Winter Notes on Summer Impressions.

"uita pamantul"

[1five1two]

'Bedtime'. Nicole Parker. 2021.

[wovi]

*

plath

[paper-wounds]

[thisandthatandeverythinginbtween]

This.

[feral-ballad]

Louise Glück, from Meadowlands; "Telemachus' Detachment"

[Text ID: "When I was a child looking / at my parents' lives, you know / what I thought? I thought / heartbreaking. Now I think / heartbreaking, but also / insane. Also / very funny."]

[maniatown]

Girl whose most frequent mistake is inaction voice: wow I keep making mistakes I better not do anything

[illimitablespaces]

“I want to come to you…Don’t be angry, after all it is me, but I want to sleep with you. Simply to fall asleep and sleep. […] And nothing further. No, there is something: to bury my head in your left shoulder, my arm on your right one - and nothing else. No, something else: to know in the deepest sleep that you are there. And also to hear the sound of your heart. And to kiss your heart.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva, from a letter to Rainer Maria Rilke featured in Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, Her World and Her Poetry (via watchoutforintellect)

[elizabethsinclair]

love elizabeth s.

[kosmogrl]

[kosmogrl]

[escuerzoresucitado]

[linguisten]

“In Greek, whose color lexicon did not stabilize for many centuries, the words most commonly used for blue are glaukos and kyaneos. The latter probably referred originally to a mineral or a metal; it has a foreign root and its meaning often shifted. During the Homeric period it denoted both the bright blue of the iris and the black of funeral garments, but never the blue of the sky or sea. An analysis of Homer’s poetry shows that out of sixty adjectives describing elements and landscapes in the Iliad and Odyssey, only three are color terms, while those evoking light effects are quite numerous. During the classical era, kyaneos meant a dark color: deep blue, violet, brown, and black. In fact, it evokes more the “feeling” of the color than its actual hue. The term glaukos, which existed in the Archaic period and was much used by Homer, can refer to gray, blue, and sometimes even yellow or brown. Rather than denoting a particular color, it expresses the idea of a color’s feebleness or weak concentration. For this reason it is used to describe the color of water, eyes, leaves, or honey.”

— Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color (via emmaylor)

[ps1]

Hyacinth Fields

[bruzum]

[metamorphesque]

walking down the streets of Yerevan, one might just come across a full-scale, realistic recreation of Van Gogh's "Bedroom in Arles" (July 2025)

[bemusedbibliophile]

I usually tell my students that “close reading” means looking at what is actually on the page, reading the text itself, rather than some idea “behind the text.” It means noticing things in the writing, things in the writing that stand out. To give you some idea of what this means, I’ve made up a list of five sorts of things that a close reading might typically notice: (1) unusual vocabulary, words that surprise either because they are unfamiliar or because they seem to belong to a different context; (2) words that seem unnecessarily repeated, as if the word keeps insisting on being written; (3) images or metaphors, especially ones that are used repeatedly and are somewhat surprising given the context; (4) what is in italics or parentheses; and (5) footnotes that seem too long. This list is far from complete—in fact, no complete list is possible—but the list is meant to begin to give you an idea of what sorts of things we notice when we’re doing close reading.

What all five of my examples have in common is that they are minor elements in the text; they are not main ideas. In fact, your usual practice of reading which focuses on main ideas would dismiss them all as marginal or trivial. Another thing they have in common is that, although they are minor, they are nonetheless conspicuous, eye-catching: they are either surprising or repeated, set off from the text or too long. Close reading pays attention to elements in the text which, although marginal, are nonetheless emphatic, prominent—elements in the text which ought to be quietly subordinate to the main idea, but which textually call attention to themselves.

Most of you have been educated to ignore such elements. You have been taught to seek out and identify the main ideas, dismissing the trivial as you go. This has had to be trained into you: read to a young child sometime, you will notice she has the annoying habit of interrupting the flow of the story to draw attention to some minor thing. Close reading resembles the interruptions of that child. It is a method of undoing the training that keeps us to the straight and narrow path of main ideas. It is a way of learning not to disregard those features of the text that attract our attention, but are not principal ideas.

Jane Gallop, “The Ethics of Close Reading: Close Encounters,” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Vol.16, No.3 (Fall 2000), pg.7-8 (x)

[havingapoemwithyou]

Prayer by Marie Howe

[rpfisfine]

I’m the first and last person in my bloodline with a tumblr blog