Up until the end of the nineteenth century, nostalgia actually names a medical pathology that largely afflicted soldiers and sailors and other people who were indentured into service.
May 09, 2013, 2:16pm
“What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support.”
— Flaubert.
May 09, 2013, 1:25pm
“… if environmental problems are really cultural problems — about the nature of our desires and our perceptions — then a crucial territory to explore or transform is the territory of the mind.”
— Solnit, Rebecca. As Eve Said to the Serpent.
March 20, 2013, 3:53pm
March 04, 2013, 9:46pm
“Never believe a man can change a woman
Those men are pretenders
who think
that they created woman
from one of their ribs
Woman does not emerge from a man’s rib’s, not ever,
it’s he who emerges from her womb”
— Qabbani, Nizar. “I Have No Power.”
February 24, 2013, 6:06pm
“that I was a fraud had never been in question—who wasn’t? Who wasn’t squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said ‘I’; who wasn’t a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life? If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.”
—
Lerner, Ben. Leaving the Atocha Station. Coffee House Press, 2011. 101.
February 22, 2013, 9:51pm
“Love, I’ve recently recognized, is that moment when you desperately need forgiveness from the one who inspires your best self for having just been, in some small, petty way, your base self.”
February 18, 2013, 7:37pm
“Women have been taught that the way to triumph over persistent, unwanted male attention is to buy into the very construct that creates it. In this context, for example, the solution [a fake wedding ring] is one that provides ‘freedom’ (and this does not always work) from the unwanted attention of some men, while rendering women no more than the property of another.
Our culture has created the illusion of choice: would you rather be the property of libidinous strangers, or the property of a man that society has been ‘gracious’ enough to let you choose?
”
— Asteria, Amy. “The Invisible Fiance.” 13 Feb 2013 Journalists for Human Rights. <http://jhruoftmag.wordpress.com/2013/02/13/the-invisible-fiance/>.
February 15, 2013, 2:42pm
“Don’t run any more. Quiet. How softly it rains
On the roofs of the city. How perfect
All things are. Now, for the two of you
Waking up in a royal bed by a garret window.
For a man and a woman. For one plant divided
Into masculine and feminine which longed for each other.
Yes, this is my gift to you. Above ashes
On a bitter, bitter earth. Above the subterranean
Echo of clamorings and vows. So that now at dawn
You must be attentive: the tilt of a head,
A hand with a comb, two faces in a mirror
Are only forever once, even if unremembered,
So that you watch what it is, though it fades away,
And are grateful every moment for your being.
Let that little park with greenish marble busts
In the pearl-gray light, under a summer drizzle,
Remain as it was when you opened the gate.
And the street of tall peeling porticos
Which this love of yours suddenly transformed.”
— Milosz, Czeslaw. “After Paradise.”
February 14, 2013, 1:00pm
“The Internet is perhaps the closest thing we’ll ever have to the ring of Gyges—the invisibility charm that allows its wearer to be alone while having access to the outside world—which Plato posited as the truest test of how a person will act when freed from accountability or restraint. We might not be doing anything evil, but we’re not doing anything we want the world to see.”
— Denhoed, Andrea. “A Fake Facebook Wedding.” New Yorker 28 Jan 2013. <http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/01/a-fake-facebook-wedding.html#ixzz2JZCxOnqt>.
February 13, 2013, 2:25pm
