February 2012
2 posts
they are passing, posthaste, posthaste, the...
“when that slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its melting fringes and overwhelming me with the sense of something much vaster, much more enduring and powerful than the accumulation of matter or energy in any imaginable cosmos, then my mind cannot but pinch itself to see if it is really awake. i have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a...
January 2012
1 post
December 2011
2 posts
Watchquizzical quacks: this is a video of my dog, five, watching a video i took of him swimming after ducks a few days ago. this particular confrontation with technology turns my heart into a lil puddle.
October 2011
2 posts
1 tag
September 2011
3 posts
Watchspeaking of war and peace, here’s a flip-book that mills and i made!
of dreams and tolstoy
for the past few weeks, i’ve been reading war and peace for a class, approximately one hundred pages a day. recently, characters from the novel have begun appearing in my dreams. they usually don’t play a big role and the way they appear is not necessarily congruent with their novelistic identity. for example, i’m pretty sure prince andrei was leaning against a wall-papered wall...
June 2011
2 posts
1 tag
May 2011
3 posts
the trouser-crease of his phrase
“russian critics have noted that chekhov’s style, his choice of words and so on, did not reveal any of those special artistic preoccupations that obsessed, for instance, gogol or flaubert or henry james. his dictionary is poor, his combination of words almost trivial – the purple patch, the juicy verb, the hothouse adjective, the crème-de-menthe epithet, brought in on a silver tray,...
April 2011
2 posts
March 2011
3 posts
February 2011
2 posts
as long as i'm here
“the enemy of silence is speech, but there can be no speech without words, and there can be no words without meanings— so it follows inexorably, in the manner of syllogisms, that when we try to speak of events of which we do not know the meaning, we must lose ourselves in the silence that lies in the gap between words and the world.”
a quote from amitav ghosh’s essay...
January 2011
9 posts
losing
the saints lost and i cried. because it feels terrible to lose. i never even cared about football or new orleans until last year. the problem is that once i care about something it is hard to
walk away, i want to do well. i now know the city and the players; i bought napkins and i wear jerseys; i learned to understand plays and rules. i sit on couches every game: at thanksgiving when my mom was in...
December 2010
8 posts
downlikehoney asked: tumblr is such a small small small world. i follow bluelunchbox (who i don't even know) and he just reblogged your nabokovian vocab list, and i just got home from that final, haha. was it just me, or was selenian NOT on the list he gave us to study? i guessed correctly, though, according to the OED.
kinbote, shade, timofey, humbert
for lack of anything else to say and as a study tool, here is my vocabulary list for my nabokov final this afternoon. considering the works we have recently covered this list seems lacking in words both ornithological and lepidopterical and strangely concerned with anatomy. whatevs yo.
bodkin: blunt, large-eyed needle. generally used for threading ribbon or thread through openings
callipygian:...
November 2010
13 posts
“… when I open a book I feel the shape of another human being’s brain. To me,...”
– Zadie Smith, “Read Better”, The Guardian, January 20, 2007. (via msodradek)
he felt as though his heart were a bomb, a...
“miss lonelyhearts stopped listening. his friends would go on telling these stories until they were too drunk to talk. they were aware of their childishness, but did not know how else to revenge themselves. at college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. when they lost this belief, they lost...
nyodene menace
“i feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own disasters.”
don delillo, white noise
