sisyphean's commonplace book

sedaris

2008-08-27T05:11:00.000-07:00

It's popular to believe that every smoker was brainwashed, sucked in by product placements and subliminal ads. This argument comes in handy when you want to assign blame, but it discounts the fact that smoking is often wonderful. For people like me, people who twitched and jerked and cried out in tiny voices, cigarettes were a godsend. Not only that, but they tasted good, especially the first one in the morning, and the seven or eight that immediately followed it. (247)

Sedaris, David. "The Smoking Section." When You Are Engulfed in Flames. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2008. 240-323.

sycamore

2008-08-16T17:26:00.002-07:00

Jeremy asks if I've had any good sex. That's when I'm more dramatic: I feel like there was a time, a number of years ago, when I felt a sense of so much possibility in sex, in sluttiness — and now it seems like everyone's so compulsive about finding dissatisfaction, and it makes me so depressed that I stop thinking about sex. I don't really have a libido, either — except at random moments when I'm on the bus or walking down the street and unfortunately it's not those random moments that are scripted to lead to something. (114)

Sycamore, Mattilda Bernstein. So Many Ways to Sleep Badly. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2008.

winterson

2008-07-10T14:43:00.001-07:00

As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone.

Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. New York: Grove, 1985.

winterson

2008-07-10T14:40:00.002-07:00

"Don't you ever think of going back?"

Silly question. There are threads that help you find your way back, and there are threads that intend to bring you back. Mind turns to the pull, it's hard to pull away. I'm always thinking of going back. When Lot's wife looked over her shoulder, she turned into a pillar of salt. Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps them clean, but it's a poor exchange for losing your self. People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here. Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake gets mouldy and they choke on what's left. Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you change, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different. (160-161)

Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. New York: Grove, 1985.

winterson

2008-07-10T14:34:00.002-07:00

My needlework teacher suffered from a problem of vision. She recognized things according to expectation and environment. If you were in a particular place, you expected to see particular things. Sheep and hills, see and fish; if there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs. Jones and talk about fishcakes. But most likely, she'd do what most people do when confronted with something they don't understand:

Panic.

What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in a usual place (our favourite aunt in our favourite poker parlour) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favourite poker in our favourite aunt). (45)

Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. New York: Grove, 1985.

july

2008-06-26T00:58:00.002-07:00

I often felt that I would be shot in the back with an arrow or gun, but that didn't happen. The world wasn't safer than I had thought; on the contrary, it was so dangerous that my practically naked self fit right in, like a car crash, it happened every day. (80)

July, Miranda. "Something That Needs Nothing." No One Belongs Here More Than You. New York: Scribner, 2007. 63-91.

july

2008-06-26T00:54:00.003-07:00

And it struck me that maybe True magazine had been wrong. Maybe there are no New Men. Maybe there are only the living and the dead, and all those who are living deserve each other and are equal to each other. I pushed his shoulders back so that he was upright in his chair again. I didn't know anything about epilepsy, but I had imagined more shaking. I moved his hair out of his face. I put my hand under his nose and felt gentle, even breaths. I pressed my lips against his ear and whispered again, It's not your fault. Perhaps this was really the only thing I had ever wanted to say to anyone, and be told. (6-7)

July, Miranda. "The Shared Patio." No One Belongs Here More Than You. New York: Scribner, 2007. 1-11.

baldwin

2008-03-30T18:17:00.001-07:00

"I mean you could have been fair to me by despising me a little less."

"I'm sorry. But I think, since you bring it up, that a lot of your life is despicable."

"I could say the same about yours," said Jacques. "There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one's head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain. You ought to have some apprehension that the man you see before you was once even younger than you are now and arrived at his present wretchedness by imperceptible degrees."

There was a silence for a moment, threatened, from a distance, by that laugh of Giovanni's.

"Tell me," I said at last," is there really no other way for you but this? To kneel down forever before an army of boys for just five dirty minutes in the dark?"

"Think," said Jacques, "of the men who have kneeled before you while you thought of something else and pretended that nothing was happening down there in the dark between your legs."

I stared at the amber cognac and at the wet rings on the metal. Deep down, trapped in the metal, the outline of my own face looked upward hopelessly at me.

"You think," he persisted, "that my life is shameful because my encounters are. And they are. But you should ask yourself why they are." (55-56)

Baldwin, James. Giovanni's Room. New York: Delta Trade Paperback, 1956.

willis

2008-03-06T19:03:00.002-08:00

This book will help you understand. We are not definable. We are not straight. We are not gay.

We are, however, Loathsome.

Willis, Danielle. Introduction to How Loathsome by Ted Naifeh and Tristan Crane. Singapore: ComicsLit, 2004.

orr

2008-01-22T00:17:00.000-08:00

Time to shut up.
Voltaire said the secret
Of being boring
Is to say everything.

And yet I held
Back about love
All those years:
Talking about death
Insistently, even
As I was alive;
Talking about loss
As if all was loss,
As if the world
Did not return
Each morning.
As if the beloved
Didn't long for us.

No wonder I go on
So. I go on so
Because of the wonder. (83)

Orr, Gregory. Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon P, 2005.

alameddine

2008-01-19T00:00:00.000-08:00

I wake up in my own room. I try to get up. I am unable to. I can't move. There is nothing constraining me. I should be able to get up. I am unable to. I am terrified. I realize I am still sleeping. I am dreaming. I wake up. I try to get up. I am unable to. I can't move. There is nothing constraining me. I should be able to get up. I am unable to. I am terrified. I realize I am still sleeping. I am dreaming. I wake up. I try to get up. I am unable to. I can't move. There is nothing constraining me. I should be able to get up. I am unable to. I am terrified. I realize I am still sleeping. I am dreaming. I wake up. I try to get up. I am unable to. I can't move. there is nothing constraining me. I should be able to get up. I an unable to. I am terrified. I realize I am still sleeping. I am dreaming. Life is a repeating pattern. (95)

I wanted to write an endless book of time. It would have no beginning and no end. It would not flow in order. The tenses would make no sense. A book whose first page is almost identical to the last, and all the pages in between are jumbled with an interminable story. A book which would make both Kant and Jung proud. (118)

Alameddine, Rabih. Koolaids: The Art of War. New York: Picador, 1998.

gottesman

2007-10-15T00:29:00.000-07:00

Heidegger's A.M.

Coffee breaks
the chain
of neglect
of the problem of being.

Coffee grounds
the problem in ancient inquiries
concerning being not being beings.

Before coffee
what is not sought
is not unfamiliar
though ungraspable, hot,

but after the first shot
everyone understands
"The sky is blue," "I am happy,"
statements like that.
A white ring mars a dark table.

The problem, the mug
being unmistakable. (24)

Gottesman, Les. "Heideggar's A.M." Harper's Magazine July 2007. 24.

eggers

2007-09-03T21:55:00.000-07:00

Then why are you talking about exhibitionism? It's a ridiculous term. Someone wants to celebrate their existence and you call it exhibitionism. It's niggardly. If you don't want someone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You're taking up space, air. (217)

Eggers, Dave. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. New York: Vintage, 2001.

eggers

2007-09-03T21:51:00.000-07:00

But look at it this way: stomach cancer is genetic, passed more down the female side of our family than otherwise, but because according to Beth and me my mother was done in by dyspepsia, the dyspepsia caused by swallowing too much of our tumult and cruelty, we are determined not to swallow anything, to not keep anything putrefying down there, soaking in its juices, bile eating bile... we are purgers, Beth and I. I don't hold on to anything anymore. Pain comes at me and I take it, chew it for a few minutes, and spit it back out. It's just not my thing anymore. (210)

Eggers, Dave. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. New York: Vintage, 2001.

eggers

2007-09-03T21:47:00.000-07:00

All we really want is for no one to have a boring life, to be impressive, so we can be impressed. (175)

Eggers, Dave. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. New York: Vintage, 2001.

eggers

2007-09-03T21:42:00.000-07:00

All together, our floor, our building, it has something, is bursting, is not just a place where people are working but a place where people are creating and working to change the very way we live. (170)

Eggers, Dave. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. New York: Vintage, 2001.

woolley

2007-08-22T01:08:00.000-07:00

I look at shock as armor in a life that is essentially one brutal offensive strike. Shock covers up my actually being a prude and also really sensitive in a totally dangerous, volatile way. Gag them before they can gag you, before they can get to know you. If they stay around after the initial assault, there is promise. I practice this philosophy in life as well as on the Internet. (26)

Woolley, Tom. Toilet. Alexandria, VA: Illiterati, 1998.

eugenides

2007-08-15T10:20:00.001-07:00

Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love. (379)

Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. New York: Picador, 2002.

rowling

2007-07-22T01:04:00.000-07:00

His insides clenched like a fist. He could not tell her the truth. He drank the last of his firewhiskey to avoid answering. (83)

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Scholastic, 2007.

ginsberg

2007-05-18T20:13:00.000-07:00

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked (9)

Ginsberg, Allen. "Howl." Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1959. 9-26.

kerouac

2007-05-15T09:36:00.000-07:00

"It's nothing but bullshit!" I yelled and suddenly I had the feeling I always got when I tried to explain the Dharma to people, Alvah, my mother, my relatives, girl friends, everybody, they never listened, they always wanted me to listen to them, they knew, I didn't know anything, I was just a dumb young kid and impractical fool who didn't understand the serious significance of this very important, very real world. (110-111)

Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. 1958. New York: Penguin, 1986.

kerouac

2007-05-15T09:33:00.000-07:00

I nudged myself closer into the ledge and closed my eyes and thought "Oh what a life this is, why do we have to be born in the first place, and only so we can have our poor gentle flesh laid out to such impossible horrors as huge mountains and rock and empty space," and with horror I remembered the famous Zen saying, "When you get to the top of a mountain, keep climbing." The saying made my hair stand on end; it had been such cute poetry sitting on Alvah's straw mats. Now it was enough to make my heart pound and my heart bleed for being born at all. (83-84)

Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. 1958. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Wollstonecraft

2007-05-13T18:59:00.000-07:00

For what purpose were the passions implanted? That man by struggling with them might attain a degree of knowledge denied to the brutes; whispers Experience. (206)

Wollstonecraft, Mary "Vindication on the Rights of Woman." 1790.

kant

2007-05-13T09:49:00.000-07:00

On the other hand, it is a duty to maintain one's life; and, in addition, everyone has also a direct inclination to do so. But on this account the often anxious care which most men take for it has to intrinsic worth, and their maxim has no moral import. They preserve their life as duty requires, no doubt, but not because duty requires. On the other hand, if adversity and hopeless sorrow have completely taken away the relish for life, if the unfortunate one, strong in mind, indignant at his fate rather than desponding or dejected, wishes for death, and yet preserves his life without loving it — not from inclination or fear, but from duty — then his maxim has a moral worth. (292)

Kant, Immanuel. Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals.

fauset

2007-04-29T10:55:00.000-07:00

If this is peace, this dead and leaden thing,
   Then better far the hateful fret, the sting,
Better the wound forever seeking balm
   Than this gray calm!

Is this pain's surcease? Better far the ache,
   The long-drawn dreary day, the night's wide awake,
Better the choking sigh, the sobbing breath
   Than passion's death! (255)

Fauset, Jessie Redmon. "Dead Fires." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David Levering Lewis. New York: Penguin, 1994. 255.

bontemps

2007-04-27T21:52:00.000-07:00

Mountains are rising all around me.
Some are so small they are not seen;
Others are large.
All of them get big in time and people forget
What started them at first.
Oh the world is covered in mountains!
Beneath each one there is something buried:
Some pile of wreckage that started it there.
Mountains are lonely and some are awful. (226)

Bontemps, Arna. "Golgatha Is a Mountain." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David Levering Lewis. New York: Penguin, 1994. 224-226.

hughes

2007-04-25T11:48:00.000-07:00

There are people (you've probably noted it also) who have the unconscious faculty of making the world spin around themselves, throb and expand, contract and go dizzy. Then, when they are gone away, you feel sick and lonesome and meaningless.

In the chemistry lab at school, did you ever hold a test tube, pouring in liquids and powers and seeing nothing happen until a certain liquid or a certain powder is poured in and then everything begins to smoke and fume, bubble and boil, hiss to foam, and sometimes even explode? The tube is suddenly full of action and movement and life. Well, there are people like those certain liquids or powders; at a given moment they come into a room, or into a town, even into a country — and the place is never the same again. Things bubble, boil, change. Sometimes the whole world is changed. Alexander came. Christ. Marconi. A Russian named Lenin. (603)

Hughes, Langston. "Father and Son." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David Levering Lewis. New York: Penguin, 1994. 599-627.

ackerman

2007-02-06T22:12:00.000-08:00

While most birds are busy singing a small operetta of who and what and where, hummingbirds are virtually mute. Such small voice don't carry far, so they don't bother much with song. But if they can't serenade a mate, or yell war cries at a rival, how can they perform the essential drama of their lives? They dance. Using body language, they spell out their intentions and moods, just as bees, fireflies or hula dancers do. That means elaborate aerial ballets in which males twirl, joust, sideswipe and somersault. Brazen and fierce, they will take on large adversaries — even cats, dogs or humans. (269)

Ackerman, Diane. "Mute Dancers: How to Watch a Hummingbird." On Writing: A Process Reader. Ed. Wendy Bishop. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2004. 268-270.

steiner

2007-02-06T21:33:00.000-08:00

I have no intention of leaving. I walk around our apartment, continuing as a reporter, looking for evidence. Not evidence of alcohol — that would be easy. If I moved this chair I'd find seven or eight cat-batted bottle caps. There's probably a stray bottle or two under her drawing table. So what? I want evidence of something else, proof of why I stay. Her jacket's tossed on a chair and one of the cats is curled up on it. I lean in and smell the jacket, and the cat's warm fur. The phone number of our favorite pizza place is stuck on the refrigerator, along with the first card she gave me: a picture of a map. Written inside: Let's go everywhere. (258)

Steiner, Donna. "Sleeping with Alcohol." On Writing: A Process Reader. Ed. Wendy Bishop. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2004. 256-259.

moore

2007-02-06T20:39:00.000-08:00

Don't all parents want the world for their children? Fellow parents, tell me, wouldn't we do anything for them? To give them big houses, we will cut ancient forests. TO give them perfect fruit, we will poison their food with pesticides. To give them the latest technologies, we will reduce entire valleys to toxic dumps. To give them the best education, we will invest in companies that profit from death. To keep them safe, we will deny them the right to privacy, to travel unimpeded, to peacefully assemble. And to give them peace, we will kill other peoples' children or send them to be killed, and amass enough weapons to kill the children again, kill them twenty times if necessary.

We would do anything for our children but the one big thing: Stop and ask ourselves, what are we doing and allowing to be done? (117)

Moore, Kathleen Dean. The Pine Island Paradox.

spanbauer

2007-02-04T22:46:00.000-08:00

Then he'd say this:

"Smoke and wind and fire are all things you can feel but can't touch. Memories and dreams are like that too. They're what this world is made up of. There's really only a very short time that we get hair and teeth and put on red cloth and have bones and skin and look out our eyes. Not for long. Some folks longer than others. If you're lucky, you'll get t be the one who tells the story: how the eyes have seen, the hair has blown, the caress the skin has felt, how the bones have ached.

"What the human heart is like," he said.

"How the devil called and we did not answer.

"How we answered." (45)

Spanbauer, Tom. The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991.

spanbauer

2007-02-04T22:42:00.000-08:00

Wasn't til I lost them all, that I heard the story I hard forever needed to hear, and I found out things weren't the way I thought they were, which mean: what I was doing wasn't what I thought I was doing, and me, in the end, who I thought I was, wasn't at all who I was. (11)

Spanbauer, Tom. The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991.

de chungara

2007-01-14T22:08:00.000-08:00

The motherland, for me, is in every corner, it's also in the miners, in the peasants, in the people's poverty, their nakedness, their malnutrition, in their pains and their joys. That's the motherland, right? But in school they teach us to sing the national anthem, to parade, and they say that if we refuse to parade we aren't patriotic, and, nevertheless, they never explain our poverty, our misery, our parents' situation, their great sacrifices and their low wages, why a few children have everything and many others have nothing. They never explained that to me in school. (64)

de Chungara, Domitila (with Moema Viezzer). "Let Me Speak!" On Writing: A Process Reader. Ed. Wendy Bishop. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2004. 60-65.

moore

2007-01-09T22:54:00.000-08:00

Why write? Where does writing come from? These are questions to ask yourself. They are like: Where does dust come from? Or: Why is there war? Or: If there's a God, then why is my brother now a cripple?

These are questions that you keep in your wallet, like calling cards. These are questions, your creative writing teacher says, that are good to address in your journals but rarely in your fiction. (10)

Moore, Lorrie. "How to Become a Writer." On Writing: A Process Reader. Ed. Wendy Bishop. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2004. 7-12.

moore

2007-01-09T22:45:00.000-08:00

First, try to be something, anything else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age — say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write a long haiku sequences about thwarted desire. It is a pond, a cherry blossom, a wind brushing against sparrow wing leaving for mountain. Count the syllables. Show it to your mom. She is tough and practical. She has a son in Vietnam and a husband who may be having an affair. She believes in wearing brown because it hides spots. She'll look briefly at your writing, then back up at you with a face blank as a donut. She'll say: "How about emptying the dishwasher?" Look away. Shove the forks in the fork drawer. Accidentally break one of the freebie gas station glasses. This is the required pain and suffering. This is only for starters. (8)

Moore, Lorrie. "How to Become a Writer." On Writing: A Process Reader. Ed. Wendy Bishop. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2004. 7-12.

hodgman

2007-01-09T11:40:00.001-08:00

Though the hoboes are gone, there are those who still admire their lifestyle of unworried rambling and crusty pants. I do not understand these people and I cannot stop them. But I can insist that if you do decide to take to the rails, you should choose for yourself a proper hobo moniker. Here are seven hundred more known historical hoboes whose names you can steal. You should not feel guilty about this. If they were still at large, they would steal your name without hesitation. If they could manage it, they'd steal your reflection from the mirror and sell it to the still surface of a moonlit pond. And then they would drain the pond out of spite.

If you wish, you may append your hobo name with "Jr," "II," or "fils," after a custom of the more honorable hoboes, bearing in mind that the more honorable hoboes tended to be strangled on sight. (46)

Hodgman, John. "Best American Things to Know about Hoboes." excerpt from The Areas of My Expertise. The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006. Ed. Dave Eggers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 43-54.

gass

2006-12-22T13:29:00.000-08:00

In my writerly guise my pages will be as shocking as my present prehistoric carapace. I want to publish principally to prove to my father I can be a success at something. But not in my role, as a writer, rather in my role as a son. Perhaps I would prefer my scribblings to stay unseen and my bound and printed sheets to remain unread, even though I have carefully placed a copy of my first book on the nightstand next to my father's bed. I want his approval so I can scorn it. I want his approval though my need makes me ashamed. I depend upon his animosity, for it defines me, gives me edges, just as the man who cuts out your silhouette from a sheet of black paper does and, for the sum of loose change, gives you the profile of a piece of land. My movements are awkward, my body cumbersome, my desires mixed. I can debate the situation with my head, but however it goes — approval or blame — I remain a failure. (86)

...

Yes, I must be a different species. I dislike everything my family does. I cannot eat what they eat; I cannot abide their games; the noises of their life are like the scratch of chalk; and they move through my room to other rooms like trains through a station. I only come out at ngiht when the card game is conceded, the last door closed, my father's lungs cough, and the parent bedsprings sigh. I come out into the conmforting emptiness of silence, where I may lead my counterclockwise life. (86)

...

My problem, if I were to put it simply, is the family, the dynamics of the family, the reach of relations, the forced feeding of custom and belief, the close embrace of the tribe, the shrinking circle that begins the words "obey" and "obligation" and concludes every "no" that issues from my father's mouth to sum me up as a zero. The family is formed by a system of functions: the father's, to rule and provide, direct and protect, beget and mold; the mother's, to cherish and succor, to bear and care; the child's, to obey and prepare, to mate and become mother or father in another such system, perpetuating the name, supplying the tribe with more tribesman, adding to its coffers, filling with good repute each grave. (87)

Gass, William H. "Half a Man, Half a Metaphor: The Unknown Kafka." Harper's Magazine (August 2006): 85-94.

eno

2006-12-09T21:18:00.000-08:00

I am reminded of a favorite uncle. He gave me a dictionary, which I mistook as the long, sad, confusing story of everything. But he taught me many things about many things. For example, we speak to keep the wolf of loneliness at bay. Or, for example, while crashing your car, always steer into the direction of the skid. But now theory must be put into practice, and the stacks of books are pushed aside, as we careen heart-first and bookless into the blackening night. (18)

Eno, Will. "Darkness at Seven." Harper's Magazine 312 (June 2006): 15-19.

A reprinting of the opening scene of Tragedy: a tragedy.

terence

2006-11-24T22:25:00.000-08:00

What unjust judges fathers are of all
Young men! They think it only right that we
Should be born old men, instantly, as boys,
Not privy to what adolescense brings.
They govern as their passion now dictates,
Not as it used to be. If I ever do have
A son, he'll have an easygoing father,
I swear; allowance made for his straying,
An understanding of it, and forgiveness.
Not like my father, who points out to me
His own views through another. (432)

Terence. The Self-Tormentor. Trans. Palmer Bovie. Classical Comedy: Greek and Roman. Ed. Robert W. Corrigan. New York: Applause, 1987. 421-484.

terence

2006-11-24T22:08:00.000-08:00

I am a man: nothing that is human is foreign to my interests. (425)

Terence. The Self-Tormentor. Trans. Palmer Bovie. Classical Comedy: Greek and Roman. Ed. Robert W. Corrigan. New York: Applause, 1987. 421-484.

Alternatively translated:

I am a man and I consider nothing human foreign to me. (414)

Bovie, Palmer. "Introduction." Classical Comedy: Greek and Roman. Ed. Robert W. Corrigan. New York: Applause, 1987. 413-419.

grayson

2006-11-24T09:17:00.000-08:00

There are times when I wish Noah would at least feign interest in what I'm doing so I could at least update him on Green Arrow and Speedy. By 2000 there was a new Speedy, a former prostitute named Mia who was HIV-postive. Green Arrow decided to lose his mask when someone pointed out it did not disguise his identity at all.

But those moments pass, and when we look at each other, it's as if history didn't exist. (101)

Grayson, Richard. "1001 Ways to Defeat Green Arrow." And to Think He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street and Other Stories. Brooklyn: Dumbo Books, 2006. 94-101.

grayson

2006-11-23T12:38:00.000-08:00

In the Sixties everyone who disagreed with us was a fascist. The war, of course, was a fascist war. ITT and Dow Chemical were fasist corporations. Israel was a fascist country even though it was Jewish. All Republicans except John Lindsay were fascists. I spelled America with a K and Nixon with a swastika.

In the Sixties it never occurred to me that I might one day become a fascist myself. (24)

Grayson, Richard. "In the Sixties." And to Think He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street and Other Stories. Brooklyn: Dumbo Books, 2006. 19-24.

lorde

2006-11-11T12:15:00.000-08:00

call me
roach and presumptuous
nightmare on your white pillow
your itch to destroy
the indestructible
part of yourself (230-231)

Lorde, Audre. from "The Brown Menace or Poem to the Survival of Roaches." The New York Head Shop and Museum. Detroit: Broadside, 1974. 48. Reprinted in Moraga, Cherríe. "La Güera." Come Out Fighting: A Century of Essential Writing on Gay and Lesbian Liberation. Ed. Chris Bull. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2001. 225-233.

euripides

2006-10-25T23:43:00.000-07:00

Medea:
I don't want money and misery.
I don't want affluence that makes me sick. (326)

Euripedes. Medea. Trans. Michael Townsend. Classical Tragedy Greek and Roman: 8 Plays in Authoritative Modern Translations Accompanied by Critical Essays. Ed. Robert W. Corrigan. New York: Applause Theatre, 1990. 309-348.

wilde

2006-10-16T08:46:00.000-07:00

Facts are not merely finding a footing-place in history, but they are usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of Romance. Their chilling touch is over everything. They are vulgarizing mankind. The crude commercialism of America, its materializing spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry tree has done more harm, and in shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature. (18)

Wilde, Oscar. "The Decay of Lying: An Observation." Intentions. 1913. Aegypan Press.

bechdel

2006-10-06T01:31:00.000-07:00

Then there were those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea?

Or just disappointed by the design failure? (12)

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

marx and engels

2006-09-26T21:46:00.000-07:00

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before tehy can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (476)

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. "Manifesto of the Communist Party." 1888. Ed. Friedrich Engels. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978. 469-500.

olsen

2006-09-12T21:30:00.000-07:00

Friedrich experiences a frothy sensation. Although his teachers at Pforta seem to consider him merely competent, industrious, and conscientious among other industrious and conscientious students, he knows every evening in addition to his regular studies he composes poems, keeps a notebook, and performs experiments in the autobiographical essay until the blue phantoms begin to lap behind his eyelids and his vision smudges. These days he cannot stop thinking and feeling. Sometimes he sleeps only four or five hours a night. Pages and pages of ideas unspool from his forehead like Rapunzel's hair from her tower. (90-91)

Olsen, Lance. Nietzsche's Kisses. Normal: FC2, 2006.

guattari

2006-09-05T22:12:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I have this image: I see myself walking a plank above an absolute abyss, and I say to myself, what is this? What does it all mean? How is it that this keeps on happening? Who among us hasn't come up against such evidence? But immediately one is snatched up, thrown against remote-controlled behavior apparatuses, taken up by emergies, games and gambles. Even dead tired, one keeps on at the roulette wheel or the poker table with an amazing vitality.
...
It is obvious that we are all suspended over the same abyss, even if we use different means in order not to see it. We are all at the mercy of the same stupor that can take you by the throat and literally suffocate you. We are all like Swann, half crazy after his separation from Odette and feeling, like the plague, any mention that could evoke, even indirectly, her existence. (12)

Félix Guattari. "So What." Trans. Chet Wiener. Chaosophy. Ed. Sylvére Lotringer. New York: Semiotext[e], 1995. 9-29.

winterson

2006-08-10T14:02:00.000-07:00

Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are the hardest to cope with in silence. Once asked they do not evaporate and leave the mind to its serener musings. Once asked they gain dimension and texture, trip you on the stairs, wake you at night-time. A black hole sucks up its surroundings and even light never escapes. Better then to ask no questions? Better then to be a contented pig than an unhappy Socrates? Since factory farming is tounger on pigs than it is on philosophers I'll take a chance.

Winterson, Jeanette. Written on the Body. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

winterson

2006-08-10T13:49:00.000-07:00

I am thinking of a certain September: Wood pigeon Red Admiral Yellow Harvest Orange Night. You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them. I did worship them but now I am alone on a rock hewn out of my own body.

CALIBAN: You taught me language and my profit on't is I know how to curse. The red plauge rid you For learning me your language.

Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid. It is no conversationist love. It is a big game hunter and you are the game. A curse on this game. How can you stick at a game when the rules keep changing? I shall call myself Alice and play croquet with the flamingoes. In Wonderland everyone cheats and love is Wonderland isn't it? Love makes the world go round. Love is blind. All you need is love. Nobody ever died of a broken heart. You'll get over it. It'll be different when we're married. Think of the children. Time's a great healer. Still waiting for Mr Right? Miss Right? and maybe all the little Rights?

It's the clichés that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. If what I feel is not precise then should I call it love? It is so terrifying, love, that all I can do is shove it under a dump bin of pink cuddly toys and send myself a greetings card saying 'Congratulations on your Engagement'. But I am not engaged I am deeply distracted. I am desperately looking the other way so that love won't see me. I want the diluted version, the sloppy language, the insignifcant gestures. The saggy armchair of clichés. It's all right, millions of bottoms have sat here before me. The springs are well worn, the fabric smelly and familiar. I don't have to be frightened, look, my grandma and grandad did it, he in a stiff collar and club tie, she in white muslin straining a little at the life beneath. They did it, my parents did it, now I will do it won't I, arms outstretched, not to hold you, just to keep my balance, sleepwalking to that armchair. How happy we will be. And they all lived happily ever after. (9-10)

Winterson, Jeanette. Written on the Body. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

baca

2006-07-31T14:57:00.000-07:00

and you go fuck yourself
dry eye days,
here I come,
giving you a Chciano monsoon season,
here comes this Chicano cry baby,
flooding prison walls,
my children's bedrooms,
splashing and tear slinging
tears up on my ankles,
planting rice and corn and beans
in fields glimmering with my tears,
and all you dry skinned nut-cracking ball whackers,
don't want to get your killer bone-breaking boots wet,
step aside,
because I'm bring you rain.

Baca, Jimmy Santiago. "Crying Poem."

lowry

2006-07-26T13:32:00.000-07:00

"And you know what, Thin Elderly? Sad parts are important. If I ever get to train a new young dreamgiver, that's one of the things I'll teach: that you must include the sad parts, because they are part of the story, and they have to be part of the dreams." (96)

Lowry, Lois. Gossamer. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

genesis

2006-07-19T13:31:00.000-07:00

And all the earth was one language, one set of words. And it happened as they journeyed from the east that they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to each other, "Come, let us bake bricks and burn them hard." And the brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar. And they said, "Come, let us build us a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, that we may make us a name, lest we be scattered over all the earth." And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the human creatures had built. And the LORD said, "As one people with one language for all, if that is what they have begun to do, nothing they plot will elude them. Come, let us go down and baffle their language there so that they will not understand each other's language." And the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth and they left off building the city. Therefore it is called Babel, for there the LORD made the language of all the earth babble. And from there the LORD scattered them over all the earth. (11:1-9)

Genesis. Trans. Robert Alter. New York: WW Norton, 1996.

nin

2006-07-14T10:19:00.000-07:00

Telephone wires only carried literal messages, never the subterranean cries of distress, of desperation. Like telegrams they delivered only final and finite blows: arrivals, departures, births and deaths, but no room for fantasies such as: Long Island is a tomb, and one more day in it would bring on suffocation. Aspirin, Irish policeman, and roses of Sharon were too gentle a cure for suffocation. (79)

Nin, Anaïs. A Spy in the House of Love. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1959.

nin

2006-07-14T10:14:00.000-07:00

His singing was offered to her in this cup of his mouth, and she drank it intently, without spilling a drop of this incantation of desire. Each note was the brush of his mouth upon her. His singing grew exalted and the drumming deeper and sharper and it showered upon her heart and body. Drum - drum - drum - drum - drum - upon her heart, she was the drum, her skin was taut under his hands, and the drumming vibrated through the rest of her body. Wherever he rested his eyes, she felt the drumming of his fingers upon her stomach, her breasts, her hips. His eyes rested on her naked feet in sandals and they beat an answering rhythm. His eyes rested on the indented waist where the hips began to swell out, and she felt possessed by his song. When he stopped drumming he left his hands spread on the drumskin, as if he did not want to remove his hands from her body, and they continued to look at each other and then away as if fearing everyone had seen the desire flowing between them. (58-59)

Nin, Anaïs. A Spy in the House of Love. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1959.

nin

2006-07-06T21:33:00.000-07:00

She understood why it angered her when people spoke of life as One life. She became certain of myriad lives within herself. Her sense of time altered. She felt acutely and with grief, the shortness of life's physical span. Death was terrifyingly near, and the journey towards it, vertiginous; but only when she considered the lives around her, accepting their time tables, clocks, measurements. Everything they did constricted time. They spoke of one birth, one childhood, one adolescence, one romance, one marriage, one maturity, one aging, one death, and then transmitted the monotonous cycle to their children. But Sabina, activated by the moonrays, felt germinating in her the power to extend time in the ramifications of a myriad lives and loves, to expand the journey to infinity, taking immense and luxurious detours as the courteson depositor of multiple desires. The seeds of many lives, places, of many women in herself were fecundated by the moon-rays because they came from that limitless night life which we usually perceive only in our dreams, containing roots reaching for all the magnificences of the past, transmitting the rich sediments into the present, projecting them into the future. (43-44)

Nin, Anaïs. A Spy in the House of Love. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1959.

nin

2006-07-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

"There is only one relief: to confess, to be caught, tried, punished. That's the ideal of every criminal. But it's not so simple. Only half of the self wants to atone, be freed of the torments of guilt. The other half of man wants to continue to be free. So only half of the self surrenders, calling out "catch me," while the other half creats obstacles, difficulties; seeks to escape. It's a flirtation with justice. If justice is nimble, it will follow the clue with the criminal's help. If not, the criminal will take care of his own atonement." (6)

...a huge blackboard, and she took a sponge and effaced it all by a phrase which left in suspense who had been at the baths; or, perhaps, this was a story she had read, or heard at a bar; and, as soon as it was erased in the mind of her listeners, she began another...

The faces and the figures of her personages appeared only half drawn; and when the lie detecter had just begun to perceive them, another face and figure were interposed as in a dream. And, when he believed she had been talking about a woman, it turned out that she had been talking about a man; and, when the image of the man began to form, it turned out the lie detector had not heard aright: it was a young man who resembled a woman who had once taken care of Sabina; and this young man was instantly metamorphosed into a group of people who had humiliated her one night. (9)

She held her breath. That was what she was always doing, holding her breath so that the truth would never come out, at any time, not here with Alan, and not in the hotel room with a lover, who had asked questions about Alan. She held her breath to choke the truth, made one more effort to be the very actress she denied being, to act the part she denied acting, to describe this trip she had not taken, to recreate the woman who had been away for eight days, so that the smile would not vanish from Alan's face, so that his trustingness and happiness would not be shattered. (19)

Nin, Anaïs. A Spy in the House of Love. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1959.

winterson

2006-06-25T09:56:00.000-07:00

He was not used to feeling. He saved himself in his lonely hours by thinking. He invented mathematical puzzles and solved them. He plotted the course of the stars. He tried to understand the ways of gods and men, and was mentally constructing a giant history of the world. His thoughts kept him from dying. His thoughts kept him from feeling. What was there to feel anyway — but pain and weight? (66)

Winterson, Jeanette. Weight. New York: Canongate, 2005.

winterson

2006-06-25T09:53:00.000-07:00

She loved him because he showed her to herself. He was her moving mirror. He took her round the world, the world that she was, and held it up for her to see, her beauty of forests and cliffs and coastlines and wild places. To him she was both paradise and fear and he loved both. Together they went where no human had ever been. Places only they could go, places only the could be. Wherever he went, she was there; a gentle restraint, a serious reminder; the earth and the waters that covered the earth. He knew though, that while he could not cover the whole of her, she underpinned the whole of him. For all his strength, she was strong. (13)

Winterson, Jeanette. Weight. New York: Canongate, 2005.

chbosky

2006-06-20T23:24:00.000-07:00

On that piece of white paper, Sam wrote, "Write about me sometime." And I typed something back to her, standing right there in her bedroom. I just typed.

"I will."

And I felt good that those were the first two words that I ever typed on my new old typewriter that Sam gave me. (69)

Chbosky, Stephen. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. New York: Pocket Books, 1999.

chbosky

2006-06-20T23:20:00.000-07:00

My grandfather was crying.

The kind of crying that is quiet and a secret. The kind of crying that only I noticed. I thought about him going into my mom's room when she was little and hitting my mom and holding up her report card and saying that her bad grades would never happen again. And I think now that maybe he meant my older brother. Or my sister. Or me. That he would make sure that he was the last one to work in a mill. (59)

Chbosky, Stephen. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. New York: Pocket Books, 1999.

chbosky

2006-06-20T23:18:00.000-07:00

Patrick then said something I don't think I'll ever forget.

"He's a wallflower."

And Bob really nodded his head. And the whole room nodded their head. And I started to feel nervous in the Bob way, but Patrick didn't let me get too nervous. He sat down next to me.

"You see things. You keep quiet about them. And you understand." (37)

Chbosky, Stephen. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. New York: Pocket Books, 1999.

chbosky

2006-06-20T23:12:00.000-07:00

There is a feeling that I had Friday night after the homecoming game that I don't know if I will ever be able to describe except to say that it is warm. Sam and Patrick drove me to the party that night, and I sat in the middle of Sam's pickup truck. Sam loves her pickup truck because I think it reminds her of her dad. The feeling I had happened when Sam told Patrick to find a station on the radio. And he kept getting commercials. And commercials. And a really bad song about love that had the word "baby" in it. And then more commercials. And finally he found this really amazing song about this boy, and we all got quiet.

Sam tapped her hand on the steering wheel. Patrick held his hand outside the car and made air waves. And I just sat between them. After the song finished, I said something.

"I feel infinite."

And Sam and Patrick looked at me like I said the greatest thing they ever heard. Because the song was that great and because we all really paid attention to it. Five minutes of a lifetime were truly spent, and we felt young in a good way. I have since bought the record, and I would tell you what it was, but truthfully, it's not the same unless you're driving to your first real party, and you're sitting in the middle seat of a pickup with two nice people when it starts to rain. (32-33)

Chbosky, Stephen. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. New York: Pocket Books, 1999.

chbosky

2006-06-20T23:08:00.000-07:00

I think you of all people would understand that because I think you of all people are alive and appreciate what that means. At least I hope you do because other people look to you for strength and friendship and it's that simple. At least that's what I've heard.

So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be. (2)

Chbosky, Stephen. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. New York: Pocket Books, 1999.

anzaldua

2006-06-08T04:42:00.000-07:00

Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create. It is like a cactus needle embedded in the flesh. It worries itself deeper and deeper, and I keep aggravating it by poking at it. When it begins to fester I have to do something to put an end to the aggravation and to figure out why I have it. I get deep down into the place where it's rooted in my skin and pluck away at it, playing it like a musical instrument—the fingers pressing, making the pain worse before it can get better. Then out it comes. No more discomfort, no more ambivalence. Until another needle pierces the skin. That's what writing is for me, an endless cylce of making it worse, making it better, but always making meaning out of the experience, whatever it may be. (95)

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands: La Frontera. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999.

deleuze and guattari

2006-05-23T23:03:00.000-07:00

It is really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly: the simple Thing, the Entity, the full Body, the stationary Voyage, Anorexia, cutaneous Vision, Yoga, Krishna, Love, Experimentation. Where psychoanalysis says, "Stop, find your self again," we should say instead, "Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO [Body without Organs] yet, we haven't sufficiently dismantled our self." Substitute forgetting for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation. Find your body without organs. Find out how to make it. It's a question of life and death, youth and old age, sadness and joy. It is where everything is played out. (150-151)

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

alcott

2006-05-08T06:40:00.000-07:00

Being only "a glorious human boy," of course he frolicked and flirted, grew dandified, aquatic, sentimental or gymnastic, as college fashions ordained; hazed and was hazed, talked slang, and more than once came perilously near suspension and expulsion. But as high spirits and the love of fun were the causes of these pranks, he always managed to save himself by frank confession, honorable atonement, or the irresistible power of persuasion which he possessed in perfection. In fact, he rather prided himself on his narrow escapes, and liked to thrill the girls with graphic accounts of his triumphs over wrathful tutors, dignified professors, and vanquished enemies. The "men of my class" were heroes in the eyes of the girls, who never wearied of the exploits of "our fellows," and were frequently allowed to bask in the smiles of these great creatures, when Laurie brought them home with him. (238-239)

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Penguin, 1989.

adams

2006-05-08T06:34:00.000-07:00

My father's murder stole my sanity as well as the sanity of my entire family. Our house became a zoo without a keeper. Our mother opened a restaurant and had to work countless hours every week, leaving four children ample time at home to scream and fight in our wild frustration. Toni locked herself in her bedroom for a period of five years and was rarely seen leaving it except to attend Evangelic Baptist Church. I wanted to be more help to my family, but I was too angry, too bitter, and too wild—an animal trapped and gnawing off my own leg to get free from the trap. I couldn't stop feeling my father's eyes upon me. I begged my mother to send me to a military academy for eighth grade; my sould screamed for order. But I was able to find no escape in a uniform; my storm was eternal, and I couldn't run away from myself or my father.

His ghost haunted me in various ways for years: nightmares, fear that kept me sleeping with a gun under my pillow, disapproval I perceived in the eyes of adult men. I would dream of his return, his walking through the door, saying, 'Why haven't you avenged my murder?" it was in the houses of my fellow teenage friends that I was most uncomfortable; I saw my father's disapproval in their fathers' eyes. (17).

Adams, Curtis Dean. "The Relationship." Sticks and Stones and Other Student Essays. 5th ed. Eds. Lawrence Barkley, Rise B. Axelrod, and Charles R. Cooper. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004. 12-18.

alcott

2006-05-02T09:53:00.000-07:00

Work is wholesome, and there is plenty for every one; it keeps us from ennui and mischief; is good for health and spirits, and gives us a sense of power and independence better than money or fashion. (117-118)

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Penguin, 1989.

hawthorne

2006-04-24T23:16:00.000-07:00

When Phoebe awoke—which she did with the early twittering of the conjugal couples of robins, in the pear-tree—she heard movement below stairs, and hastening down, found Hepzibah already in the kitchen. She stood by a window, holding a book in close contiguity to her nose; as if with the hope of gaining an olfactory acquaintance with its contents, since her imperfect vision made it not very easy to read them. If any volume could have manifested its essential wisdom, in the mode suggested, it would certainly have been the one now in Hepzibah's hand; and the kitchen, in such an event, would forthwith have steamed with the fragrance of venison, turkeys, capons, larded partridges, puddings, cakes, and Christmas pies, in all manner of elaborate mixture and concoction. It was a Cookery Book, full of innumerable old fashions of English dishes, and illustrated with engravings, which represented the arrangements of the table, at such banquents as it might have befitted a nobelman to give, in the great hall of his castle. And, amid these rich and potent devices of the culinary art, (not one of which, probably, had been tested, within the memory of any man's grandfather,) poor Hepzibah was seeking for some nimble little tidbit, which, with what skill she had, and such materials as were at hand, she might toss up for breakfast! (71)

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Robert S. Levine. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.

hawthorne

2006-04-23T14:13:00.000-07:00

"Oh, believe me, Miss Hepzibah," said the young man quietly, "these feelings will not trouble you any longer, after you are once fairly in the midst of your enterprise. They are unavoidable at this moment, standing, as you do, on the outer verge of your long seclusion, and peopling the world with ugly shapes, which you will soon find to be as unreal as the giants and ogres of a child's story-book. I find nothing so singular in life, as that everything appears to lose its substancee, the instant one actually grapples with it. So it will be with what you think so terrible." (34)

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Robert S. Levine. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.

camus

2006-04-09T20:42:00.000-07:00

What always amazes me, when we are so swift to elaborate on other subjects, is the poverty of our ideas on death. It is a good thing or a bad thing, I fear it or I summon it (they say). Which also proves that everything simple is beyond us. What is blue, and how do we think "blue"? The same difficulty occurs with death. Death and colors are things we cannot discuss. Nonetheless, the important thing is this man before me, heavy on earth, who prefigures my future. But can I really think about it? I tell myself: I am going to die, but this means nothing, since I cannot manage to believe it and can only experience other people's death. I have seen people die. Above all, I have seen dogs die. It was touching them that overhwlemed me. Then I think of flowers, smiles, the desire for women, and I realize that my whole horror of death lies in my anxiety to live. I am jealous of those who will live and for whom flowers and the desire for women will have their full flesh and blood meaning. I am envious because I love life too much not to be selfish. What does eternity matter to me. You can be lying in bed one day and hear someone say: "You are strong and I owe it to you to be honest: I can tell you that you are going to die"; you're there, with your whole life in your hands, fear in your bowels, looking the fool. What else matters: waves of blood come throbbing to my temples and I feel I could smash everything around me. (78)

Camus, Albert. "The Wind at Djemila." Lyrical and Critical Essays. Trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy. NY: Vintage, 1968. 73-79.

bachelard

2006-04-09T18:39:00.000-07:00

Alexander Dumas tells in his Mémoires that, as a child, he was bored, bored to tears. When his mother found him like that, weeping from sheer boredom, she said: "And what is Dumas crying about?" "Dumas is crying because Dumas has tears," replied the six-year-old child. This is the kind of anecdote people tell in their memoirs. But how well it exemplifies absolute boredom, the boredom that is not the equivalent of the absence of playmates. There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic of my boredome when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of all freedom! (94)

Bachelard, Gaston. "Poetics of Space (Extract)." Ed. Neil Lench. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Critical Theory. Routedge, 1997. 86-97.

poe

2006-04-09T16:48:00.000-07:00

But it is in matters beyond the limits of mere rule that the skill of the analyst is evinced. He makes, in silence, a host of observations and inferences. So, perhaps, do his companions; and the difference in the extent of the information obtained, lies not so much in the validity of teh inference as in teh quality of the observation. The necessary knowledge is that of what to observe. (143)

Coincidences ten times as remarkable as this (the delivery of the money, and murder committed within three days upon teh party receiving it), happen to us every hour of our lives, without attracting even momentary notice. Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in teh way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities... (166)

Poe, Edgar Allen. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." 141-176.

poe

2006-04-09T16:41:00.000-07:00

We sat down; and for some moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a suprassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; thes features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. (264)

Poe, Edgar Allen. "The Fall of the House of Usher." (1839). The House of The Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Robert S. Levine. New York: Norton, 2006. 260-277.

sartre

2006-04-08T16:06:00.000-07:00

And I—soft, weak, obscene, digesting, juggling with dismal thoughts—I, too, was In the way. Fortunately, I didn't feel it, although I realized it, but I was uncomfortable becuase I was afraid of feeling it (even now i am afraid—afraid that it might catch me behind my head and lift me up lik a wave). I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives. But even my death would have been In the way. In the way, my corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at the back of this smiling garden. And the decomposed flesh would have been In the way in the earth which would receive my bones, at last, cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth, it would have been In the way: I was In the way for eternity.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. 1938. Trans. Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions, 1968.

capossere

2006-03-27T01:35:00.000-08:00

We need the sight of the stars and their gentle, nightly reminder of our small place in the universe. Otherwise we might become as the characters in Asimov's story who, knowing no stars but their own until the 2,049th year, are stunned by the appearance of so many millions. They find it a crushing blow. Faced with sudden insignificance, driven mad by the swift inconsequences of their lives, their civilization crumbles. The universe is not what they thought it was. It seldom is.

Recently I stood in our driveway and in a moment's time counted the stars—Little Dipper, the North Star, and a few I could not name. Eleven in all. Tycho Brahe, from his island stronghold of Uraniborg, counted a thousand. Hipparchus of Nicaea about the same. Granted, tonight was overcast, a poor night for stargazing made worse by the damping light of a gibbous moon. But a handful more would have made the total no less meager, and there is something in me that sighs at such an empty sky. The stars of my childhood have, like the moments of my life, like the memories of my father, winked out one by one, leaving the night diminished, and me outside wondering what greater world I will show to my own small and wondering son. (27-28)

Bill Capossere. "Man in the Moon." Harper's Magazine. February 2006. 25-29.

nietzsche

2006-03-26T22:53:00.000-08:00

To allure many from the herd—for that is the purpose I have come. The people and the herd must be angry with me: a robber shall Zarathustra be called by the herdsmen.

Herdsmen, I say, but they call themselves the good and just. Herdsemn, I say, but they call themselves the believers in the orthodox belief.

Behold the good and just! Whom do they hate most? Him who breaketh up their tables of values, the breaker, the law-breaker:—he, however, is the creator.

Companions, the creator seeketh, not corpses—and not herds or believers either. Fellow-creators the creator seeketh—those who grave new values on new tables.

Companions, the creator seeketh, and fellow-reapers: for everything is ripe for the harvest with him. But he lacketh the hundred sickles: so he plucketh the ears of corn and is vexed.

Companions, the creator seeketh, and such as know how to whet their sickles. Destroyers, will they be called, and despisers of good and evil. But they are the reapers and rejoicers.

Fellow-creators, Zarathustra seeketh; fellow-reapers and fellow-rejoicers, Zarathustra seeketh: what hath he to do with herds and herdsmen and corpses! (11)

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra Trans. Thomas Common. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999.

o'neill

2006-03-24T03:10:00.000-08:00

Forlorn hope is from the Dutch for lost troop. How sad the swords and beautiful. All love does ever rightly show humanity our tenderness. (35)

O'Neill, Jamie. At Swim, Two Boys. New York: Scribner, 2001.

peters

2006-03-22T00:53:00.000-08:00

Once when I was little Dad let me try on his hunting jacket. It was huge; it hung to the floor, and it stank. But what I remember most was the weight. As if that coat would break my knees and drag me down and trap me inside and smother me. That's how it felt with Liam. Like I was trapped. Suffocating.

Was that fair? No. Life wasn't fair. Liam proved that. (180)

Peters, Julia Anne. Luna: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2004.

kingston

2006-03-05T18:04:00.000-08:00

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.
—Maxine Hong Kingston

cicero

2006-03-02T10:41:00.000-08:00

For what is...so pleasing to the understanding and the ear as a speech adorned and polished with wise reflections and dignified language? Or what achievement so mighty and glorious as that the impulses of the crowd, the consciences of the judges, the austerity of the Senate, should suffer transformation through the eloquence of one man? What function again is so kingly, so worthy of the free, so generous, as to bring help to the suppliant, to raise up those that are cast down, to bestow security, to set free from peril, to maintain men in their civil rights? (293).

Cicero. "From De Oratore." Trans. E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2nd ed. Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001. 289-339.

anzaldua

2006-03-02T10:36:00.000-08:00

There are more subtle ways that we internalize identification, especially in the forms of images and emotions. For me food and certain smells are tied to my identity, to my homeland. Woodsmoke curling up to an immense blue sky; woodsmoke perfuming my grandmother's clothes, her skin. The stench of cow manure and the yellow patches on the ground; the crack of a .22 rifle and the reek of cordite. Homemade white cheese sizzling in a pan, melting inside a folded tortilla. My sister Hilda's hot, spicy menudo, chile cordida making it deep red, pieces of panza and hominy floating on top. My brother Carito barbequing fajitas in the backyard. Even now and 3,000 miles away, I can see my mother spcing the ground beef, pork, and venison with chile. My mouth salivates at the thought of the hot steaming tamales I would be eating if I were home. (31)

Anzaldúa, Gloria. "How to Tame a Wild Tongue." 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology. Ed. Samuel Cohen. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004. 22-34.

marcus

2006-02-11T22:49:00.000-08:00

RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculate use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms—the dash gives the reader a clear sign that they are coming. (78)

Marcus, Ben. The Age of Wire and String. Dalkey Archive P, 1995.

proulx

2006-01-17T00:55:00.000-08:00

As it did go. They never talked about the sex, let it happen, at first only in the tent at night, then in the full daylight with the hot sun striking down, and at evening in the fire glow, quick, rough, laughing and snorting, no lack of noises, but saying not a goddamn word except once Ennis said, "I'm not no queer," and Jack jumped in with "Me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody's business but ours." There were only the two of them on the mountain flying in the euphoric, bitter air, looking down on the hawk's back and the crawling lights of vehicles on the plain below, suspended above ordinary affairs and distant from tame ranch dongs barking the dark hours. (260)

"You're too much for me, Ennis, you son of a whore-son bitch. I wish I knew how to quit you." (276)

Annie Proulx. "Brokeback Mountain." Close Range: Wyoming Stories. New York: Scribner, 1999. 253-283.

o'neill

2006-01-17T00:52:00.000-08:00

I tell you, it's a conspiracy against the working man. If you're at hurling and you curse in English they send you off the field. But they won't teach you to curse in Irish. They think our native tongue is good for nothing but praying in. That's why the priests is for it. They think there's no words in it for, I don't know, anything the priests is against. They'd have us blessing ourself in Gaelic the day long. And what worth is a blessing to a working man? For an ignorant heathen whoring bastard working Irish man? (98)

Jamie O'Neill. At Swim, Two Boys. New York: Scribner, 2001.

moore

2006-01-07T11:15:00.000-08:00

How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler's mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye's instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That's where the narrator comes in. The narrator comes with her kisses and mimicry and tidying up. The narrator comes and makes a slow, fake song of the mouth's eager devastation. (237)

Moore, Lorrie. "People Like That Are the Only People Here." Birds of America. New York, Picador, 1998. 212-250.

moore

2006-01-07T11:09:00.000-08:00

Every house is a grave, thought Ruth. All that life-stealing fuss and preparation. Which made moving from a house a resurrection—or an exodus of ghouls, depending on your point of view—and made moving to a house (yet another house!) the darkest of follies and desires. At best, it was a restlessness come falsely to rest. But the inevitable rot and demolition, from which the soul eventually had to flee (to live in the sky or disperse itself among the trees?), would necessarily make a person stupid with unhappiness. (191)

To Ruth, it seemed so sad and true, just like life: someone assumed the form of the great love of your life, only to reveal himself later as an alien who had to get on a spaceship and go back to his planet. Certainly it had been true for Terence. Terence had gotten on a spaceship and gone back long ago. Although, of course, in real life you seldom saw the actual spaceship. Usually, there was just a lot of drinking, mumbling, and some passing out in the family room. (200-201)

Moore, Lorrie. "Real Estate." Birds of America. New York: Picador, 1998. 177-211.

moore

2006-01-07T10:57:00.000-08:00

Those had been strange, bold nights, a starkness between them that was more like an ancient bone-deep brawl than a marriage. But ultimately, it all remained unreadable for him, though reading, he felt, was not a natural thing and should not be done to people. In general, people were not road maps. People were not hieroglyphs or books. A person was an infinite pile of rocks with things growing underneath. (148)

After dinner, they lie in their motel bed and kiss. "Ah, dear, yes," murmurs Quilty, his "dears" and "my dears" like sweet compresses in the heat, and then there are no more words. Mack pushes close, his cool belly warming. His heart thumps against Quilty's like a water balloon shifting and thrusting its liquid from side to side. There is something comforting, thinks Mack, in embracing someone the same size as you. Something exhilarating, even: having your chins over each other's shoulders, your feet touching, your heads pressed ear-to-ear. Plus he likes—he loves—Quilty's mouth on him. A man's full mouth. There is always something a little desperate and diligent about Quilty, poised there with his lips big and searching and his wild unshaded eyes like the creatures of the aquarium, captive yet wandering free in their enclosures. With the two of them kissing like is—exculpatory, specificity, rubric—words are foreign money. There is only the soft punch in the mouth, the shrieking and feeding both, which fills Mack's ears with light. This, he thinks, this is how a blind man sees. There is nothing at all like a man's strong kiss: apologies to the women of Kentucky. (160)

Moore, Lorrie. "What You Want to Do Fine." Birds of America. New York: Picador, 1998. 143-178.

kika and hibickina

2005-12-29T09:28:00.000-08:00

We still believe in the viability of dreams, in and through and around the stuff of daily living, and even as the bedrock for our most solid practicalities. Dreaming is a dangerous position; it dares us to risk everything, to walk blind into the hills, to do the hardest work in ourselves and in the world—and to reap the richest reward. Sometimes, possibly, our dreams urge us to reveal ourselves intimately to an audience of strangers, and hope they’ll meet us where we most want to be. (7)

Stories and streets are powerful venues for contradicting the imminent doom of loneliness. The public art we make of ourselves in the street, the languages of our bodies tracing postures and assuming them, the paths of our eyes grazing each other, are either participatory or resistant. Here, in public, we can choose to change our immediate world by remaking our myths and telling our own stories, by remembering how to ask and listen, and by learning to show our most real faces to each other and celebrating them. Show your warts, and you defy the very process of airbrushing the truth. Risk smiling at the person sitting next to you on the bus, and immediately the message of isolation is undermined. Not just for the two of you, but also for those watching this unusual event unfold. The moment we notice that we can make fresh choices every minute, the moment we take Funky’s advice and think for ourselves, it’s easy to see that we’re all in this together. Isolation was somebody else’s bad idea. (43-44)

Our entire lives have been squatted by systems we don’t believe in, and our very souls have been occupied by indoctrinations which destroy our ability to love and create, and which take away our freedom from the inside out. It’s time to squat back, we had agreed again and again, time to stake claim to the bones of human history and sew them new flesh. Maybe that was why the caricatures of skeletons were so prominent in squat culture. (61)

Kika and Hibickina. Off the Map. Olympia, Washington: CrimethInc, 2003.

burroughs

2005-12-29T09:27:00.000-08:00

I’d never seen a real, live gay man in person before; only on the Donahue show. I wondered what it would be like to see one without the title “Admitted Homosexual” floating in blocky type beneath his head. (70)

Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when. No wonder my parents smoked, I thought. That part of me that used to polish jewelry for hours and comb my hair until my scalp was deeply scratched was now lighting cigarettes every other minute and then carefully stomping them out. It turned out I had always been a smoker. I just hadn’t had any cigarettes. (75)

Burroughs, Augusten. Running with Scissors: A Memoir. New York: Picador, 2002.

sappho

2005-12-15T02:24:00.000-08:00

You may forget but

Let me tell you
this: someone in
some future time
will think of us

Sappho, #60

marcus

2005-11-26T11:06:00.000-08:00

ALBERT: Nightly killer of light, applied to systems or bodies which alter postures under various stages of darkness. Flattened versions exist only in the water or grass. They may not rise until light is poured upon them. (Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String, p. 13)

marcus

2005-11-26T01:38:00.000-08:00

...the outer gaze alters the inner thing, that by looking at an object we destroy it with out desire, that for accurate vision to occur the thing must be trained to see itself, or otherwise perish in blindness, flawed. (Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String, pp. 3-4)

schwitters

2005-11-14T00:41:00.000-08:00

Letters, of course, give only a rather incomplete score of the spoken sonata. As with any printed music, many interpretations are possible. As with any other reading, correct reading requires the use of imagination. The reader himself has to work seriously to become a genuine reader. Thus, it is work rather than questions or mindless criticism which will improve the reader’s receptive capacities. The right of criticism is reserved to those who have achieved a full understanding. Listening to the sonata is better than reading it. This is why I like to perform my sonata in public. But since it is not possible to give performances everywhere, I intend to make a gramophone recording of the sonata... (Kurt Schwitters “Signs in my Ursonate,” printed in the insert to Ursonate: Original Performance by Kurt Schwitters, 1994)

welch

2005-10-25T16:26:00.000-07:00

In the bean patch, Didier knelt down. He knelt down, my husband of just two months, and he reached out, snapped off a bean. For the past month we had been preparing for the worst and now here was something worser still. Worser. How could we talk of such things? Even grammar was against us. (Nancy Welch, "Managed Care: An Essay about Irony, Illness, and Teaching," in Genre by Example: Writing What We Teach, edited by David Starkey, p. 10)

hapgood

2005-10-23T21:51:00.000-07:00

If fields of winter freshmen were
A heavy fall of virgin snow,
Then I would be a shoveler
Of ashes. Rhythmically, I'd sow
My cinders, scatter broadcast flake
On flake of petaled grey on white.
Piously, I'd know my wake
Was ugly, but a harbinger
Of fructifying summer things,
Like Mercury's touch and Flora's flings
In Primavera's wanton rite.

(Robert Hapgood, "Corrupting the Youth," in College English, volume 18, number 8, May 1957, p. 400)

britton

2005-10-16T09:57:00.000-07:00

I look at the world in the light of what I have learned to expect from past experience of the world. That is to say, there is on the one hand my world representation - the accumulated record of my past experience - and there is on the other hand the process of representing to myself whatever of the world confronts me at any given moment. It is as though, in confrontation, my world representation were a body of expectations from which I select and match: the selecting and matching being in response to whatever cues the situation offers (but influenced also by my mood of the moment). What takes place in the confrontation may contradict or modify or confirm my expectations. My expectations are hypotheses which I submit to the test of encounter with the actual. The outcome affects not only my representation of the present moment, but, if necessary, my whole accumulated representation of the world. Every encounter with the actual is an experimental committal of all I have learned from experience. (James Britton, Language and Learning, p. 15, quoted in Erika Lindemann, A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, 4th ed., p. 90)

de zengotita

2005-10-03T07:57:00.000-07:00

...when you hear statistics about AIDS in Africa for the 349th time, or see your 927th picture of a weeping fireman or an oil-drenched seabird, you can’t help but become fundamentally indifferent - unless it happens to be “your issue,” of course, one you “identify with,” a social responsibility option you have chosen. Otherwise, you glide on, you have to, because you are exposed to things like this all the time. All the time. Over breakfast. In the waiting room. Driving to work. At the checkout counter. All the time. (Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It, pp. 23-24)