#quoted text

[fresafresitawrites]

in the time of butterflies (1994) - julia alvarez 

-currently reading this for my latino literature course- 

[Text ID: The slamming of a car door startles Dedé. When she calms herself she finds she has snipped her prize butterfly orchid. She picks up the fallen blossom and trims the stem, wincing. Perhaps this is the only way to grieve the big things - in snippets, pinches, little sips of sadness.]

[time-and-disregard]

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

hello beautiful frank. would you ever peel an orange for your lover?

"Would you peel your lover? The answer is yes and no."

[sweetcatastrophex]

"When most people talk about stories, they usually mean fictional narratives or timeless fairy tales like "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." But when journalists talk about news stories,they mean real people and real events: BEARS TERRORIZE LOST GIRL IN ABANDONED COTTAGE." I love journalism lol.

[theatrenarrativemind]

ideas about "the scene"

"It seems true to say that during a performance of a play something comes into being which can be called, quite unpretentiously an "audience mind' -- something to which the actors respond as to a single entity: the corporate presence in the auditorium. This corporate being is composed of everything which the individual spectators have mentally in common. It is indeed precisely the fact that an audience can only be addressed in terms of what its members share that accounts for the characteristic forms of drama: those patterns and structural devices, and in particular those large scenic units which are characteristic of Shakespeare in his most robust stage plays. It is by means of these that a dramatist first unifies his audience and then engages with it. Before the performance has begun, the spectators may be no more than a collection of disparate individuals, possibly complete strangers to each other, though likely to be members of the same society. Only during the course of the play does the 'audience mind' come into being, and it does so when the individual spectators are made to recognize what is recognizable to everyone present. In the course of an entire play, the members of an audience will be made over and over again to affirm their consiousness of their shared knowledge in response to what the dramatist shows them. 

The dramatists materials are therefore from one point of view very limited and concrete: living actors moving about and speaking from within a space visible to the audience. But his concern is also  with something much more abstract: he must devise forms, of a bold and even hypnotically arresting kind, which will draw an audience, without its necessarily being aware of it, into a state of lively concern or excitement, and all the while carrying forward the plot, advancing the fortunes of his characters, and calling into being the world of action. So that while the spectators are being absorbed into the visible and audible world of the play, they are also being exposed to the influence of patterns which, though themselves neither visible nor audible, are none the less powerfuly coercive. These patterns are in fact the menas where by the action of the play is carried deep into the audience's mind. Without them, the  details of the action would be heard as cooly and with as little involvement as one rads the synopsis of an opera."

--SCENIC FORM IN SHAKESPEARE by Emrys Jones

[iseultsdream]

"We need the tonic of wildness—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe, to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed, and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible viguor, vast and Titanic features—the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander." Henry David Thoreau - excerpt from Walden, 1854

[iseultsdream]

Camp Evergreen

The boats like huge bright birds sail back when someone calls them; the small campers struggle out and climb the hill to lunch. I see the last dawdler disappear in a ridge of trees. The whole valley sighs in the haze and heat of noon. Far out a fish astonishes the air, falls back into its element. From the marshy cove the bullfrog offers thoughts on the proper limits of ambition. An hour passes. Piano music comes floating over the water, falters, begins again, falters.... Only work will make it right. Some small thing I can't quite see clatters down through the leafy dome. Now it is high summer: the solstice: longed-for, possessed, luxurious, and sad. - Jane Kenyon (1947 - 1995)