“One never writes alone. As Deleuze and Guattari say, one writing alone is already a crowd. Our words in this book are never without the echoes of the voices of those whose difference we chose to write with. Not to mention the moves, gestures, colors, architectures, and events of the creative practices we encountered. A veritable cacophony. Or better: an ecology.”
— Erin Manning&Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act
"I recognize that I love—you—by this: that you leave in me a wound that I do not want to replace." Jacques Derrida, The Postcard: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond "My wound existed before me." Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life "The wound is symbolic and cannot be reduced to any single interpretation. But wounding seems to be a clue or a key to being human. There is value here as well as agony." Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
"We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most."
Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey
“The event of reading, like the event of loving, is singular. Just as our love for another creates a new reality as it unfolds, each reading of a particular text makes us lovers without precedent. Reading creates in us new ways of loving, and thus new ways of being. Or it can. In order for a book to work on us this way, we have to open ourselves up to an intentionality and signifying practice that originates outside of our own “egological sphere.” Because we cannot anticipate the way we will be changed by an event of reading, we commit ourselves first to the act of surrender itself and, through that surrender of our own intentionality, find ourselves remade.” Cassandra Falke, The Phenomenology of Love & Reading
“I discovered that reading has to be a loving event, an act of beauty because it has to do with the reader rewriting the text.” Paulo Freire, Reading the World and Reading the Word: An Interview with Paulo Freire
“The work is a work only when it becomes the intimacy shared by someone who writes it and someone who reads it, a space violently opened up by the contest between the power to speak and the power to hear.” Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature
“Think of this- that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.” A. S. Byatt, Possession
“The truth is, a writer’s voice is made from other writers’ voices. Pieced together, picked and chosen, stumbled into, uninformed: influence seems like an involuntary series of contagions that eventually turns into a sort of vessel, or transportation system. As we acquire a sense of taste, and perhaps a sense of vocation, our reading becomes more directed and targeted, but we are bent and shaped and destined to be changed by the genius of others. Compare it to the theory behind cannibalism, if you like. One eats the heart of the admired one and becomes them. The remarkable news is that this pastiche of voices results in the incarnation of a new poet, a new hybrid distillation of voice, capable of telling the story of experience in new, valuable ways. […] Each strong new writer is a deep student of what he or she has read and an amalgam of preexisting sentences and styles that have never been combined like that before. The idea that writerly originality appears from nowhere, or exists as something in isolation, a thing to be guarded and protected from influence, is lunacy. Anyone who doesn’t school themselves by deep, wide, and idiosyncratic reading is choosing aesthetic poverty.”
— Tony Hoagland, from The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019)
favourite poems of january
He articulated beliefs I did not yet know I had, but in which I recognized myself clearly and immediately. “We have a way of talking about beauty as though beauty were only skin deep,” he said. “But real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness in order to understand what beauty is.” He meant that to opt for beauty but not darkness was to cling to false hope, that real hope required an awareness of both darkness and beauty at once. To make space in one’s own mind for both was to remain open to a “full expression” of life.
the sopranos - everybody hurts (4x06) // the bloody chamber - angela carter // the husband stitch - carmen maria machado // the green ribbon - alvin schwartz & dirk zimmer
The “bats can do calculus” thing is funny, because if you play around with synths for a while, you realize a lot of what humans perceive as “natural” sounds are just us directly perceiving certain complex mathematical things as big gestalt gestures. Like recognizing a multiplied wave as sounding like a woodwind. Hearing individual notes within a chord is basically Fourier analysis. Feeling how naturally a note decays is perceiving how linear or exponential the curve is. The fact that a sine wave sounds smooth but a sawtooth wave sounds nasally, and a square wave has a certain hollow fuzz to it. Is someone doing “math” there? Once you get the flavor of what each of those qualities are like, listening to the world becomes like directly perceiving math. Also, listening to birds becomes very strange. Because you realize some goofy easy weird sound you can squelch out of an analog synth is the same thing a bird is doing. Then sometimes they make a sound you can’t make. What kind of math is that bird on? Makes you wonder.
Tony Hoagland, from Application for Release from the Dream; “The Complex Sentence”
jum, huge fan of your writing, always waiting for your words/short stories/novels, and until then was wondering - if you didn't mind, could you tell which books/media have strongly influenced your writing - in terms of specific pieces/ideas? i'm trying to develop my own writing and thought maybe i'd begin by consuming more intently
Books: J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan made me a writer. I learned craft of language from The Great Gatsby. Charlotte Bronte and Dostoyevsky have given me a model for theological fiction. Thomas Hardy changed how I write nature. The Unbearable Lightness of Being got me writing fiction as unanswerable philosophical debate. Ursula K. Le Guin exploded my brain and made me rethink everything from adjective usage to the purpose of life in general. Ferrante set my pen alight. Zora Neale Hurston made me write for myself. The Grapes of Wrath taught me how to write plot and use character archetypes as a narrative tool. A Good Man is Hard to Find, The Lottery, and First Nations writers like Ellen van Neerven (Water), Loki Liddle (Snake of Light), John Morrissey (Five Minutes) taught me how to write a short story. Orientalism gave me my artist's manifesto. Elif Batuman taught me how to use first person perspective in a deliberate, thematic way. I'm always re-writing Antigone by Jean Anouilh.
Let's not even begin to touch on how The X Files has rewired me but the unsayable has a lot to do with it. And I love writing characters who have to find a medium in extremes of belief. Evil has also helped that, it's great with dialogues in dialectics.
Movies have had a huge impact on how I write dialogue but also how I block a scene, or write movement into the mind's eye of the reader as it pans over the scene, or how I keep dialogue taut like a good play. Someone wrote that Pedro Costa's films have 'meaningful ellipses' and I think about that a lot when I'm writing. The same could be said about Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which also changed how I approach portraying gaze and desire. idk the list of influences on my fiction is endless...persona (Ingmar Bergman), certified copy (Abbas kiarostami), chocolat (Claire Denis), desert hearts (donna deitch), the piano (Jane campion), blue (Krzysztof Kieślowski), first reformed (Paul Schrader), Léon Morin Prêtre (Jean-Pierre Melville), Tarkovsky....
Caylin Capra-Thomas, from "Lightning Suspected in Deaths of Horses", Iguana Iguana
yep.
So much of the "advice" given to people with ADHD is just like
Step One: Become neurotypical
Habit formation part of the brain broken, advice ineffective
It took me until my twenties to build an actual tooth brushing habit. Years and years of parents hounding me to brush after breakfast & dinner, painful years having to also brush after lunch at school because braces (and mostly not doing it), years & years of 6 weeks managing each night then a long stretch of not brushing at all, years & years of frequent cavities...I had a years-long stretch of good brushing broken by one night being too exhausted to brush & just didn't brush at all for the longest while ever...
I could not tell you what exactly helped me transition, but I can tell you various pieces
I want to close on a certain note, which is a How to ADHD book by a psych professional living with ADHD, and which I actually found helpful, but I am having trouble finding the title even searching back through all my reading history on 2 apps so....bear with me and I will either edit this post or reblog again. It was a book I heard about from @thebibliosphere first so I dunno maybe I'll chance the tumblr search function
Possibly KC Davis, How To Keep House While Drowning?
