August 2011
22 posts
“My work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There’s always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two. Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected—pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.”
—Adrienne Rich (via saint-hymen)
“Your Jesus is my mother is someone else’s turtle. Show us his light. Do it so righteously that we can’t help but look. Don’t worry. Don’t apologize. Don’t cower behind the defeated security of there is no “room for someone like me.” There isn’t room for any one of us. It’s up to you to make a place for yourself in the world. So get to work.”
—DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #82: The God Of Doing It Anyway - The Rumpus.net
“Sometimes you have to revise them before they sell… or revise them again. Sometimes you have to take a break and come back later with fresh eyes. Sometimes you have to shelve it and then cannibalize that book for parts. Sometimes you have to shelve it and move on. Sometimes you have to shelve it and move on… more than once.”
—Jennifer Represents…: So, What If Your Book Doesn’t Sell?
“While there’s a different discussion to be had perhaps about the fairness of mercilessly critiquing celebrities (who are also real people), for what they wear to an event, it’s a very different discussion than whether it’s fair, right or appropriate to target women who are victims of extreme forms of violence and who are considered on the very lowest rung of society. Mocking Celebrity X for wearing an ill-advised $15,000 couture gown to the Oscars is quite different than mocking a woman who is literally living on the streets. I doubt if E! would have fashion segments called “Homeless or Hollywood?”, “Drug Addict or Debutante?”, “Poor or Posh?”. Yet because these women are not ‘just’ potentially homeless, drug addicted and definitely poor, but are ‘streetwalkers,’ prostitutes, whores, hookers, they’re considered fair game.”
—Rachel Lloyd: The Power Behind Policing Fashion
“Here’s a secret: there are lots of books about boys now. As our beloved Chérie l’Ecrivain so aptly noted, they often get shelved in adult fiction, because stories about teenage boys are so much more universal in their appeal than all that boring shit about periods and crying, or whatever it is that teenage girls get up to. A politically inclined person might point out that the problem is not, and never has been, a dearth of stories about boys—you want us to list off complex, moving stories about boys that explore difficult emotions and tough decisions, we’d be here all night, and we need to finish this whiskey and get back to BSG. Can we just pony up for once and admit, collectively, that the problem is a culture that raises boys to be sociopaths? We have been blessed with some stellar men in our life, and they all have one thing in common: they made a conscious choice to be allies, to be friends, to work every day to unlearn the truly terrifying messages our culture inculcates in its men. They all manage to read books just fine.”
—The Rejectionist: Boys and Reading: Is There Any Hope of Someone Saying Something Intelligent?
“
Here’s my system for what to do if you find yourself consumed with anxiety over maintaining the follower counts on your dozens and dozens of social networking presences—if life begins to seem like an unending stream of status updates and check-ins:
1) Link all your social media accounts—Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Tumblr, Last.fm, etc.—to a single Twitter feed. You can easily do this using services like Ping.fm, OnlyWire or Hellotxt.
2) Write down the password to that Twitter feed on a napkin.
3) Take the napkin to the top of the tallest mountain you can find.
4) Burn the napkin.
5) Eat the ashes.
6) Vanish into the underbrush.
Digital fatigue: solved.
” —How to Deal with Social Media ‘Fatigue’
“Harris-Perry is able to eloquently break down why The Help is damaging in that it completely distorts American history and at worst rewrites it to whitewash just how horrible it really was for black women in the south at that time. Harris-Perry argues the movie makes it seem like “Real Housewives of Jackson, Mississippi” when in reality for black women, “it was rape, it was lynching, it was the burning of communities” that were the unspeakable realities they survived.”
—Feministing | Young Feminists Blogging, Organizing, Kicking Ass
“Perhaps the only way to escape your fate is to not know it.”
—The Querent - The Morning News
