round-up: 3/09
reading recs, quotations, & tweets
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
& a disclaimer, again: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is appalling, and there are many people out there who have addressed and do address it better than I ever could, so I’m not getting on a soapbox here—this will just be your weekly round-up featuring what I’ve been reading and thinking through, like usual.
Things to read:
Housekeeping:
Can everyone send me your favorite recipe, please? I aspire to cook more this spring.
What I’m reading:
Quotations:
I was not their friend. And I'm still not their friend. When you're in New York long enough, you see how insular and nepotistic everything is.
I think there is this idea that if you went to Spence or this boarding school and then you go to Yale or Columbia where I'm an adjunct, and I've been an adjunct for a long time, you expect to have the best. But the thing is to be a writer, you have to actually have an interesting voice.
Ambition is one thing, but to have a vision, to be original, to be your true self, and not to just mimic other people, that’s a whole other thing.
We should be able to be writing amoral, unlikable characters who are repeating these traps, which seem to be the traps of the violence of patriarchy, the atmosphere of misogyny, all these traps.
The problem with these Second Wave writers, like Angela Carter, who's writing about Jean Rhys, is she was always like, "Is this feminist? Have we come far?" But that shouldn't be the diagnostic kit in which we look at literature. Is someone empowered enough?
I don't think literature should be about empowerment.
I think if you’re going to put yourself out there, and if you’re going to earn money, then you’re positioning yourself as a leader in this domain, and you should take responsibility for the repercussions
When someone gives you something, you say thanks. When someone goes out of his way to give you something, you say thank you very much. Those are just the rules.
My mom loved being on vacation, if it meant she could sit by the pool and drink bottomless margaritas, or go shopping. She hated sightseeing, history, nature, museums, stuff like that. She didn’t even much like being with our family, not really. If she could drive out with us and then we’d leave her alone with a frozen drink on a float in the sunshine, those were the times she was truly at ease. But, I mean, what was I going to do? Contact the Hyatt Regency Hill Country Resort and Spa in San Antonio and ask to scatter her remains in their lazy river?
grief is one of those rare emotions that you don’t always move on from but you learn to grow and continue to live on in spite of it. you continue to wake up, you continue to drink your morning coffee, you sleep in, you wake early, you kiss someone new, you sparkle in the light of a small crush, you spend nights alone, you eat well, you indulge, you wander, you come back, you daydream, you stare listlessly at your ceiling some nights, you float back to a time in the past, you look to the future, you drift in the melancholy, you come alive in the sunshine, you freeze in nostalgia, you weep a little in the driver seat of your car, you find yourself growing and moving and moving and slowing down and moving again and slowing down until one day the grief is small enough to keep deep in your pocket. it’s somewhere. it’s close enough to feel with your fingertips but it’s not enough to weigh you down.
every decision you make in life is a brave decision and i truly believe that. i really believe that as you get older and you get to know yourself more, each decision you make is aligned with who you are and who you are becoming. it’s a process that happens naturally and organically.
love will tell you when it’s over.
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
-Anna Quindlen
Tweets:
That’s all for today!
Here are some fun stockings:
