L.E. > Recent Status Updates

Hello Goodreads folks!

I started a jazz-inspired lit mag. Here’s the link if you’re interested: https://www.instagram.com/unsquaredli... (or @unsquaredlit).

Subs open soon.

Happy reading (and writing)!

Picked it up for the "toothless" quote, and the build up to it was pretty sublime. However, I find that after crossing the halfway point, it has dragged, has become repetitive. Might put this down for a bit.

it's going swimmingly, though I've chosen to deliberately slow down my reading...and in turn, have been writing more

just a percentage or so before the halfway point, we got another look into Daniel's POV, who displayed a guttural, rhythmic language on the page

‘Come, do as I did. What prevents you? Do you suppose you can live your whole life between parentheses?’

This particular dialogue reminds me of the film/play, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. I feel that the book’s themes and plot will get more complex from here on out.

‘The gardener slows
as he sweeps dead leaves;
they remain dead’

‘…people said they were very close to their neighbors, but they also said they would not talk to them if they had problems, which the researcher found odd. Wouldn’t you tell your problems to those you feel close to? And then she realized that maybe she was “imposing a Western idea of ‘closeness’ in a non-Western context.” What does it mean to be close to someone, in Asia?’

'It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude...The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or some one else, as he chooses.'

'I was free, but my limbs were shackled. A democratic soul with a free meal ticket, but no power of locomotion, no voice.'

been engulfed in my lit mag readings, but here we go again w/ Tropic of Cancer !

‘Twilight hour. Indian blue, water of glass, trees glistening and liquescent. The rails fall away into the canal at Jaurès. The long caterpillar with lacquered sides dips like a roller coaster. It is not Paris. It is not Coney Island. It is a crepuscular melange of all the cities of Europe and Central America. The railroad yards below me…not ordered by the engineer but cataclysmic in design…’

‘Memory is meaning, forgetting is death, and the job of the writer is not so much to teach as to remind.’

‘Literate enough
to follow a poem with
a dictionary

and write down the roots of all
the ninety-nine names of God,

not to decipher
some truth from a newspaper’s
scrimshaw fioriture,

pass untoward yearnings in
calligraphic contraband.’

‘Everything seemed provisional, everything was a proposition; life was exciting because we were approaching it, we were in a constant state of arrival.’

AMIN: …I have a question. About catharsis.
SONIA: Okay.
AMIN: Does it still count, if it’s happy?

'They who from private condition ascend to be princes, and merely by the indulgence of fortune, arrive without much trouble at their dignity, though it costs them dear to maintain it...being hurried as it were with wings, yet when they come to settle and establish then begins their misery.'

Kublai: I do not know when you have had time to visit all the countries you describe to me. It seems to me you have never moved from this garden.

Polo: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here...Perhaps all that is left of the world is a wasteland...(of rubbish and gardens) it is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which outside.

'The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.'

Been racking my brain but I still can't understand how his statement that 'we cannot decide a priori what it is that should be done' holds up to his statements after. E.g., there is the thesis of man making himself 'in relation to his commitments' but in certain cases, isn't there an awareness prior said commitments, not matter how misled?

I feel seen so far

"An artist!" I interrupted. "What do you mean an 'artist'? An artist can slice a salami, too! Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job."

(reminds me of Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood)

(to continue) Warhol's still such an interesting figure to me, but I'm craving a different type of book right now, but so far this has been really good! choppy though, but not exactly vignette-styled (still prefer Popism than this so far)

'For a man cannot change, that is to say become another person, while he continues to obey the dictates of the self which he has ceased to be.'

REAL 😭 I missed reading this !!!

'But I was troubled by the fundamental uncertainty inherent in post-structuralist theories—there was nothing left to hold you. I longed to believe in some a priori truth. Goodness and God.'

'Beauty and pleasure seem as inextricable from daily life as particles suspended in a liquid.'

not going swimmingly folks (im afraid i don't give as much of af about this romance part anymore)