August 2011
31 posts
*hangs up sign*
who knew law schools start accepting applications next week? not i.
off tumblr/lj indefinitely; message me on gmail if there’s something urgent you feel needs to be called to my attention, like, oh, pictures of maru dressed as a twinkie (this will never not be relevant to my interests).
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ten things about me
01 When it comes to relationships, I’m constantly calculating and rationing out my affections. How much do I put into this person? Does he or she appear as interested in me as I am in them? Who is it that’s making the phone calls and initiating meet-ups? How do I stand in relation to them and our other, mutual friends? When we talk am I a sounding board for all of their problems or do...
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Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
In which, very beautifully, nothing happens.
The back cover calls Mrs. Dalloway the first novel to split the atom. Congrats, Harcourt. That’s a ingenuous way of marketing what would for most people be utterly unreadable, unbearably stuffy drek. Did I just say that aloud? Whoops. Well, no surprise: there’s a threshold between you and liking this book. If you have an ear for rhythm in language,...
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i thought this was real at first CRYING SO HARD
Kaka: Hello, children! Thank you for welcoming me to your school on the wonderful day. I am really looking forward to answering your questions, so who has the first one?
Dani: Hi, Kaka. My name is Dani and I’m eight. My question is: What is your favorite thing about Spain?
Kaka: That’s a very good question, Dani! I have lots of favorite things about Spain. The people, the food,...
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I've Been Reading Lately, the Annex: A tournament! →
Contestants began trickling into the city a few days later. They were a bizarre menagerie: men and women, tall and short, haunted and feral, scarred and branded and shaved and tattooed. There was an ambulatory skeleton and an animated suit of armor. They carried swords that glowed and buzzed and burned and sang. A handsome pair of conjoined twins offered to enter individually and, in the...
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The Player (subtitle: the Loneliness of the Long...
Panting, he runs up the wing. On one side await the heavens of glory; on the other, ruin’s abyss.
He’s the envy of the neighborhood: the professional athlete who escaped the factory or the office and gets paid to have fun. He won the lottery. And even if he does have to sweat buckets, with no right to fatigue or failure, he gets into the papers and on TV, his name is on the radio,...
“For a society that tells women in order to be beautiful we have to be tanned,...”
– Jessica Valenti, He’s a Stud, She’s A Slut and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know. (via crystalsavestheday)
This actually confuses me quite a bit. We’re “trained to judge her”? It seems to me that this line about “training” conflates two causes, one of...
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“I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the...”
– Humbert Humbert, from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov [p. 265] (via falenburg)
TRUTH.
my life for the last two months
Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people’s parts as he ate; mouthed them as...
July 2011
33 posts
falenburg asked: Hello,
Thanks for the follow! I believe that you asked me a question previously about whether or not I was a Berkeley English Major.
As it seems that you have graduated, (and if I may ask) where has your English Major taken you today, and what was your undergraduate career like at Cal? Anything general (it need not be specific) will be helpful, as I am attempting to...
Thanks for the follow! I believe that you asked me a question previously about whether or not I was a Berkeley English Major.
As it seems that you have graduated, (and if I may ask) where has your English Major taken you today, and what was your undergraduate career like at Cal? Anything general (it need not be specific) will be helpful, as I am attempting to...
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“If you read a book with your laptop thrumming on the other side of the room, it can be like trying to read in the middle of a party, where everyone is shouting to each other. To read, you need to slow down. You need mental silence except for the words. That’s getting harder to find.
And here’s the function that the book – the paper book that doesn’t beep or flash or link...
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yes, yes, yes (part deux)
“The truth was that I had come to a rough patch in my understanding of what I wanted my writing to be. I was in a state of confusion. Over the past four years I had been struggling to find a way to accommodate my taste for the genre fiction I had been reading with the greatest pleasure for the better part of my life—fantasy, horror, crime, and science fiction—to the way that I...
that. smile.
i need to stop this. RIGHT NOW. blarghgasaasg;aslgkajglkasgj;
[Pride and Prejudice] showed her “how dialogue can lift and dance on points, how sentences can shine and crackle with a concentrated energy and a sharp crystal intelligence. So listening to Miss Barnes read it is like falling in love. It’s like walking on air. It fills Dinah’s mind with a new kind of music. Language is all the music she’s never learned to play. Language is...
“Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always try to be a little kinder...”
– J.M. Barrie (via makelovetothemoon)
Early Reviews of Dance with Dragons
“Martin has produced — is producing, since the series isn’t over — the great fantasy epic of our era. A Dance with Dragons is the fifth volume out of a planned seven, and in many ways it’s the best. After five volumes Martin is, if anything, a better writer than when he started. If you’re watching A Game of Thrones on HBO, you’re forgoing the great pleasure of...
