Pantomime

I don't really know what I'm doing
Just watching myself in some play
And the actress looks like she wants to go home
And lie in bed all day
Yeah lie in a big bed all day 

- Patty Griffin, watching my back since 2002

Your tools don't work here

"How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" 

- Meno, via Unknown, via Rebecca Solnit

Calm

"There was no calm, and all that existed was movement, which is the mask of many things, calm among them."

- from 2666, by Roberto Bolaño, trans. Natasha Wimmer

Past it

The victim, by continuing to suffer, irritates the oppressor, who would rather be already past it.

            TEJU COLE

Learn

You've got to learn to leave the table 
When love's no longer being served 

Salient as salient gets

This is the finest example of critical, cultural and linguistic wizardry I can identify. Reproduced here, in full, from the New Yorker website, and from its original home, Teju Cole's utter fucking genius.

WHAT IT IS 

Teju Cole

Is Ebola the isis of biological agents? Is Ebola the Boko Haram of aids? Is Ebola the al-Shabaab of dengue fever? Some say Ebola is the Milosevic of West Nile virus. Others say Ebola is the Ku Klux Klan of paper cuts. It’s obvious that Ebola is the MH370 of MH17. But at some point the question must be asked whether Ebola isn’t also the Narendra Modi of sleeping sickness. And I don’t mean to offend anyone’s sensitivities, but there’s more and more reason to believe that Ebola is the Sani Abacha of having some trouble peeing. At first there was, understandably, the suspicion that Ebola was the Hitler of apartheid, but now it has become abundantly clear that Ebola is actually the George W. Bush of being forced to listen to someone’s podcast. Folks, this thing is serious. The World Health Organization calls it the Putin of Stalin. In layperson’s terms, that’s like saying it’s the Stalin of U2. Now we are seeing the idea thrown around that it could be the Black Hand of the Black Death, not to mention the Red Peril of the Red Plague. If you don’t want to go that far, you have to at least admit that Ebola is the Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb of Stage IV brain cancer. At this point, it’s very possible that Ebola could become airborne and turn into the Tea Party of extreme climate events. Throughout the country of Africa, Ebola is the Abu Ghraib of think pieces. Look, I’m not the politically correct type, so I’m just going to put this out there: Ebola is the neo-Nazism of niggling knee injuries. The kind of threat it poses to the American way of life essentially makes it the North Korea of peanut allergies. I’m not going to lie to you, and I don’t care what color you are, you could be red, green, blue, purple, whatever; you need to understand that Ebola (the Obama of Osama, but don’t quote me) is literally the “Some of my best friends are black” of #NotAllMen. But the burning question no one has raised yet is whether Ebola is the Newsweek of halitosis. We’ll go to the phones in a moment and get your take on this. But first let me open the discussion up to our panel and ask whether Ebola is merely the Fox News of explosive incontinence, or whether the situation is much worse than that and Ebola is, in fact, the CNN of CNN.

Libertad y justicia

Imprescindible

No trates de vivir contra la vida.
No destruyas lo que el movimiento te ofrece para estar tranquilo.

Roberto Bolaño

En casa

"No necesito mas que una biblioteca y un aeropuerto para sentirme en casa." 

- Ida Vitale

If, then.

If you walk with all your restlessnesses in your heart, then you are alive.

Adapting Neruda

"Quiero hacer contigo lo que la koala hace con el árbol."

Para que me entiendas, querido

“What I want to say, querido, is
hunger is not romantic to the hungry.
What I want to say is
fear is not thrilling if you’re the one afraid.
What I want to say is
poverty’s not quaint when it’s your house you can’t escape from.
Decay’s not beautiful to the decayed.”

- from Still Life with Potatoes, Pearls, Raw Meat, Rhinestones, Lard, and Horse Hooves by Sandra Cisneros

The Only Pertinent Resolution

"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."

- Dorothy Parker

Glitch

"Loneliness, loneliness; such a waste of time"

 - The venerable Solomon Burke

Civilization

'But that's the aim of civilization: to make everything an enjoyment.'
'Well, if that's its aim, I'd rather be wild.'

[Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky]

Seams

"Sometimes — quite often — the same people who are capable of a radical questioning of, say, economic neo-liberalism or the role of the state, are deeply conservative socially — about women, marriage, sexuality, our so-called ‘family values’ — sometimes they’re so doctrinaire that you don’t know where the establishment stops and the resistance begins. For example, how many Gandhian/Maoist/ Marxist Brahmins or upper caste Hindus would be happy if their children married Dalits or Muslims, or declared themselves to be gay? Quite often, the people whose side you’re on, politically, have absolutely no place for a person like you in their social, cultural or religious imagination. That’s a knotty problem… politically radical people can come at you with the most breathtakingly conservative social views and make nonsense of the way in which you have ordered your world and your way of thinking about it… and you have to find a way of accommodating these contradictions within your worldview."

- Arundhati Roy, in a 2005 interview with Tehelka

Crash Course

THE PRIDE OF GARBAGE When the owner of the house picked up the bag of garbage and headed out to the street to throw it in the dumpster, the bag was overwhelmed with the fear that she would be put side by side with her companions. But when the man placed her on top of all the others, she became intoxicated with her greatness and looked down at them with disdain.

by Osama Alomar, translated from Arabic by C. J. Collins with Lydia Davis

Look Out, Kids! It's Kurt Vonnegut Madlibs!

We knew from all the [magazines] I'd read out loud in my squeaky [desk chair], often with [grammar], that beautiful [writers] had their [sentences] destroyed by passionate [sub-editors].

The Thing in Itself

"Today at work I was wiping shit down and I was just wistful as fuck. And I was like, damn, I really want to tell Devika about how fucking WISTFUL I am wiping off these goddamn counters. You know?" —Gwenmarie White

Photo: Ryan Primm. Art Direction: Gwenmarie White

With Mint Tea On a Sunday Night; Weightless

What She Knew

People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?

—Lydia Davis