sarah madges

writer, co-host of same page reading series, co-curator @handwrittenwork

[sarahmadges]

“the white guilt spa for financing the revolution.” new favorite title for a poem? new favorite title for a poem.

[sorayachemaly]

Last year, I wrote an article about women standing in lines to use public bathrooms. It wasn’t actually about toilets, but about why holding women to male standards is discriminatory. It must have twisted some people’s knickers in very tight and uncomfortable knots, because it resulted in...

[madmenintegrated]

[sarahmadges]

my thoughts exactly

[sorayachemaly]

[sarahmadges]

Baltimore

You are under curfew and I am under covers and I do not read past the headlines. You say they say "Baltimore" like it's pronounced "Bald-a-more" like bald more, means "lacking a natural covering," or "having white feathers." Baldwin says white cops have second-nature callousness second-nature covering the streets with new red ruffling white feathers. Black and white and red all over.

[sarahmadges]

A Depression

[sarahmadges]

I've come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn't. So, sad fact, but get used to it, because nothing else is going to happen

The Paris Review, The Art of Poetry No. 88 interview with Anne Carson

[sarahmadges]

He was aware of a low-level but continuous feeling of anxiety connected with the fact that he hadn't started writing yet and didn't have an idea.

"Present Waking Life," The New Yorker portrait of John Ashbery (2005)

And that's how it is. Anxious procrastination.

[sarahmadges]

Thomas Pynchon's legit commercial for his book, Bleeding Edge, is comedic gold. 

[sarahmadges]

“Readers do not want to put their foot on the same step twice."

from Creative Writing magazine--"Picturing the Personal Essay: A Visual Guide"

[sarahmadges]

"Being Someone’s Someone is cozy in theory—a snug image like two letter S’s fitting where the convex meets its concave. Unfortunately, I felt little of that snugness. I’d sculpted myself into what feels nearest to apparatus, a piece of equipment that was increasingly capable of delaying my desires. Of slow-drip longing."

-Durga Chew-Bose via the Hairpin, "Since Living Alone"

Discussions of solitude vs. loneliness, and what it means to be a person, and a friend, in NYC = nailed it.

[slaughterhouse90210]

“I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, inbuilt, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of woman.” —Hilary Mantel, An Experiment in Love

[sarahmadges]

This is why I follow slaughterhouse90210

[sarahmadges]

just gotta be honest with my phone's insurance provider.

[peterfeld]

America 2014, here is your Christmas card.

[sarahmadges]

"He [the Negro in America] is a social and not a personal or a human problem; to think of him is to think of statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence; it is to be confronted with an endless cataloguing of losses, gains, skirmishes; it is to feel virtuous, outraged, helpless, as though his continuing status among us were somehow analogous to disease--cancer, perhaps, or tuberculosis--which must be checked, even though it cannot be cured.  In this arena the black man acquires quite another aspect from that which he has in life. We do not know what to do with him in life..."

-James Baldwin, "Many Thousands Gone" (1955)

[sarahmadges]

Sexual AssAlt-Lit

What's happening in the alt lit world re: assault is troubling, but also not surprising. Alt lit is a microcosm for the larger human community, and bad stuff happens out there all the time, too. But alt lit has a unique vantage point of being able to immediately disseminate awareness of the issue, unlike the world-at-large which will go on silencing and ignoring as per usual. I guess there is a chance for redemption here, and writers like Sophia Katz and Tiffany Wines and countless others coming forward is a beautiful and powerful thing. For Steve Roggenbuck, it was a meaningful opportunity to talk about issues of consent. And probably Steven Trull is feeling esp stupid about ever publishing a "fuck list."

These were just my "quick thoughts." Got a whole 'nother thing coming...

[sarahmadges]

My loan servicer made me pick some weird image for future login purposes. I chose the one called "Jumping Dogs" so that I can forever be bothered by the fact that there is not more than one jumping dog in the icon, and also the one dog that does exist cannot be a dog. This is my "distinctive phrase for this image."