and there is no particular agenda to any of this

a record of my personal musings along with stuff i find on tumblr which arouses something in me which i feel should be recorded also

[yearinreview]

Most Reblogged in 2013:  Books

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Divergent 

The Fault in Our Stars

Looking for Alaska

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Fight Club

Fangirl

Pride and Prejudice

Insurgent

Life of Pi

Paper Towns

Beautiful Creatures

Clockwork Princess

An Abundance of Katherines

Allegiant

A Series of Unfortunate Events

The Twilight Saga

50 Shades of Grey

To Kill a Mockingbird

The Catcher in the Rye

The Cuckoo’s Calling

Wuthering Heights

[fluffytrepidation]

a story YOU contributed to [no.1]

With your help this post may evolve into something beautiful. Below I shall write the beginnings of a story, a story hopefully someone will continue. And then another shall continue further, and another further, turning into something long and detailed, perhaps insanely complex or perhaps just insane. Even if it doesn't make sense at times, or spins out of control, it is still something. Something I will think special.

I remember it through a sort of hazy detachment. I know it happened to me, but it’s like it happened to another part of me. A part that’s not now present. Like when you’re angry at someone because in your dream they were mean to you. You’re not really mad at them, but some lost part of you is. Strings of thought slide in and out as the hospital room slowly materialises through the mist. This room, too, I see through a haze of cold detachment. A thought slips in. The smack of the bathroom tile against my cheek. Then the coldness of the tile materialises underneath me, draining away the heat from my body as I feel it more. Those tiles, much like this mist of detachment, were cold and white.

I feel so alone, although Alice slouches beside my cot, fast asleep. His chest rises and falls slowly in the darkness. The room is dark - at first so bright, compared to what I came from, but now I see how the lights are all off, the sky outside is black, and the curves of Alice’s face are formed by shadows. All shadows - crescents of bruise under his eyes, black clothes. He needs a shave, too.

[fluffytrepidation]

do you believe in the existence of God? Yes, but only within the confines of the mind. Faith - making something exist by believing in it.

[fluffytrepidation]

[nevver]

Yoko Ono

[sxmholla]

[fluffytrepidation]

catcher in the rye inside the mind of holden caufield made me cry Little haiku there. I asked my mum, wanna hear my haiku poem about catcher in the rye? I said it to her, she went is that it? and burst out laughing in my face. It's meant to be short and simplistic and sweet, I say, and shit, my mum says. Moving on, here are some snippets of the book I liked 'Once you get past all the Mr. Vinsons, you're going to start getting closer and closer - that is, if you want to, and if you look for it and wait for it - to the kind of information that will be very, very dear to your heart. Among other things, you'll find that your not the first person who has ever been confused and frightened and even sickened by human behaviour. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.' 'All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.' 'Grand. That's a word I really hate. It's a phoney.' 'People always clap for the wrong things.' 'You take a very handsome guy, or a guy that thinks he's a real hot-shot, and they're always asking you to do them a big favour. Just because they're crazy about themselves, they think you're crazy about them, too, and that you're just dying to do them a favour.' 'I was so damn worried, that's why. When I really worry about something, I don't just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. Only, I don't go. I'm too worried to go. I don't want to interrupt my worrying to go.' That last one killed me. I was interested in the book cause

Whenever I ask my mum why she never reads, she's always given the (what I always think is a bad) excuse: I read The Catcher in the Rye and it was so brilliant that I have never felt the need to read anything else, or rather, that she thought no book could ever be as good and so there was no point. While thinking this absolutely ridiculous, I cannot help but be intrigued.

My brother has been diagnosed with clinical depression and I want to find out how to help him. Perhaps books will tell me how.

The guy who shot John Lennon supposedly said he did it because of reading The Catcher in the Rye, so I sure as hell wanted to know what that was all about.

But I was pretty bored with it at first, with the feeling that it was never going anywhere. Like there was no beginning, middle or end, it was just like taking out a few days of his life. But then when you get used to it it's like the beauty of it:

The realism. It's not often you read a book and actually feel as if you were inside that person's mind, if that's sense-making. Often it's like yea, this is what they think, but they must be thinking a million other things at the same time, so this isn't really what they're thinking. This book, it was like, yea, this is someone real. When something happened to him, it felt real, and so it was just easier to connect with him, and feel the full weight of every little thing that happened. 

Very dark in the most normal way possible, making the darkness not accessible but consuming.

[fluffytrepidation]

Bernadette Mayer's List of Journal Ideas: Journals of: * dreams * food * finances * writing ideas * love * ideas for architects * city design ideas * beautiful and/or ugly sights * a history of one's own writing life, written daily * reading/music/art, etc. encountered each day * rooms * elaborations on weather * people one sees-description * subway, bus, car or other trips (e.g., the same bus trip written about every day) * pleasures and/or pain * life's everyday machinery: phones, stoves, computers, etc. * answering machine messages * round or rectangular things, other shapes * color * light * daily changes, e.g., a journal of one's desk, table, etc. * the body and its parts * clocks/time-keeping * tenant-landlord situations * telephone calls (taped?) * skies * dangers * mail * sounds * coincidences & connections * times of solitude Other journal ideas: * Write once a day in minute detail about one thing * Write every day at the same time, e.g. lunch poems, waking ideas, etc. * Write minimally: one line or sentence per day * Create a collaborative journal: musical notation and poetry; two writers alternating days; two writing about the same subject each day, etc. * Instead of using a book, write on paper and put it up on the wall (public journal). * and so on ... Bernadette Mayer's Writing Experiments * Pick a word or phrase at random, let mind play freely around it until a few ideas have come up, then seize on one and begin to write. Try this with a non- connotative word, like "so" etc. * Systematically eliminate the use of certain kinds of words or phrases from a piece of writing: eliminate all adjectives from a poem of your own, or take out all words beginning with 's' in Shakespeare's sonnets. * Rewrite someone else's writing. Experiment with theft and plagiarism. * Systematically derange the language: write a work consisting only of prepositional phrases, or, add a gerund to every line of an already existing work. * Get a group of words, either randomly selected or thought up, then form these words (only) into a piece of writing-whatever the words allow. Let them demand their own form, or, use some words in a predetermined way. Design words. * Eliminate material systematically from a piece of your own writing until it is "ultimately" reduced, or, read or write it backwards, line by line or word by word. Read a novel backwards. * Using phrases relating to one subject or idea, write about another, pushing metaphor and simile as far as you can. For example, use science terms to write about childhood or philosophic language to describe a shirt. * Take an idea, anything that interests you, or an object, then spend a few days looking and noticing, perhaps making notes on what comes up about that idea, or, try to create a situation or surrounding where everything that happens is in relation. * Construct a poem as if the words were three-dimensional objects to be handled in space. Print them on large cards or bricks if necessary. * Write as you think, as close as you can come to this, that is, put pen to paper and don't stop. Experiment writing fast and writing slow. * Attempt tape recorder work, that is, recording without a text, perhaps at specific times. * Make notes on what happens or occurs to you for a limited amount of time, then make something of it in writing. * Get someone to write for you, pretending they are you. * Write in a strict form, or, transform prose into a poetic form. * Write a poem that reflects another poem, as in a mirror. * Read or write a story or myth, then put it aside and, trying to remember it, write it five or ten times at intervals from memory. Or, make a work out of continuously saying, in a column or list, one sentence or line, over and over in different ways, until you get it "right." * Make a pattern of repetitions. * Take an already written work of your own and insert, at random or by choice, a paragraph or section from, for example, a psychology book or a seed catalogue. Then study the possibilities of rearranging this work or rewriting the "source." * Experiment with writing in every person and tense every day. * Explore the possibilities of lists, puzzles, riddles, dictionaries, almanacs, etc. Consult the thesaurus where categories for the word "word" include: word as news, word as message, word as information, word as story, word as order or command, word as vocable, word as instruction, promise, vow, contract. * Write what cannot be written; for example, compose an index. * The possibilities of synesthesia in relation to language and words: the word and the letter as sensations, colors evoked by letters, sensations caused by the sound of a word as apart from its meaning, etc. And the effect of this phenomenon on you; for example, write in the water, on a moving vehicle. * Attempt writing in a state of mind that seems least congenial. * Consider word and letter as forms-the concretistic distortion of a text, a mutiplicity of o's or ea's, or a pleasing visual arrangement: "the mill pond of chill doubt." * Do experiments with sensory memory: record all sense images that remain from breakfast, study which senses engage you, escape you. * Write, taking off from visual projections, whether mental or mechanical, without thought to the word in the ordinary sense, no craft. * Make writing experiments over a long period of time. For example, plan how much you will write for a particular work each day, perhaps one word or one page. * Write on a piece of paper where something is already printed or written. * Attempt to eliminate all connotation from a piece of writing and vice versa. * Experiment with writing in a group, collaborative work: a group writing individually off of each other's work over a long period of time in the same room; a group contributing to the same work, sentence by sentence or line by line; one writer being fed information and ideas while the other writes; writing, leaving instructions for another writer to fill in what you can't describe; compiling a book or work structured by your own language around the writings of others; or a group working and writing off of each other's dream writing. * Dream work: record dreams daily, experiment with translation or transcription of dream thought, attempt to approach the tense and incongruity appropriate to the dream, work with the dream until a poem or song emerges from it, use the dream as an alert form of the mind's activity or consciousness, consider the dream a problem-solving device, change dream characters into fictional characters, accept dream's language as a gift. * Structure a poem or prose writing according to city streets, miles, walks, drives. For example: Take a fourteen-block walk, writing one line per block to create a sonnet; choose a city street familiar to you, walk it, make notes and use them to create a work; take a long walk with a group of writers, observe, make notes and create works, then compare them; take a long walk or drive-write one line or sentence per mile. Variations on this. * The uses of journals. Keep a journal that is restricted to one set of ideas, for instance, a food or dream journal, a journal that is only written in when it is raining, a journal of ideas about writing, a weather journal. Remember that journals do not have to involve "good" writing-they are to be made use of. Simple one-line entries like "No snow today" can be inspiring later. Have 3 or 4 journals going at once, each with a different purpose. Create a journal that is meant to be shared and commented on by another writer--leave half of each page blank for the comments of the other. * Type out a Shakespeare sonnet or other poem you would like to learn about/imitate double-spaced on a page. Rewrite it in between the lines. * Find the poems you think are the worst poems ever written, either by your own self or other poets. Study them, then write a bad poem. * Choose a subject you would like to write "about." Then attempt to write a piece that absolutely avoids any relationship to that subject. Get someone to grade you. * Write a series of titles for as yet unwritten poems or proses. * Work with a number of objects, moving them around on a field or surface-describe their shifting relationships, resonances, associations. Or, write a series of poems that have only to do with what you see in the place where you most often write. Or, write a poem in each room of your house or apartment. Experiment with doing this in the home you grew up in, if possible. * Write a bestiary (a poem about real and mythical animals). * Write five short expressions of the most adamant anger; make a work out of them. * Write a work gazing into a mirror without using the pronoun I. * A shocking experiment: Rip pages out of books at random (I guess you could xerox them) and study them as if they were a collection of poetic/literary material. Use this method on your old high school or college notebooks, if possible, then create an epistemological work based on the randomly chosen notebook pages. * Meditate on a word, sound or list of ideas before beginning to write. * Take a book of poetry you love and make a list, going through it poem by poem, of the experiments, innovations, methods, intentions, etc. involved in the creation of the works in the book. * Write what is secret. Then write what is shared. Experiment with writing each in two different ways: veiled language, direct language. * Write a soothing novel in twelve short paragraphs. * Write a work that attempts to include the names of all the physical contents of the terrestrial world that you know. * Take a piece of prose writing and turn it into poetic lines. Then, without remembering that you were planning to do this, make a poem of the first and last words of each line to see what happens. For instance, the lines (from Einstein) * When at the reception * Of sense-impressions, memory pictures * Emerge this is not yet thinking * And when. . . * Would become: * When reception * Of pictures * Emerge thinking * And when * And so on. Form the original prose, poetic lines, and first-and-last word poem into three columns on a page. Study their relationships. * If you have an answering machine, record all messages received for one month, then turn them into a best-selling novella. * Write a macaronic poem (making use of as many languages as you are conversant with). * Attempt to speak for a day only in questions; write only in questions. * Attempt to become in a state where the mind is flooded with ideas; attempt to keep as many thoughts in mind simultaneously as possible. Then write without looking at the page, typescript or computer screen (This is "called" invisible writing). * Choose a period of time, perhaps five or nine months. Every day, write a letter that will never be sent to a person who does or does not exist, or to a number of people who do or do not exist. Create a title for each letter and don't send them. Pile them up as a book. * Etymological work. Experiment with investigating the etymologies of all words that interest you, including your own name(s). Approaches to etymologies: Take a work you've already written, preferably something short, look up the etymological meanings of every word in that work including words like "the" and "a". Study the histories of the words used, then rewrite the work on the basis of the etymological information found out. Another approach: Build poems and writings form the etymological families based on the Indo-European language constructs, for instance, the BHEL family: bulge, bowl, belly, boulder, billow, ball, balloon; or the OINO family: one, alone, lonely, unique, unite, unison, union; not to speak of one of the GEN families: kin, king, kindergarten, genteel, gender, generous, genius, genital, gingerly, pregnant, cognate, renaissance, and innate! * Write a brief bibliography of the science and philosophy texts that interest you. Create a file of newspaper articles that seem to relate to the chances of writing poetry. * Write the poem: Ways of Making Love. List them. * Diagram a sentence in the old-fashioned way. If you don't know how, I'll be happy to show you; if you do know how, try a really long sentence, for instance from Melville. * Turn a list of the objects that have something to do with a person who has died into a poem or poem form, in homage to that person. * Write the same poem over and over again, in different forms, until you are weary. Another experiment: Set yourself the task of writing for four hours at a time, perhaps once, twice or seven times a week. Don't stop until hunger and/or fatigue take over. At the very least, always set aside a four-hour period once a month in which to write. This is always possible and will result in one book of poems or prose writing for each year. Then we begin to know something. * Attempt as a writer to win the Nobel Prize in Science by finding out how thought becomes language, or does not. * Take a traditional text like the pledge of allegiance to the flag. For every noun, replace it with one that is seventh or ninth down from the original one in the dictionary. For instance, the word "honesty" would be replaced by "honey dew melon." Investigate what happens; different dictionaries will produce different results. * Attempt to write a poem or series of poems that will change the world. Does everything written or dreamed of do this? * Write occasional poems for weddings, for rivers, for birthdays, for other poets' beauty, for movie stars maybe, for the anniversaries of all kinds of loving meetings, for births, for moments of knowledge, for deaths. Writing for the "occasion" is part of our purpose as poets in being-this is our work in the community wherein we belong and work as speakers for others. * Experiment with every traditional form, so as to know it. * Write poems and proses in which you set yourself the task of using particular words, chosen at random like the spelling exercises of children: intelligence, amazing, weigh, weight, camel, camel's, foresight, through, threw, never, now, snow, rein, rain. Make a story of that! * Plan, structure, and write a long work. Consider what is the work now needed by the culture to cure and exact even if by accident the great exorcism of its 1998 sort-of- seeming-not-being. What do we need? What is the poem of the future? * What is communicable now? What more is communicable? * Compose a list of familiar phrases, or phrases that have stayed in your mind for a long time--from songs, from poems, from conversation: * What's in a name? That which we call a rose * By any other name would smell as sweet * (Romeo and Juliet) * A rose is a rose is a rose * (Gertrude Stein) * A raisin in the sun * (Langston Hughes) * The king was in the counting house * Counting out his money. . . * (Nursery rhyme) * I sing the body electric. . . * These United States. . . * (Walt Whitman) * A thing of beauty is a joy forever * (Keats) * (I summon up) remembrance of things past * (WS) * Ask not for whom the bell tolls * It tolls for thee * (Donne) * Look homeward, Angel * (Milton) * For fools rush in where angels fear to tread * (Pope) * All's well that ends well * (WS) * I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness * (Allen Ginsberg) * I think therefore I am * (Descartes) * It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,. . . * (Dickens) * brave new world has such people in it * (Shakespeare, The Tempest, later Huxley) * Odi et amo (I hate and I love) * (Catullus) * Water water everywhere * Nor any drop to drink * (Coleridge) * Curiouser and curiouser * (Alice in Wonderland) * Don't worry be happy. Here's a little song I wrote. . . * Write the longest most beautiful sentence you can imagine-make it be a whole page. * Set yourself the task of writing in a way you've never written before, no matter who you are. * What is the value of autobiography? * Attempt to write in a way that's never been written before. * Invent a new form. * Write a perfect poem. * Write a work that intersperses love with landlords. * In a poem, list what you know. * Address the poem to the reader. * Write household poems-about cooking, shopping, eating and sleeping. * Write dream collaborations in the lune form. * Write poems that only make use of the words included in Basic English. * Attempt to write about jobs and how they affect the writing of poetry. * Write while being read to from science texts, or, write while being read to by one's lover from any text. * Trade poems with others and do not consider them your own. * Exercises in style: Write twenty-five or more different versions of one event. * Review the statement: "What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems."

Poetry ideas - Write a poem about:

Night-time

A particular color

Being underwater

A person whose life you're curious about

Your mother's perfume

Falling asleep or waking up

Growing older

The feeling of getting lost in a book

How to know if you're in love

A bad dream

A ghost

Your city, town, or neighborhood

An important life choice you've made

Spring, summer, fall, or winter

Something most people see as ugly but which you see as beautiful

Jealousy

Becoming a parent

An event that changed you

A place you visited -- how you imagined it beforehand, and what it was actually like

The ocean

Forgetting

The speed of light

A voodoo doll

Reflections on a window

A newspaper headline

Your greatest fear

Your grandmother's hands

A particular toy you had as a child

Being invisible

A time you felt homesick

Having an affair, or discovering your partner is having one

Birthdays

A favorite food and a specific memory of eating it

An imaginary city

Driving with the radio on

Life in an aquarium

Dancing

Walking with your eyes closed

What a computer might daydream about

Time travel

Brothers or sisters

Your job, or a job you've had

Weddings

Leaving home

Camping

A zoo

A historical event from the perspective of someone who saw it firsthand (You will have to do some research for this).

Holding your breath

Intimacy and privacy

A time you were tempted to do something you feel is wrong

Physical attraction to someone

A superstition you have

Someone you admire

Poem starters- the five senses

Write about the taste of: an egg, an orange, medicine, cinnamon

Write about the smell of: burning food, melting snow, the ocean, your grandparents' home, the inside of a bus, pavement after the rain

Write about the sound of: a radio changing channels, a dog howling, a football or baseball game, your parents talking in another room

Write about the sight of: lit windows in a house when you're standing outside at night, someone you love when he or she doesn't know you're watching, a dying plant, shadows on snow

Write about the feeling of: grass under bare feet, a really bad kiss, the headrush when you stand up too fast, sore muscles, falling asleep in the back seat of a moving car.

Poem starters- three elements

Write a poem that contains all three of the elements in any of the lists below:

a dessert, a memory, and someone in your family

dancing, a pitch-black room, and the smell of lilacs

a balloon, smoke, and a keyhole

a secret box, an ice cube tray, and a velvet ribbon

a betrayal, soap, and a plane ticket

[fluffytrepidation]

Mon 28th Oct, sometime after 1. I just returned home from Ro's 18th birthday. I thought that it would be a posh and elegant dinner party (as he's had in the past, where his mother has sat at the head, offering you expensive wines and telling you to have more ribs even though you've politely told her you're a vegetarian several times, and when she asks you what's new with you and you tell her you recently got a tattoo she delves into an hour-long speech about how awful tattoos are, and how stupid you'd have to be to get one). So when me and Cleo came in holding a bottle of white wine (a tactical choice, working well as both a contribution to a decadent dinner party and as a drunken let-me-pass-this-around-and-drink-from-the-bottle-in-between-tokes-of-spiff house party type sitch) we wasn't expecting that many people we didn't know. Tbh, you never really know what expect with R. There was many many rich private school guys, who are always somehow good-looking in at least in the well-groomed way. Rory poured me two glasses of champagne through the night, so I guess it was a classy, but then later on his balcony were were drinking champagne straight from the bottle because we couldn't be fucked to go downstairs to get glasses, so there was that pre-described element too. Bit of both. I also had two spritzers of mine and Cleo's booze. There were drugs. Two lines of coke.  The first in R's room, using my foyalty card, the second in O's room, with this guy named H who seemed quite into me, using his oyster card which bore a strong resemblance to Robert Smith despite him in real life looking extremely normal in a posh well-groomed smells-nice way. I like him, but nothing happened. When we got back to R's room he kept going 'Lana, this is weird. It's weird.' I was only feeling hyper-drunk instead of sleepy-drunk, and I'd had twice as much as he had, so just told him everything was cool and nice and and all the usual stuffy shite you tell people who are feeling weird after taking a line of coke. I was skeptical of taking it because my close group of school friends are not really into hard drugs. They'll smoke weed all the time, and do MD at raves, but if they're doing harsher drugs, like Acid, it's at a festival, or something equally like a thing-thing. Not at a house party. And probably not coke. As there were lots of private-school guys I was almost expecting coke would be in the picture once I came in and saw it was a house-party-type-thing. In my world, where you're poor and not opposed to recreational drugs, when a person you know and trust offers you an expensive drug for free yougrab that shit. But I was a bit iffy, thinking the crew (the name prescribed to my friendship group by my friendship group) would tease me later like 'ooooo coke you're such a badman'. Which they did do, the next night at my house. D phone me asking if people could come over, and I said yes and she started saying that I sounded really sad (which I wasn't. I wasn't sad). Then she went, you're on a comedown, aren't you baby, and went I was like erm, she she went, aww, did you. did you have some coke-a-cola? In the matter-of-fact-I'll-find-out-anyway-maternal-type voice. And I didn't deny it, so when everyone was at mine later she went 'guys, she had coke last night, you know' and so it began, the 'yeah, I totes rate that' and the like. Which I did not like, the like. Nor did I like the like of the coke really. I sort of feel like it wasn't even coke. I couldn't get to sleep but wasn't feeling particularly special either. Which is a bummer. But then why was that guy 'weird'? Maybe it was the placebo effect. Then where the fuck did my placebo go? Whatever.

[fluffytrepidation]

vegetarianism

[nevver]

Dylan Thomas

[fluffytrepidation]

taken out of context this facebook message can be given so many meanings

[fluffytrepidation]

I'm re-reading Catching Fire (second to The Hunger Games Triliogy, by Suzanne Collins) as seeing the recently released production of the film reminded me of how much I loved this book - however long ago it was. Six years, seven. As Dr Zeuz said, a good children's book is not just for children at all. Or young adult book, in this case, I guess. And as, I think it was Oscar Wilde, said, a book worth reading only once is not worth reading at all.

So I'm reading it and thinking about something R said, about how she loves it when she sees certain words or lines or sections underlined in the used books she reads, and thinking, what made someone underline this particular bit or word or line or whatever? And reading other people's comments in the margins, because they wanted to remember their particular thoughts or reaction or something. Not like annotating a book for school, like annotating a thought for more thought. Reading a book is a very personal thing, as someone said.

I think all this when reading the line 'the only thought that distracts me from my current situation is fantasizing about killing President Snow. Not very pretty daydreams for a seventeen-year-old girl, I guess, but very satisfying.' And I immediately think, but that is pretty, in the strong, reduced-to-your-primitive-survival-insincts, human-nature and hunter-type way of Katniss way. Katniss is beautiful for her strength, which is why this book is amazing for young girls to read in those susecptible-to-influence first years of teenagehood when you really begin to form who it is you are. The Hunger Games may be seen as an antidote to Twilight, which, alternately, brings beauty out of weakness. I underline this line, hoping that if ever someone comes to read this same book which my hands now rest against, they will wonder, why did someone underline this?