Xuebing Du
@theartofmadeline
KIROKAZE
NASA
Misplaced Lens Cap
⁂
tumblr dot com
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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
titsay
Keni
Peter Solarz
Andulka
Kiana Khansmith
izzy's playlists!
YOU ARE THE REASON
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
One Nice Bug Per Day
Product Placement
will byers stan first human second
seen from Italy
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from Japan
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Switzerland
seen from Israel
seen from Australia
seen from Bangladesh
seen from Japan
seen from Qatar
seen from Chile
seen from Spain
seen from Australia
seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Argentina
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
@adansonias
What more can I tell you? Oh, everything — like how they would walk home in the evenings when the light was soft, anything bad sliding off them, and they would feel owned, completely owned, in a good way, by the air, which would touch them constantly, sometimes urgently, sometimes lightly, just to let them know it was there, and they would think maybe this is what being alive is
— Emily Berry, from “No Name,” published in Poetry
Written Deer
Why does this written doe bound through these written woods? —Wisława Szymborska
My handwriting is all over these woods. No, my handwriting is these woods,
each tree a half-print, half-cursive scrawl, each loop a limb. My house is somewhere here, & I have scribbled myself inside it.
What is home but a book we write, then read again & again, each time dog-earing
different pages. In the morning I wake in time to pencil the sun high. How fragile it is, the world—I almost wrote
the word but caught myself. Either one could be erased. In these written woods,
branches smudge around me whenever I take a deep breath. Still, written fawns lie in the written sunlight that dapples
their backs. What is home but a passage I’m writing & underlining every time I read it.
Maggie Smith 2018
“This is something I know: damaged women? We don’t think we deserve kindness. In fact, when kindness happens to us, we go a little berserk. It’s threatening. Deeply. Because if I have to admit how profoundly I need kindness? I have to admit that I hid the me who deserves it down in a sadness well. Seriously. Like abandoning a child at the bottom of a well because it’s better than the life she is facing. Not quite killing my little girl me, but damn close.”
Lidia Yuknavitch, from “The Chronology of Water: A Memoir,” wr. c. 2011
Springsteen On Broadway (2018)
I could cry
Before you wrote you studied painting. Are there any tools that you took from painting to use in writing?
First and foremost, I learned procrastination from my painting career. Also, how a story has to have layers of meaning. I remember once one of my teachers, during a critique, saying about a series of paintings I had made over a frantic weekend, big wild eleventh-hour-fueled things: “This looks like the product of one weekend of painting.” That was his entire critique and I still remember exactly the feeling of it—of having offered something that was all surface, no depth. A couple of us had a drink with him afterward, at the Foxhead in Iowa City, and he kindly bought me a beer and a basket of popcorn but never said another word about those paintings. It was the most valuable lesson I ever learned as a student, and therefore everything about it is amplified in my memory, from the turp-smelling sprung couch in the critique room to the layer of greasy fuzz on the Foxhead hanging lamps; everything, that is, but the paintings themselves. In the end, nobody could teach me how to paint, but John Dilg taught me something invaluable about art.
(AN INTERVIEW WITH JO ANN BEARD, BY HEIDI SISTARE)
damn, dorothy!!!!
“Time passed. But time flows in many streams. Like a river, an inner stream of time will flow rapidly at some places and sluggishly at others, or perhaps even stand hopelessly stagnant. Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.”
— Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty And Sadness (via ha-n)
Insanely cute letterpress postcards by Pottering Cat, Japan.
Zadie Smith, On Shame, Rage and Writing
People who are old enough to remember ad free YouTube, FB, Twitter and Instagram believing that capitalism drives innovation are fucking hilarious.
Like, all of those platforms were still profitable...massively profitable before they had targeted ads on your feed and unskippable ads before videos. They didn’t need to bring them in. They weren’t going to go under, their CEOs weren’t living in the backseats of their cars, they were living in mansions already. They just wanted more money.
Greed was the only reason. Capitalism is the reason they made their platforms and the user experience worse. That’s it.
I can’t stop thinking about this quote, from The Atlantic’s article about Mr. Rogers and his legacy:
That last bit, “we all long to know that there’s a graciousness at the heart of creation” has been stuck with me all day. Partly because there are echoes of the Catholic I used to be in its phrasing—the idea that we are all hungering for grace is embedded in my very skull; I don’t think it’s ever washing out. But there’s something about graciousness in particular…
These days, I take a bus to work. Once, long ago (i.e., 2012) a coworker described public transportation as an exercise in mutual tolerance—a group of perfectly unaffiliated strangers come together in a crowded, constrained environment with the understanding that this will be mutual painless only insofar as we make it painless for each other. This means: you don’t talk loudly on your cellphone. You listen to music with earphones. You pretend not to be reading what your immediate neighbor is texting her friends. You squeeze yourself into as small a space as you can and say liberally “sorry” and “excuse me.”
And still…..there are older people on my route, and pregnant women, and a couple folks with the big motorized wheelchairs. And every time, I’m still surprised—touched, even, by the people who very gently brush an older woman’s elbow and ask “Would you…?” and when she nods, gather their things and stand. The nervy-looking young man who rockets to his feet to offer the pregnant woman somewhere to sit. CTA buses are somewhat-to-mostly ADA accessible, but only if the people sitting in the designated seats get up and lift the plastic, ugly-colored pew they were sitting on to make room. I’ve never heard the bus driver do more than start to lower the access ramp; the people in those seats nod, gather up purses and laptop bags and coffee cups and make their way to a convenient hanging strap.
It’s not anything profound, it’s not special. This should be the way the world works on every level, the ordinary and rote grind of mindfulness of how others move through the world—even perfect strangers, stuck in traffic on Lakeshore Drive. I think often graciousness is a habit, a rote lesson learned and reiterated and made ordinary by its consistent application. Saying “thank you” is gracious even if it isn’t meant, small talk with coworkers is gracious even without any sort of real or genuine connection. Graciousness, the unthinking social response to need, to difference, to the other people you occupy the world with, and all others who you don’t personally know, can be deeply and movingly virtuous by virtue of its existence. Still mundane, absolutely, but….making it a part of our ordinary reality gestures to an even better one, where the good and the gracious are even more boring and commonplace.
For contrast: there are a number of times I’ve run to catch a bus (or watched someone else run for the bus while I’m on it) and every time the bus driver waits for you feels like an unearned gift. The bus driver is not obligated—they have a proscribed route and a certain timeline for fulfilling it, they are under no obligation to wait for panting, half-running person wind-milling her arms in an attempt to stall. But for me, the difference between grace and graciousness is that exactly. We all want to believe that at the heart of creation is an elevated kindness, a true and earnest desire to help; I believe that. And there’s certainly evidence of it in graciousness—last week when a man slipped in the slush of Michigan Ave and strangers rushed to help him up; a woman hanging off a pole lost her grip as the bus stopped suddenly, and another woman was already reaching out to steady her. But there’s also those situations you can’t write off as habit or instinct—sometimes there’s a choice, and you can either keep going and serving your self and your agenda, or you can stop, and let someone skip-run across the intersection and catch their bus.
maggie nelson on eve kosofsky sedgwick
Currently reading The Long Covid Self-Help Guide by the Post-Covid Assessment Clinic, Oxford, and while I still obvs can't say for sure that my general fatigue, sleep problems, post-exertional malaise, lightheadedness and dizziness, etc etc is related to getting COVID two whole years ago, I can say the chapter about managing fatigue has already rocked my world, especially in regards to low-level activity vs. real rest:
It's a good idea to think about the difference between rest and low-level activity. Many of us think we are resting when in fact we are engaging in low-level activity. Reading a book or magazine, watching TV, scrolling through our phone: these are low-level activities, and while they do not require a huge amount of energy (and are good to do in your day), they are still using up a little. Proper, restorative/healing rest helps to put some energy in your battery -- to charge it up. Rests are 'pauses' in activity. These might be in the form of relaxation exercises, breathing exercises, meditation techniques, mindfulness, restorative yoga practice or sensory techniques such as sound apps, a heated blanket, or aromatherapy. Find a way of truly resting that works for you.
Many people express feelings of guilt about stopping and resting or view it as a negative thing. This can act as a barrier to resting. If this sounds familiar, try to reframe your attitude to rest in a positive light. By resting you are not doing nothing, you are recharging your battery. You will be doing yourself (and those around you) a huge favor.
The book also notes that sleep and rest meet different needs and that getting good rest could lead to healthier sleep. Again: mind blown. I'm truly stoked I picked this book up for the first chapter alone.
“I think poetry is a way of carrying grief, but it’s also a way of putting it somewhere so I don’t always have to heave it onto my back or in my body. The more I put grief in a poem, the more I am able to move freely through the world because I have named it, spoken it, and thrown it out into the sky. Everyone has grief that they carry and sometimes we have anxiety and depression about anticipatory grief. The thing that I’ve found that helps is knowing we are all in this, someone has gone or is going through the same thing. Poetry helps us with that too. Writing. Reading. As James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, and then you read.“”
— Ada Limón interviewed by Lauren LeBlanc, BOMB Magazine (via amaalsdrifting)
I love when singers think maybe their song requires a little prerequisite information so they just cover it real fast so everyone’s on the same page. I love that TLC opens No Scrubs quickly reviewing exactly what a scrub is and when ABBA was like “just in case you didn’t know, famed 19th century militant ruler Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated in the battle of Waterloo. We though perhaps not everyone would know that. Alright, so moving on to my love life, which is similar to that actually,”
exactly thank u yes I saw that too. this is about in-song debriefing specifically. when the lyrics themselves are a quick explanation of the info you need to set u up for the rest of the song
there was a certain man in Russia long ago
Anya Taylor-Joy by Pip.
