Button > Recent Status Updates

I haven't wept at the end of a book the way I'm weeping now in a good, long while.

I adore the Kwen facta non verba moral stance, and the riverbed notion of yet unfulfilled potential for good. While I don't think intentions count for nothing when weighing the goodness of a person, ultimately, it is the actual impact we have upon others in the real world rather than our theoretical, intended impact that matters.

This magic system! Sanderson, eat your heart out.

Sciona and "Tommy" have met. I'm enchanted, gobsmacked, intrigued. Wang has done a flawless job of making this reader simultaneously sympathetic to Sciona's plight and furious with her dismissive, prejudical treatment of Thomil.

Both Sir Ector and the Lady of the Lake have made miraculous recoveries from death.

I'm impressed with the performances and editing of this dramatization, but every once in a while the anachronistic anglicization of everyone's speech makes me squawk.

I struggle to understand why Graves invented the false narrative about Postumus being framed for attempted rape of Livilla by Livia. It seems explicitly woman-hating to turn Livilla into an accessory to legal entrapment that never appears to have actually happened.

This author clearly believes in the friendzone.

Never before had he received the look of scientific condescension native to a mind that is forever tracing deep connexions between unscientific postulates and the world itself. Psychoanalytic jargon allowed both respectable professionals and those en route to respectability to pepper their vocabulary with genital references that would have been out of bounds even in openly lowbrow entertainment such as cabaret shows.

You think every functioning couple knows themselves and expresses what they want and hears what the other is saying perfectly? That we're not pumping everyone else full of prejudices and fantasies with no connection to reality? The only thing holding relationships together is intention. It's not a matter of fact or reason. We get to say what happened because we're the only ones who care.

shyness wobbling her voice at the rare moment of wanting to get a compliment right.

You think I'm oblivious to what you want, but you still want me to intuit your feelings, even though you deliberately mislead me about them, possibly to test my intuition, which you use to gauge the depth of my understanding and caring for you.

What I really fear is being an echoist. A helpless nymph who loses her voice for loving it too much, loses her body for loving a narcissist. Nothing but a dumb attention-hungry repetition of other people's words. The cliche made flesh, then robbed of it. Wherever will collapses under fate it makes an echo.

to the charge of narcicissm? Nolo contendere. All love is projection. stuffing your experiences and hopes into whatever object petit a, then embracing it. And don't forget, dude, we've discussed how self-loathing is narcissistic too; dwelling over your shortcomings, insisting on your own worthlessness over everyone else's objections. Hating is, after all, caring.

I want impossible self-authorship: to be sui generis, valuable in myself and flawed by my own hand. I'll become the archangel of wry suffering, producing only ephemera, marginalia, juvenilia--a print so fine it doesn't exist. Being unwritten, unread, hiding out in an apartment, in subtext, unnatural, unnurtured, refusing to be emplotted like a good little subject, that's my whole deal now.

'More than anything I refuse to make my past mean anything, to have the imposed cliche of mistreatment-by-shitty-dudes matter in any way.'

Oh Linda I love you. Despite a truckton of your shit.

I always knew narrative was oppressive--narrowing things down to one or even a thousand perspectives is still an abridgment of infinity.

'I didn't say no, because I assumed he'd probably say no to my no and there was definitely no saying no to that. Consent made everything less complicated.'

fresh damn hell

I'm the kind of idiot who'd have no identity without idiocy to condemn; overcontent with half-knowledge, deploring received knowledge so much she refuses knowledge wholesale.

She waved him off as if he were an odor.

Insecurity proves as contagious as yawning.

his hands are unimaginative tourists, bumbling around her most obvious landmarks, before wandering circles around her back and thighs.

She seemed to have forgotten their fight, which meant she'd won.

you go online and read the public affirmations of the First World. At last the mass can sing of the mass. What writing can survive? The inverse in verse, the antisocial novel?

Huge flat-screen on the wall where portraits of ancestors might have once hung.

"But now it's like, we click. You totally get it. Come on, you know it's true."
Here I'm trying to contain the fury--you know, that seething star-core of indignation that goes supergiant whenever some dickhead makes his sexual entitlements known.

Henrik, p. 226-230. Just wow.

It felt uncanny to square this needy version of Linda with the intimidation he'd always associated with her, embodying as she did that unicorn species of hot girl who he'd been trained to assume looked down on him and thus deserved to be resented.
that loserly imperative to get as near as possible to hot girls and stare at them and be useful to them and get their approval had never withered, like he'd hoped it would.

Memory to be constructed into something less obviously stupid and trivial than it obviously was, filtered through consciousness, refined into language, rolled and toasted into literature. Someone had to choose the words. Every account was a frame around chaos, excluding this and highlighting that, thus fiction by omission, no matter how factual.