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The virus has reminded us, after all, of the thing we have been denying so passionately: that we are delicate creatures, composed of the most fragile material.

“For the longest time, I have felt that there’s been too much world. Too much, too fast, too loud...when I learned of the impending quarantine, I felt something like relief. I know many people felt similarly, even if they also felt ashamed of it. My introversion, long strangled and abused by hyperactive extroverts, has brushed itself off and come out of the closet.”

Beirut, April 3, 2020 Dearest M, I was so happy to receive your email, and so happy to know you are healthy and managing, despite everything. That most unimaginative of all email openers: “I hope t…

It’s my dirty secret that when I long for childhood, I find myself also somehow longing for the war, or at least the whole culture it enforced, of an indoor, interior space that had to be consistently fortified against the horrors of the outside with food and books and play and love. I guess it’s the same way that children who grow up in abusive households tend to seek out love that’s full of pain—love isn’t recognizable without its accompanying helping of pain; for me it is comfort, or rather safety, security, stability, that cannot be fully felt somehow unless it comes coupled with dread and danger and the threat of annihilation.

"The female gays were quite young. Well, they didn’t look old yet."

Author and teacher Maggie Nelson talks about why research is "like throwing crap in a cauldron" (in a good way), and how she handles those tricky times in between.

Painter Joan Mitchell once described her gargantuan abstract paintings as “remembered landscapes which involve my feelings”

Michael Turek’s photographs act as a corrective to Western perceptions of Siberia, that vast blank space on our maps.

“He is a houseguest following his subjects’ lead.“

It is thought to be Europe’s last matriarchy, a tiny Baltic island where women are in charge and weddings can last three days. Photographer Anne Helene Gjelstad’s portraits of Kihnu are a lament for a dying way of life

#photography #estonia #art and design #culture #europe

“Taking a page from the playbook of the LGBTQ rights movement, we believe that you cannot change the politics of immigration until you change the culture in which immigrants are seen. Storytelling is central to our strategyy: collecting stories of immigrants from all walks of life, creating original content (documentaries, databases, graphics, etc), and leveraging stories we’ve collected and stories we’ve told to influence how news and entertainment media portray immigrants, both documented and undocumented.”

“Because I am not a citizen by law or by birth, I’ve had to create and hold on to a different kind of citizenship. Not exactly what President Shepard described as ‘advanced citizenship’—I don’t know what that meant—but more akin to what I call citizenship of participation. Citizenship is showing up. Citizenship is using your voice while making sure you hear other people around you. Citizenship is how you life your life. Citizenship is resilience.”

We are in the midst of the planet’s sixth great extinction, in a time where we are seeing the direct effects of radical global climate ch

“On recent visits to the Midwest I’ve driven through ghost landscapes—less prairie, less farmland. Memory overlaid my vision, inscribing alternative realities onto the present, making me aware of where I was within the context of where I have been.

Isn’t this one of the things we do when we sit down to write? We decide how to describe what we are compelled to describe.“

“I had experienced enough Cordova deaths to know one pot was filled with green chili [sic?!], another with pintos, and the last one with menudo. Deaths, weddings, birthdays—the menu was always the same.”

The author of the prize-winning Ducks, Newburyport on why she prefers books written before Hiroshima

“I often find it more rewarding to read what people thought about, and what they did with literature, before we were reduced by war and capitalism to mere monetary units, bomb fodder and password generators. And before the natural world became a depository for plastics and nuclear waste.

Anger and alienation have resulted, and they’re fine subjects, but there are times when you’d like to remember some of the higher points in the history of civilisation as well, and the natural world before we learned to view it all as tainted. The intense humour, innocence, sexiness and play of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, for instance – could this have been written after Hiroshima? Could Gargantua and Pantagruel? Don Quixote? Emma? I don’t see how. Thanks to the offences of patriarchy, a lot of the fun has gone out of being human, and I like books that look at life in less constricted ways.”

...

“You watch people get pregnant and know they’ll be emotionally and intellectually absent for 20 years. Thought, knowledge, adult conversation and vital political action are all put on hold while this needless perpetuation of the species is prioritised. Having babies is a strong impulse, a forgivable one, but it’s also just a habit, a tradition, like weddings or putting butter on popcorn.”

#lucy ellmann #fiction #books #literature

“Kathleen Hanna sometimes talks about the first Julie Ruin album as something produced out of what she calls ‘bedroom culture’: just a girl, in her room, with a tape recorder. The ability to shut yourself in and create a world where you’re safe in your aloneness. Where you have control of every shape, every curve. I love the record. Its tape loops are stitched carefully over drum-machine beats, a dreamy self-containment in its melodic repetition. A lot’s been made of the material of confined womanhood, from its potential or its idiosyncrasy.

Give a girl her own room and she can produce a whole world, we’ve been told by many. She can write her own zine, find her own band, create her own blog, all that bullshit. But sometimes a room isn’t safe at all. Sometimes imagination can be its own prison. Sometimes, trapped in my room, watching my feet float against the wall by my bed, the only worlds I can imagine building are the bleak, solipsistic ones. Worlds where insecurity emerges to tear me to shreds, one delicate peel of skin at a time. I finger the edge of Sophie Calle’s angry scrawl, the smell of burnt sheets in my nostrils. Rooms have a way of betraying you, especially when what you’ve built in them is so entirely yours. Your solitude can consume you, a bed that sets itself on fire over and over again.”

“Teacher told us to describe three sunsets— ‘in French if you like,’ — which betrayed, though we knew already, her priorities did not lie with that tongue.”

The second movie proved to be the last straw for Willa Cather. Warner Bros. had first adapted her novel A Lost Lady in 1924, a year after the book was published. The film is now lost, so we can only take the New York Times’s word for how terrible it might have been. (It seems unfair to reduce a thing that can’t defend itself to a single snide glance upon it, but the past, reliant on summary, unable to preserve most of the things described, rarely gives us another option.) “There are too many close-ups in this production,” Mordaunt Hall—the Times’s first regular film critic—complained, and far too many scenes of trains for a film that doesn’t go anywhere. There is one absurd mustache, and said lost lady unforgivably wears so much makeup that “she presents an appearance that would hardly attract any young man.”

“Joanna Russ wrote in her book How to Suppress Women’s Writing that Cather seemed to be reduced in the canon by being treated as a mere regionalist, while Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner’s small plots of land were allowed to be synecdoches. Cather never thought her project so small— ‘America,’ she wrote, ‘works on my mind like light on a photographic plate.’ Russ also writes that women’s writing can be cheapened by being received without context and antecedents, an unexpected find amid a backdrop of men.”

“I can see there are pleasures to be found in a shared sense of alienation, a shared queerness, emerging from a shared blackness that is still understood, in the first instance, as an unfitness for the world and history as it is.”

“Knowledge is, by its nature, always incomplete. ‘A scientist is never certain,’ the scientist Richard Feynman reminds us. And neither, the poet John Keats would argue, is a poet. ‘Negative capability’ was his term for the ability to dwell in uncertainty. My mother, a poet, has been instilling this ability in me since I was a child. ‘You have to erase yourself,’ she says, meaning abandon what I think I know. Or ‘live the questions,’ as Rainer Maria Rilke writes in his Letters to a Young Poet. This, my mother reminds me, is as essential to mothering as it is to poetry—we must live the questions our children raise for us.”

Adapted from the essay “Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits” in Essays One. * The following are just my personal pieces of advice. They won’t be the same as someone else’s, and they may …

The artform has allowed many female illustrators to confront how they see their bodies and how their bodies are seen by the men around them

“Drawing a female body isn’t necessarily about confronting shame, but in many ways it can be about reminding oneself that it’s difficult to be in a body at all.”

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