a heart's a heavy burden

Jaycee 🏳️‍🌈 | she/her my little corner of the internet movies, music, books, pop culture, and life in general

[maryoliveoil]

may i ask the meaning behind your URL

My favorite poet is Mary Oliver, and olive oil makes everything better. So, I smashed them together and thought it was cute. Although by the number of asks I've gotten, hardly anyone gets it lmao.

[maryoliveoil]

Can never experiment with URLs again

[maryoliveoil]

A friend just reminded me that Gannett hired a Taylor Swift correspondent. I wonder if they’ve checked with coverage lol

[maryoliveoil]

Now how do I manifest Anya showing up at the Dior show happening right now?

[maryoliveoil]

Two beloved moots are seeing Noah at Fenway this week and all I can think is that I hope no one poops near them lol

[thelordsoftherings]

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) // Dir. Peter Jackson

[maryoliveoil]

I wish you could mute words but only on specific blogs. Like I love the aesthetic things you post, but I don’t need to see your bad Taylor takes.

[tscreators]

TAYLOR SWIFT  — 2021 BRIT Awards

[papayajuan2019]

folks, they're saying it's the highest score a body has ever kept

[seravph]

i think it is very depressing that like every aesthetic people try to emulate are of people doing things but they themselves are incapable of being somebody that does things… the mall goth 2005 aesthetic revived in 2022 but nobody goes to the mall to be annoying and weird and nobody lets themselves be cringe… the cottagecore aesthetic but nobody knows how to raise gardens or live self sufficiently … the dark academia aesthetic but nobody actually reads books…. The obsession of looking like you are a type of person who does something without actually doing anything … the Instagram effect

[seravph]

we need to bring back the word Poser

[red-lamb]

[elizabethanism]

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) - Jonas Mekas

[trin-santos]

PHOEBE BRIDGERS - WAITING ROOM (LIVE ON KEXP) If you were a waiting room, I would never see a doctor I would sit there with my first-aid kit and bleed

[animations-daily]

SAILOR MOON • 1992-1997

[maryoliveoil]

The internet talking about Taylor Swift being in her 30s

[girlmv]

archive mb for @bbarican

[maryoliveoil]

Almost time for Lorde to be back on the festival circuit!!!!!

[mariacallous]

What it meant to be a writer—imaginatively and morally—had interested Didion since she spent her teen-age years retyping Hemingway sentences, trying to understand the way they worked. Fifty years later, she wrote about his afterlives in “Last Words,” an essay for this magazine condemning the publication of books that Hemingway had deemed incomplete. To edit a dead author’s near-finished work for publication, Didion thought, was to assume that he or she was playing by the usual rules. But it was precisely not working in this consensus realm that made great artists great.

A common criticism of Didion suggests that the peppering of her prose with proper nouns (the Bendel’s black wool challis dress, the Grès perfume) is somehow unserious. (For whatever reason, these complaints usually come from men.) But the correct way to understand this impulse is in the lineage of front writing. As Adam Gopnik has noted in these pages, it is Hemingway who’s forever telling you which wines to enjoy while fighting in Spain, how to take your brasserie coffee—how to make his particular yours. Didion feminized that way of writing, pushing against the postwar idea that women writers were obliged to be either mini Virginia Woolfs, mincing abstractions from the parlor, or Shulamith Firestones, raging for liberation. Part of what Didion took from Hemingway, by her account, was a mind-set of “romantic individualism,” “looking but not joining,” and a commitment to the details that gave distinctiveness and precision to that outside view. A trip to the Royal Hawaiian in the midst of a rocky marriage, the right soap to pack for a reporting trip while your husband stays with the baby: in Didion’s work, these were as important in their hard details as Hemingway’s crabe mexicaine and Sancerre at Prunier. Hemingway mythologized his authorial life style so well that generations of writers longed to live and work his way. Didion saw what he was doing, and appropriated the technique.

Yet what made the modernists daring was sometimes a weak point of their endeavor: the writing doesn’t always let readers know how it wants to be read. Hemingway’s theory was that if you, the writer, could reduce what you saw in your imagination to the igniting gestures and images—don’t elaborate why you feel sad about your marriage ending; just nail the image of the burning farmhouse that launched you on that train of thought—then you could get readers’ minds to make the same turns at the same intersections, and convey the world more immersively than through exposition. He explained his theory rarely and badly (hence the endless rancid chestnuts about lean prose, laconic dialogue, and crossing important things out), but Didion didn’t miss the point. “When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges… . The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture,” she noted, in “Why I Write.” And yet she added in signposts Hemingway left out. A first-rate Didion piece explains its terms as it goes, as if the manual were part of the main text. She is perpetually on guard about saying stuff either not clearly enough (the title “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” emerges from her work) or so clearly as to be subject to “distortion and flattening,” and thus untrue to what she means.

“I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself. I wanted everything in the picture” is how she puts it in “Telling Stories,” an essay from 1978 included in the new collection. She is explaining why she lost, or maybe never had, a desire to write salable short stories—tightly constructed pieces hung on a “little epiphany.” For her, the key to capturing life on the page without the usual sort of reduction, she says in the same essay, was figuring out how to use the first person across time.

What We Get Wrong About Joan Didion