Riley Wolfram > Recent Status Updates

“The fact that this sadomasochistic power dynamic can and usually does exist with affection, care, tenderness, and loyalty makes it easy for power-driven individuals to deny their agendas, even to themselves. Their positive actions give hope that love will prevail.” (152)

“But everyone knows that all forms of violence are glamorized and made to appear interesting and seductive by the mass media. The producers of these images could just as easily use the mass media to challenge and change violence.” (98)

Hmmm…I see the sentiment, I understand it — do I agree with it? Not really! She says it’s not an argument for censorship but it holds a totally similar logic. Idk.

“To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility. We are often taught we have no control over our ‘feelings.’ Yet most of us accept that we choose our actions, that intention and will inform what we do. We also accept that our actions have consequences.” (13)

“I was in the Italian American Lit class at a city college in Brooklyn when I saw, on my phone, a Facebook update from Trevor‘s account, posted by his old man. Trevor had passed away the night before. ‘I’m broken in two,’ the message said. In two, it was the only thought I could keep, sitting in my seat, how losing a person could make more of us, the living, make us two.” (167)

“Outside, the hummingbird’s whirring sounds almost like human breath. Its beak jabs into the pool of sugared water at the feeder’s base. What a terrible life, I think now, to have to move so fast just to stay in one place.” (64)

“The cruelest walls are made of glass, Ma. I had the urge to break through the pain and leap out the window…He was only nine, but had already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers. The boys crowded around me, sensing entertainment. I could smell their fresh-laundered clothing, the lavender and lilac in the softeners.” (24)

THE CRUELEST WALLS ARE MADE OF GLASS. Yeah. Break my heart. Wow.

“What do we mean when we say survivor? Maybe a survivor the last one to come home, the final monarch that lands on a branch already weighted with ghosts.” (13)

One chapter in and the pen game is already bonkers.

“I whisper, or sigh, and I want to cry out. The room yawns open. I have the sensation time is shifted, that we are in a directionless flow of time that goes back down infinite tunnels and corridors, as if this one room in the hospital has opened out onto the farthest stretches of the universe.” (56)

Ugh, been a while since I read something by the diva, miss thang herself. Cannot wait.

“Finally, neophytes in the witch cult would be asked to enter their names into the Devil’s book—an unmistakably Faustian conceit—and often to perform sexual acts with the goat-man Satan, including anilingus (the act of eating Lucifer’s asshole is termed osculum infame, something important to know).”

UMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!????????

Full transparency: was not expecting to read this in a scholarly work. Kudos?

Wouldst thou like to live deliciously … let us discuss