No Relation

PhD student. A tumblr for literature and academia findings. Sideblog.

[byronlite]

OK, then, enough of this thinking about the mind. Think about reality. Think about the real world. The body's world. That's why I'm here.

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

[afrohijab]

“The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it…If there is no moral question, there is no reason to write. I’m an old-fashioned writer and, despite the odds, I want to change the world”

— James Baldwin

[byronlite]

I have the chance to meet a scholar in my field this week and I’m already anxious how do I talk to this woman like a normal person and not immediately hoist all my problems with the field on her

[byronlite]

I don’t think The Vegetarian was particularly well written on the level of the sentence but as a narrative it left me breathless

[muppethole-deactivated20240312]

more people would be for prison abolition if they just tried to send mail to an inmate even once

[muppethole-deactivated20240312]

for almost a year now i’ve been trying to send a copy of the literary magazine i edit to an inmate who requested one. his prison prohibits any written materials that so much as mention drugs, weapons, criminal activity, or malicious violence of any sort. i’ve been poring over what’s available of the 95 volumes my magazine has printed over the years, and of those found 3 that might pass inspection. the first two were sent back undelivered two months after i sent them because one had a short story that alluded to a playground fight, and the other a poem that used the word “fist” in a nonviolent context. The third was returned for the stated reason that its contents depicted the use of firearms. i reread the entire issue, there’s not a single gun mentioned in all its 120 pages.

while going back and forth with this guy trying to figure out how to get a copy of the magazine in his hands, two of my letters bounced back for unspecified reasons. i learned that inmates are not given their correspondents’ original letters, but scanned copies, often poorly reproduced and sometimes illegible. these people aren’t even granted the ink their loved ones used to pen their messages, or to hold in their hands the paper their loved ones held, if they’re able to receive their words at all.

[byronlite]

“It’s your body, you can treat it however you please. The only area where you’re free to do just as you like. And even that doesn’t turn out how you wanted.”

-Han Kang, The Vegetarian

[byronlite]

“Though the ostensible reason for her not having wanted Yeong-hye to be discharged, the reason she gave the doctor, was this worry about a possible relapse, now she was able to admit to herself what had really been going on. She was no longer able to cope with all that her sister reminded her of. She’d been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she’d never even known they were there.”

-Han Kang, The Vegetarian

[byronlite]

“Her voice had no weight to it, like feathers. It was neither gloomy nor absent-minded, as might be expected of someone who was ill. But it wasn’t bright or light-hearted either. It was the quiet tone of a person who didn’t belong anywhere, someone who had passed into a border area between states of being.”

-Han Kang, The Vegetarian

[effemimaniac]

maybe introspection is a scam

[pattern-recognition]

When a boy…discovers that he is more given into introspection and consciousness of self than other boys his age, he easily falls into the error of believing it is because he is more mature than they. This was certainly a mistake in my case. Rather, it was because the other boys had no such need of understanding themselves as I had: they could be their natural selves, whereas I was to play a part, a fact that would require considerable understanding and study. So it was not my maturity but my sense of uneasiness, my uncertainty that was forcing me to gain control over my consciousness. Because such consciousness was simply a steppingstone to aberration and my present thinking was nothing but uncertain and haphazard guesswork.

Mishima, Yukio. Confessions of a Mask

[citizen-zero]

I think the funniest possible modern textual adaptation of Dracula would be Jonathan as a part time recipe blogger and you have to scroll through 10 paragraphs of the most harrowing thing you’ve ever read in your life just to get the recipe for paprika hendl

[hjarta-deactivated20260124]

i’m watching an ocean vuong video right now and he just said “language is real. the power of it is that it gets deeper than any human touch. if i were to touch you right now, i would only get to your skin. but when i speak to you, i’m all the way through”

[punkrorschach]

This kicks ass. Disabled activists are protesting for their rights in South Korea by literally just riding the train during rush hour.

[punkrorschach]

full article

[kafk-a]

[beguines]

Neil Hilborn, “For Henry, Who Has Just Died”, The Future

[gnomebud]

[image descriptions: text that reads:

“For Henry, Who Has Just Gone

Henry was my pet rat, and he died last night in my hands. He was three years old, which is way longer than

an albino rat is supposed to live. To be honest, he wasn’t a very smart animal, but he was so sweet that now I wonder

if intelligence has anything to do with leading a good life. He had been sick for a few months, and every twelve hours

I had to apply antiseptic and lotion to both his back feet. By the end they didn’t really work anymore,

so he would just drag his feet behind him in a way so cute and sad that I started calling him my little sea lion. When he died it was, somehow,

a surprise: you would think that when your rat is older than older than dirt and has been sick for months you’d be sort of prepared: after I had laid out the towel

and mixed the solution, I picked him up and noticed his breathing was s slow. I lay down with him

on the towel, the towel where we’d spent the last few months, where I think we finally, really, completely loved each other,

not like humans do: humans always want something from you and he and I would rather just be together than apart,

and I pulled him toward me, and he chittered in that way that always meant he was wind coming in after a rain, his head fell forward, and there was so much less

light in the room. The lamp was so far away, like the light of a house to which there is no road. I know, he was just a rat. So many

just like him, all white, red eyes, die every day and only one or two people in white coats are even there to see it.

He was all in white, he was always there to see me. When I would wake from a nightmare, so many nightmares, I would turn on the light

and there he was, holding on, a constant companion to a prisoner, the prison being the apartment, the world being inside his cage. Once I was crying

in bed because of who knows why, and he sat beside my face and licked my tears away. I had a rat once, named Henry. Named Buddy. Named Mr. Big

Mouse. Named proof that something could need me and still love me. Named please can I have some of your apple? Or I know

you’re sad but I’m hungry. Don’t go; if you go I won’t survive: a child reaches for her father; a couple, buried in ash, dies holding each other;

a man and a woman in an office, crying slightly, sign sheets of paper; sparrows fall out of the sky together. Some day I’m going to have a child. She’s going to have

eyes like mine and such small hands. Just like she’ll need me alive then, she needs me alive now; I can’t say goodbye before I’ve had a chance

to say hello. I don’t stare off bridges anymore. I don’t count out little blue exit signs and even today, with Henry buried under a tree, a tree somewhere so far away

it feels like someone else buried him using my body, today I came home and only wanted to sleep for twenty minutes instead of always. Something needed

me once, and I know something will need me again. One day I’m going to have a daughter. She’s going to sleep through the night

sometimes. She is a light on a rock at the edge of a lonely see. You see that light out there? That’s where I’m headed. That’s home.”

/end id]

[kxowledge]

“Many young Americans think that to know themselves they need to find themselves, and they hold the naive belief that if they could just strip off everyday life like layers of an onion they would reach their true core, unadulterated by other people’s expectations and the distractions of a fastpaced world. They believe that they have a true core, an essence, and that it sits inside of them waiting to be discovered, and that once they find it they will know whether they ought to be a doctor or a lawyer or a philosophy professor. Sometimes these young people go to Europe and work their way through Mediterranean countries picking grapes, confident that their true self will emerge somewhere en route to Italy. But people who believe that the self is like an onion and their true self is its core have not spent much time in the kitchen. Peel an onion down to its core and all you will find is air. You are not an untouched core. You are and will become the sum of your commitments, your choices—moral, intellectual, and practical—they amount to much the same thing in the end. To find yourself, don’t dig under the surface of your life. Look at what you actually do, at what you come to care for, at what you fight to defend. Look at the small choices you make every day in the classroom, in the way that you read and interpret and argue, and the big choices will sort themselves out by themselves.”

— 2003 - Tanya Luhrmann | Aims of Education | The University of Chicago (via logicandgrace)

[byronlite]

“It’s not just about how humans treat artificial life, but how you all will treat us. What kind of ethics should we expect? What kind do we deserve?”

-Victor LaValle’s “Destroyer”

[metamorphesque]

What the Living Do, Marie Howe

[cloudbeam]

Written for her brother, John Howe, who died of complications of AIDS