“Nay, I do not oscillate in Emerson’s rainbow, but prefer rather to hang myself in mine own halter than swing in any other man’s swing. Yet I think Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow. Be his stuff begged, borrowed, or stolen, or of his own domestic manufacture he is an uncommon man. Swear…
And if you don’t come and lock me up with your voice
in the deep nocturnal house,
then I must pour myself out of my hands
into the gardens of
dark blue…
Beach accident in Coney Island, 1957, Margaret Bourke-White
Visual ‘proliferation’ as I call it has always made my skin crawl; part repulsion, part fascination. Has someone (Freud, probably!) written about this sensation?
(Source: secretcinema1, via banshee-hands)
My fav moment of Town Bloody Hall, starring the devastating Cynthia Ozick!
What I love about the way she frames her question at the end is how it mimics/mocks the amateur’s position, the way the would-be writer begs the God-author for the details of His desk and habits in the hope that copying the method will produce the (divine) madness. Mailer’s superciliousness presupposes all women artists in this supplicatory position. Humor over anger is the weapon concealed in Ozick’s thought here, (earlier, Mailer accuses feminists, not incorrectly, of being “humorless”) and with it she castrates his misogynist fallacies more effectively than anyone else that night.
(Source: offonatangent)
(Source: tranceend, via banshee-hands)
What is poetry anyway? It falls like snow, and settles where it falls,
And melts. I thought I was going to wake up in another world,
And so I have, but it’s the one where I began.
Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me. But they all seem to. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in or what religion they claim. They want to control women. They want to control how we dress, they want to control how we act, they even want to control the decisions we make about our own health and bodies. Yes, it is hard to believe that even here at home, we have to stand up for women’s rights and reject efforts to marginalize any one of us, because America needs to set an example for the entire world. And it seems clear to me that to do that, we have to live our own values and we have to defend our own values. We need to respect each other, empower all our citizens, and find common ground.
(via kelsfjord)
Submit to being called a neurotic. You belong to that splendid and pitiable family which is the salt of the earth.
Why be happy when you can be interesting?
(Source: vintage-sea-nymph, via jujutsu-with-zizek)
“I even planned a last radio talk … . I have made a number of radio talks on all kinds of subjects, in Denmark … . They seem to enjoy me as a radio speaker there … . I planned a talk on how easy it was to die … . Not a morbid message, I don’t mean that, but a message of, well, cheer … that it was a great and lovely experience to die. But I was too ill, you know, to get it done. Now, after being so long in the nursing home and so ill, I don’t feel I do really belong to this life. I am hovering like a seagull. I feel that the world is happy and splendid and goes on but that I’m not part of it. I’ve come to Rome to try and get into the world again. Oh, look at the sky now!”
