February 2012
18 posts
2 tags
“Trembling with desire, whipping yourself with your own tail, you steal...”
– Franz Kafka, “Investigations of a Dog”
2 tags
“I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on...”
– Moab Is My Washpot (via fuckyeahstephenfry)
1 tag
It’s impossible, isn’t it, to go on living the way you do, thinking the way you do, fooling yourself, pretending to be learning new things each day, thinking about the same things over and over again, mulling the same memories, after talking with someone with passion, curiosity, intellect, and decency enough for both of you? What must you do to bridge that sublime gap? Where do you...
2 tags
“I feel sorry to say I have no favorite place in Beijing. I have no intention of...”
– Monsterbeard
From Chinese activist Ai Weiwei’s heartbreaking piece in Newsweek.
I saved this quote a while back and keep thinking about it over and over. For all the frivolousness of my favorite sorts of writing, this clean bleakness is what sticks with me.
(via beenthinking)
1 tag
1 tag
“‘Whew, what a cold hand!’ he cried. ‘I wouldn’t like to...”
– Franz Kafka, “Description of a Struggle”
1 tag
Hello, cyclobenzaprine.
ETA: ‘t Was divine.
1 tag
“What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, “I...”
– David Foster Wallace, “How Tracy Austin Broke my Heart”
1 tag
2 tags
read this* while you listen to this**
* DFW’s “This is Water”
Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of me. Instead of paying attention to what’s going on inside me.
The really important kind of...
2 tags
I asked one of my friends for permission to keep an observational journal on him so that I can better understand him. He was not offended. He laughed and said now he knows why I’m one of the few who’s come close to not accusing him of being a nut.
We were comfortably silent for a minute. Then he said, maybe I should keep an observational journal on myself. So that we could, you...
2 tags
What is the protocol for closing the parentheses* (is this even how one is supposed to say it?) if you started the sentence with “(” but want to end it with a smiley face? I am having a terrible time clicking the “send” button with this on the screen:
(blah blah blah, blah blah :)) **
But I am equally uncomfortable clicking “send” with this on the screen:
...
1 tag
“We don’t know if what ends with daylight terminates in us as useless...”
– Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, translated by Richard Zenith
vogue-strikeafranzen asked: you could rename your blog silent franzies ... like jonathan franzies... haha im hilarious. / i don't even know if your a fan of franzen (fanzen)
1 tag
You’d hate for him to stop talking to you after learning you’re not the biggest Kandinsky fan, but you’ll probably just like him more if he really stopped talking to you after learning you’re not the biggest Kandinsky fan.
2 tags
“There again, Gloder had met men more skilled in mathematics and the sciences...”
– Making History (via fuckyeahstephenfry)
2 tags
2 tags
“You can tell them that maybe it’s good they don’t “get”...”
– David Foster Wallace, “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed”
Read it here.
3 tags
january 2012
Philip Roth, The Human Stain
Elie Wiesel, A Mad Desire to Dance
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (reread)
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
Steve Martin, The Pleasure of My Company
Keith Gessen, All the Sad Young Literary Men
David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster
Justin Torres, We the Animals
Daniel Harris, Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism
The...
January 2012
43 posts
1 tag
1 tag
2 tags
I feel like going to the park to hike the 2 mile trail and maybe talk to the horses for a little while (not in a deranged way) and watch the sunset and listen to some music, but I can’t stop feeling I’ll see a snake today. It would be nice if my dog would for once in her life not go crazy at the horses so I can bring her along so I won’t suddenly find myself enveloped in thick...
1 tag
“And then a check for twenty-five hundred dollars fell out of the envelope. The...”
– Steve Martin, The Pleasure of My Company
3 tags
“To be making something as yet unformed, unknown—to be living in a deferred...”
– Moyra Davey, “Polyvalence”
2 tags
“In Distinction (1979), a thorough study of “taste” in...”
– Erin Sickler, “Art and the 99%”, Art in America, Jan 2012
4 tags
“Ultimately, we know that the creation of a few art stars is based on the...”
– Erin Sickler, “Art and the 99%”, Art in America, Jan 2012
Thanks for explaining to me why I should not beat myself up over the fact that I’m working for racists and why everybody has been calling Time Warner to change their internet package from “standard” to...
2 tags
things i can do without (a series): #2 CLOTHING
R pointed out I might want to shop for some new clothes, because my super comfy light-blue-and-white striped men’s shirt that I’ve been wearing at least once a week since senior year of high school is “so old that it smells even if you’ve just washed it”. It doesn’t smell bad, it just smells like sleep and bleached coffee stains and shampooed-and-blow-dried...
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
2 tags
2 tags
“The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about...”
– Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
2 tags
“And though Rosa describes how with time she married her dark crow, how her...”
– Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
3 tags
“She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure,...”
– Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
3 tags
SF Public Library by Wendy MacNaughton →
2 tags
2 tags
This is What Happens When You Give Thousands of... →
2 tags
“Dear Thom:
We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of...”
– John Steinbeck’s 1958 response to his eldest son’s proclamation of falling in love.
I have found about 15 solid and timely reminders in here and a great fat affection for the closing line.
via the Rumpus and Letters of Note
(via beenthinking)
3 tags
“with whom I shared a hurried encounter—correction: to whom I got close, I...”
– Elie Wiesel, A Mad Desire to Dance
2 tags
“I wondered why he’d chosen to bring her to Tanglewood. Simply because he...”
– Philip Roth, The Human Stain
2 tags
“The human desire for a beginning, a middle, and an end—and an end...”
– Philip Roth, The Human Stain
Love Poem
It’s so nice to wake up in the morning all alone and not have to tell somebody you love them when you don’t love them any more.
― Richard Brautigan
(via ekatherine)
2 tags
“It is impossible to make my portrait because of my mobility. I am not...”
– Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume IV 1944-1947
2 tags
1 tag
2 tags
1 tag
