April 2010
37 posts
The Solar System Visualized As a Musical... →
“The body can be read like a text, just as the text can be read like a body. Gaps...”
– Roland Barthes, from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
March 2010
49 posts
from The War of the Foxes by Richard Siken
(v)
Let me tell you a story about love:
There was a place on the floor where they could lie together, on the floor together, backs pressed to the carpet, where they could look out the window together and see only the tops of the trees. They would do this. They would lie on the floor and say things like Now we are in the country! or Oh, what a far away place this is! Then they would ...
“I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake.”
– James M. Cain, from Double Indemnity
Things C. Simon and I Are Doing on a Saturday...
Listening to the sound of the loneliest whale.
Deciding it is his power animal.
from Spaces by Arkaye Kierulf
1.
In this room I was born. And I knew I was in the wrong place: the world. I knew pain was to come. I knew it by the persistence of the blade that cut me out. I knew it as every baby born to the world knows it: I came here to die.
5.
Happiness is simple. Sadness forks into many roads.
6.
Before the time of Christ, Aristotle believed that the earth was the center of the universe because...
“There is a Funfetti smorgasbord! Werner Herzog is breakdancing!”
– Peter, pulling out the big guns via text to get me to go a party full of people drinking shirley temples and swing dancing (it worked).
1 tag
“It is often easier to discover a truth than to assign it to its proper place.”
– Ferdinand de Saussure
An Ongoing List of Things I am Deeming Necessary...
otter pops
a funfetti cake
building a massive fort in the loft of this house we are staying at
I understand if from this list you might not guess I will be turning 29
*Which is not until next month, but, you know. I like to be prepared.
And once, you stopped on a dark desert road, to show me the stars climbing over each other riotously like insects; like an orchestra thrashing its way through time itself. I never saw light that way again.*
It comes before the pause but after the words hang in the air. Something slashing through the cold air with precision. He told me to stand on the edge today, to wait there, to not...
4 tags
“Sometimes you need to wait for the decision to be made internally. The decision...”
– C. Simon, best friend
1 tag
“Watch out for love
(unless it is true,
and every part of you says yes...”
– Anne Sexton, from Admonitions to a Special Person
“Lost again. Where was I? Where am I? Mud road. Stopped car. Time is rhythm: the...”
– V. Nabokov, from Ada, or Ardor
1 tag
Songs About Wells
The Well by Smog*
Deep, Dark Well by M. Ward
That’s all I’ve got
Urgent edit: We’re Sending Our Love Down the Well by Krusty the Klown (f. Sting)**
*probably one of my top ten favorite songs of all time ever
**Thanks to our resident tumblr expert on wells, amongst other things: Sir S. 12th
Monk by the Sea, Caspar David Friedrich.
This is my favorite Friedrich! I hope you are co-annotating! Sorry for the missing picture of Kinski strangling Herzog (p. 307 or so), it is currently living on this paper crown somewhere in Brooklyn.
ourcoldsummers:
While reading Herzog on Herzog today I learned Caspar David Friedrich is a painter that Herzog feels a deep connection with.
“…a man...
jsyingling asked: Hey. You know Peter, I know Peter. Bad ass Tumblr you got going here. Kafka On the Shore wrecked my head. I keep a bunch of poems beneath my mattress—Sheep in the Fog is one of them, as is Scheherezade.
1 tag
Criteria My Students Came Up With For What Makes a...
violence
stuff blowing up
funny
someone in a purple suit
no romance
an anti-hero
This is all merely a preface to them staging Act One of King Lear as an episode of “The Jerry Springer Show.”
1 tag
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Things I Learned Today
Wolverines are actually very large weasels1.
And they are just looking for love like every other poor chump.
1. This whole time (meaning the time in which I have been aware of wolverines. I’m not sure I can give you even a broad estimate of this), whenever I have conjured up a wolverine, I have always pictured a very sleek and tiny wolf.
2 tags
WatchThis short film by American director Ramin Bahrani (Goodbye Solo) traces the epic, existential journey of a plastic bag (voiced by Werner Herzog) searching for its lost maker, the woman who took it home from the store and eventually discarded it. Along the way, it encounters strange creatures, experiences love in the sky, grieves the loss of its beloved maker, and tries to grasp its purpose in the...
4 tags
“Then there’s the two
of us. This word
is far too short for us, it has only...”
–
Margaret Atwood, from “Variations on the Word Love”
4 tags
5 tags
from an interview with Robert Kaplan, mathematics professor at Harvard and author of The Nothing That Is:
Is your argument that there is randomness in the universe but we cannot see it because of the human desire to see structure, or the stronger claim that there simply is no randomness in the universe?
I would not even use the word ‘desire.’ I would put it in Kantian terms. Kant says just as...
3 tags
Why I Teach High School
[after reading Emily Dickinson’s “Much Madness” out loud]
student: Yo, this is more like Emily SICKinson!
me: OK.
student: I think she’s smoking crack!
me: Well, considering this was written in 1869, that’s probably not feasible. But I hear what you’re trying to say.
1 tag
A Far Wittier Way of Telling Someone "I'm Going to...
I owe your cheek my hand for that presumption!*
Previously in 17th century insults installments:
How to Insult the Dutch With Butter**
Yo Mama Looks Like an Abortive Hedgehog Jokes
*From the 1606 play The Revenger’s Tragedy
**Please also peruse this academic research on anti-Dutch tirades from gospelofmoll. Apologies to my Dutch readers.
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You...”
– Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore
Only five pages in, but, still.
(via mongermonger)
Ten of the Best: Fogs →
Well, ok, six. From literature.
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Dickens’s opening is the foggiest in all fiction and, before we meet any characters, we follow the fog through London. “Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds”.
The Love Song of Alfred J....
