lookerlooker:

tumblr-y merch at the seattle aquarium gift store

<3

ourladyofperpetualhelp:

““It’s only in an initial state of privation that you can begin to have thoughts about what it is you might want, to really imagine or picture it. It’s very difficult to know what we’re frustrated by. In making the case for frustration I want to make it more interesting, such that people can talk or think about it in different ways. […] What I would suggest is more time wasting, less stimulation. We need time to lie fallow like we did in childhood, so we can recuperate. Rather than be constantly told what you want and be pressurised to go after it, I think we would benefit greatly from spells of vaguely restless boredom in which desire can crystallise.””

— Adam Phillips

same. 

notational:

“What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone else’s orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away. Part of what you enjoy in a documentary technique is the sense of banditry. To loot someone else’s life or sentences and make off with a point of view, which is called “objective” because you can make anything into an object by treating it this way, is exciting and dangerous.”

— Anne Carson, ”Foam (Essay with Rhapsody): On the Sublime in Longinus and Antonioni” in Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera, 2006 (via msodradek)

"if i were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace."

gaston bachelard, the poetics of space 

(Source: jungjoo)

marc luring me out of bed with a fancy coffee maker and a fire so that i can write my feminist dissertation might be my new best example of feminist capitalism.  

i knew i was going to major in english and women’s studies pretty much from the time i was in grade school, but i think my father was still a little surprised when i told him my freshman year of college that i was taking a class called ”queer alphabets.” he did okay. it was my first important moment with adrienne rich.

i should have known that i would feel a little bit warm and cozy watching barbara and sarah schulman talk about “what is the queer novel?” since i suffer the hypersignificance of historical feelings even—and sometimes especially—if they are not my own. i loved sarah’s story about going on book tour in the wake of judith butler; she also called barbara a “real academic” or “real scholar” or something. maybe i don’t even want that battle to end. for a few hours i stopped thinking that i really need to get rid of my tumblr bio; sometimes i’m even more second wave than i would think.  

and sometimes less. afterwards, at dinner, i was telling marc about a formative essay i read in ms. when i was about twelve about a utopian thanksgiving potluck populated by cheery lesbian couples and their equally cheery exes. i wanted to be those people. he asked “because it was a group of women?” and i said “no, those were the kind of relationships i wanted to have, but then i turned out to be the exact opposite.” 

one time i said to aliza “it’s not what you remember. it’s what you imagine them remembering.” i might wish i had never read “the floating poem, unnumbered.” 

i told marc my other consequential relationship story from that time: i was getting my hair done before a grade school dance and the woman in the chair next to me was talking about getting married on a beach with only three other people. i thought that sounded nice. this was the only thought i had about weddings for about a decade. marc asked me, kindly, “do you want to do that?” despite the established fact that neither of us is into weddings. 

at the post-women & performance hangout at our regular bad nyu bar on the eve of my final meeting as managing editor. i finally got my crown!

(notational)

"…the becoming historical of the affective event and the improvisation of genre amid pervasive uncertainty…"

lauren berlant, cruel optimism