12/6: round-up
Hi & happy Monday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I read last week
Quotations
Tweets
Housekeeping:
As always:
I’m selling 5 books for $30 to raise funds for The West Review’s contributors. Free shipping. You can tell me what you’re looking for or let me surprise you. They’re generally brand-new to lightly-annotated by yours truly. I will also include stickers or a lil zine.
Alternately,
you can receive a surprise book in the mail every month for $10 monthly. It’s like a Vogue subscription except it’s more ~intellectual~ than seventy-five pages of perfume advertisements. (Full disclosure: I subscribe to Vogue, so no hate. But why not both?)
What else?
Rachel Weisz plays a heterosexual in the newest Bourne. Sad.
I have new nemeses & please hex them with me.
For those of you who also appreciate homoerotic thrillers like Black Swan, I recommend Birds of Paradise (a little derivative but still good & gay). You can stream it on Prime Video.
Also I rewatched As Good as It Gets on Netflix last weekend & it’s still so good.
As a writer, Alice Seybold damn well knows the difference between active & passive voice, the difference between—for example—someone saying “You were wronged” and saying “I wronged you.” Anyways, read her apology letter to Anthony Broadwater here.
In case you missed it last week:
If anyone else celebrates the holidays with consummerism (mood), here are a few little things that I love:
What I read last week:
Safe Space, Jos Charles
The Renunciations, Donika Kelly
Red Lemons, Sean Shearer
& books I bought last week:
Flung Throne, Cody-Rose Clevidence
Beast Feast, Cody-Rose Clevidence
Quotations:
Just by making a decision to stay out of politics, you are making the decision to allow others to shape politics and exert power over you. And if you are alienated from the current political system, then just by staying out of it, if you do nothing to change it, you simply entrench it.
-Joan Kirner
I think art is the only political power, the only revolutionary power, the only evolutionary power, the only power to free humankind from all repression. I say not that art has already realised this, on the contrary, and because it has not, it has to be developed as a weapon.
-Joseph Beuys
Tonight, my love, we are free / of men, of gods, and I am a river // against you, drawn to current and eddy, / ready to make, to be unmade.
-Donika Kelly
I call this the difficulty of the nonbeliever, / of waking, every morning, without a god.
-Donika Kelly
In a past life I was a blue blaze of sky. / In a past life the blue bottom of a flame.
-Sean Shearer
I don’t know what it means to be lyric anymore.
-Jos Charles
I will cry for this / hand-me-down history, // for your native tongues / lost in the melting pot, the ink of heritage / wet on the page and vanishing.
-Cameron Barnett
To ache is perhaps the first human act. Perhaps the last, too.
-Stevie Edwards
I will always be lousy / at dancing, but it’s still something to do / with my limbs, flailing as they are against time.
-Stevie Edwards
Words are spells in our mouths.
-Suzan-Lori Parks
They are not characters. To call them so could be an injustice. They are figures, figments, ghosts, roles, lovers maybe, speakers maybe, shadows, slips, players maybe, maybe someone else’s pulse.
-Suzan-Lori Parks
My thigh still burns with the stain your hand left behind.
-Steve Bellin-Oka
I try to apologize for things I haven’t done / yet. Those are the bruised apples of me, / the possible fruit rotting in the field.
-Kelli Russell Agodon
Tweets:
Have a good week! & please buy my books so my mom will stop calling me a hoarder.
-DB
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