by max ritvo, from four reincarnations
Saturday, December 5, 2020
living it up
Thursday, November 12, 2020
irresistible
from the needle's eye by fanny howe
Sunday, November 1, 2020
ha ha! you thought you got to choose
from know my name by chanel miller
Friday, October 16, 2020
dot dot dot
by ari banias, from anybody
touch your arm to mine.
see the sunset behind the courthouse, and how they are one
institution touching another. to my elbow touch your own
as the pelicans dip their otherworldly faces
in union into the night water. starched dress shirts
without bodies in them, without heads.
walk with me up the residential hill and down the other side.
as we sit across from each other at the unexceptional thai restaurant
touch your leg to my leg. the table wobbles and because i am with you
i forget it. at the streetcorner,
smell the eucalyptus reminiscent of cat piss.
glance with me into the cardboard box at the discarded khakis
and rollerboard suitcase, and touch my shoulder. this is the key
broken off inside my car door in desperation by a stranger.
climb in through the trunk with me and touch your head to my head
at the cheek, at the temple, at the eye, at the lips.
let's go to the mucky shore and watch
the gondolier in the striped shirt, a cliche and real,
stroking the water seriously.
take my body away from me
lightly by touching me, take away
my head. steer me with gentleness
from the sizeable heap of oranges molding at the curb
which i would otherwise describe further.
Thursday, October 15, 2020
song of the anti-sisyphus
by chen chen from when i grow up i want to be a list of further possibilities
Wednesday, October 14, 2020
for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me
by chen chen from when i grow up i want to be a list of further possibilities
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
kafka's axe & michael's vest
by chen chen, from when i grow up i want to be a list of further possibilities
Monday, October 12, 2020
sorry
excerpts from on earth we're briefly gorgeous by ocean vuong
Friday, October 9, 2020
moonbeam
Thursday, October 8, 2020
~nobel prize winner~
💙
Saturday, September 26, 2020
ace of hearts
Thursday, September 24, 2020
red velvet classic
Wednesday, September 23, 2020
weekend in the underworld
Tuesday, September 22, 2020
old story
Monday, September 21, 2020
on earth
Sunday, September 20, 2020
leisure-loving man suffers untimely death
Monday, September 7, 2020
too much and not the mood
from too much and not the mood by durga chew-bose [published by farrar, straus and giroux]
"being wowed by fruit or cake batter, i should add, yet fairly sure i'm okay with never seeing the grand canyon in person, ought to disqualify me from ever writing about wonder. then again, maybe that's why i'm drawn to wonder: it pays no attention to priorities." (12)
"i've come around to the conciliatory quality of untruths. memory fans out from imagination, and vice versa, and why not. memory isn't a well but an offshoot. it goes secretly. comes apart. deceives. it's guilty of repurposing the meaning of deep meaning and poking fun at what you've emotionalized.
and besides, it feels more covert to have no evidence. to believe that something you've experienced will build on your extent -- your extent as a person who sees things, and is moved by things -- without ever having to prove those things happened exactly as they happened. substantiating is grueling, monotonous. it's what life expects of you. memory is trust open to doubt." (31-32)
"i've been so young for so long and so old for longer -- so heart-wrinkled and naive all at once. so brow-furrowed but heart-open too; a detective. snooping yet easily sidetracked. i'll believe anything because i want to understand, yet understanding can sometimes organize itself like a series of false starts." (35)
"it's been months since i'd been to a museum, but watching this woman mechanically tie her hair was softly enormous." (57)
"going to the movies is the most public way to experience a secret. or, the most secretive way to experience the public." (191)
"i still confuse being misunderstood with feeling shame." (215)
"while my mother said, 'people don't change,' what she meant is, i'd estimate: i shouldn't try to change a person. that the effort exerted is often ineffectual and upsetting. nobody adjusts himself or herself, unless prompted first, by some interior gurgling. some deep mobilizing. urgency forms in the belly. and change, i've come to understand, rises up like nausea: the promise of relief is what makes it bearable. the body's clever ways for communicating shifts can make a person crazy, but also move a person toward life.
in suggesting i shouldn't attempt to alter how this person from my past thinks or finds his focus, my mother also meant: be wary of overvaluing what he gives. be cautious of how proportioned my ability to love is with how impressionable i become. what moves him to create belongs discretely to him. what lights him up from inside and incites growth is what will ultimately specify his dimension. not me." (218-219)
Sunday, September 6, 2020
common to whom
from the introduction section (by anna della subin) in the hospital by ahmed bouanani [published by new directions]
"in his manifesto the editor and poet adbdellatif laabi railed against the stagnation of moroccan thought and called for the total decolonization of culture and art. yet what foundation was left upon which to build a national culture? what bound moroccans together as a nation? after all, it was the colonizers, laabi wrote, who had come up with the boundaries of nations, artificial divisions that retraced the history of conquest and dismembered tribal zones. what made morocco a unity beyond a shared history of defeat? its conquerors had imposed an invented binary between 'berbers' and 'arabs,' for the french had seized upon linguistic differences to pit two imagined 'races' against one another. often, colonial administrators extended special protections to the berbers to alienate them from their arab neighbors, in a classic tactic of divide and rule." (16)
"the number fourteen conjures a conflicting way of measuring time, as the islamic fourteenth century a.h. corresponds to the twentieth century c.e. - the designation ever prompting the question, common to whom? the dueling systems of timekeeping destabilize any authority time itself might have, that 'invention of adults' which twists into absurd shapes in the eternity of a hospital ward." (24)
Saturday, August 22, 2020
sadness and wild freedom
from the rules of inheritance by claire bidwell smith
"grief is like another country, i realize. it's a place." (94)
"my grief fills rooms. it takes up space and it sucks out the air. it leaves no room for anyone else.
grief and i are left alone a lot. we smoke cigarettes and we cry. . .
grief holds my hand as i walk down the sidewalk, and grief doesn't mind when i cry because it's raining and i cannot find a taxi. grief wraps itself around me in the morning when i wake from a dream of my mother, and grief holds me back when i lean too far over the edge of the roof at night, a drink in my hand.
grief acts like a jealous friend, reminding me that no one else will ever love me as much as it does.
grief whispers in my ear that no one understands me.
grief is possessive and doesn't let me go anywhere without it."
"her death leaves me both depleted and emboldened. that's what tragedy does to you, i am learning. the sadness and the wild freedom of it all impart a strange durability. i feel weathered and detached, tucking my head against the winds and trudging forward into my life."
"when it comes to boys, i've always been the same. i;ve always been the girl who gives too much too easily and expects the same in return. i don't remember which boy was first. in the beginning they were all the same: smooth and hairless and vulnerable, emulating or disobeying their fathers -- there was nothing original about them yet.
maybe there never is."
"when people ask me what i do and i say that i work in hospice, they often recoil in a horror that ushers forth a series of well-meaning exclamations.
oh, isn't that hard?
that seems so sad!
i couldn't do that.
the truth is that i don't find it sad at all. when i talk to grieving people, it's like looking at a negative image -- the deeper the grief, the more evidence of love i see.
after my father died i let the follow-up calls from the hospice bereavement counselor go unanswered, and sought out my own coping methods. sometimes these involved drinking and losing myself in the people around me, but i was also driven to learn as much about grief as i could.
i read everything from scientific texts to memoirs about loss. i found myself drawn to movies about death and to information specific to my particular parental loss. i read about trauma and its effects on development. i studied anxiety and how to overcome it. i read about attachment theory and tried to link it to my current relationships.
i couldn't help wondering if what i felt was normal. and each time i came across someone else's story, each time i found reassurance that i wasn't alone in my grief process, i relaxed a little more. . .
the bottom line is that there is simply no one way to define grief, but the irony is that almost every grieving person i've met seems concerned about whether they're doing it right."
Tuesday, August 18, 2020
the pure lover
from the pure lover by david plante [beacon press, 2009]
"grief makes the griever believe the death of his lover is unique. grief demands a grand, timeless expression, and the bereaved tries, tries for that expression, and wonders if the expression is false." (25)
"grief cannot help but idealize." (43)
"grief reveals the griever's vanity, the vanity of his grief, the vanity of all his life." (47)
"at a dinner party to celebrate the success of one of these books, you, when complimented, raised a napkin to cover your face, as if to absent yourself. at the time, i thought you were trying to impress more with your absence than your presence, but i was wrong, for you always thought of yourself as more absent than present." (53-54)
"how confused i become thinking of you and me as one, wondering how much of you i have made mine, how much of me i have made yours - combining in us both mind and soul, as if these two were one, and aristotle and plato, too." (76)
"nietzsche's books, you argued, all together 'cohered,' not 'logically' as philosophy, but 'formally' as in a work of art, the 'form' containing 'an infinite number of inconsistencies.' nietzsche's 'form' was cyclical, was repetition revolving on repetition, each repetition an elaboration." (79)
"did i want you to die, as though your death were a strange fulfillment of my love for you? i'd stop, stand still in the street, overwhelmed by this: the sense, a sensation throughout my body and, too, my soul, that you must live.
i sometimes asked myself in the pages of my diary (wanting in those pages to account for every thought, every feeling) if your death would liberate me from our lives together to live an altogether other life with radiating possibilities. my answer to myself, as near as i could get to a central truth, was no - i wanted, at that center, no other life, but my life radiating in you." (89)
"every night, in bed with you, i thought: i am falling asleep with someone who is dying. all during the night, often woken by you because your back pained you, i'd think: i'm in bed with someone who is dying." (91)
"the griever prays that grief will come and purify him, prays that after the overwhelming devastation of grief, whatever remains of him will be simple and clear. and suddenly, grief overwhelms the griever at the sight of an old woman in a crowd carrying a small valise.
my love for you was not enough - you died." (103)
"grief centers the griever's grief everywhere, making connections." (111)
Monday, August 17, 2020
airport chapel of your mind
from someday this pain will be useful to you by peter cameron [farrar, straus and giroux, 2007]
". . . what she didn't know was that the story of the woman who disappeared like that didn't make me sad, i didn't think it was tragic that she left the world without effect. i thought it was beautiful. to die like that, to disappear without a trace, to sink without disturbing the surface of the water, not even a telltale bubble rising to the surface, like sneaking out of a party so no one notices that you're gone." (175)
"and i felt it was okay to think about the lady with the parrot and not think about why i was thinking about her if i knew why i was thinking about her, and i wanted to tell dr. adler that by wanting those things to be explained she was missing something else. i thought, it's enough that i've thought that, i don't need to say it. i don't need to share it. most people think things are not real unless they are spoken, that it's the uttering of something, not the thinking of it, that legitimizes it. i suppose this is why people always want other people to say 'i love you.' i think just the opposite - that thoughts are realest when thought, that expressing them distorts or dilutes them, that it is best for them to stay in the dark climate-controlled airport chapel of your mind, that if they're released into the air and light they will be affected in a way that alters them, like film accidentally exposed." (175-176)
"she said this in a smug, pleased way that really bugged me. like because i had done something stupid in an effort to get close to somebody i deserved to be ostracized and ridiculed. it made me angry that my own mother welcomed my misfortune. i knew she thought it was probably good for me, a so-called learning experience. the problem is i don't ever learn anything from learning experiences. in fact, i make a special effort not to learn whatever it is the learning experience is supposed to teach me, because i can't think of anything drearier than being somebody whose character is formed by learning experiences."
Sunday, August 16, 2020
bleak fate
from asymmetry by lisa halliday [simon & schuster, 2018]
"the last time i saw my brother, in early 2005, he said that parents have no way of knowing when their children's memories will wake up. he also said that the oblivion of our first few years is never entirely cured. plenty of life is memorable only in flashes, if at all.
what don't you remember? i asked.
what do i remember? what do you remember of last year? of 2002? of 1994? i don't mean the headlines. we all remember milestones, jobs. the name of your freshman english teacher. your first kiss. but what did you think, from day to day? what were you conscious of? what did you say? whom did you run into, on the street or in the gym, and how did these encounters reinforce or interfere with the idea of yourself that you carry around?" (135-136)
"and if it's violence driving up your employer's advertising revenue and you're the one reporting the violence it's hard to see how in that respect, too, you aren't one of the ones perpetuating the violence. so, no, i don't always sleep soundly at night. but it i quit, which i considered very seriously after that day, i think i'd go mad from the alternative. when i'm working, when i'm high on adrenaline, i'm not exactly in what you would call a contemplative state. but when i go home, when i go out to dinner or sit on the tube or push my trolley around waitrose with all the other punters and their meticulous lists, i start to spin out. you observe what people do with their freedom - what they don't do - and it's impossible not to judge them for it. you come to see a mostly peaceful and democratic society as being in a state of incredibly delicate suspension, suspension that requires equilibrium down to the smallest molecule, such that even the tiniest jolt, just one person neglecting its fragility with her complacency or self-absorption, could cause the whole fucking thing to collapse." (214)
"over dinner on the night of his engagement, my brother was trying to explain to his soon-to-be-in-laws about new year's resolutions. in america, he said, it's traditional for people to promise themselves they'll change aspects of their behavior in the coming year. zahra's family thought that was crazy. who are you, they asked, to think you can control your behavior in the future? well, you know, my brother replied, some things you can control. you can decide you're going to eat more vegetables. or that you're going to exercise more. or that you're going to read a little each night before you fall asleep. to which zahra's mother, an x-ray technician at the teaching hospital, replied: but how do you know you're going to be able to afford vegetables next month? or who says there won't be a curfew tomorrow, preventing you from going to the gym or running in the park after work? or who says your generator won't give out and then you'll have to read with a flashlight until the batteries die and then with a candle until that burns down, and then you won't be able to read in bed at all - you'll just have to sleep, if you can?" (222)
". . . i looked rather more like the embodiment of a line i would later read - something about the metaphysical claustrophobia and bleak fate of being always one person. a problem, i suppose, that it is entirely up to our imaginations to solve. but even someone who imagines for a living is forever bound by the ultimate constraint: she can hold her mirror up to whatever subject she chooses, at whatever angle she likes - she can ever hold it such that she herself remains outside its frame, the better to de-narcissize the view - but there's no getting around the fact that she's always the one holding the mirror. and just because you can't see yourself in a reflection doesn't mean no one can." (225)
Wednesday, August 12, 2020
what belongs to you
from what belongs to you by garth greenwell
"he never chatted with one woman, she went on, he was always chatting with several of them at once. he was polite sometimes, sweet, but he could be rude, too, he was rough with some of them, it was like he was a different person with each one. it was like that for me, too, i thought as i listened to her, it's one of the things i crave in the sites i use, that i can carry on these multiple conversations, each its own window so that sometimes my screen is filled with them; and in each i have the sense of being entirely false and entirely true, like a self in a story, i suppose, or the self i inhabit when i teach, the self of authority and example. i know they're all i have, these partial selves, true and false at once, that any ideal of wholeness i long for is a sham; but i do long for it, i think i glimpse it sometimes, i even imagine i've felt it."
"making poems was a way of loving things, i had always thought, i had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning."
"love isn't just a matter of looking at someone, ,i think now, but also of looking with them, of facing what they face"
Saturday, February 22, 2020
silence
"when the phone stopped ringing she perceived a peculiar silence. one of many. which one? there is a silence of perception. it wasn't that. thoughtless silence? forced silence? chosen silence? silence because you're listening. fearful silence. because the radio's broken. hesitation. when you don't say it because you don't want to hurt the other person. enraged silence. when you don't say it because it's not going to do any good. waiting. thinking. not wanting to be misunderstood. refusing to participate. self-absorption. when a loud sound is over. shame."
"'at jack's service this morning,' anna continued, as though all of this was normal, 'i realized that when i first comprehended the enormity of what was happening to my community, i only anticipated that i would lose many people. but i did not understand that those of us who remain, that is to say, those of us who will continue to lose and lose, would also lose our ability to fully mourn. i feel that i have been dehumanized by the quantity of death, and that now i can no longer fully grieve for each person."
"'my family seems so unreal to me. and when i am with them, i also am not real. i am a character in some movie and someone else wrote the script."
"she had long been the kind of person who explains herself regularly. it was part of a longstanding faith in being understood and a desire to apologize for every inadequacy. to ask forgiveness."
"only shame is the true indication of authentic camouflage."
Saturday, February 8, 2020
dislocation
"the late queer theorist jose esteban munoz pointed out that 'queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence. . . when the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present.' what gets left behind? gaps where people never see themselves or find information about themselves. holes that make it impossible to give oneself a context. crevices people fall into. impenetrable silence."
"we can't stop living. which means we have to live, which means we are alive, which means we are humans and we are human: some of us are unkind and some of us are confused and some of us sleep with the wrong people and some of us make bad decisions and some of us are murderers. and it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing: the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. it is simply a state of being -- one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind. so bring on the queer villains, the queer heroes, the queer sidekicks and secondary characters and protagonists and extras. they can be a complete cast unto themselves. let them have agency, and then let them go."
"later, you will learn that a common feature of domestic abuse is 'dislocation.' that is to say, the victim has just moved somewhere new, or she's somewhere where she doesn't speak the language, or has been otherwise uprooted from her support network, her friends or family, her ability to communicate. she is made vulnerable by her circumstance, her isolation. her only ally is her abuser, which is to say she has no ally at all. and so she has to struggle against an unchangeable landscape that has been hammered into existence by nothing less than time itself; a house that is too big to dismantle by hand; a situation too complex and overwhelming to master on her own. the setting does its work."
Saturday, January 25, 2020
more truthful lives
"death's perpetual certitude inspires us to imagine more truthful lives. but death, by thwarting narcissism, also elevates our ethical imaginations. what does the egotist believe but that his existence is more important than those of others, that his self is of immense value and preeminently worthy of being nourished and perpetuated? death deflates this puffery, positing that all attempts to boost the "i" are ultimately vain. though you are unique on one level, on another you are the same as everyone else: you will suffer and die and return to the dirt.
shaking us out of narcissism, death calls us to merge with our fellows, to enter into a global community bound by hurt. it says: you are dying, and this is pain, and you would like to alleviate it in any way possible, and so now you apprehend the plight of all others, also moribund and agonized and in need of succor. obviously, when we experience this distress, we don't by necessity become aware of the miseries of others. we can hurt selfishly, convincing ourselves that our discomfort is worse than anyone else's and thus deserving of the most care. but hopefully we will, when we realize that our lot is common, suffer charitably, and so translate our own groaning into empathy with another's torment."
Friday, January 24, 2020
kudos
"i said that while her story suggested that human lives could be governed by the laws of narrative, and all the notions of retribution and justice that narrative lays claim to, it was in fact merely her interpretation of events that created that illusion. the couple's divorce, in other words, had nothing to do with her secret envy of them and her desire for their downfall: it was her own capacity for storytelling - which, as i had already told her, had affected me all those years ago - that made her see her own hand in what happened around her. yet the suspicion that her own desires were shaping the lives of other people, and even causing them to suffer, did not seem to lead her to feel guilt. it was an interesting idea, i said, that the narrative impulse might spring from the desire to avoid guilt, rather than from the need - as was generally assumed - to connect things together in a meaningful way; that it was a strategy calculated, in other words, to disburden ourselves of responsibility."
"'i have known many men,' sophia said, resting her slender arms on the table, whose white cloth was littered with crumpled napkins and wine stains and half-eaten pieces of bread, 'from many different parts of the world, and the men of this nation,' she said, blinking her painted eyes and smiling, 'are the sweetest but also the most childlike. behind every man is his mother,' she said, 'who made so much fuss of him he will never recover from it, and will never understand why the rest of the world doesn't make the same fuss of him, particularly the woman who has replaced his mother and who he can neither trust nor forgive for replacing her. these men like nothing better than to have a child,' she said, 'because then the whole cycle is repeated and they feel comfortable. men from other places are different,' she said, 'but in the end neither better nor worse: they are better lovers but less courteous, or they are more confident but less considerate. 'the english man,' she said, looking at me, 'is in my experience the worst, because he is neither a skilled lover nor a sweet child, and because his idea of a woman is something made of plastic not flesh. the english man is sent away from his mother, and so he wants to marry his mother and perhaps even to be his mother, and while he is usually polite and reasonable to women, as a stranger would be, he doesn't understand what they are."
Friday, January 3, 2020
ambiguous loss
"the outcomes of ptsd are also similar, though not identical, to outcomes of long-term ambiguous loss. both can result in depression, anxiety, psychic numbing, distressing dreams, and guilt. but ambiguous loss is unique in that the trauma goes on and on in what families describe as a rollercoaster ride, during which they alternate between hope and hopelessness. a loved one is missing, then sighted, then lost again. or a family member is dying, then goes into remission, then the illness returns again in full force. hopes are raised and dashed so many times that psychically people no longer react."
"learning to live with the ambiguity of divorce and remarriage requires a whole new set of skills. the first is to revise our perception of who our family is and who it is not. . . all this requires a second skill, the ability to let go of needing an absolute and precise definition of family. . . rather than weakening the family, such elasticity in family composition enhances resilience and flexibility. . . in a sense one has to abandon the concept of monogamy in order to make divorce and remarriage work because a first marriage does not simply stop when a second one starts. it is forever a part of the fabric of one's life."
"ambivalence can result from the ambiguity of not knowing who is included in the structure that is supposed to be one's family. conflicting impulses that may exist in the psyche are often a consequence of this uncertainty.
ambivalence is often intensified by deficiencies outside the family -- officials cannot find a missing person or medical experts cannot clearly diagnose or cure a devastating illness. because of the ambiguity, loved ones can't make sense out of their situation and emotionally are pulled in opposing directions -- love and hate for the same person; acceptance and rejection of their caregiving role; affirmation and denial of their loss. often people feel they must withhold their emotions and control their aggressive feelings because social norms dictate that becoming upset is inappropriate and will only bring further harm to the missing person, demented elder, or comatose child. this is the bind, especially for women, who are most often caught in caregiving or waiting roles.
mixed emotions are compounded when a separation involves the potential of irretrievable loss. when there is a chance that we will never see a loved one again, we protect ourselves from the prospect of losing that person by becoming ambivalent -- holding our spouse at arm's length, picking a fight with a parent, or shutting a sibling out even when he or she is still physically present. anticipating a loss, we both cling to our loved ones and push them away. we resist their leaving and at the same time want to be finished with the goodbye."
"if we are to turn the corner and cope with uncertain losses, we must first temper our hunger for mastery. this is the paradox. to regain a sense of mastery when there is ambiguity about a loved one's absence or presence, we must give up trying to find the perfect solution. we must redefine our relationship to the missing person. most important, we must realize that the confusion we are experiencing is attributable to the ambiguity rather than to something we did -- or neglected to do."
"for people who are accustomed to having some control over their lives, insight appears to help; such people want to understand 'why,' to penetrate the deeper meaning of an experience before they risk doing something different. but for others, insight is gained experientially, not cognitively. for them, the family therapist carl whitaker was right when he said, 'you only know what something is after you've gone past it.' people have to experience a phenomenon before they can understand it. what is clear to me is that we as clinicians must be more sensitive to individual differences in ways of understanding a situation if we are to avoid creating the very resistance we sometimes attribute to the people we are trying to help."