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Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
nyc_for_free
[ evilly_cherubic ]
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12:29p
birth control
would any of you guys know if you can go into one of those free clinics that charge based on a sliding scale (you are put on the honor system for putting your correct money info in) and get a birth control prescription for pretty much free? i have no health insurance right now and am on my last pack and cant pay a crapload of money for a physical and everything. could i just say im on my period and just need the prescription and that ive been on it already with no adverse effects?
thanks!
current mood:  annoyed
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Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
literaryquotes
[ deathnevets ]
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8:50p
Thoreau
“Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance … till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake.”
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literaryquotes
[ midnight_birth ]
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4:38p
♥ Blind dates and setups of all kinds are completely useless, I long ago decided. Most intelligent men and women like to go forth into the world and stalk their own prey, choose their own mirrors of dysfunction, and repeat their own patterns of abusive relationships, without the well-meaning but futile efforts of friends.
♥ ...He looks away, his other hand quickly swiping at his eye. Was that a tear?
I fight the urge to gather him in my arms and cradle his head against my breasts. And rip off his clothes.
♥ ..As my bedside candles illuminate a page in the precious first edition I hold in my hands, I understand, as I have long understood through my own insatiable appetite for reading and rereadings of Jane Austen's six novels, why children want the same stories read to them a thousand times. There is comfort in the familiarity of it all, in the knowledge that all will turn out well, that Elizabeth and Darcy will end up together in Pemberley, that Anne Eliot will pierce Captain Wentworth's soul, and that Mr. Elton will be stuck with his caro sposa for the rest of his life. It is so unlike the unpredictability and unfairness of real-life endings and the half-life stasis I inhabit.
♥ We walk on for another minute while I contemplate the prudishness of a society that can hardly admit to the means by which the human species reproduces itself, let alone that those same humans actually participate in the process.
♥ The candlelight casts a flattering glow on everyone in the room, from the servants and old gentlemen in their powdered wigs and the young men with their hair au naturel, to the women, octogenarians and rosy-cheeked teenagers alike, clad in the uniform empire waistlines and long gloves, necks glittering with diamonds, gold, and pearls. This is the perfect light for a woman forced to appear in public without makeup.
Even the smell of the body odor has lost its usual overpowering quality tonight, heavily laced as it is with the mingled scents of soaps, perfumes, and the wax of a thousand melting candles. I can almost understand for a second, even in all my twenty-first-century fastidiousness, that one could come to like the scent of a ballroom. Is that Jane's sensibility, I wonder, that's responding to this particular mélange of scents? Or am I, my real self, responding to something else? Certainly I don't need a nineteenth-century frame of reference to pick up the erotic charge underlying the formality of the curtseys, bows, and nods of this elaborately stylized mating ritual.
~~Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler.
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literaryquotes
[ vibekiil ]
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9:09p
Cloud In Pants - Prologue
Your thoughts
day-dreaming in a pudden'-soft head
like an overfed lackey on a greasy sofa,
I'll tease with my heart's blood-streaming shred,
deride you, audacious, till you smart all over.
In my soul there isn't a single grey hair,
no senile tenderness does it hold!
My voice thundering everywhere,
I go, - handsome,
twenty-two-years old.
Tender lovers
with violins vie.
The ruder compete with cymbals.
But can anyone turn inside out like I
to be nothing but lips, bodiless and limbless?
Come and I'll teach you,
Miss Now-Now-No-Fooling,
angelic, stiff as the wall of a precipice.
Come you, too, who skim over lips as coolly
as a cook skims through books of cooking recipes.
If you want -
I can be all crazy flesh,
the antipode of polite romance.
Or
sweet and delicate as you wish;
not a man but a cloud in pants.
I'll never believe there's a flowery Nice.
Today once again I sing glory
to men who've sinned till they're sick of vice,
to women worn as a trite old story.
V.V. Mayakovsky
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greatpoets
[ coqdorysme ]
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11:00p
Voie / Way
Way
what is this road that separates us
across which I hold out the hand of my thoughts
a flower is written at the end of each finger
and the end of the road is a flower which walks with you
—Tristan Tzara
Voie
quel est ce chemin qui nous sépare
à travers lequel je tends la main de ma pensée
une fleur est écrite au bout de chaque doigt
et la bout du chemin est une fleur qui marche avec toi
(traduction par Lee Harwood)
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literaryquotes
[ furius ]
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12:53a
Good Bad Books by George Orwell
"A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which flowered with great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is what Chesterton called the “good bad book”: that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished. Obviously outstanding books in this line are Raffles and the Sherlock Holmes stories, which have kept their place when innumerable “problem novels”, “human documents” and “terrible indictments” of this or that have fallen into deserved oblivion."
- "Good Bad Books" by George Orwell
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greatpoets
[ angabel ]
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2:53a
I'm suffering a lot, trying to cut someone I love very much out of my life. I'm requesting poems that have to deal with letting go, not because of death, but because of all the other reasons why we have to let go of a love. Thank you.
( and a poem by Adrienne Rich )
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Monday, January 4th, 2010
literaryquotes
[ caerial ]
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11:17p
The Rules of Attraction, Bret Easton Ellis
I have lost my I.D. three times this term. I tell the person I see in psychological counseling that I feel the apocalypse is near. She asks me how my flute tutorial is progressing. I do not tell her I dropped it and started taking an advanced video course instead.
Someone asks me: "What's going on?"
"I don't know," I say. "What is going on?"
Sensory Deprivation Tank.
Rest in Peace.
People are afraid to merge on campus after midnight.
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greatpoets
[ ravengirl ]
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10:30p
"Strings" by Ruth Stone
Strings
by Ruth Stone
We pop into life the way
Particles pop in and out
Of the continuum.
We are a seething mass
Of probability.
And probably I love you.
The evil of larva
And the evil of stars
Is a formula for the future.
Some bodies can
Thrust their arms into
a flame and be instantly
cured of this world,
while others sicken.
Why think, little brother
Like the moon, spit out like
A broken tooth.
"Oh," groans the world.
The outer planets,
The fizzing sun, here we come
With our luggage.
Look at the clever things
We have made out of
A few building blocks—
O, fabulous continuum.
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literaryquotes
[ scrabbledude ]
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10:58p
Rainer Maria Rilke - The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
"Ah, but poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one, if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else--); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,--and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. ( Read more... )
current music: Gregor Samsa - Even Numbers
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literaryquotes
[ midnight_birth ]
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7:25p
One of the most amazing poems, ever.
Incvictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
~~William Ernest Henley.
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Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
greatpoets
[ taniwhanui ]
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11:56a
Days
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
Philip Larkin
current mood:  contemplative
current music: Tyra on TV2.
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Monday, January 4th, 2010
literaryquotes
[ withoutanaria ]
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2:56p
To all the world he was the man of violence, half animal and half demon; but to her he always remained the little wilful boy of her own girlhood, the child who had clung to her hand. Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him.
There is nothing so deceptive as the distance of a light upon a pitch-dark night, and sometimes the glimmer seemed to be far away upon the horizon and sometimes it might have been within a few yards of us.
A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog.
-The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sir Aurthor Conan Doyle)
I'm in a Sherlock Holmes mood after seeing the movie. : )
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literaryquotes
[ 16press ]
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2:16p
and now for some Canadian literature...
"Okay, maybe here's something. Sometimes I daydream about terrible things happening to me. Like I'll imagine almost drowning and getting pulled onto the beach, or getting kicked in the face and having a black eye and a big scar, and having to tell people what happened. I'll imagine Josh leaving me for someone else, and our big showdown fight in public, my tearful exit. I don't know why. Most people probably daydream about winning an Academy Award, but I spend a lot of time imagining my funeral or how I'd look in a body cast. I don't even get scared. I just like to imagine them, all these potential emergencies."
- Holding Still For As Long As Possible by Zoe Whittal
pages 75 and 76
current mood: awake
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Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
Monday, January 4th, 2010
literaryquotes
[ imperfectionist ]
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11:58p
Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
From the very beginning I must have trained myself not to want anything too badly. From the very beginning I was independent, in a false way. I had need of nobody because I wanted to be free, free to do and to give only as my whims dictated. The moment anything was expected or demanded of me I balked. That was the form my independence took. I was corrupt, in other words, corrupt from the start. It's as though my mother fed me a poison, and though I was weaned young the poison never left my system. Even when she weaned me it seemed that I was completely indifferent; most children rebel, or make a pretense of rebelling, but I didn't give a damn. I was a philosopher when still in swaddling clothes. I was against life, on principle. What principle? The principle of futility. Everybody around me was struggling. I myself never made an effort. If I appeared to be making an effort it was only to please someone else; at bottom I didn't give a rap. And if you can tell me why this should have been so I will deny it, because I was born with a cussed streak in me and nothing can eliminate it. I heard later, when I had grown up, that they had a hell of a time bringing me out of the womb. I can understand that perfectly. Why budge? Why come out of a nice warm place, a cosy retreat in which everything is offered you gratis? The earliest remembrance I have is of the cold, the snow and ice in the gutter, the frost on the window panes, the chill of the sweaty green walls in the kitchen. Why do people live in outlandish climates in the temperate zones, as they are miscalled? Because people are naturally idiots, naturally sluggards, naturally cowards. Until I was about ten years old I never realized that there were "warm" countries, places where you didn't have to sweat for a living, nor shiver and pretend that it was tonic and exhilarating. Wherever there is cold there are people who work themselves to the bone and when they produce young they preach to the young the gospel of work—which is nothing, at bottom, but the doctrine of inertia. My people were entirely Nordic, which is to say idiots. Every wrong idea which has ever been expounded was theirs. Among them was the doctrine of cleanliness, to say nothing of righteousness. They were painfully clean. But inwardly they stank. Never once had they opened the door which leads to the soul; never once did they dream of taking a blind leap into the dark. After dinner the dishes were promptly washed and put in the closet; after the paper was read it was neatly folded and laid away on a shelf; after the clothes were washed they were ironed and folded and then tucked away in the drawers. Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge and on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, and not one idiot ever thinks of blowing up the bridge.
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
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greatpoets
[ mariashes ]
|
11:36p
Little Red-Cap
At childhood’s end, the houses petered out
into playing fields, the factory, allotments
kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men,
the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan,
till you came at last to the edge of the woods.
It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf.
He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud
in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw,
red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears
he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!
In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me,
sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink,
my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.
The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods,
away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place
lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake,
my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer
snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes
but got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night,
breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem.
I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for
what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?
Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws
and went in search of a living bird – white dove –
which flew, straight, from my hands to his open mouth.
One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said,
licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back
of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books.
Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head,
warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.
But then I was young – and it took ten years
in the woods to tell that a mushroom
stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds
are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf
howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out,
season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe
to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon
to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf
as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw
the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones.
I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up.
Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.
- Carol Ann Duffy
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Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
literaryquotes
[ polarisdib ]
|
11:44p
Infinite Jest
'What I did, I went in there and presented with anger at the grief-therapist. I accused the grief-therapist of actually inhibiting my attempt to process my grief, by refusing to validate my absence of feelings. I told him I'd told him the truth already. I used foul language and slang. I said I didn't give a damn if he was an abundantly credentialed authority figure or not. I called him a shithead. I asked him what the cock-shitting fuck he wanted from me. My overall demeanor was paroxysmic. I told him I'd told him that I didn't feel anything, which was the truth. I said it seemed like he wanted me to feel toxically guilty for not feeling anything. Notice I was subtly inserting certain loaded professional-grief-therapy terms like validate, process as a transitive verb, and toxic guilt. These were library-derived.'
'The whole difference was this time you were walking on-court oriented, with a sense of where the lines were, Schtitt would say.'
'The grief-therapist encouraged me to go with my paroxysmic feelings, to name and honor my rage. He got more and more pleased and excited as I angrily told him I flat-out refused to feel iota-one of guilt of any kind. I said what, I was supposed to have lost even more quickly to Freer, so I could have come around HmH in time to stop Himself? It wasn't my fault, I said. It was not my fault I found him, I shouted; I was down to black street-socks, I had legitimate emergency-grade laundry to do. By this time I was pounding myself on the breastbone with rage as I said that it just by-God was not my fault that--"
'That what?'
'That's just what the grief-therapist said. The professional literature had a whole bold-font section on Abrupt Pauses in High-Affect Speech. The grief-therapist was now leaning way forward at the waist. His lips were wet. I was in The Zone, therapeutically speaking. I felt on top of things for the first time in a long time. I broke eye-contact with him. That I'd been hungry, I muttered.'
'Come again?'
'That's just what he said, the grief-therapist. I muttered that it was nothing, just that it damn sure wasn't my fault that I had the reaction I did when I came through the front door of HmH, before I came into the kitchen to get to the basement stairs and found Himself with his head in what was left of the microwave. When I first came in and was still on the foyer trying to get my shoes off without putting the dirty laundry-bag down on the white carpet and hopping around and couldn't be expected to have any idea what had happened. I said nobody can choose or have any control over their first unconscious thoughts or reactions when they come into a house. I said it wasn't my fault that my first unconscious thought turned out to be--'
'Jesus, kid, what?'
'"That something smelled delicious!" I screamed.
--David Foster Wallace
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Monday, January 4th, 2010
literaryquotes
[ 1234569or10 ]
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12:03a
Love is a mix tape.
"I thought, there is nowhere else in the universe I would rather be at this moment. I could count the places I would not rather be. I've always wanted to see New Zealand, but I'd rather be here. The majestic ruins of Machu Picchu? I'd rather be here. A hillside in Cuenca, Spain, sipping coffee and watching leaves fall? Not even close. There is nowhere else I could imagine wanting to be besides here in this car, with this girl, on this road, listening to this song. If she breaks my heart, no matter what hell she puts me through, I can say it was worth it, just because of right now. Out the window is a blur and all I can really hear is the girl's hair flapping in the wind, and maybe if we drive fast enough the universe will lose track of us and forget to stick us somewhere else." --Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time by Rob Sheffield
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Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
literaryquotes
[ cseresznie ]
|
10:57p
anne sexton, suicide note
Dear friend,
please do not think
that I visualize guitars playing
or my father arching his bone.
I do not even expect my mother's mouth.
I know that I have died before—
once in November, once in June.
How strange to choose June again,
so concrete with its green breasts and bellies.
Of course guitars will not play!
The snakes will certainly not notice.
New York City will not mind.
At night the bats will beat on the trees,
knowing it all,
seeing what they sensed all day.
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literaryquotes
[ cseresznie ]
|
10:53p
anne sexton, the addict
"Don't they know that I promised to die!
I'm keping in practice.
I'm merely staying in shape.
The pills are a mother, but better,
every color and as good as sour balls.
I'm on a diet from death."
"My supply
of tablets
has got to last for years and years.
I like them more than I like me.
It's a kind of marriage.
It's a kind of war where I plant bombs inside
of myself."
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literaryquotes
[ cseresznie ]
|
10:45p
emma forest, thin skin
"My thoughts are messy, my emotions are messy, my body goes in and out at will. The raised white scars on my arms and legs are the only aspect of my being that comes close to minimalism. They came from chaos, but it is hard to carve frustration and unease into the flesh. Only straight lines."
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literaryquotes
[ cseresznie ]
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10:39p
david foster wallace, infinite jest
"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."
"You'll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do."
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literaryquotes
[ cseresznie ]
|
10:31p
elizabeth wurtzel, prozac nation
I would actually sit on the bus to Dr. Sterlings office trying to think of things to talk about. I felt like a girl heading out for a first date with her dream boy, creating a mental agenda of potential conversation ideas just in case, heaven forbid, there was any kind of lag. I worried I wasn't entertaining Dr. Sterling enough, I worried that she's put me on some list of her dull patients that she'd share with her husband late at night, of the ones who couldn't even scare up enough psychodrama in their lives to get themselves through a fifty-minute hour. I worried that my decision to abstain from self-destruction was turning me into a bore. I began to think that in my current state I was too sane for therapy.
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literaryquotes
[ sassycat922 ]
|
11:32p
Two from The Wild Things
"Max wondered why he was the way he was. He didn't want to hate Claire and he didn't want to have destroyed her room. He didn't want to have broken the window over the kitchen sink when he thought he was locked out of the house - which he'd done a few months ago. He didn't want to have screamed and pounded the walls of his room last year, when in the middle of the night he couldn't find the door. There were so many things he'd done, so many things he'd broken or torn or said, and always he knew he'd done them, but could only half-understand why...It was so strange to think about: how was it that just minutes ago, doing all that had seemed like the only thing to do? He hadn't even questioned it. It was the only idea in his head, and he carried it out with great speed and determination. Now he was listening to his mother's footsteps on the stairs, coming up to see him, and he felt like erasing the past, everything he had ever done. He wanted to say, I know I've always been bad, and now I will be good. Just let me live."
(I think this perfectly captures the aftermath of being just so so sooooo angry when you're little - you don't yet have full control of your impulses, but once you've calmed down you have enough rationality to sort of realize what you just did.)
"Just then, the first light of day split the darkness like a knife prying the sky from the earth. The white gumdrop sun broke the horizon and the birds began to gossip from the trees."
Both from The Wild Things by Dave Eggers. :)
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literaryquotes
[ nahara ]
|
11:11p
Paper Towns
"Maybe it’s more like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like, each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these things happen – these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places. And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. […] But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And it’s only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out."
-- Paper Towns, John Green
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literaryquotes
[ darthcynique ]
|
4:57p
Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease
"I don't write to forget what happened; I write to remember. There are worse things in life than painful desire; one of them is to have no desire."
"Educators often justify art courses and creative writing courses on the grounds that self-expression can teach students about themselves. That may be true to some extent, but many creative writers have been quite capable of powerfully emotive writing while lacking insight into the internal conflicts that drive their suffering. While they may not gain insight, they still gain a sense of relief – and a sympathetic audience."
"Several factors besides skill are more significant in professional writers than in most amateurs. One is love of the surface level of language: the sound of it; the taste of it on the tongue; what it can be made to do in virtuosic passages that exist only for their own sake, like cadenzas in baroque concerti. Writers in love with their tools are not unlike surgeons obsessed with their scalpels, or Arctic sled racers who sleep among their dogs even when they don't have to.
"Amateur writers tend to write primarily for self-expression, whereas writers able to become professional can hide or transform their own agenda enough that they are of interest to others."
– The Midnight Disease by Alice W. Flaherty
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