Mo' Mobertz!

“I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later — because I did not belong there, did not come from there — but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.”

— Joan Didion

The Internet Is Off In Syria

Real-time traffic reports show internet traffic has virtually disappeared throughout the country.

(via cheatsheet)

Source: michaelhayes

Oh how I love Santiago. Here she is at sundown. Shot from the roof of my friend’s apartment building when I visited in April.

“Because the other thing that being here reminds you is that as much as you miss home, the home you miss doesn’t exist. If it did, you’d still be there, probably. Though, much like with the image of the West they try to recreate here in the hotels, much like the image of yourself that you create as a professional and a heavyweight in your field, much like with the package of Ben and Jerry’s Willie Nelson Country Peach Cobbler, the most painful thing is you suspect that what you miss is either gone or will be gone when you get back or maybe never existed at all.”

— “The Cost of Things in Qatar” by Dane Wisher

This week I’m reading The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. I’d requested it some time ago from my library but really became interested in reading it when The Rumpus posted a comic review of the book. So when I received an email notifying me the book was ready to be picked up, I was keen to read it and expected that it was not only good enough to be Oprah-approved, but also Rumpus-approved.

And I’m reading it and I’m loving it. It’s true, we get a strong sense of Hattie through the tiny vignettes her children remember. And the writing is beautiful and simple. The characters sometimes insert tiny, fanatical yet true ideas into their stories, like little Oskar Schell does in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. For example at one point Hattie’s lover thinks, “Maybe we have a finite amount of love to give. We’re born with our portion and if we love and are not loved in return, it’s depleted.” He then thinks that he hasn’t yet loved enough, he has so much love to give Hattie, but wonders if, after giving life to all her children, she hasn’t yet depleted all the love she’s had to give. These are the thoughts that float into our minds when we stare at nothings on trains, when we go for runs with nothing on our minds, and Mathis captures them in her writing.

Another passage I thought was beautiful: “She put all the blame on August. She never for one minute stopped thinking he was the cause of every bad thing that ever was, and he never stopped hoping that one morning he would wake up and prove her wrong. If she would stop hating him for one day, one hour, he’d have the strength to do the right thing by her. This was the life they had. Nobody could ever know it like they did. They owed it to each other to stay together. That was their bond.”

What a beautiful description of a broken relationship, and how simply it’s written. To encompass the sort of problems so many couples face in their relationships, the contradictions and bonds they inhabit, in this one short paragraph is a marvel. I’ve fallen in love with Ayana Mathis.

Each character possesses an almost extrasensory perception of Hattie. They respect her and, though she may have been cold to them, appreciate and treasure every small sign she gives of her love for them. To me, the book represents more what it’s like to be a mother, the sun of a tiny familial universe, than who Hattie is.

The book also dives into a battle of desire vs. complacency. According to August, he and Hattie only ended up together because he needed a purpose in life and they’d made a baby. Floyd, who desires to be with men but fears societal repercussions, denies even himself the awareness of his sexuality. Six wants so badly to be loved and wanted by society that he lets the men convert him into a preacher at 16 years old. Mathis, chapter by chapter, drops the characters’ desires in our minds and then cuts us off, leaves us hanging at the point in the story where we may find out whether their desires will be fulfilled or not. In this way she leaves each character’s story squirming freshly in our brains, craving grooves that will not disappear from our minds for a long time.

“Camaros, remember them? Camaros, Firebirds, El Caminos, Cougars, Novas with scooped hoods and hemi-engines. Corvettes in primer gray racing down Touhy until someone died. Smart people will say these cars are just penis replacements. Good people will point out the damage being done to the atmosphere. And personally I don’t even like cars. But we didn’t think about things that way. We didn’t quote Freud. We were anti-Nazi but that’s about as far as our politics went. We were guerillas on the other side of the war on drugs but we didn’t know who we were fighting anymore than they did. Cars big enough to put your life in. Years later I found out my friends stole my father’s car and left it somewhere out by the 94. Apparently he left a spare set of keys stuck inside the bumper. That’s how it is though, you hang out with thieves stuff disappears.”

— Stephen Elliott, The Daily Rumpus

“

I think that redemption, or enlightenment, or some sort of truth is found very close to destruction. It’s in the most extreme situations where you find this, where you get this abandon that allows you to understand yourself or understand other people. It’s part of what fascinates me about Louisiana. There’s just some sort of internal and external freedom that exists there that I don’t feel anywhere else in America. When I leave and go somewhere else I feel myself being judged in ways that I never am there. There’s some kind of enlightenment that exists in Louisiana. There’s a fearlessness in the culture down there that has everything to do with how close to death it is. To be there, you have to be brave. It’s not for timid hearted people to live down there because it’s dangerous, and it’s scary, and it threatens your life, and it threatens your children’s lives. I’m trying to make the connection between that and what makes people also so openhearted. And I think the ends of both movies have to do with exploring that territory.

What is it about living close to death that benefits your soul as a person? It reminds me of like being at a crazy concert or something, like in a mosh pit, and you come out and your nose is broken and you’re all fucked up but you’re like, “Wow I just accessed some incredibly important, ecstatic moment.” [Werner] Herzog’s work is a lot about that. You can’t timidly find this ecstatic truth; you have to really push yourself to get there. In both movies I think we try to do that in the production and the films are about going there. It’s like a religious experience.

”

— Another Benh Zeitlin quote

“So that’s the goal, that people will get behind the Bathtub and accept a lot of things that they’ve preconceived as bad. I think it’s a real thing. When you go down there, there is, without any money, way more fun and joy happening in South Louisiana than there is in New York City. There are people out there with no money at all, no job, going to the water and eating what would be a $300 meal for lunch, like 500 crabs on the table. It’s this decadent experience where you don’t need money to have a feast every night and to celebrate. That is definitely something that I’m trying to glorify in the film. It’s not a miserable place. The poorest parts of that town are not miserable. There are certainly problems that I don’t have in the movie. I’m not dealing with the harsh realities, but that’s not the idea. The idea is the good parts of it. And it’s not a piece of realism, so I don’t have to deal with the bad parts of it.”

—

Benh Zeitlin, director of Beasts of the Southern Wild discussing his film with The Atlantic.

I saw this film today in Buenos Aires. It’s given mythology a new meaning to me as well as made me reconsider my notion of utopia. Never seen something quite like this film.

“Even if it’s a true story there’s nothing interesting about a character who is only evil. When I teach non-fiction classes I tell my students never to do that. If you hate someone so much you can’t see their humanity then it won’t be interesting to anyone. Sometimes, to write something good, you have to really forgive someone, or at least learn to see the world from their point of view. Nobody thinks they started it; nobody thinks they’re bad inside. Sometimes, to write something good, you actually have to become a better person.”

— Stephen Elliott, The Daily Rumpus

“The social media world is not one of, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ It’s a world where you have to build it, then tell everyone in the world about it a dozen times, then some of them will come.”

— Jason Falls, “Are You Marketing Your Marketing?”

Chez embeedub: On not being middle class in New York City

embeedub:

On Friday, the New York Times ran a classically tunnel visioned New York Times feature, about what it means to be middle class in Manhattan. The Times would have you believe that to live in the Apple, you’re going to need about $235K a year to just hit that modest goal.

If you are defining…

YES.

Source: embeedub

“Leaving is not enough. You must stay gone. Train your heart like a dog. Change the locks even on the house he’s never visited. You lucky, lucky girl. You have an apartment just your size. A bathtub full of tea. A heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. Don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. You had to have him. And you did. And now you pull down the bridge between your houses, you make him call before he visits, you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. Make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. Place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. Don’t lose too much weight. Stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. And you are not stupid. You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. Heart like a four-poster bed. Heart like a canvas. Heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.”

— Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell, by Marty McConnell (via saturdaynightveins)

(via sicktomyheart-deactivated201304)

millionsmillions:

“While [Lena] Dunham’s lady-centered wry comedy may be singular in today’s television line-up, the world of literature is home to a multitude of books with the same appeal as Girls, books that feature a certain kind of female protagonist (usually one coming of age) or a certain kind of female narrator (pointed, self-deprecating, and ultimately wise).”

- Ten Books to Read Now That HBO’s Girls Is Back by Claire Miye Stanford

Ohhh yes.

Source: millionsmillions

Alfajores <3 if only these were delivered to me every night..

Best gift ever