flâneur

Jodi Sy

40 followers · 17 following · 4368 views

on the atlas — 164

highlights — 823

  • they lived narrow lives.
    Think more about what to focus on - by Henrik Karlsson
  • they lived narrow lives.
    Think more about what to focus on - by Henrik Karlsson
  • The history of literary studies at Columbia must include Lionel Trilling and Edward Said;
    Tokens of Ruined Method | Issue 29 | n+1
  • He expressed the belief that major US literary publishers and publications held an arbitrary preference for “international” or “complicated” or “historical” fiction, such as the works of Jhumpa Lahiri and Salman Rushdie, over the fiction he preferred, which tended to consist of plain, nonhistorical narratives of individual misery and isolation: among the works he positively cited were the stories of Jean Rhys, Lorrie Moore, Rebecca Curtis, Ann Beattie, and Joy Williams.
    Nobody’s Protest Novel | Issue 20 | n+1
  • he minimized his social activity and concentrated his energies on producing short stories for creative-writing workshops in which he was enrolled. He submitted his stories to New York literary publications, the New Yorker and the Paris Review, among others (this magazine included), and received rejection letters in return.
    Nobody’s Protest Novel | Issue 20 | n+1
  • Where, frankly, were you going to get your diagnosis of society—from Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho? Lyotard did it better in Libidinal Economy, and was much scarier—without pornographic bloodshed.
    n+1 Death is Not the End | 2006
  • Many of the classics of the era opened with feats of prose that American novels of the 1970s and 1980s rarely even attempted. LÈvi-Strauss could describe a sunset in Tristes Tropiques for longer than a sun takes to set. Foucault did fourteen pages on a single painting, Velazquez’s “Las Meninas.”
    n+1 Death is Not the End | 2006
  • My influences are everything from grunge to hip hop to Ralph Lauren and Giorgio Armani.
    Jerry Lorenzo Doesn’t Want You to Be Afraid of God
  • as a way of getting a feel for the larger culture as expressed through its most durable containers for ideas: books.
    Help us continue our mission by subscribing and spreading the word - The Editors - Bookforum Magazine
  • In several famous novels, such as Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, women fall in love and kill themselves. I knew I was never going to be like that–a female character written by a man, I mean. The male gender is without a doubt the more melodramatic one. I tend to shuffle through my life with a mildly embarrassed air, often refusing to acknowledge the chaos happening around me.
    another year - by Ava - bookbear express
  • I’ve always aspired to love in a totalizing, deranged way.
    another year - by Ava - bookbear express
  • 011 | YOU ARE A VICTIM OF THE RULES YOU LIVE BY.
    ABOUT ✦ HALOSCOPE
  • 012 | LOOK BEYOND THE AWE OF IMPLEMENTATION AND SEE WHAT IS LOOKING BACK AT YOU. DO NOT LOOK IN THE HOPES OF SEEING YOURSELF
    ABOUT ✦ HALOSCOPE
  • While young women are praised for “being chill,” moms are revered for being painstakingly altruistic to the point of self-abnegation.
    Self-Silencing Is Making Women Sick | Time
  • perpetually pleasant, self-sacrificing, and emotionally in control,
    Self-Silencing Is Making Women Sick | Time
  • IN A TEACHING MANUAL she wrote in the 1980s, the artist Sybil Andrews stressed the importance of reaching into an image for its essence, stripping away whatever stagnated it. “Can you catch that? Can you get that sense of movement?” she would ask. The advice revealed a design philosophy that had defined her work for decades: her 1931 linocut In Full Cry shows a row of horses leaping over a hedge, their riders’ coattails soaring behind them. The lines themselves are Andrews’s subject, vigorous and unflinching. “I don’t draw the horse jumping,” she said. “I draw the jump.”
    Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power’s interwar art - Apoorva Tadepalli - Bookforum Magazine
  • Sometimes the only way to tirelessly contemplate your person is to contemplate the outside world first.
    Fruit Without Taste: On Marguerite Duras’s “The Easy Life”
  • What you think utopian play should look like will change depending on the telos for society you have in mind. I personally want a society where socialization doesn’t happen along gender lines. Meanwhile right-wing figures in the U.S. have focused a lot on sports as a practically sacred ground for maintaining binary sex, picking on trans athletes in particular. What if we figured out better ways to do sports that don’t rely on sex segregation? What might that look like? (Korfball is one attempt.)
    sausage fest - by Adora Svitak - the pillow book
  • You can look at this data and take the position that these practices of male homosocial gathering keep women out of certain fields and off corporate boards, so it’s objectionable. Some would say, That’s a neoliberal girlboss-y concern, I don’t care if men or women or nonbinary people are on the board of the company that fracks in my backyard and pollutes the groundwater. I get that very much but I think the attention to homosocial interaction as a mechanism of exclusion is important, not just for the more venal concern of winning the rat race and getting a promotion at your silly Big Three con…
    sausage fest - by Adora Svitak - the pillow book
  • For mine: Feminist Philosophy class? Pretty good. Campsite in rural California? Terrible. (My vibe check is a complex algorithm. It takes in a lot of inputs besides race and gender, like the number of visible “State of Jefferson” separatist bumper stickers.)
    sausage fest - by Adora Svitak - the pillow book
  • and I remember little other than the first line: I count people when I walk into a room. How many of a race, how many of a gender.
    sausage fest - by Adora Svitak - the pillow book
  • My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing, by Carl Phillips,
    Stamina | The Sewanee Review
  • Difficulty meets surprise, and—without having thought to choose to—they mate for life.
    Stamina | The Sewanee Review
  • And it’s the possibility of surprise—the firm belief in that possibility—that keeps me reading and writing.
    Stamina | The Sewanee Review
  • For me, both as reader and writer, a piece of writing (but again, the same for all art) is only as interesting as its capacity for surprise.
    Stamina | The Sewanee Review
  • Our twenties and thirties, for most of us, are the time when we’re just coming into a sense of who we are as adults; the different freedom of adulthood (for childhood, too, has its freedoms, as does adolescence, despite how it feels), combined with the recent maturing of our thinking—about ourselves, about the world around us—means we have a lot to say, all of it still new, and we have the energy to say it. I remember feeling, at the time, that I couldn’t write fast enough to get all of my thoughts down.
    Stamina | The Sewanee Review
  • stamina, in the way that I’m thinking of it, always includes perspective, the means by which we can contextualize doubt and, in giving it context, displace it somewhat, thereby clearing room again for shaken faith. Maybe the best way to think of stamina is as a fusion of perspective and will.
    Stamina | The Sewanee Review
  • Take praise when and if you can get it, but don’t forget that it was never the point—or, if it was, then you’ve confused devotion with celebrity,
    Stamina | The Sewanee Review
  • that the book itself existed and meant something to me long before anyone else confirmed its existence or worth, and that each book is itself, that the point is for me to find my way, undistracted, toward the book that I have to write, for me—only I need to find it praiseworthy;
    Stamina | The Sewanee Review
  • “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” goes the line from Beckett’s The Unnamable. Stamina’s what happens between those two sentences.
    Stamina | The Sewanee Review
  • What is femininity, at its core, but institutionalized disadvantage?
    Becca Rothfeld, An Activist Practice  — Sidecar
  • feminist efforts to equalize abortion access in the wake of Dobbs – activists distributing contraceptive pills along underground networks, by securing funding for travel to states where there is still a right to choose, and more – have been nothing short of heroic.
    Becca Rothfeld, An Activist Practice  — Sidecar
  • Alas, by far the most visible strain of feminism in the contemporary West is the gospel of girl bossery,
    Becca Rothfeld, An Activist Practice  — Sidecar
  • It is also true that the female intellectuals we tend to canonize are too often flattened into symbols – although it is Joan Didion, not much of a feminist by any measure, who has been most thoroughly converted into a slogan on a tote bag.
    Becca Rothfeld, An Activist Practice  — Sidecar
  • And again: Write your heart out.
    27 Clues into Writing Your Heart Out
  • Read widely, deeply—intensely—read many books by the same writer, ideally in the order in which they were written— this will be uplifting to you as well as instructive. You see how other writers made their way through the underbrush when they were your age and had no idea that they would ever become “writers”—let alone “famous.” The more challenging the classic, like Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” the more rewarding, as Zanche has discovered.
    27 Clues into Writing Your Heart Out
  • What is ultimately important is a writer’s strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones—just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.
    27 Clues into Writing Your Heart Out
  • Keeping a journal sharpens our senses. It's like physical exercise through language. Otherwise, precious thoughts that drift into your mind, unexpected revelations and recollections may just evaporate and be lost. (This is one of the motives for writing fiction, especially novels: the fiction becomes a container for much that might be otherwise lost.)
    27 Clues into Writing Your Heart Out
  • The “old verities of the human heart” (to quote William Faulkner) can be enshrined in new forms that may be challenging to the reader because they represent an unusual perspective, like entering a house not by its front door but by a rear door or a cellar door or even a window.
    27 Clues into Writing Your Heart Out
  • One of the main things to remember when you're writing is that writing should be pleasurable. It should be fun. It should be exploratory. You should be writing about things that surprise you.
    27 Clues into Writing Your Heart Out
  • Write your heart out.
    27 Clues into Writing Your Heart Out
  • Everybody has at least one story to tell.
    27 Clues into Writing Your Heart Out
  • Read, observe, listen intensely! as if your life depended upon it.
    27 Clues into Writing Your Heart Out
  • Crucial for the writer: seclusion, quiet, NO INTERRUPTIONS.
    27 Clues into Writing Your Heart Out
  • When in doubt how to end a chapter, bring in a man with a gun.
    27 Clues into Writing Your Heart Out
  • I would say almost dogmatically that you can't be a writer unless you're reading all the time and reading with purpose.
    27 Clues into Writing Your Heart Out
  • if I did not believe, in other words, that cringe is an ethical affront — I would probably not be a critic.
    Feminism and Kitsch - The Drift
  • The “Bliss Montage,” explains Basinger, is that generic sequence where “the leading lady can be seen laughing her head off, dressed in fabulous clothes, racing across the water in a speedboat, her yachtsman lover at her side.” You get the picture. It is “a woman’s small piece of action, her marginal territory of joy.” Though it is fleeting: “the rapid and brief passage of time in which a woman can be happy.”
    The Post-American Surreal - Dissent Magazine
  • Bliss Montage’s surrealism. Ma borrows her title from film scholar Jeanine Basinger’s 1993 book A Woman’s View,
    The Post-American Surreal - Dissent Magazine
  • “I was a normal Soviet boy,” he said. “I could have become a man of the system. But something turned me upside down: [Fyodor Dostoevsky’s] Notes from the Underground. I realized what I am. That I am bad.”
    About Joseph Brodsky | Academy of American Poets