lisa reads things

[lisareadsthings]

“Her presence was enough, like that of the evening light”

George Eliot, Middlemarch

[lisareadsthings]

“Bosch is off somewhere fucking a hydrangea, and I’m checking my work email.”

Discontent, Beatriz Serrano

[lisareadsthings]

Beetle & the Hollowbones, Aliza Layne

[lisareadsthings]

“I only want to live in peace and plant potatoes and dream.”

[lisareadsthings]

“A daring thought was taking shape in her mind. She began to anticipate a solitude of her own, peaceful and full of possibility. She felt something close to exhilaration, of a kind that people can permit themselves when they are blessed with love.”

Tove Jansson, Fair Play

[dk-thrive]

“It is simply this: Do not tire, never lose interest, never grow indifferent — lose your invaluable curiosity and you let yourself die. It’s as simple as that.”

— Tove Jansson, Fair Play (NYRB Classics, March 15, 2011)

[lisareadsthings]

“Indeed the truths of women in fiction have meant trouble since the time of Cassandra.”

- After Sappho, Selby Wynn Schwartz

[lisareadsthings]

“Readers according to Colette were like lovers. The best were attentive, intelligent, exigent, and promiscuous. She urged us to read widely and well, to seek out precisely the novels prohibited to us and lie down for hours in bed with them. We should read to gorge and sate ourselves, Colette enjoined us; after a good book we should lick our fingers. We should especially read the lives of women…”

- After Sappho, Selby Wynn Schwartz

[lisareadsthings]

“In the woods behind the summer house, they slipped off their dresses; naked all afternoon they apostrophized each other in the vocative.”

- After Sappho, Selby Wynn Schwartz

[girlmostlikely]

So real

[rafefar]

The great blue heron patiently stalks its prey. In the blink of an eye, it lunges in and pulls out a stick, yuck!

[lisareadsthings]

Per bell hooks: We must engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have meaningful chances of survival… yes, yes! But I don’t know how. How do we examine the legacy of colonization when the basic facts of its construction are disputed in the minds of its beneficiaries? Even that which wasn’t burnt in the 60s – by British officials during the government-sanctioned frenzy of mass document destruction. Operation Legacy, to spare the Queen embarrassment. The more insidious act, though less sensational, proved to have the greatest impact: a deliberate exclusion and obfuscation within the country’s national curriculum. Through this, more than records were destroyed. The erasure itself was erased. With breathtaking ease, the facts of Britain’s non-war twentieth-century history have been unrooted, dug out from the country’s collective memory. Supplanted. Vague fairytales of benevolent imperial rule bloom instead. How can we engage, discuss, even think through a post-colonial lens, when there’s no shared base of knowledge? When even the simplest accounting of events – as preserved in the country’s own archives – wobbles suspect as tin-foil-hat conspiracies in the minds of its educated citizens?

Natasha Brown, Assembly

[lisareadsthings]

The answer: assimilation. Always, the pressure is there. Assimilate, assimilate… Dissolve yourself into the melting pot. And then flow out, pour into the mould. Bend your bones until they splinter and crack and you fit. Force yourself into their form. Assimilate, they say it, encouraging. Then frowning. Then again and again. And always there, quiet, beneath the urging language of tolerance and cohesion – disappear!

Natasha Brown, Assembly

[lisareadsthings]

This kind of thinking leads to undoing. Or else, not doing, which is the slower, more painful approach to coming undone.

Natasha Brown, Assembly

[lisareadsthings]

I feel. Of course I do. I have emotions. But I try to consider events as if they’re happening to someone else. Some other entity. There’s the thinking, rationalizing I (me). And the doing, the experiencing, her. I look at her kindly. From a distance. To protect myself, I detach.

Natasha Brown, Assembly

[lisareadsthings]

“You know, it’s not because I haven’t thought about it. About changing things. But it always seems like there’s no time or money to patch the holes. Just enough to keep tossing water overboard.” -Travis Baldree, Bookshops & Bonedust

[lisareadsthings]

“Every book is a little mirror, and sometimes you look into it and see someone else looking back.”  ― Travis Baldree, Bookshops & Bonedust