OSCILLATIONS AND MUTILATIONS

"I was just a boy when I sat down to watch the news on TV. I saw some ordinary slaughter, I saw some routine atrocity. My father said, "Don't look away. You got to be strong, you got to be bold, now." He said that in the end it is beauty that is going to save the world, now." Katya Kazbek, 28, NYC. Columbia postgrad, Oxford alum. Aspiring writer, freedom fighter, binge eater, infidel. I brew vodka and convert bears to feminism, then braid my hair and go dancing. This is my moodboard, my sketchbook and my liquor cabinet.

[liquorcabinet]

Régis Marvin Merveille N'Kissi Moggzi in "Swagger", dir. Olivier Babinet, 2016.

[liquorcabinet]

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the deathcup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

Shirley Jackson, "We Have Always Lived in the Castle"

[liquorcabinet]

I remembered my mother's insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked down by a car on the way to or from school and I and the family would be disgraced even beyond the grave, presumably, if my underwear was dirty. And I began to worry, in fact, as the doctor sniffed and prodded, about the state of the shorts I was wearing. This made me want to laugh. But I could not breathe.

James Baldwin, "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone"

[nenavisti]

“Listen, dis foreign TV channels dey spoil de image of our country. Dese white stations dey make billions of dollars to sell your war and blood to de world… We  no bad like dis. OK, why dem no dey show corpses of deir white people during crisis for TV? Abi, people no dey kill for America or Europe?” “You dey speak grammar!” someone shouted. “Wetin concern us wid America and Europe? Abeg, give us cable TV.” “Remove dis toilet pictures!” said another. “So our barracks be toilet now?” the police answered.  "What an insult!“  "You na mad mad police,” Monica said. “Ok, cable TV no be for free anymore!” the police said. “But it’s our pictures we are watching on cable TV,” Madam Aniema said. “Why should we pay you to see ourselves and our people?” The police answered, “Because government dey complain say cable TV dey misrepresent dis religious crisis.”

Uwem Akpan, “Say You’re One of Them” (via nenavisti)

[nenavisti]

Status, as in any traditional, class-conscious society, declines more slowly than wealth.

Mohsin Hamed, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” (via nenavisti)

[nenavisti]

You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare.

Philip Roth, “The Plot Against America” (via nenavisti)

[nenavisti]

Ever notice how many expressions carry over from queers to con men? Like ‘raise,’ letting someone know you are in the same line?

William S. Burroughs, “Naked Lunch” (via nenavisti)

[liquorcabinet]

At nineteen, one lives in the utter idolatry, therefore the extreme superstition, of sex. Monstrously exaggerated tales about sexual feats, which we listen to greedily, determine our expectations. The disappointments are correspondingly great.

Gregor von Rezzori, "Memoirs of an Anti-Semite"

[liquorcabinet]

All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.

Aleksandar Hemon, "The Lazarus Project"

[nenavisti]

Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it’s okay to be a boy; for girls it’s like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.

Ian McEwan, “The Cement Garden” (via nenavisti)

[nenavisti]

The mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence.

William Faulkner, “Absalom, Absalom!” (via nenavisti)

[liquorcabinet]

The discovery of the horror tale at an early age was fortuitous for me. This sort of tale serves, in many ways, the very same purpose as fairy tales did in our childhood. It operates as a theater of the mind in which internal conflicts are played out. In these tales we can parade the most reprehensible aspects of our being: cannibalism, incest, parricide. It allows us to discuss our anxieties and even to contemplate the experience of death in absolute safety. And again, like a fairy tale, horror can serve as a liberating or repressive social tool, and it is always an accurate reflection of the social climate of its time and the place where it gets birthed

Guillermo del Toro, "Haunted Castles, Dark Mirrors"

[liquorcabinet]

Most beautiful, good things are done by women people scorn.

Gillian Flynn, "Gone Girl"

[liquorcabinet]

I wished, first of all, to buy my way into people's good graces with my book so that, in subsequent personal contact, I would find the ground already prepared, and, I reasoned, if I succeeded in implanting in their souls a favorable image of me, this image would in turn shape me; and so, willy-nilly, I would become mature.

Witold Gombrowicz, "Ferdydurke"

[liquorcabinet]

I was counting the blades of grass, he said, by way of apology for his absentmindedness. It's a sort of pastime of mine. Rather irritating, I'm afraid.

W.G. Sebald, "The Emigrants"

[liquorcabinet]

The monologue of an isolated person who allows the threads of private thoughts to surface in letters and conversations, even in conversations with strangers.

Julia Blackburn, "Daisy Bates in the Desert: A Woman's Life Among the Aborigenes"

[liquorcabinet]

Nippers was a whiskered, sallow, and, upon the whole, rather piratical-looking young man of about five and twenty. I always deemed him the victim of two evil powers — ambition and indigestion.

Herman Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener"