eliminate wrongness, make only order our master and eliminate disorder?’ this is someone who has not yet understood the coherence of heaven and earth and the realities of the ten thousand things. That would be like taking heaven alone as your master and eliminating earth, or taking yin alone as your master and eliminating yang—an obvious impossibility. If someone nonetheless insists on talking this way, he is either a fool or a swindler.” - Zhuangzi 17, Autumn Waters

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All creation depends on alienation, which is a process that uproots us from our place and from the given properties of our existence. As it dislocates us, alienation frees us from our situation. Even though all people are born into a specific social situation in which powerful forces act on them, they are not reducible to the place where they emerge or to these determinative forces, no matter how powerful they may be. As a result of the primary alienation in language, an internal distance forms that allows people to relate to themselves as if to another entity, at the same time as it distances them from others who surround them. We are alienated both from ourselves and from others. No matter what we do, we will never overcome this alienation. It is the basic fact of our existence.

– Todd McGowan, Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn't Try to Find Ourselves (2024)

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The goddess Isis-Thermuthis.

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you can learn new things every day with the courage to be unashamed of your ignorance and the good humor to tolerate being taught

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obligatory post today

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The great fantasies, myths, and tales are indeed like dreams: they speak from the unconscious to the unconscious, in the language of the unconscious—symbol and archetype. Though they use words, they work the way music does: they short-circuit verbal reasoning, and go straight to the thoughts that lie too deep to utter. They cannot be translated fully into the language of reason, but only a Logical Positivist, who also finds Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony meaningless, would claim that they are therefore meaningless. They are profoundly meaningful, and usable—practical—in terms of ethics; of insight; of growth.

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The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy (Ursula K. Le Guin)

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sadomasochism is ugly--that is the style of cruelty. a man controlling, punishing, and humiliating a woman is not rebellious, radical, playful, subversive, or anything but utterly conventional in the ugliest way. pornography is the mythic imagery of the masculine imagination.

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Louise Glück, From Descending Figure; “The Garden”

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I think I would have really thrived as a Nantucket whaler’s wife…..I’m a professional yearner with a low sex drive, I love to be alone and have my space…..an intense emotional affair with another whaler’s wife while our husbands are at sea could have easily sustained me for decades

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Victoria Chang, from "Untitled #5, 1998", With My Back to the World

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Zhou Yansheng（周彦生 Chinese, b.1942）

via more

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Fresh fish for lunch in the High Sierra

Tulare, California

1968

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i have a friend who is obsessed with walt whitman like walt whitman's number one fan in this world and he only reads leaves of grass over and over to memorize it and i tried to get him a book of poetry by gary snyder which i don't think he liked so i'd like to get him poetry that he likes if anyone has suggestions for a walt whitman only kind of guy