"Blog"

It was a houseful of Bohemians who wanted tremendously to be Philistines.

[thefemalecomplaint]

XVI Across a city from you, I'm with you just as an August night moony, inlet-warm, seabathed, I watched you sleep, the scrubbed, sheenless wood of the dressing-table cluttered with our brushes, books, vials in the moonlight— or a salt-mist orchard, lying at your side watching a red sunset through the screendoor of the cabin, G minor Mozart on the tape-recorder, falling asleep to the music of the sea. This island of Manhattan is wide enough for both of us, and narrow: I can hear your breath tonight, I know how your face lies upturned, the halflight tracing your generous, delicate mouth where grief and laughter sleep together.

[thefemalecomplaint]

How many miles to Babylon? Three score miles and and ten— Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again— If your feet are nimble and light You can get there by candlelight.

    It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my  finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in  the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

[thefemalecomplaint]

“Nothing need be said; nothing could be said. There it was, all round them. It partook, she felt, of eternity... there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out...of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.” 

- V. Woolf, To the Lighthouse

[fotojournalismus]

Notebooks of students are scattered around on the yard of Islamic University in Gaza, hit by an Israeli airstrike on August 2, 2014. (Onur Coban/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

[thefemalecomplaint]

“As if their home cemetery in some way still did exist, in a land where you could somehow walk, and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones could still rest in peace, nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.”

- Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

[thefemalecomplaint]

The earth's a cathedral of pale eyelids

eternally bound and gathered in a

tempest of segments, in salt domes,

in a final color of forgiven autumn.

-Neruda, "Eternity"

[thefemalecomplaint]

During that time I decided someday I wanted to write the Infinite Jest for fellow fucked-up girls, for the slit-your-wrist girls like me. I hadn't even finished Infinite Jest, but I knew it didn't speak to me, just like I knew Kerouac's On the Road didn't speak to me, because he kept on writing about jumping into girls, and I knew I was one of the girls who were fucked and forgotten.

Yet no one had actually told me you could write about being a fucked-up girl. No one had given me permission, or told me that the young female experience was valid to write about in literature. This was not experience we are told we can use-- our breakdowns, our love affairs. Too personal. Too emotional. Too "feminine tosh."

- Kate Zambreno, Heroines

[thefemalecomplaint]

“Grace, variety, the lovely voice, the sparkle of fun and fancy in those dark eyes; all this was nothing. It was not a moral scruple she had outraged, but an aesthetic ideal. Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said… was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?” 

-A Lost Lady, Willa Cather

[viceuk]

[roxanegay]

I have long been ambivalent about Woody Allen. Given his oeuvre, I’m supposed to recognize his talent as a filmmaker. Given how revered Allen is in certain circles, I’ve tried to recognize this talent. I’ve tried to believe we can simply work under the delusion that there are two Woody Allens—the brilliant filmmaker and the sexual predator who married his ex-partner’s daughter and has been accused of sexually abusing his own daughter, Dylan Farrow. I have tried, as others have, to compartmentalize art and humanity. I have tried, and it shames me, to believe that certain transgressions can be overlooked in the face of great art.

Read the rest: Compartmentalizing Woody Allen: What America chooses not to see - Salon.com (via roxanegay)

[awkwardsituationist]

Visit Original Link

"play a different melancholy song"

[thefemalecomplaint]

If women want a feminist revolution-- ours is a world that is crying out for a feminist revolution-- then we must assume responsibility for drawing women together in political solidarity. That means we must assume responsibility for eliminating all the forces that divide women. Racism is one such force. Women, all women, are accountable for racism continuing to divide us. Our willingness to assume responsibility for the elimination of racism need not be engendered by feelings of guilt, moral responsibility, victimization, or rage. It can spring from a heartfelt desire for sisterhood and the personal, intellectual realization that racism among women undermines the potential radicalism of feminism. 

-bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman

[madnatural]

Rainbow Putin. Looks like #BrianEno circa #HereComeTheWarmJets. #equality #putin #russia #gayrights #humanrights #olympics #pussyriot #sochi #sochi2014

[thefemalecomplaint]

“Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.”  ― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

[thefemalecomplaint]

An idea I have is to spend days walking nights writing never eating, sleep only when it rains and have an occasional beer.

-Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day

[thefemalecomplaint]

http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/other-side-story?fullpage=1

"Now, I recognize the sensation as anxiety and shrewdness and intuition—a lesson learned from the man who crept into my bedroom while my mother and father were out; who I wrapped in my bed sheets while he wrapped me around his finger; who held my head against his chest, stroked my hair, and made my stomach flutter. I once believed that that flutter came from the flapping of butterflies’ wings, but I have since learned that it came from a grown man fanning the flames of a young girl’s vulnerability. Trace Lehrer taught me that those flames consumed naiveté and then released passion, but I have since learned that they engulfed trust and then incinerated innocence. They left scar tissue on my memory and cinders of my late childhood. But Trace Lehrer taught me that I could gather those remains just as I once gathered lies in a jar, and I have learned to spread the ashes along wherever I go, so that I won’t have to rummage through debris. He taught me to follow him down a dark dirt road, but I have since learned to follow my gut." 

READ.READ.READ. 

[thefemalecomplaint]

“Yet, she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this—love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.” 

-To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf