flâneur

Cypress Williams

3 followers · 2 following · 1383 views

on the atlas — 36

highlights — 83

  • I don’t know how to explain to him that when I write, I never feel in pursuit of anything so much as running from a churning, spiralling undertow that will disappear me unless I record something of myself just so: in prose so perfect, so plain it can’t be misunderstood.
    SBS Emerging Writers' Competition 2021 Winner: Cat Yen
  • Without the context of what they were born into, and what they went through, a poor person’s life easily looks ugly, failed, worthless. I’d like somebody to enter my empty apartment and understand, without me having to put it in words, that I have a rich inner world. Never owning much to look at has made me sensitive to minds and hearts, and this is how I have best made something of myself, something out of nothing.
    SBS Emerging Writers' Competition 2021 Winner: Cat Yen
  • It’s un-Chinese to be direct about suffering. Talking about the ways dad has constrained her life, how she feels about it all, would make mum uncomfortable. I can’t tell her how brave I think she is, how strong. That I’m so sorry for not having seen her as a hoping, dreaming woman.
    SBS Emerging Writers' Competition 2021 Winner: Cat Yen
  • Two years ago, I traded writing stories for code. The truth is as poetic as programming syntax: higher pay and a paranoid habit of stock-piling funds in case dad does something ludicrous.
    SBS Emerging Writers' Competition 2021 Winner: Cat Yen
  • These stories do not appear in the official record of his life or achievements, and yet an incalculable number of them form a collage that shows the way he changed the world. I loved Sondheim, but I never knew him; I was just someone in a tree.
    a fragment of the day
  • History is the small pieces, the things that don’t survive into the record, the little human stories, the fragments that form the day.
    a fragment of the day
  • This is how lives recede into history—Sondheim becomes part of the story of an era, understood in context. He becomes part of how things once were, which is not how they are anymore.
    a fragment of the day
  • Until then I had always eschewed obligation; now, I wanted to be obligated. I had begun to understand that obligation was not the opposite of romance, but rather the only thing that gives it substance. I wanted someone to know where I was, and to care if I came home at night. All of this was new to me; I felt nauseous all the time, and grateful, desperate to be a better person and profoundly unsure that I was up to the task.
    a fragment of the day
  • Every single thing I’ve ever done or made is to some degree stolen from him.
    a fragment of the day
  • Genius is a rotten, filthy-handed word, culpable and useless, and also Sondheim is one of about three people to whom I would sincerely apply it.
    a fragment of the day
  • If finding out what she’s up to involves combing through tagged photographs and scrutinizing status updates, if it means wanting to deny our walks through the woods and rejecting the way it felt to be in awe of someone, if it means reevaluating and weighing my Alison against a digital composite of the girl I met all those years ago, I don’t want it
    A Love Letter To The Unsearchable | Thought Catalog
  • We want to believe that we are concrete entities that are sound in our convictions and beliefs, that we’ve always been this way, and witnessing disparities where there used to be unbridled harmony can be unnerving.
    A Love Letter To The Unsearchable | Thought Catalog
  • New, technocratic solutions are proposed every day: billionaire funding, paid newsletters, essays crowdfunded on the Ethereum blockchain, a new patronage system funded by NFTs of GIFs. How grim it all seems. We never really wanted to live in the future.
    Critical Attrition
  • Do you feel me? Do you care? Can I ever feel alive again when I’m with you?
    A Breakup Letter to My Writing Career
  • I admire writers who are free to be tame or wild depending on their inclinations and convictions, their political ideas. But I always end up feeling the urge to be tame against my own instincts, my own wishes.
    A Breakup Letter to My Writing Career
  • They say you can sustain yourself on love, on sheer love. You, too, swear by this bit of common sense. I myself would never say something that cheesy, but in fact I’ve also become the kind of person that only wants love. You’re the one who’s fallen out of love.
    A Breakup Letter to My Writing Career
  • The thing about a writing career is that it starts by being about writing and then slowly evolves into something else. Whatever it is now, it’s something into which I’m afraid to put my real writing, because I’m afraid that you might not understand where I’m at.
    A Breakup Letter to My Writing Career
  • Shone through the nice-kind prism, you might say “nice” feminism addresses wants, and “kind” feminism addresses needs.
    Are you nice or kind?
  • The goal being collectivism versus luxury, ease, or pleasantries. To state the obvious, this is the New York people fear is being replaced by super-cheap delivery services and Instagrammable coffee shops and street murals sponsored by Chase.
    Are you nice or kind?
  • Technology and social media exploit this need. Many of us use it to document ourselves and our lives not out of self-love, but out of a genuine desire for self-understanding. It’s a flawed strategy, emphasizing the self as an object of interest instead of an endlessly subjective, ever-evolving, interdependent atom in a constellation of others. And maybe we find ourselves unsatisfied with these tools – scrolling and scrolling, looking and relooking – because they’re incapable of actually capturing that.
    I got a camera to spy on my cat – and it made me question everything about myself | Life and style | The Guardian
  • There’s something distinctly postmodern about the fact that our compulsion to consume makes us want to consume ourselves. That as commodities, we feel more real.
    I got a camera to spy on my cat – and it made me question everything about myself | Life and style | The Guardian
  • The unspoken goal is to love yourself the way you love the main character in a movie. That is, from a distance, in two dimensions.
    I got a camera to spy on my cat – and it made me question everything about myself | Life and style | The Guardian
  • In 2017, I wrote that I don’t know what I look like, but I think I meant that I don’t know what I look like to other people. Such a paranoia presumes that what other people think about me is both consistent and matters a lot.
    I got a camera to spy on my cat – and it made me question everything about myself | Life and style | The Guardian
  • I always imagined that getting older meant inching towards a more static version of my personality, but it’s turned out to be more about embracing transience as a default. And treating ebbs and flows as marks of animation rather than proof of an unreliable self.
    How My Bad Acid Trip Taught Me Nothing and Everything
  • I don’t think it’s right to assume that there is an authentic version of me, buried under all the moods. That very view is what has lead me to believe my emotions are something to solve, or my swings something to diagnose. It’s what makes me think, I just haven’t felt like myself lately, when what I really mean is: I just don’t like how I’ve felt lately.
    How My Bad Acid Trip Taught Me Nothing and Everything
  • The truth, in other words, doesn’t always set us free.
    How My Bad Acid Trip Taught Me Nothing and Everything
  • We are perpetually trapped in our current experience, whether the condition is clear to us or not. And knowing the truth, intellectually — I’m just tripping, I shouldn’t feel like this, I’m smarter than that — doesn’t necessarily change anything.
    How My Bad Acid Trip Taught Me Nothing and Everything
  • I’d convince myself that safety and comfort were the same as fulfillment.
    Should I Break Up With My Boyfriend?
  • The problem with persuading myself to stay was never that I didn’t have the data points, it was that I had to do it in the first place.
    Should I Break Up With My Boyfriend?
  • One reason: if you enact high-friction walls around giving you money, people are less likely to give you money, and you would prefer the money even at a marginal cost to no money at all.
    Payments in Japan
  • Fun fact: your phone (very probably) sports a little extra silicon specifically to support this use case.
    Payments in Japan
  • eating lunch at a fast-casual chopped-salad chain, like Sweetgreen, which feels less like a place to eat and more like a refueling station
    Athleisure, barre and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman | Women | The Guardian
  • The cyborg is powerful because she grasps the potential in her own artificiality, because she accepts without question how deeply it is embedded in her. It’s possible if we want it. But what do we want? What would you want – what desires, what forms of insubordination, would you be able to access – if you had succeeded in becoming an ideal woman, gratified and beloved, proof of the efficiency of a system that magnifies and diminishes you every day?
    Athleisure, barre and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman | Women | The Guardian
  • Resistance to a system is almost always presented on the terms of the system. It’s so much easier, when we gain agency, to use it to adapt rather than to oppose.
    Athleisure, barre and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman | Women | The Guardian
  • And the real trick of athleisure is the way it can physically suggest that you were made to do this – that you’re the kind of person who thinks that putting in expensive hard work for a high-functioning, maximally attractive consumer existence is about as good a way to pass your time on Earth as there is.
    Athleisure, barre and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman | Women | The Guardian
  • Barre feels like exercise the way Sweetgreen feels like eating: both might better be categorized as mechanisms that help you adapt to arbitrary, prolonged agony.
    Athleisure, barre and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman | Women | The Guardian
  • That’s one of the perks of living in modernity. You don’t have to care whether others see you as human or approve of your preferences. You just need them to not get in your way, and modernity makes that possible. Being a ghost doesn’t matter in relation to people you don’t care to haunt.
    Ghost Protocols
  • It is starting to feel like that the future of the world is not really mine to think about. This means, as a generally future-oriented thinker, I’m kinda free to think about futures that are personally interesting to me, rather than preferred or valuable ones.
    Ghost Protocols
  • Children are the default form of skin in the game of civilization. To be voluntarily childless is to have no legible stake in the future that society can see.
    Ghost Protocols
  • on the Something Awful thread about Kyanka's death
    The most influential man on the internet - by Max Read - Read Max
  • Neither Molly, nor Max, has accepted the bargain at the heart of premium mediocrity that Maya Millennial has, which is to refuse to deny either the need for meaning or the need for financial sustainability. Which is why — and this is definitely my attempt at supplying a redemptive account of Maya Millennial’s choices as being fundamentally the correct ones — she chooses to fake both for a while in the hope of acquiring both for good later.
    The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial
  • This took me a while to understand because on the surface, all the illusion-crafting and believing goes the other way. Steve Jobs hypnotized you, not the other way round, didn’t he? Actually the hypnotism has always been duplex.
    The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial
  • Premium mediocrity is in part a theater put on by Maya Millennial in part to spare the feelings of parents. Inter-generational love, not inter-generational war.
    The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial
  • This exception exists because premium mediocrity is by and large sanguine rather than melancholic about itself. It does not wallow in brooding despair about its own precarity. It is not joyless. It likes to occasionally actually treat itself, instead of only pretending to, without disturbing the fiction it presents.
    The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial
  • So premium mediocrity is not clueless, tasteless consumption of mediocrity under the mistaken impression that it is actual luxury consumption.
    The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial
  • The more fortunate ones occasionally break into the cryptobourgeoisie for days to weeks at a time, depending on the current value of bitcoin and ether.
    The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial
  • At its broad, fuzzy edges, premium mediocre is an expansive concept; a global, cosmopolitan and nationalist cultural Big Tent: it is arguably both suburban and neourban, Red and Blue, containing Boomers and X’ers. It includes bluetooth headsets favored by Red State farmers and the tiki torches — designed for premium mediocre backyard barbecues — favored by your friendly neighborhood Nazis. It includes everything Trump-branded. It covers McMansions, insecure suburbia-dwelling Dodge Stratus owners and Bed, Bath, and Beyond shoppers. It includes gentrifying neighborhoods and ghost-town malls. It …
    The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial
  • This undue gullibility is also seen in the tendency of many readers to accept the printed word of the press as final truth. Few people realize that even our authentic channels of information – the press, the platform, and in many instances the pulpit – do not give us objective and unbiased truth.
    A Tough Mind And A Tender Heart | maladjusted
  • But life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony. The philosopher Hegel said that truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis that reconciles the two.
    A Tough Mind And A Tender Heart | maladjusted
  • A grad student named Janis Carter went with her to help her adjust to life in the wild. Janis Carter was supposed to stay there just a few weeks, but pretty quickly she realized that that wasn't going to be enough. She spent years teaching Lucy how to live outdoors and forage for food. Ultimately Lucy died because she wasn't able to adapt to the wild, but I was really struck by Janis Carter's commitment; here was someone who didn't even like camping, and she changed her entire life in order to help Lucy. How many people would be willing to do that for someone who isn't a human being?
    Ted Chiang on Writing | Boing Boing