raising 2.5 plants

m•xx• undergrad lit student class of 2019• in between scotland and england• following from @booksareportals

[127leilas]

i just dont think we were made to look at ourselves

[malaak]

Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet //  Milan Kundera - Immortality

[ardor-mohr]

“The poet places language beyond the reach of time: or, more accurately, the poet approaches language as if it were a place, an assembly point, where time has no finality, where time itself is encompassed and contained.”

“Şair dili zamanın erişebileceğinden öte bir yere koyar, veya daha doğrusu, dile sanki o bir yermiş gibi, zamanın hiçbir son sözünün olmadığı, zamanın kendisinin dahi içerilip kuşatıldığı bir toplanma yeriymiş gibi yaklaşır.”

— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984)

[luxobnubilata]

“The finest actor is he who play the comedy of life perfectly, as i aspire to do. To walk well, talk well, weep well, laugh well and die well, it is all pure acting, because in every man there is the dumb dreadful immortal spirit who is real- who cannot act, who-is and who steadily maintains an infinite though speechless protest against the body’s lies”

— Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan or The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire (1895)

[timotaychalamet]

“A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving into a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is a experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept the mystery.”

Bright Star (2009) dir. Jane Campion

[briyarmara]

12.10.18

was in london for the weekend, visiting my dad during his layover in heathrow and then spending the next couple of days wandering about. this was when i was at the v&a, which was the first time i’ve actually gone, but it will not be the last

[sealochs]

why are we still telling women in academia to be more assertive, to hedge less, and pretending that this is supportive advice?? what if, instead of telling women to hedge less and be more assertive, we told men to hedge more and to be less assertive??

why is ‘male’ writing the standard to which women should aspire?? why are we perpetuating the gender binary in this way?? there are as many writing styles as there are genders and sorry, but all the best scholarship i’ve ever read is explorative and suggestive and experimental and open to refutation. it hedges. hedging is good. things grow in hedges, grow from hedges, grow around and between hedges.

[briyarmara]

30.11.18

last day of november and both the term and the year as a whole are closing in. handed in my final essays this week and now i can see my friends again, enjoy the winter festivities and finally have the first glass of mulled wine this christmas period

[briyarmara]

01.12.18 got a lot of meetings this week. so i needed to take a day to recalibrate my emotions, check in with my worries, and—as always—write

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“Whether landscape is a mirror, a theatre, a text, or a seamless continuity with its inhabitants, it is the place from which we draw meaning, feeling; it is the armature for existence, the realm in which place and culture co-exist, and where the self dwells […] ‘Landscape is not perspective and horizon, a particular shape or defined aesthetics, but caught in its occurrence of affects: felt smudges, smears, kaleidoscope, a multi-sensual expressive poetics of potentiality, becoming and poetics: shuffling, unstable and lively.’

With this expansive and meaning-imbued terrain the landscape holds within it the natural habitat for melancholy, as the locus of places of contemplation, memory, death, sadness. Yet, the place of melancholy with the landscape is one which is often resisted, marginalized and edited out.”

Jacky Bowring, from Melancholy and the Landscape: Locating Sadness, Memory, and Reflection in the Landscape (Routledge, 2017)

[briyarmara]

01.12.18 got a lot of meetings this week. so i needed to take a day to recalibrate my emotions, check in with my worries, and—as always—write

[henryclervals]

“When I was 21 I read “Anna Karenina.” I thought Anna and Vronsky were soul mates. They were deeply in love and therefore had to be together. I found Karenin cruel and oppressive for keeping his wife from her destiny. Levin and Kitty and the peasants bored me. I read those parts quickly. Last year I turned 49, and I read the book again. This time, I loved Levin and Kitty. I loved the fact that after she declined his proposal he waited for a long time to mend his hurt feelings and then asked her again. I loved that she had grown up in the interim and now felt grateful for a second chance. Anna and Vronsky bored me. I thought Anna was selfish and shrill. My heart went out to poor Karenin, who tried to be decent. What has literature taught me about love? Literature (along with experience) has taught me that love means different things at different points in our lives, and that often as we get older we gravitate toward the quieter, kinder plotlines, and find them to be richer than we had originally understood them to be.”

— Ann Patchett, “A Sentimental Education - Writers on Love” (via zenshipper)

[heteroglossia]

from Roland Barthes’ S/Z

[briyarmara]

17.11.18

i’m well into the last first time of my university career and our dissertation proposals are due soon. my third year english dissertation is actually going to be a creative piece; i am to present a poetry collection for my final project at university. at first i was nervous, and seriously against producing art that will be subject to marking and guidelines. i have taken a course in creative writing every year of study and it has severely impacted my sense of style and voice. i have never been self conscious about it till i had teachers tell me that i should write like this, that this is good writing because it won awards and accolades. but then i remembered that writing is perhaps the most important thing in my life and i want to pursue a career in writing, if not at least engage in the world creative writing in a professional setting. and i need to trust my voice is strong enough, that my words are true enough. i need to believe that my creative output is more than metrics and grades. so i’m reading to gather inspiration– above is night sky with exit wounds by ocean voung and the year of magical thinking by joan didion 

[briyarmara]

30.11.18

last day of november and both the term and the year as a whole are closing in. handed in my final essays this week and now i can see my friends again, enjoy the winter festivities and finally have the first glass of mulled wine this christmas period

[briyarmara]

one all nighter certainly seems irresponsible. but pulling off two all nighters? i am seriously concerned that my heart will never beat the same way

[briyarmara]

16.09.18

the plant shop i went to the other day had a sweet little dog just chilling about and the sheer edenic energy that the place radiated increased sevenfold. the excursion was a welcome reprieve from the stress–but also the excitement–of a new academic year. it’s nice to just be a person buying a plant and not the various roles must perform as a result of my responsibilities and obligations

[briyarmara]

12.10.18

was in london for the weekend, visiting my dad during his layover in heathrow and then spending the next couple of days wandering about. this was when i was at the v&a, which was the first time i’ve actually gone, but it will not be the last