LitReflex

cataloguing reflections on literature

[theparisreview]

Happy birthday, Virginia Woolf! Listen to the only known recording of her voice here.

[micdotcom]

The 39 best literary references from ‘The Simpsons’ — according to the Lisa Simpson Book Club 

[litreflex]

Transience

Coming off of reading Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland, where the permanence of a character is felt and conveyed and loved and resented and agonized over, the impermanence of characters in Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad is striking.

Not that they aren't full personalities—just that their wholeness is transient. The chapters mark the turning of character viewpoints as much as the turning of entire narratives—and I'm hungry for more.

Half-way through and I feel like I've lived a thousand lives.   

[brightwalldarkroom]

Spectacle is one purpose for cinema. Stories best viewed on a large screen because of the dollars allocated to their effects make the movie-going experience an amusement park. But, as at a theme park, many of the delights of the cinema of spectacle are best directed at the young, whose tastes are still nascent and who are responsive to kinetic thrills. For the rest of us, cinema’s concerns can become smaller and grander. If the takeaway of a movie has become the screen capture—four or five frames that conjure the entire experience—film is no longer at-speed, emotional time travel. It works more concisely, in a few excised images that are an aesthetic index for exalted feelings. The importance of cinema’s plastic elements become exaggerated, like an advertisement— but they still carry an emotional heft. The aim now is the beautiful, and the interesting.

Karina Wolf, “Gifts” (Bright Wall/Dark Room, Dec. 2014)

[quicklikelight]

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee, 1960

[everythingrhymeswithalcohol]

A riot is the language of the unheard.

Martin Luther King (via kateoplis)

[litreflex]

...since America is nothing if not about categories.

The truest half sentence, found in "Tristes Tropiques," White Girls by Hilton Als

[litreflex]

I worked the double, figuring maybe this was what was required: total dedication. Forget the loved ones. Forget the outside world. There is no life other than this life. I didn't spend much time trying to figure it out. The man scared me. Years later, I got another perspective on things. I opened the Post to see a photo of my old boss's wife, draped over the awning of a Chinese restaurant on the Upper East Side. She'd apparently performed a double-gainer from the window of her high-rise apartment and not quite made it to the pavement. So I guess she wasn't that happy after all.

Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

[litreflex]

"As a person on the first island of that great colonial archipelago that Spanish colonization created, I feel a deep calling to spend time among the last islands. Call it history or call it family but something about the Philippines speaks to my deepest hybrid colonized-island self."

[bostonreview]

Reading poetry challenged our worst affectations: cheap ideology, fraudulent insights, secondhand convictions. We had found a language that had not gone rigid.

Drew Calvert (via bostonreview)

[millionsmillions]

To live abroad, particularly for work, particularly in isolation, inspires a particular kind of surrealism. I wake up around seven from the church bells clanging across the street; I brush my teeth, walk down the hill to work, spend all day with my colleagues and students. At night I go back to the gîte, smoke a cigarette off my balcony, and fall asleep feeling empty, alone, and strange. It feels rude to say I am sad here: there is nothing to be sad about. I am working a dream job, in a beautiful place. But as it is easy to be lonely in a crowd, so it is easy to be depressed in southern France.

Recommended Reading: Larissa Pham on Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. You could also read Holloway McCandless on the author’s By Nightfall. (via millionsmillions)

[bostonreview]

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

-Denis Diderot

Celebrate poetry every week with our Poetry Matters newsletter.

(via bostonreview)

[filmantidote]

Seeing the two women, [Vanda’s character Clotilde and real life-named Clotilde Montron], together in Pedro Costa’s Ossos is striking – the unkempt unwashed hair, the ungroomed eyebrows, the upper lip hair, lack of even natural cinematic makeup – help establish the elements of realism. Both are gender ambiguous to the typical spectator, illustrating the expectancy of gender performance for women in cinema, as well as the expectation of the operation of the gender binary (women are clearly demarcated as “feminine” cis females).  I would even say that Vanda’s challenging of this expectation is what makes her so “dangerous” [as Costa described her]. This refreshing imagery, coupled with the unapologetic look of confidence Duarte exudes when Clotilde and Tina dress for work as housemaids, reinforces why Duarte is so magnetic and fascinating to observe. The contrast of her more delicately-featured friend does nothing to deter her confidence, which makes the description “total lack of respect” further apply to gendered beauty standards. More than this, Vanda represents a woman often not seen in cinema: a woman unconcerned  with expected gender performance and appearance.

[filmantidote]

— Apexa M. - Vanda’s Resistance: Exploration of Vanda Duarte in Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas trilogy | FilmAntidote.com

[litreflex]

What happens when the workshop pits a person of color's lived experience against a white perspective of how that experience should read on the page? For a writer of color, the defense of one's work can quickly become a defense of the self.

Mathew Salesses, in NPR's Code Switch 

[litreflex]

A Text Conversation on Interracial Dating, One-Sided

I: I want to believe that interracial relationships can work.

I: I want to believe that an empathy gap between two races -- one with whom there has historically and presently been a fetishization of the other -- can be breached with diligence, care, and not least some measure of love.

I: I want to believe this despite a lot of evidence to the contrary.

I: I hope you can forgive knee-jerk reactions, but I also hope you don't dismiss them.

I: Beyond that, I don't really know how to feel.

[ribofunky]

Science fiction is social fiction. That’s the line from Mary Shelley through H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley and George Orwell to the politically committed writers of the sixties and seventies. It’s about using speculation as a tool with which to examine the contemporary condition. The closest it comes to prediction is in the provision of long-range weather warnings.

Warren Ellis (x)

[neil-gaiman]

Hi, Mr. Gaiman. I am feeling inexplicably sad today. There's no trigger, it just happens - some days worse than the others. Any words of comfort, just anything to get me through this episode? :(

Stephen Fry said it so much better than I ever could…

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/it-will-be-sunny-one-day.html

April 10, 2006Dear Crystal,I’m so sorry to hear that life is getting you down at the moment. Goodness knows, it can be so tough when nothing seems to fit and little seems to be fulfilling. I’m not sure there’s any specific advice I can give that will help bring life back its savour. Although they mean well, it’s sometimes quite galling to be reminded how much people love you when you don’t love yourself that much. I’ve found that it’s of some help to think of one’s moods and feelings about the world as being similar to weather:Here are some obvious things about the weather:It’s real.You can’t change it by wishing it away. If it’s dark and rainy it really is dark and rainy and you can’t alter it. It might be dark and rainy for two weeks in a row.BUTIt will be sunny one day.It isn’t under one’s control as to when the sun comes out, but come out it will. One day.It really is the same with one’s moods, I think. The wrong approach is to believe that they are illusions. They are real. Depression, anxiety, listlessness - these are as real as the weather - AND EQUALLY NOT UNDER ONE’S CONTROL. Not one’s fault. BUT They will pass: they really will.In the same way that one has to accept the weather, so one has to accept how one feels about life sometimes. “Today’s a crap day,” is a perfectly realistic approach. It’s all about finding a kind of mental umbrella. “Hey-ho, it’s raining inside: it isn’t my fault and there’s nothing I can do about it, but sit it out. But the sun may well come out tomorrow and when it does, I shall take full advantage.”I don’t know if any of that is of any use: it may not seem it, and if so, I’m sorry. I just thought I’d drop you a line to wish you well in your search to find a little more pleasure and purpose in life. Very best wishes(Signed)Stephen Fry