Natalie S. > Recent Status Updates

I got the big book with the big pictures in it 😈

this shit hittin

this book is fucking me up real good!

*whispers into the void* Based on the boring and unprofound first book, I think the obsession with this series among mainstream/internet-y feminists might be an Emperor's New Clothes situation! I am reading the second book to test this hypothesis

so bored I am SO BORED with this book

There is a sort of frankness about the evils of Paris which robs them of much of the seductiveness of things forbidden, and with that frankness goes a certain cleanliness of thought belonging to things not hidden. London will do whatever Paris does.... The difference may be summed up in this: Paris practises its sins as lightly as it does its religion, while London practises both very seriously.

"Rap's poetic voice is deeply political in content and spirit, but rap's hidden struggle, the struggle over access to public space, community resources, and the interpretation of black expression constitutes rap's hidden politics; hegemonic discourses have rendered these institutional aspects of black cultural politics invisible."

"Sampling, as employed by rap producers, is a musical time machine, a machine that keeps time for the body in motion and a machine that recalls other times, a technological process whereby old sounds and resonances can be embedded and recontextualized in the present.... In a simultaneous exchange, rap music has made its mark on advanced technology, and technology has profoundly changed the sound of black music."

Got a few pages in on the metro and decided it should not be my last Paris read. To be continued.

pew pew pew!

"She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things."

Also, "Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs."

This is a powerful book, but it's not what I wanted to be reading under the Eiffel Tower. It's not a slog, but for a vacation read, it's a slog.

This book was not on my summer reading list, but I recently got my copy back from a friend, and I'll take any opportunity to revisit this text, "if the accident will." I always consider Slaughterhouse-Five to be a "quick read" but after reading, re-reading, and re-re-reading the first chapter, I'm beginning to realize that finishing this book takes a lot more than just looking at 275 pages.

"Happiness could be felt as a pressure, too, Louis realized, more hard-edged and solid than longing, even. In Clarinda, he had yearned for better in a formless way, desire like a gray milk churn.... In contrast, this new happiness had angles; it had a jewel-cut shadow, and he could lose it."

I was just trying to remove a stain; I made a bigger stain.

Nothing more exhilarating (he wrote) than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.

Occasionally I get halfway through a book and don't want to read it anymore, but I finish it because otherwise I would feel like my time had been wasted. Curiously, in doing so, I waste even more time. This is all to say that this book is bad, very bad, so bad that I'm beginning to think the badness is intentional.

However, I am now interesting in reading Derrida and Barthes. So there's that.