ginseng peddling grandmother

hangs up sign

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:48:00 -0700

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).

ten things about me

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:10:00 -0700

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 they take the time to ask me how I am, in order to show that they care? In other words, am I made a priority?

K.’s recent post resonated with me in this respect. I think we all do it to some extent. In romantic relationships I can imagine these tendencies being amplified a hundredfold; but luckily, me and B. are pretty equal in how into each other we mutually are.

02 I talk to B. for hours every night and at lunch. He is interesting and smart and patient and liberal and devoted and so well fitted to me that it kind of deeply freaks me out. YOU DEAR, SWEET MAN, COULD YOU POSSIBLY BE REAL?

03 Still nuts for football. I want to quit my job and watch this sport forever. :(( Drunken caterwauling with Em outside and inside of sports bars need to happen when I next come to Chicago.

04 I miss co-op life. Yeah, the vegetables rotted, the city health inspector shut down our kitchens, the fruit flies descended in nettlesome clouds, people OD’d and were put into homes, vomit was ejected onto carpets in the dining room, and did I tell you guys that one story about how some kids at Casa Zimbabwe got tipped off about an incoming police raid and packed up like 60 pounds of pot from CZ’s root-top marijuana garden into their car and drove 400 miles down to Los Angeles in order to evade capture and incarceration? No? But communal living was good for me on a lot of levels. Although I did not appreciate getting sick three-four times a semester like clockwork.

05 When I feel inadequate about writing, I try to remember that at the Eisner ceremony all the other awards recipients were doctoral candidates in literature and comp lit, and that one of whom had her poetry selected to be in the Best American Poetry Series just that past year.

06 Things that I have inherited from my parents: an incredible, hilarious, body-gloving Asian glow. Hair that falls out after I wash it. Smelly feet. Bouts of reclusiveness.

07 I feel much gratitude to my friends, both the ones that have stayed with me through high school and the ones that I’ve made in uni. I’m not the easiest friend to have sometimes, being secretive, unforthcoming, distracted, inflexible in my beliefs, easy to anger, and/or unemotionally unavailable, but y’all are still here! It’s amazing. Thank you guys. I love you. Some of you won’t read this but if you do, you know who you are.

08 When the author of CP pinged me to ask if I’d like to be an origfic brainstorming buddy I messaged her back all sweaty and nervous and saying stuff like “OMG I CAN’T DO IT I would have major performance anxiety ahahhahaa sorryyyyyy.” Which kind of applies to like twenty other areas of my life, bawling. Seriously though, I need to be better under pressure.

09 David Silva is a sweetie and I want to knit him socks and wool caps because he has been exiled from sunny, edenic Spain and is now forced to live in Manchester where there are only two restaurants and everyone speaks fucking English which he doesn’t understand and it rains all the time. :(((

10 Overcoming one’s inner fear of embarrassment and and rejection is incredibly important. Push yourself outside of your comfort zone and amazing, or therapy-requiring, things will happen! I constantly remind myself.

Tagging: seeminglysweet, lyrist, moutheyes, portmanteau, sophiaxtai, nabokovian, linguaphile, braided, rowistha, falenburg. I think that’s ten.

Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 17:17:00 -0700

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, if you like artless, offhand, china-boned meditations on life and living, if the idea of all of this set to the tune of roughly six ongoing and interpenetrating levels of leitmotifs and symmetries and Big Ben striking hour upon hour upon hour thrills you to no end, you are much more likely to bear through two hundred pages of Mrs. Dalloway nattering breathlessly about flowers.

Do I sound mildly disgusted? I don’t mean to. Mrs. Dalloway is an extraordinarily beautiful book. I just don’t want to oversell it. I could say stuff here about living tapestries of words and beautiful breathable metaphors and prose that radiates, like, unremitting showers of priceless gold coins. And I suppose that I just did. But, honestly. I read this for an undergrad survey course when I was nineteen and came away indifferent. Now it’s like a hearing aid has switched on in my ear. The meter is masterful. There are sentences that read like they were so carefully sewn. I can just feel Woolf briskly snapping off the thread with her teeth and knotting it tight.

I’ve come to realize that I read so much because books are music to my ears. Language ripples, is musical, scales worlds in a jump. Sentences ring like singing through my head. Literally, if you were to take an MRI of my brain while I read Lolita or James Baldwin the areas that’d glow neon on the x-ray would probably be the same ones that’d flare up, with my brain on Chopin. So in many respects, this was eye-popping stuff. Certainly Woolf is in complete command of her writing, and her knack for pinning the kicking verb, for netting bagfuls of lively flopping characters, is I’m sure unsurpassed.

Still, this book really illustrates for me the irritating and apparently omnipresent tension between “beauty of writing” and “something fucking happen before I put my foot through my computer screen”. It’s a rare combo platter that features both. Natalie is supposed to be writing me The Perfect Novel that does just that — in other words, the greatest, loveliest, most moving novel you could ever dream of, about organic vampires — yes, please harass her with me, I’m amassing signatures for a petition — but who knows when that’ll come out? And in the meantime, I’m lost. There’s only so much Dorothy Dunnett in this world.

UNFAIR. UNFAIR.

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 09:08:22 -0700

UNFAIR. UNFAIR.

David Silva is also magical. That smile. It slays me every time.

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 09:05:00 -0700

David Silva is also magical.

That smile. It slays me every time.

lalage: Keep calm and make tea Magical.

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 08:50:25 -0700

lalage:

Keep calm and make tea

Magical.

i thought this was real at first CRYING SO HARD

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 15:43:00 -0700

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, the culture. It’s all very special. But above all else, I love my friends here. Like all of you! Thank you, Dani. Who has another question?

Bill: Hi, Kaka. I’m Bill and I like Real Madrid. Will you kill Barcelona until they are dead this season? Please say yes.

Kaka: Heh, no no no, we don’t want anyone to die, Bill. Of course we hope to beat them this season and win the title, but that’s all. We don’t want violence in football.

Felix: Hi, Kaka. My name is Felix and I’m nine. If you are sold to Chelsea or back to Milan for a lot less than what Real paid for you, does that make you a failure?

Kaka: Wow. Where did you get that idea, Felix?

Felix: I read the papers.

Kaka: Uh, wow, you’re a little young to be reading newspapers, aren’t you, Felix? No, I don’t think it makes me a failure. I’ve had some injuries and couldn’t do as much as I would like for Real, but I think this season I will prove my worth to those papers. Who, uh, who has another question?

Briana: Hi, Kaka. I’m Briana and I like hammers. Why did you let Brazil do so bad at Copa America? My mother said you abandoned them the way my dad abandoned our family when he met that tramp Sandy.

Kaka: Oh wow. Wow, I, uh- I didn’t abandon anyone. I just needed a break after the long season and I knew Brazil would be better off calling up someone else. Wow, I’m sorry about your family and Sandy, but. Wow. Does anyone else have a question? Maybe about the new season and how exciting it will be?

Xavi: Hi, Kaka. My name is Xavi and I’m 31. Cesc is suffering.

Kaka: That’s, uh, that’s not a question Xavi. Why are you here? Please, do any of the children have one more question? Perhaps a question about football and happiness?

Eric: I have one!

Kaka: Excellent! Please, ask away, young man.

Eric: I’m Eric and I have two dogs. Xavi just gave me a note telling me to ask you this: “Cesc is suffering.” And then he wrote 18 exclamation points. I think he’s crying now. Why did you make him cry, Kaka?

Kaka: Jesus.

— from this Dirty Tackle Exclusive.

I—I have nothing intelligent to add. sob.

Spring in Fialta is cloudy and dull. Everything is damp: the...

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 12:47:00 -0700

Spring in Fialta is cloudy and dull. Everything is damp: the piebald trunks of the plane trees, the juniper shrubs, the railings, the gravel. Far away, in a watery vista between the jagged edges of pale bluish houses, which tottered up from their knees to climb the slope (a cypress indicating the way), the blurred Mount St George is more than ever remote from its likeness on the picture postcards which since 1910, say (those straw hats, those youthful cabmen), have been courting the tourist from the sorry-go-round of their prop, among amethyst-toothed lumps of rock and the mantelpiece dreams of sea-shells. The air is windless and warm, with a faint tang of burning. The sea, its salt drowned in a solution of rain, is less glaucous than grey with waves too sluggish to break into foam.

It was on such a day in the early thirties that I found myself, all my senses wide open, on one of Fialta’s steep little streets, taking in everything at once, that marine rococo on the stand, and the coral crucifixes in a shop window, and the dejected poster of a visiting circus, one corner of its drenched paper detached from the wall, and a yellow bit of unripe orange peel on the old, slate-blue sidewalk, which retained here and there a fading memory of ancient mosaic design. I am fond of Fialta; I am fond of it because I feel in the hollow of those violaceous syllables the sweet dark dampness of the most rumpled of small flowers, and because the altolike name of a lovely Crimean town is echoed by its viola; and also because there is something in the very somnolence of its humid Lent that especially anoints one’s soul. So I was happy to be there again, to trudge uphill in inverse direction to the rivulet of the gutter, hatless, my head wet, my skin already suffused with warmth although I wore only a light mackintosh over my shirt. I had come on the Capparabella express, which, with that reckless peculiar to trains in mountainous country, had done its thundering best to collect throughout the night as many tunnels as possible. A day or two, just as long as a breathing spell in the midst of a business trip would allow me, was all I expected to stay. I had left my wife and children at home, and that was an island of happiness always present in the clear north of my being, always floating beside me, and even through me, I dare say, but yet keeping on the outside of me most of the time.

— Vladimir Nabokov, Spring in Fialta

Full text here.

It makes me cry to know that English was this man’s second language.

When I hear the introductory drum riff of Sincerely, Jane, my...

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 09:20:03 -0700

When I hear the introductory drum riff of Sincerely, Jane, my heart drops and rolls, and I think of jogging along in Brooklyn by myself in 103 degree heat, bedeviled by mosquitoes, greasy with repeated applications of tiger balm, eating yogurt and chicken hearts on skewers and 99c packages of chemical tasting sugar wafers in the evenings, but perking up and feeling peppier every time I heard this song.

So Janelle Monae is kind of my idol.

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 09:19:00 -0700

So Janelle Monae is kind of my idol.

I've Been Reading Lately, the Annex: A tournament!

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 12:13:24 -0700

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 event that they vanquished the field, gallantly declared themselves willing to fight each other. An intelligent sword arrived, borne on a silk pillow, and explained that it wished to enter, it merely required somebody willing to wield it.

From Lev Grossman’s The Magician King.

Can’t decide if my loathing of the narrator (snivelly Holden Caulfield with an oversized entitlement complex and, worse, access to unlimited weed) outweighs my desire to revisit Grossman’s provocative and oddity-crammed world of slayer rabbits and ruined gods. One thing that The Magicians did quite well was put a horror of magic in me — some of the scenes are gut-lurching; Grossman clearly takes notes while reading George R.R. Martin. And the writing is of course near edible. But Quentin! I can’t stand his petulance and grousing.

The Player (subtitle: the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner)

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 10:39:00 -0700

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, women swoon over him and children yearn to be like him. But he started out playing for pleasure in the dirt streets of the slums, and now he plays out of duty in stadiums where he has no choice but to win or to win.

Businessmen buy him, sell him, lend him; and he lets it all happen in return for the promise of more fame and more money. The more succesful he is and the more money he makes, the more of a prisoner he becomes. Forced to live by military discipline, he suffers the punishing daily round of training and the bombardments of painkillers and cortisone to forget his aches and fool his body. And on the evening of big games, they lock him up in a concentration camp where he does forced labor, eats tasteless food, gets drunk on water and sleeps alone.

In other human trades, decline comes with old age, but a soccer player can be old at thirty. Muscles tire early: “That guy couldn’t score if the field were on a slope.”

“Him? Not even if they tied the goalie’s hands.”

Or before thirty if the ball knocks him out badly, or bad luck tears a muscle, or a kick breaks a bone so it can’t be fixed. And one rotten day the player discovers he has bet his life on a single card and his money is gone and so is his fame. Fame, that fleeting lady, didn’t even leave him a Dear John letter.

— Eduardo Galeano, Soccer In Sun And Shadow

I love this so much. I promised myself I would attempt to interact with the things that came through my feed on tumblr instead of just mindlessly reblogging pictures of food/books/feminist rage/pelicans (Jason Lanier: “If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?”), but THIS. I’m twenty pages into Galeano and he writes about footie in ways that make me feel ashamed that I ever tried. I think even non-fans would find this book compelling. The writing surely is.

"For a society that tells women in order to be beautiful we have to be tanned, plucked, waxed,..."

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 10:56:00 -0700

““For a society that tells women in order to be beautiful we have to be tanned, plucked, waxed, sucked, and primped, we sure do love making fun of gals who live up to that ideal! While the male model of rugged manly roughness is rarely mocked (hell, we put him on Brawny paper towels!), women who meet the feminine ideal are most often made fun of, called stupid and shallow, and dismissed as vain. It seems there’s no winning for pretty girls, either! It’s something similar to the celeb-hate we love so much, but worse-because we do it to each other every day as well. Be honest-how often do we see a woman with a fake tan, or dyed hair, or obvious plastic surgery, and judge her-even just a little? Don’t feel too bad; we’re trained to do as much. We’re supposed to simultaneously want to be that woman-and want to destroy her. (And maybe hate ourselves for wanting to be her.) It’s all sorts of fucked up. But it drives the competitive spirit that keeps women buying more products, more surgeries, more everything. A lot of people are depending on our judging and hating each other!””

- 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 which is insidious, the other maybe a little less so. The first is the societal imperative to judge other women; we tear others down to boost our own esteem. This is bad. The other comes from a very real concern about the unhealthy standards to which women are held. This is quite healthy. Women shouldn’t aspire to put themselves on the surgeon’s chopping board, eat food and then vomit it back up, dye their hair so that they can conform to some racialized standard of white beauty.

That said, I take her point about not being malicious in one’s judgments. Pursued to an extreme, a judgment inspired by a ‘benevolent’ wish to see these impossible standards dismantled can be equally destructive in its effects. The last thing that one wants to do when attempting to stage a constructive dialogue with people of differing opinions is to launch into a thousand hurtful criticisms of their lifestyle choices and retail philosophy. But at the same time, I think it’s important to keep from falling down the moral relativism sinkhole. An appraisal, an assessment, a judgment in the strictest sense of the word, isn’t necessarily bad. How are we to, ahem, smash the epistemological framework that maintains this essential ontological order without them?

“Hello, Judith Butler. Allow me to scrub your back. So you and Feminist Hulk are saying that my devotion to Old Spice body wash might be part of a larger regulative discourse to maintain an essential ontological gender?”

“That’s correct, Old Spice Man.”

“HULK SMASH EPISTEMOLOGICAL FRAMEWORKS, WHILE SMELLING LIKE SPRING GARDEN.”

Still my fave.

so, actually, it was bobby who alerted me to barca’s magic...

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 09:53:00 -0700

so, actually, it was bobby who alerted me to barca’s magic schoolbus fieldtrip to sea world a few days ago. “did you watch barca get their asses whupped by chivas gualadajara yesterday night? no? well, i’m not a nerd or anything, nor am i taking this soccer habit far too seriously, but alongside of launching an in-depth investigation into wayne rooney’s sordid tabloid exploits and liaisons with various prostitutes and committing to memory the name of cristiano ronaldo’s two sisters, former paramour, and son, i also watched a video featuring xavi and villa riding dolphins on youtube just now!”

edit: DAVID VILLA IN FLORIDA KISSING DOLPHINS W HY IS THIS NOT A FANFIC YET

0:56: a dolphin just beat valdes. in goal. what a precious creature you are, dolphin. (i hope this is an accurate forecast of the season to come.)

Inside my head it’s like “blah Barcelona.” “But David Villa is kissing a dolphin!” “But…Barcelona.” “David Villa KISSING a DOLPHIN!” “Control yourself woman, I’m sure there are Real Madrid players who have also kissed dolphins.” “VILLA! DOLPHIN!”

pretty much.

seasquared: This is a picture of: a. a “night at the enoteca”...

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:15:04 -0700

seasquared:

This is a picture of:

a. a “night at the enoteca” party.
b. 1Ls celebrating the end of their first quarter of exams, fully aware that there will be two more quarters of grueling, soul-sucking exams to follow, and thus drinking heavily.
c. speed-dating.
d. one of those grown-up events you always told yourself you’d have a plenty when you reached 25 and now you’re 28 and still drinking shitty tequila in a friend’s apartment, eating gluten-free ice cream sandwiches and wondering if you’re happy.
e. a perfect Friday evening, and hopefully your Friday evening.

callmecayce: (via Underwater Sculptures Give Sea Creatures a...

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 08:57:27 -0700

callmecayce:

(via Underwater Sculptures Give Sea Creatures a Haunting New Habitat | Underwire | Wired.com)

callmecayce:

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 08:57:17 -0700

callmecayce:

Photo

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 08:57:06 -0700

roswitha: laphamsquarterly: Created this weekend over the...

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 08:46:18 -0700

roswitha:

laphamsquarterly:

Created this weekend over the course of six hours as part of Longshot magazine’s Debt issue, “Circles of Influence” is a chart of artistic, scientific, and phiosophical debts through time. It’s also very pretty and something we’d like to hang on our wall.

Listen to a Longshot Radio interview about the making of this chart with Michelle Legro of Lapham’s Quarterly, Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, and illustrator Wendy MacNaughton.

white guy, white guy, white guy, white guy. this is why i ADORE lapham’s quarterly. ADORE. (and associated.)

dude, i had the exact same thought. the first thing i did was count the ladies. except for a 19c concentration in the top left corner there are basically none elsewhere.

behold! poetry in motion. okay, folks. that’s it for now.

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 10:04:20 -0700

behold! poetry in motion.

okay, folks. that’s it for now.

ginseng peddling grandmother

*hangs up sign*

ten things about me

Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

UNFAIR. UNFAIR.

David Silva is also magical. That smile. It slays me every time.

lalage: Keep calm and make tea Magical.

i thought this was real at first CRYING SO HARD

Spring in Fialta is cloudy and dull. Everything is damp: the...

When I hear the introductory drum riff of Sincerely, Jane, my...

So Janelle Monae is kind of my idol.

I've Been Reading Lately, the Annex: A tournament!

The Player (subtitle: the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner)

"For a society that tells women in order to be beautiful we have to be tanned, plucked, waxed,..."

so, actually, it was bobby who alerted me to barca’s magic...

seasquared: This is a picture of: a. a “night at the enoteca”...

callmecayce: (via Underwater Sculptures Give Sea Creatures a...

callmecayce:

Photo

roswitha: laphamsquarterly: Created this weekend over the...

behold! poetry in motion. okay, folks. that’s it for now.

hangs up sign