Showing posts with label Recommendations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Recommendations. Show all posts
14.9.11
13.3.11
Communism, Cunnilingus, and Common Decency
Click on the image if you wish to go to a magical place where all your questions about North Korean female sexuality and all your prayers for an unprecedented Internet experience will be answered.
25.2.11
Letter
Dear F,
I find myself surrounded by the imaginative debris of my most recent read, a slim but monumental novella by the always astounding Alan Bennett called The Uncommon Reader. The most pertinent thing to say about it for the purposes of this letter, although too mechanical a remark to really befit the work, is that it is everything I have ever wished to know or say about reading, writing, and English Royalty, squeezed through a much more sensitive, seasoned brain, and poured across one hundred or so pages. The following, for instance, plucked a resonant string:
The book is making me romantic and a little ridiculous, dulling my cynicism and softening me toward everything. One has even begun to wish one were a queen, just so one could get away with referring to oneself as "one". In all seriousness, though, apropos of this writing business: I do feel something brewing inside me and by jove it isn't tea.
Can't decide if I want to move onto to Jane Austen or D.H. Lawrence next. No doubt the sex will be a determining factor. Write soon. It's lonely these days. Skeletal trees and literary Brits are my only company.
Love,
L
I find myself surrounded by the imaginative debris of my most recent read, a slim but monumental novella by the always astounding Alan Bennett called The Uncommon Reader. The most pertinent thing to say about it for the purposes of this letter, although too mechanical a remark to really befit the work, is that it is everything I have ever wished to know or say about reading, writing, and English Royalty, squeezed through a much more sensitive, seasoned brain, and poured across one hundred or so pages. The following, for instance, plucked a resonant string:
"The truth was Sir Claude had no notion of what the queen should write or whether she should write at all, and he had only suggested writing in order to get her off reading and because in his experience writing seldom got done. It was a cul de sac. He had been writing his memoirs for twenty years and hadn't even written fifty pages."I wonder if this isn't the hidden, terrifying reason I aspire to a life of writing. Because it is, somehow, the suburbia of ambition, recognizably noble yet too safe to really be significant. A cul de sac career. Comfortable, finite, foreseeable. A place where there is no more journey left to journey.
The book is making me romantic and a little ridiculous, dulling my cynicism and softening me toward everything. One has even begun to wish one were a queen, just so one could get away with referring to oneself as "one". In all seriousness, though, apropos of this writing business: I do feel something brewing inside me and by jove it isn't tea.
Can't decide if I want to move onto to Jane Austen or D.H. Lawrence next. No doubt the sex will be a determining factor. Write soon. It's lonely these days. Skeletal trees and literary Brits are my only company.
Love,
L
12.2.11
1.2.11
16.9.10
In The Eye
The latest gem from Arundhati Roy:
The essay which finds its conclusion in the paragraph above is stunning, upsetting, and absolutely essential. Put an hour aside and read every word.
"The first step towards re-imagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination -- an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past, but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this, we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the water in the rivers? The trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain? If they say cannot, then perhaps they should stop preaching morality to the victims of their wars."
The essay which finds its conclusion in the paragraph above is stunning, upsetting, and absolutely essential. Put an hour aside and read every word.
25.8.10
Bolaño knows better.
"Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite,but the desire to read and to fuck are infinite;
it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace."
it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace."
- Roberto Bolaño.
(Responding to Stéphane Mallarmé: “The flesh is sad—and I’ve read every book.”)
Amulet sucked me in and spit me back out again.
And now I am asking myself: Where shall I go from here? Everywhere, I suppose.
Somebody told me this evening that I am better equipped for the world than it is for me.
And now I am asking myself: Where shall I go from here? Everywhere, I suppose.
Somebody told me this evening that I am better equipped for the world than it is for me.
22.6.10
Bad-ass Boots.
The Coup, The Coup, The Coup.
One single band that can make you think, dance, lust, grieve.
Here's what I was listening to this evening:
One single band that can make you think, dance, lust, grieve.
Here's what I was listening to this evening:
8.5.10
17.2.10
A Single Man
Emotionally thrumming and intensely sensual. I can't remember the last time I experienced a film so viscerally. Here's the trailer (though the film is better than it might suggest, which is as it should be):
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