Something

[melisica]

i’m kinda happy but i also wanna get hit by a car at the same time

[pigmenting]

“I remember my childhood as a long wish to be elsewhere.”

— Louise Glück, from “Unpainted Door” in Poems 1962-2012

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

“And you have the nerve to say you love me more than I love you. Well, anyway.”

— Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West wr. c. November 1927

[thebodyfeels]

When any relationship reaches these heights ❤️

[quotemadness]

“Angry, and half in love with you, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

[thebodyfeels]

I remember this

[antigonick]

I’ve watched a video essay on the over-analysis of films lately which really got me thinking about the extent to which people/critics ‘overanalyze’ some parts/aspects of literature in particular, like seeing/interpreting meaning in something when it was explicitly not intended to be there. I’d love to hear what you think about it!!

I’m going to leave Umberto Eco take this one for me, shall I ? I entirely agree with his Limits of Interpretation (1990) :

The text is a system, and as system it has necessary constraints. 

“A text is a place where the irreducible polysemy of symbols is in fact reduced because in a text symbols are anchored to their context. The medieval interpreters were right: one should look for the rules which allow a contextual disambiguation of the exaggerated fecundity of symbols. […]

Any act of interpretation is a dialectic between openness and form, initiative on the part of the interpreter and contextual pressure.”

The reader is free to interpret, but this freedom does not deny the existence of the interpreted product (and its natural limits) :

“The aesthetics of reception maintains that a literary work is enriched by the various interpretations it underwent along the centuries […] and does not deny that every interpretation can and must be compared with the textual object and with the intention operis.”

because : 

“To critically interpret a text means to read it in order to discover, along with our reactions to it, something about its nature.”

In short, 

“Any act of freedom on the part of the reader can come after, not before, the acceptance of the literal meaning of lexical [and more] items’ constraint.” 

I’d like to thank Umberto and my obsession with Reader Response Theory for this very lazy exposé.

[thebodyfeels]

Read ‘Because’.

[poetsandwriters]

“I’ve decided I don’t always have to be writing. I let myself live and try to let go of the pressure to always physically write. In some ways it feels like I’m collecting feeling. That’s not to say I don’t sit down and try regularly to get something on the page, but it might not look like a poem. It might look like writing in a journal about what I’ve seen and heard that day. That process helps me feel more willing to listen to what’s possible rather than predetermine what I think I should be on the page.”

—Analicia Sotelo, in “Wilder Forms: Our Fourteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine (2019); read the extended version on pw.org!

[thebodyfeels]

COLLECTING FEELING. YES

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Bertolt Brecht, from Selected Poems: 1913-1958; “Sentimental Song No. 78,”

[thebodyfeels]

this is where they can bury me indeed. I am gentler now with the authors who write the same stories of the one they love. like fitzgerald. 

[verkur]

Solitary shopkeepers, Hong Kong 2018.

[forkeepsblog]

- Walt Whitman

[forkeepsblog]

When a note you jotted down for yourself years ago resurfaces right when you need it.

[nwaj]

Nouvelle vague, Jean-Luc Godard, 1990

[booksqouted]

“You never got what you wanted; you just learned to get by without it.”

— Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

[thebodyfeels]

This will not be me

[thechosenjuan]

honestly a good partner isn’t necessarily someone who loves the exact same things you love but rather someone who is willing to listen to you ramble on and on about a particular subject that you’re passionate about even if they have little to no interest in it

[thebodyfeels]

It is also someone who might get bored and don’t have the capacity to listen to too much of it at first, but really want to. And tries over time to get better at listening, because they know you care about it.

18/Dec/2018

[soulsorting-deactivated20190722]

I’m so unapologetic about my love for love. Why should I dim my intensity? Why should I restrict my heart when it lives within everything?

[neil-gaiman]

I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’. That’s just treating other people with respect.”

Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile. 

You should try it. It’s peculiarly enlightening.

I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking “Oh my god, that’s treating other people with respect gone mad!”

Happy Valentine’s Day.

[neil-gaiman]

It feels like it’s time to repost this.

[danger]

One Hour Photo (2002)

[booksqouted]

That’s the way it is: if two people want to be together, they’ll find a way. They’ll forge a way.

Shobha Rao, An Unrestored Woman: And Other Stories (via booksqouted)

[booksqouted]

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.

Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane (via booksqouted)

I am proud that I still do. and guard my pleasure in small things fiercely