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[readingcauldron]

Incredible... when he says "it's like a re-evaluation of yourself in your space, rather than escapism" <3 I find it so touching when a writer is able to take your jumbled up thoughts, organize, rearrange, and analyze them, and output a string of sentences that change your perspective even if only for a moment in time. It feels as though the little angel on my shoulder was sick of my griping and placed the book in my hands as a remedy. Also music as a soundfield is such a beautiful analogy and makes me want to clear my arbitrary schedule for the day and listen to music until I'm ready for tomorrow to begin (If I'm doing really well this is how I view sleep)! Anyways, I loved this! And I wish I didn't stash this book amidst others in Maya's closet to waste away.

May the days be aimless,

Zeena

mic check!

I am feeling inspired so I’m going to talk about Ocean of Sound by David Toop. SO GOOD!!!! So good. I feel very moved by it. Toop is very good at articulating something that is so filled with feeling for me that I am unable to come up with the words that will do it justice. But Toop is able! (To be fair I haven’t read a lot about ambient music so I’m sure a bunch of other people can do it also) ok anyway it’s kept me thinking about what it is that I love about ambient music. I don’t know how to say this in a non-asshole way but I literally feel as if it’s made me a better person lol. It’s taught me so much—how to be like water, how to look around again, how to feel grounded, etc. etc. 

There’s also the collaging aspect of it, since so much of it features remixes and samples and interpolations. and we all know i love collages! I’ve also been delving in to what it is I like about collages so much — their sense of isolation, randomness, universality, connection, resourcefulness, removal of context, curiosity, messiness, empty spaces filled with meaning —anyway this book has helped me realize that “removal of context” is probably the biggest reason. 

“Feasibly, you could extrapolate a novel from the interweaving stories buried within John Cage’s Variations IV, but richer possibilities unfolded in the early 1908s when Jon Hassell began to capture, loop and laminate fragments of sampled sound… Hassell formalized that process by naming his 1994 band Bluescreen, after the cinematic technique of filming foreground action against a blue background, ‘adopting this metaphor in musical ways, creating magical textures in sound, making something familiar sound fresh and exotic by separating it from its background and combining it with something new and startling.'"

Omg. "...by separating it from its background..." imagine that. and as a human that's all we can do - imagine. i lust over the idea of being separated from my background and my context. i am its humble servant and i am failing - but i think that's how everyone feels. when your background and your context follow you around everywhere you go like it's one giant heavy shadow and all you want is to be separated from it! but I know that's impossible - so I turn to collage, not necessarily imagining my parts and my pasts coming apart and coming back together, but given a sense of place in the chaos, an understanding surface.

Even though my background and context feel like they have meshed themselves with my skin, I also kind of feel they are the only things holding me together - not in a bad way, but in a "i feel shapeless and haphazard and sea-like" and "I am not anything at all" way. collage pieces mean something different with every combination. so maybe i would go crazy or lose all sense of self if I didn't have my context to keep me from floating away. ugh i need to read more about this

anyway when a book about the rise of ambient music helps you articulate thoughts and feelings youve been struggling to identify your whole life i think that is awesome.

finally, bonus read if you have the energy:

-Lizzy

[readingcauldron]

mic check!

I am feeling inspired so I’m going to talk about Ocean of Sound by David Toop. SO GOOD!!!! So good. I feel very moved by it. Toop is very good at articulating something that is so filled with feeling for me that I am unable to come up with the words that will do it justice. But Toop is able! (To be fair I haven’t read a lot about ambient music so I’m sure a bunch of other people can do it also) ok anyway it’s kept me thinking about what it is that I love about ambient music. I don’t know how to say this in a non-asshole way but I literally feel as if it’s made me a better person lol. It’s taught me so much—how to be like water, how to look around again, how to feel grounded, etc. etc. 

There’s also the collaging aspect of it, since so much of it features remixes and samples and interpolations. and we all know i love collages! I’ve also been delving in to what it is I like about collages so much — their sense of isolation, randomness, universality, connection, resourcefulness, removal of context, curiosity, messiness, empty spaces filled with meaning —anyway this book has helped me realize that “removal of context” is probably the biggest reason. 

“Feasibly, you could extrapolate a novel from the interweaving stories buried within John Cage’s Variations IV, but richer possibilities unfolded in the early 1908s when Jon Hassell began to capture, loop and laminate fragments of sampled sound… Hassell formalized that process by naming his 1994 band Bluescreen, after the cinematic technique of filming foreground action against a blue background, ‘adopting this metaphor in musical ways, creating magical textures in sound, making something familiar sound fresh and exotic by separating it from its background and combining it with something new and startling.'"

Omg. "...by separating it from its background..." imagine that. and as a human that's all we can do - imagine. i lust over the idea of being separated from my background and my context. i am its humble servant and i am failing - but i think that's how everyone feels. when your background and your context follow you around everywhere you go like it's one giant heavy shadow and all you want is to be separated from it! but I know that's impossible - so I turn to collage, not necessarily imagining my parts and my pasts coming apart and coming back together, but given a sense of place in the chaos, an understanding surface.

Even though my background and context feel like they have meshed themselves with my skin, I also kind of feel they are the only things holding me together - not in a bad way, but in a "i feel shapeless and haphazard and sea-like" and "I am not anything at all" way. collage pieces mean something different with every combination. so maybe i would go crazy or lose all sense of self if I didn't have my context to keep me from floating away. ugh i need to read more about this

anyway when a book about the rise of ambient music helps you articulate thoughts and feelings youve been struggling to identify your whole life i think that is awesome.

finally, bonus read if you have the energy:

-Lizzy

[readingcauldron]

Wooooooow thank you for sharing Lizzy! I often think about “template” as language… and unfortunately being in advertising (🤢) where we often have to create social media content (🤮), I feel the words of the internet have become almost a sort of Mad Libs - fill in the blank, approved, send tweet

And it’s so crazy to think… the landscape of communication without the crux of social media in a “trending” generation … Like you mention, now - we have a word bank and phrases to immediately generate a sense of connection (often times: superficial, without true meaning). Taking away this bank, how would people in the age of TikTok speak to someone else their own age?

I think it’s the reason I very much respect the early ages of YouTube internet culture and even Tumblr culture: where creation was not about relatability or templatized formats (AKA like TikTok trending sounds, phrases, filters, etc), but purely from the individuality of making something new and weird. Bring back random core tbh… (y’all remember I like trains?)

In a world where everyone looks, thinks, and speaks from the same bank of expression, I have one thing to say: we have to get out of our flop era 😓

<3 Kiana

I'm currently reading Against Interpretations and Other Essays by Susan Sontag and today I read her critique of Notes and Counter Notes: Writings on the Theatre by Eugene Ionesco.

it was kind of ideal timing to read this because I've been thinking a lot about how when language becomes a habit it almost becomes meaningless--especially in terms of the sentence formulas people our age constantly use. things that started out as a funny tweet and then became a twitter trend and then incorporated themselves into our daily vocabulary--like "silly little treat" becoming "silly little (insert anything here)". the words "silly little" used to imply a lot but now they don't mean anything.  or hollywood coopting "eat the rich," or (white/nonblack) people misunderstanding the origins and depth of "karen" to render both things practically meaningless in popular culture. 

i'm trying to think of phrases that i and many other people use in our daily lives: maybe "you're in your ____ era." or maybe "liminal" or "post-ironic." i know there are better examples, i'll come back and edit this post when i think of them lol. 

there are formulas we follow to say a sentence. the "era" example is one i'm guilty of--it's an easy way to comfort a friend, to uplift them, to converse with a coworker and get a cheap laugh, to express my emotions without being vulnerable or thinking as deeply as i should about what i'm saying and how i want to say it. in short, it's an out, a mode of vulnerability-less expression. it's reflexive, empty words used to fill the space.

I don't think these things have the value that slang does, because they're so transient. by feeling meaningless within a few uses, they self-destruct, and we move on to another phrase/sentence formula that becomes meaningless then self-destructs (by becoming cringe or by nonblack people finding out it's AAVE). i could be wrong though...haven't done much research on what qualifies as slang

i think, to a certain extent, maybe it's okay if not every word someone says has meaning. maybe... but habit is so dangerous when it comes to language. "no ethical consumption under capitalism" is a good example of this. it was said so much by the wrong people that the majority of its users don't actually know what it means and it's used by nominal anti-capitalists to justify very capitalist activities. 

back to the book: "...exotic substance secreted--in a sort of trance--by interchangeable persons." this puts it into words perfectly. these phrases require no brainpower, they're practically a reflex.

so of course i had to read Ionesco's essay The Tragedy of Language, which is about his first play The Bald Sopranos, which he was inspired to write while learning English from a workbook that had him write down English sentences like "The floor is down" and "The ceiling is up."

From the essay:

So then of course I had to watch the play (links to read, watch). The conversations reminded me a lot of when I was back home and had to talk to a bunch of adults. “How curious it is! How very bizarre! What a coincidence!…but I do not believe I recall it.” Forms of expression that in their automatic usage render their content meaningless. the veneer of politeness that I often find myself trapped in—when I feel I need to be polite, and I feel my personality disappear, and with it any original language, and I default to an echo of the adults around me. The play exposes the absurdity of it all very well. 

What I love about reading nonfiction: you go from book to essay to essay to play, hardly conscious of it!

-Lizzy

[readingcauldron]

I'm currently reading Against Interpretations and Other Essays by Susan Sontag and today I read her critique of Notes and Counter Notes: Writings on the Theatre by Eugene Ionesco.

it was kind of ideal timing to read this because I've been thinking a lot about how when language becomes a habit it almost becomes meaningless--especially in terms of the sentence formulas people our age constantly use. things that started out as a funny tweet and then became a twitter trend and then incorporated themselves into our daily vocabulary--like "silly little treat" becoming "silly little (insert anything here)". the words "silly little" used to imply a lot but now they don't mean anything.  or hollywood coopting "eat the rich," or (white/nonblack) people misunderstanding the origins and depth of "karen" to render both things practically meaningless in popular culture. 

i'm trying to think of phrases that i and many other people use in our daily lives: maybe "you're in your ____ era." or maybe "liminal" or "post-ironic." i know there are better examples, i'll come back and edit this post when i think of them lol. 

there are formulas we follow to say a sentence. the "era" example is one i'm guilty of--it's an easy way to comfort a friend, to uplift them, to converse with a coworker and get a cheap laugh, to express my emotions without being vulnerable or thinking as deeply as i should about what i'm saying and how i want to say it. in short, it's an out, a mode of vulnerability-less expression. it's reflexive, empty words used to fill the space.

I don't think these things have the value that slang does, because they're so transient. by feeling meaningless within a few uses, they self-destruct, and we move on to another phrase/sentence formula that becomes meaningless then self-destructs (by becoming cringe or by nonblack people finding out it's AAVE). i could be wrong though...haven't done much research on what qualifies as slang

i think, to a certain extent, maybe it's okay if not every word someone says has meaning. maybe... but habit is so dangerous when it comes to language. "no ethical consumption under capitalism" is a good example of this. it was said so much by the wrong people that the majority of its users don't actually know what it means and it's used by nominal anti-capitalists to justify very capitalist activities. 

back to the book: "...exotic substance secreted--in a sort of trance--by interchangeable persons." this puts it into words perfectly. these phrases require no brainpower, they're practically a reflex.

so of course i had to read Ionesco's essay The Tragedy of Language, which is about his first play The Bald Sopranos, which he was inspired to write while learning English from a workbook that had him write down English sentences like "The floor is down" and "The ceiling is up."

From the essay:

So then of course I had to watch the play (links to read, watch). The conversations reminded me a lot of when I was back home and had to talk to a bunch of adults. “How curious it is! How very bizarre! What a coincidence!…but I do not believe I recall it.” Forms of expression that in their automatic usage render their content meaningless. the veneer of politeness that I often find myself trapped in—when I feel I need to be polite, and I feel my personality disappear, and with it any original language, and I default to an echo of the adults around me. The play exposes the absurdity of it all very well. 

What I love about reading nonfiction: you go from book to essay to essay to play, hardly conscious of it!

-Lizzy

[readingcauldron]

ok reblogging so i don't have to do multiple notes lolol

love this - so yes to "There was no good or bad illustration."

and love the quote from the picture you uploaded - makes me think of when all written language was pictographic - a bunch of illustrations that were so very clever in their simplicity

"But it’s crazy when you do it, you realize sometimes just how simple it can be." UGH so true!

sometimes I struggle with comics because when I open the book it feels like my eyes and brain are being attacked by the pictures, the text that's coming out of boxes, the multiple characters in a panel. it can be overwhelming! but that's why I'm now trying to get into them - trying to help my eyes learn how to focus, how to not jump around as I'm so inclined to doing, taking my time with each panel and letting the new reading experience take shape - getting the awesome opportunity to process a type of storytelling i've only dabbled in. i'm so excited to feel my brain stretch!

do you have any pictures (or even the originals!) of jenny and her magic shoes??? would love to read...

-Lizzy

"Making Comics" by Lynda Barry

“Everything we have come to call the arts seems to be in almost every 3 year old.”

I <3 Comics.

Post-adolescence, my love for the art of comics grows everyday. In-adolescence, I had associated “comics” as Marvel Universe, action-oriented, honk shoo / mimimi.

It was at the later end of my teens (wholeheartedly through the TLC of RookieMag), I was introduced to creation through The Teenage Girl. Thus, came my infatuation of online magazines, zines, print making, and through it all: comic art.

This is when I came into contact with graphic novels like “Boy’s Club”, “Wendy”, and the comics of Michael Deforge, and drawings of Jon Michael Frank, - I found a relatability I wasn’t able to feel in the types of media I’d consume which often chose a vehicle of message: books (words), movies (visuals), music (audio).

After reading “Making Comics” by Lynda Barry - I finally was able to make sense of why comics all of a sudden clicked for me. In this comic workshop-styled book, she spoke of comics as one of our oldest, natural, and spontaneous languages. Like in the image from the book above, even our letters were once drawings to us: they held shape, distinct from each time we wrote them. Even our names held expression!

In my discovery of comics, I especially loved the shitty ones. The art with stick figures or fragments of what something is, the way something was drawn defining the character more than realism. There was no good or bad illustration. The words and pictures together made something happen. It was less finished than what I previously thought was an adequate, “valid” way to tell a story: something my younger self assumed needed publishing, producing, fame, $$$$$.

In the second grade, I made a mini series called “Jenny and her magic shoes”. I created 20 issues: all about a girl my age who had magic powers through a pair of shoes she finds in the first issue. I still remember it being one of the first times I created something of sequence - a story. The image felt just as important as the words. Till this day, both are so integral in the way I consume and create my media.

And a creation it was! There was no pressure in making those stories. And yes, it was essentially a rip off of "The Fairly Oddparents" without Cosmo and Wanda. But I drew! I wrote words! I made something. Deep inside, I still think that’s all that it takes.

“Stories show up on their own when kids draw. The drawing itself propels the story, changing it in a living way. This is the state of mind I’m after when I make comics and spending time working beside four year olds has helped me relearn.”

Similar to what we can learn from comics, I think we can all learn from our younger selves: to not make something perfect, but to make something. And you know what, sometimes it is sooo hard!!! But it’s crazy when you do it, you realize sometimes just how simple it can be.

<3_______<3 Kiana

[readingcauldron]

"Making Comics" by Lynda Barry

“Everything we have come to call the arts seems to be in almost every 3 year old.”

I <3 Comics.

Post-adolescence, my love for the art of comics grows everyday. In-adolescence, I had associated “comics” as Marvel Universe, action-oriented, honk shoo / mimimi.

It was at the later end of my teens (wholeheartedly through the TLC of RookieMag), I was introduced to creation through The Teenage Girl. Thus, came my infatuation of online magazines, zines, print making, and through it all: comic art.

This is when I came into contact with graphic novels like “Boy’s Club”, “Wendy”, and the comics of Michael Deforge, and drawings of Jon Michael Frank, - I found a relatability I wasn’t able to feel in the types of media I’d consume which often chose a vehicle of message: books (words), movies (visuals), music (audio).

After reading “Making Comics” by Lynda Barry - I finally was able to make sense of why comics all of a sudden clicked for me. In this comic workshop-styled book, she spoke of comics as one of our oldest, natural, and spontaneous languages. Like in the image from the book above, even our letters were once drawings to us: they held shape, distinct from each time we wrote them. Even our names held expression!

In my discovery of comics, I especially loved the shitty ones. The art with stick figures or fragments of what something is, the way something was drawn defining the character more than realism. There was no good or bad illustration. The words and pictures together made something happen. It was less finished than what I previously thought was an adequate, “valid” way to tell a story: something my younger self assumed needed publishing, producing, fame, $$$$$.

In the second grade, I made a mini series called “Jenny and her magic shoes”. I created 20 issues: all about a girl my age who had magic powers through a pair of shoes she finds in the first issue. I still remember it being one of the first times I created something of sequence - a story. The image felt just as important as the words. Till this day, both are so integral in the way I consume and create my media.

And a creation it was! There was no pressure in making those stories. And yes, it was essentially a rip off of "The Fairly Oddparents" without Cosmo and Wanda. But I drew! I wrote words! I made something. Deep inside, I still think that’s all that it takes.

“Stories show up on their own when kids draw. The drawing itself propels the story, changing it in a living way. This is the state of mind I’m after when I make comics and spending time working beside four year olds has helped me relearn.”

Similar to what we can learn from comics, I think we can all learn from our younger selves: to not make something perfect, but to make something. And you know what, sometimes it is sooo hard!!! But it’s crazy when you do it, you realize sometimes just how simple it can be.

<3_______<3 Kiana

[readingcauldron]

🤎 new bookends just arrived! for my physical books in my (top) “to read” list! and others that i just like the titles of :P 🤎

🤎, kiana

[readingcauldron]

POLL: I just finished listening to the audiobook All About Love by Bell Hooks after first reading it three years ago- Do I log this in my goodreads? Is listening to an audiobook the same thing as reading it? (IMO it's not and I probably wouldn't log it but I want to hear what you guys think)

zeena

[readingcauldron]

my turn!!

The second essay of Things That Are by Amy Leach is called "In Which the River Makes Off with Three Stationary Characters," and is about beavers. It opens with:

"In the seventeenth century, his Holiness the Pope adjudged beavers to be fish. In retrospect, that was a zoologically illogical decision; but beavers were not miffed at being changed into fish. They decided not to truckle to their new specification, not to be perfect fish, textbook fish; instead they became fanciful fish, the first to have furry babies, the first to breathe air and the first fish to build for themselves commodious conical fortresses in the water. If Prince Maximilian, traveling up the Missouri River, had taken it in mind to recategorize them as Druids or flamingos, beavers would have become toothy Druids, or portly brown industrious flamingos."

Whenever I read something profound I like to sit on it and then go see what the Internet has to say - so I came across this interview with Amy Leach. My favorite line of hers: "I just enjoy words so long out of use they are almost nonsense again, as they were before they were used." And when you're writing a book about nature, one about the wonder and intrinsic, borderline-casual phenomenal-ness (?) of it, using words that have been forgotten, or sound playful, is so awesome! She's forcing me to use my imagination to read, to pay attention to each word, and by using words out of standard context or 1900s/silly-sounding words I don't know the definition of, I get to re-see something I've always taken for granted :) Beavers are so cute and I know that they build dams but now I also know they used to be fish and didn't even care.

Ok that was not what I was planning on writing about. I just wanted to talk about how beautiful it is that classification means absolutely nothing to beavers. After I read that last line, about beavers as flamingos, I just kind of sat and stared at the wall. You know when your room suddenly, momentarily, looks a little different and sounds a little different and you swear the light changed a little as you looked up from the page...

The next line:

"The beavers’ reaction to the papal renaming highlights two of their especial qualities: their affability and their unyieldingness."

The rest of the essay talks about beavers' relentlessness, their genetically-coded sense of purpose (how lucky are they!), and more about beaver life--beaver babies can swim within hours, the weak are sometimes excommunicated...

Leach then has a gorgeous 20-line sentence about how a beaver builds a dam. Why does reading about beavers feel so emotional? It is one of the most moving things I have ever read. Maybe because I wasn't expecting it?

Sorry this is getting long but now I can't stop. As soon as I finished reading and feeling moved by the unfaltering beaver, who will thrive no matter what you call him, I moved on to read about the melting glacier that displaces the beaver:

"Though octopuses make sense in the ocean, beavers and cactuses and pencil-makers do not. When they get there the ocean must derange them, making them delirious, because the sound of water is what triggers their gnawing reflex. As soon as they hear the burbly gushing of a stream, beavers speed to the nearest trees to chisel girdles around their trunks so they go whomping down and then they can stuff them into the chatterboxy river to strangulate it into silence. But the ocean is a wilderness of chatter, and not in all the forests of the world are there enough trees to muzzle its splashing, sloshing, gurgling, yammering, yackety-yacking waves."

(First of all, um hello awesome onomatopoeia - what the ocean sounds like to us, what the ocean sounds like to the beaver)

Classification may not mean anything, may not leave the beaver gaining or lacking, but place is everything! The beaver has a purpose, regardless of classification or place--it doesn't try to change its purpose to match its place...ok clearly the beaver we're talking about here is me (which is funny because I went into this book with the intent of NOT relating it back to myself but I'm in my 20s so I'm allowed a little conceit, a little stretch of the imagination)

Next is a passage about salmon, and then she ends the essay with a passage about music. The last sentence:

"...until [music] spills you into a place whose dimensions make nonsense of your heretofore extraordinary spatial intelligence."

there are so many things that are capable of spilling me into a place whose dimensions make nonsense of my heretofore extraordinary spatial intelligence. in reference to both zeena's and kiana's posts: it's just a matter of giving them the opportunity. of seeking them out...of opening myself up a little :)

-Lizzy

[readingcauldron]

the heart of a dog

At age 5 I met a black Chow Chow- his size about me or so times two. His name was Bear. He belonged to my Dad's coworker: a man who also owned two chihuahuas, a cat, and maybe others who were hiding in the furniture. Bear mostly would gaze at you softly and sit, and even though half of his body weight was now on the ground, he couldn't mask his magnitude against my own. Dogs often scared me, the big ones terrified me. Even so, Bear's gentle nature taught me the love of the dog.

Tonight I watched the movie "A Heart of A Dog" by Laurie Anderson - an essay film that recounts the creator's feelings on death in her life, mainly the death of her dog.

It just so happened I had recently read "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion. After completing, I was informed (AKA listening to a podcast featuring Angel Olsen who recommended the movie to those who have also read Didion's book) - of this moving image on death and grieving.

Both are memoirs that center on loss: painting portraits that re-call it, let it go, and charge forward.

I'll never forget the first dog I have loved, the first dog I lost, the dog that sleeps next to me now.

Many have admitted to me that they could not have a dog themselves: to be responsible for all of the messes - including the ultimate one: the time of passing.

I think the rationale behind all of this can be partly answered by this quote from the movie: "She left us with a tenderness we didn't know we had." The rest: by experience. The rest: by mystery.

Also in the movie, her dog plays the piano.

To all the dogs i have met in my life, I repeat the words of a random man who once stopped me on the street as I was walking my own: GOD BLESS DOG. AND GOD BLESS YOU!

Blessed be! <3 Kiana

[readingcauldron]

Hello and welcome to the reading cauldron. When I think of a cauldron I imagine a cast iron pot filled with miscellaneous items— hopes and dreams, a dash of revenge, mysterious green goo and a frog or three. In my own personal cauldron also known as my notes app (a melange of my hopes and dreams, to-do lists, screenshots of passages of books I'm reading on archive.org, et cetera) I re-stumbled upon this image. It wasn't meant to live in the wasteland of my notes app, I wanted to send it to someone. As they are technically not allowed within a 40 foot radius of me (I'm being dramatic) I have held on to it for when I decide their time will be up.

This has now become a diary entry rather than a book review, but if a book doesn't make me feel like my heart is moldable clay then I will immediately chuck it right back under my bed where it belongs. This is a passage that particularly speaks to the part of me that gets very sad when the weather outside is particularly beautiful. Or when the sun sets. Or when I see leaves blowing across the pavement and do a little swirl. I always had a hard time describing the feeling but this really does the job...nice!

What's also funny is I'm not quite sure of which book this came from. I'm pretty sure it was The Courage to Create by Rollo May. But I also might be wrong. Either way, I'll leave it up to you to find out. Or not. As I said before I love to put things (notes, books, this post) into the abyss so it doesn't matter either way.

HAGS!!! (Have A Good Spring)

— zeena