rowdwrites

[rowdwrites]

Joy Sullivan, from “Raze”, Instructions for Traveling West

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To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

Mary Oliver, from "In Blackwater Woods" in American Primitive

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There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn't that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life.

Anne Carson, from Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides; Tragedy: A Curious Art Form.

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"It's like a hole in my life, an eight-year hole. That's what I find interesting in people's lives, the holes, the gaps, sometimes dramatic, but sometimes not dramatic at all. There are catalepsies, or a kind of sleepwalking through a number of years, in most lives. Maybe it's in these holes that movement takes place."

—Gilles Deleuze, On Philosophy

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anne carson interviewed by kate kellaway for the guardian

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From a poetry collection by Mary Oliver, where after a hundred poems showcasing gentle observations on nature and animals, she hits you with this:

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The eye of a marble statue from Herculaneum, with surviving paint. Roman before 79 AD.  

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Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963.

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Sam Sax, Yr Dead (McSweeney's, 2024)

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Because of Re: Carmilla, I thought you all would enjoy my edition of Carmilla :

The holes go all the way through, the sides of the book are red, and on some pages the text is colored red just under the holes !

I was so happy when I found it in a little french bookshop specialized in queer texts ❤️

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The soul that has no fixed goal loses itself; for as they say, to be everywhere is to be nowhere.

— Montaigne, "Of Idleness"

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The thing is to stalk your calling…. I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.

— Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (Harper & Row, 1982)

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Gentle reminder that often creativity decides to hibernate for a bit.

It’s okay.  You’re not broken, you’re resting, and much like spring, creativity comes back.

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“I was like a physicist who believes in quarks intellectually, but doesn’t feel quarks. I could make all the Thomist arguments about God and discuss Spinoza and say all the right things. But I didn’t feel God. It was not a thing of the heart for me. I could defend the idea of God but it was all from hearsay evidence, a lawyer would call it. None of it had any emotional truth for me. I mean, there was a place in me that wanted God to be in it, but it was empty.”

— Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

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“I like to think of the zuihitsu as a fungus—not plant or animal, but a species unto itself. The Japanese view it as a distinct genre, although its elements are difficult to pin down. There’s no Western equivalent, though some people might wish to categorize it as a prose poem or an essay. You mentioned some of its characteristics: a kind of randomness that is not really random, but a feeling of randomness; a pointed subjectivity that we don’t normally associate with the essay. The zuihitsu can also resemble other Western forms: lists, journals. I’ve added emails to the mix. Fake emails.”

— Kimiko Hahn

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Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor. Most stories get told out loud because the storyteller hopes that the telling of the story can transform a nameless event into a familiar or intimate one. We tend to associate intimacy with closeness and closeness with a certain sum of shared experiences. Yet every day total strangers, who will never say a single word to one another, can share an intimacy. An intimacy contained in the exchange of a glance, a nod of the head, a smile, a shrug of a shoulder. A closeness which lasts for a second or for the duration of a song being sung and listened to together. An agreement about life. An agreement without clauses. A conclusion spontaneously shared between the untold stories gathered around the song.

Confabulations, John Berger

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on hedonism by anne carson