Tuesday, August 31, 2021

bell hooks
All About Love: New Visions
____________________

Emotional neglect lays the groundwork for the emotional numbing that helps boys feel better about being cut off. Eruptions of rage in boys are most often deemed normal, explained by the age-old justification for adolescent patriarchal misbehavior, "Boys will be boys." Patriarchy both creates the rage in boys and then contains it for later use, making it a resource to exploit later on as boys become men. 

As a national product, this rage can be garnered to further imperialism, hatred and oppression of women and men globally. This rage is needed if boys are to become men willing to travel around the world to fight wars without ever demanding that other ways of solving conflict can be found.

KOREAN HOME COOKING
Classic and Modern Recipes
____________________

Sohui Kim
with Rachel Wharton

 

Monday, August 30, 2021

Art Porn
____________________

Photographer unknown to me.

JEAN DE SPONDE
"Sonnet on Love XIII"
____________________

"Give me a place to stand," Archimedes said,
"and I can move the world." Paradoxical, clever,
his remark which first explained the use of the lever
was an academic joke. But if that dead

sage could return to life, he would find a clear
demonstration of his idea, which is not
pure theory after all. That putative spot
exists in the love I feel for you, my dear.

What could be more immovable or stronger?
What becomes more and more secure, the longer
it is battered by inconstancy and the stress

we find in our lives? Here is that fine fixed point
from which to move a world that is out of joint,
as he could have done, had he known a love like this.


Translated by David R. Slavitt

Sunday, August 29, 2021

CAVETT ROBERT
____________________

If you don't think every day is a good day, just try missing one.

Saturday, August 28, 2021

G. K. CHESTERTON
____________________

The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

Friday, August 27, 2021

RABINDRANATH TAGORE
____________________

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

AMERICAN HORROR STORY - 1984


Thursday, August 26, 2021

HARVEY FIERSTEIN
____________________

Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself.

AMERICAN HORROR STORY - 1984

Wednesday, August 25, 2021

PABLO NERUDA
"A Song Of Despair"
____________________

The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.
Deserted like the dwarves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!
Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.
Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.
In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
From you the wings of the song birds rose.
You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!
It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.
Pilot's dread, fury of blind driver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!
In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!
You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!
I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.
Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.
Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness.
and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.
There was the black solitude of the islands,
and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.
There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle.
Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me
in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!
How terrible and brief my desire was to you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.
Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.
Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.
Oh the mad coupling of hope and force
in which we merged and despaired.
And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.
And the word scarcely begun on the lips.
This was my destiny and in it was my voyage of my longing,
and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!
Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you,
what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned!
From billow to billow you still called and sang.
Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel.
You still flowered in songs, you still brike the currents.
Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well.
Pale blind diver, luckless slinger,
lost discoverer, in you everything sank!
It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour
which the night fastens to all the timetables.
The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.
Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.
Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands.
Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything.
It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!

MY RICE BOWL
Korean Cooking Outside the Lines
____________________

Rachel Yang

 

AMERICAN HORROR STORY - 1984

Tuesday, August 24, 2021

QUENTIN CRISP
____________________

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, “Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don’t believe?”

AMERICAN HORROR STORY - 1984

Monday, August 23, 2021

STEPHEN KING
____________________

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

Sunday, August 22, 2021

NEIL GAIMAN
Coraline
____________________

“How do I know you’ll keep your word?” asked Coraline.

“I swear it,” said the other mother. “I swear it on my own mother's grave.”

“Does she have a grave?” asked Coraline.

“Oh yes,” said the other mother. “I put her in there myself. And when I found her trying to crawl out, I put her back.” 

Saturday, August 21, 2021

bell hooks
All About Love: New Visions
____________________

It still took years for me to let go of learned patterns of behavior that negated my capacity to give and receive love. One pattern that made the practice of love especially difficult was my constantly choosing to be with men who were emotionally wounded, who were not that interested in loving, even though they desired to be loved. I wanted to know love but was afraid to be intimate. By choosing men who were not interested in being loving, I was able to practice giving love but always within an unfulfilling context. Naturally, my need to receive love was not met. I got what I was accustomed to getting. Care and affection, usually mingled with a degree of unkindness, neglect, and on some occasions, out right cruelty.

Friday, August 20, 2021

MAANGCHI'S BIG BOOK OF KOREAN COOKING
____________________

Maangchi
with Martha Rose Shulman

Art Porn
____________________

Photographer unknown to me.

CARRIE FISHER
____________________

If my life wasn't funny, it would just be true, and that's unacceptable.

Thursday, August 19, 2021

ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
"A Magic Moment I Remember"
____________________

A magic moment I remember:
I raised my eyes and you were there.
A fleeting vision, the quintessence
Of all that's beautiful and rare.

I pray to mute despair and anguish
To vain pursuits the world esteems,
Long did I near your soothing accents,
Long did your features haunt my dreams.

Time passed- A rebel storm-blast scattered
The reveries that once were mine
And I forgot your soothing accents,
Your features gracefully divine.

In dark days of enforced retirement
I gazed upon grey skies above
With no ideals to inspire me,
No one to cry for, live for, love.

Then came a moment of renaissance,
I looked up- you again are there,
A fleeting vision, the quintessence
Of all that's beautiful and rare.

Wednesday, August 18, 2021

WILLIAM MORRIS
"Love's Gleaning Tide"
____________________

Draw not away thy hands, my love,
With wind alone the branches move,
And though the leaves be scant above
The Autumn shall not shame us.

Say; Let the world wax cold and drear,
What is the worst of all the year
But life, and what can hurt us, dear,
Or death, and who shall blame us?

Ah, when the summer comes again
How shall we say, we sowed in vain?
The root was joy, the stem was pain
The ear a nameless blending.

The root is dead and gone, my love,
The stem's a rod our truth to prove;
The ear is stored for nought to move
Till heaven and earth have ending.

Tuesday, August 17, 2021

TYLL
____________________

Daniel Kehlmann

Translated by Ross Benjamin
 

LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU
"Between Your Sheets"
____________________

Between your sheets you soundly sleep
Nor dreams of vigils that we lovers keep
While all the night, I waking sign your name,
The tender sound does every nerve inflame,
Imagination shows me all your charms,
The plenteous silken hair, and waxen arms,
The well turned neck, and snowy rising breast
And all the beauties that supinely rest
between your sheets.

Ah Lindamira, could you see my heart,
How fond, how true, how free from fraudful art,
The warmest glances poorly do explain
The eager wish, the melting throbbing pain
Which through my very blood and soul I feel,
Which you cannot believe nor I reveal,
Which every metaphor must render less
And yet (methinks) which I could well express
between your sheets.

Monday, August 16, 2021

GLORIA SWANSON
____________________

I think all this talk about age is foolish. Every time I'm one year older, everyone else is too.

Sunday, August 15, 2021

W. S. MERWIN
"Conqueror"
____________________

When they start to wear your clothes
do their dreams become more like yours
who do they look like

when they start to use your language
do they say what you say
who are they in your words

when they start to use your money
do they need the same things you need
or do the things change

when they are converted to your gods
do you know who they are praying to
do you know who is praying

for you not to be there

Saturday, August 14, 2021

NANCI GRIFFITH

(1952-2021)

ELIAS CANETTI
____________________

With every hour spent alone, with every sentence that you draft, you win back a piece of your life. 

Friday, August 13, 2021

LEE LI-YOUNG
"The Gift"
____________________

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

Thursday, August 12, 2021

THE SUN

____________________

Issue 548
August 2021

 

ELISAVIETTA RITCHIE
"To Oscar, The Black Snake at my Birthday Party"
____________________

No, disappearance saddens. You vanished.
No wake, no trace of skin or scale of blade
of grass bent to reveal where you slithered.

All muscle and anthracite gleam in the May
sunshine we sought together, you did not
mind when I lifted you coil by coil,
a rope tarred black for a pirate's yacht.

I let you weave around my neck, then wind
upward into an Athenian wreath for a head
bystanders would call foolhardy, the risk
too great for my bravado.

One child and I wore you as an onyx
choker: guests screamed, edged
toward the grill, into the house –

But I know you. You wintered overhead
in our attic we reach only by a ladder too
steep to scale. You found secret apertures
to steal through these century-old walls,
explore the house we had thought ours,
inspect paintings you left askew or else
shattered in apparent disapproval, then
you hid on the broom closet's shelves
with bug spray, unopened silver polish.

Those of us who know our serpents
admired the sheen of your latest skin,
cut of your jaws, your hat-pin eyes.
I released you in the yard where you
keep down moles, toads, field mice,
and alas, a few baby bluebirds.

Every late spring you turn up, regular
as birthdays. Another due, we wonder
who will attend. Will you, veteran of many
herpetological years in our wild yard?
and spiraling back upon myself, will I?

Wednesday, August 11, 2021

bell hooks
____________________

I still think it's important for people to have a sharp, ongoing critique of marriage in patriarchal society — because once you marry within a society that remains patriarchal, no matter how alternative you want to be within your unit, there is still a culture outside you that will impose many, many values on you whether you want them to or not. 

Tuesday, August 10, 2021

BUSTER KEATON
____________________

If one more person tells me this is just like old times, I swear I'll jump out the window.
Art Porn
____________________

SANTY MITO
Death-Eroticism No. 6

Monday, August 9, 2021

CHARLIE CHAPLIN
___________________

I love this country. I owe it everything. That's why I can make fun of it.

Sunday, August 8, 2021

GERALDINE CHAPLIN
____________________

I was born in Santa Monica but brought up abroad so I don't use English much. 

Tsongkhapa

THE MIDDLE-LENGTH TREATISE ON THE STAGES OF THE PATH OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Translated by Philip Quarcoo

Saturday, August 7, 2021

THE MIRE '97
(ROJST '97)

Jan Holoubek
Poland, 2021
 

URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
____________________

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

Friday, August 6, 2021

MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye
____________________

When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.

Thursday, August 5, 2021

DORIS LESSING
____________________

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

Wednesday, August 4, 2021

THOMAS JEFFERSON
From a letter to Peter Carr - Paris, August 19, 1785
____________________

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truth without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

Tuesday, August 3, 2021

NICK DRAKE
"Pink Moon"
______________________

Saw it written and I saw it say
Pink moon is on its way
And none of you stand so tall
Pink moon gonna get ye all
And it's a pink moon
Hey, it's a pink moon
Pink, pink, pink, pink, pink moon
Pink, pink, pink, pink, pink moon
I saw it written and I saw it say
A pink moon is on its way
And none of you stand so tall
Pink moon gonna get ye all
It's a pink moon
Yeah, it's a pink moon

Monday, August 2, 2021

WILLIAM HEINESEN
"Rain in Leningrad"
____________________

It rains in the gray-light evening
over mirror-wet streets
over the bay and the dim river.
Quietly the grass trembles on the graves of the dead
under the steady rain.

Everywhere in the falling wetness
stand young leafy trees
planted by the city folk
after war’s end and victory
and bitter loss.
Every man every woman every child,
their hope’s green tree.

In the Winter Palace there is a hall
of pure gold.
Today it was full of silent, staring people.
This evening only the gold is at home
behind rain-wet panes in the dark halls.

Sunday, August 1, 2021

bell hooks
Communion: The Female Search for Love
____________________

Think of all the women you know who will not allow themselves to be seen without makeup. I often wonder how they feel about themselves at night when they are climbing into bed with intimate partners. Are they overwhelmed with secret shame that someone sees them as they really are? Or do they sleep with rage that who they really are can be celebrated or cared for only in secret?
ANAÏS NIN
Henry and June: A Journal of Love
The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931–1932)
____________________

The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over again.
FREEDOM IS A CONSTANT STRUGGLE
Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement
____________________

Angela Y. Davis