April 2013
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"Yes. It's like you're stretching; it's like an athletic event. You have to jump higher. You have to lift heavier weight. It's those muscles that are getting stronger, and you start to feel, Ah yes, now I can do that, and by doing it, you become the person who did it. That's how you cross that bridge."
by
Meredith Turits
While I was reading Dune, Death of a Ladies' Man played my brain. The two have nothing to do with each other, unless you consider era, in a very large sense... or maybe both could be presented in a curation of "texts that touch the precipice of time"? I had not been listening to the album in the time preceding my starting of the book, but I sure as hell played that thing after a few chapters. The music came to me while I was reading, and it came to me in posture and inclination, in the sense that the two texts were made for each other, in the sense that some days I read this book while lounging on our futon-bed, in the apocalyptic summer of a globally warmed world, in probably a ratty nightgown, while my newish baby daughter slept in the room next door and my husband was probably reading in his own heat-cave in another room of the apartment, and I would emerge from my reading like I was stoned and craven and sharing consciousness with two texts and with myself and conflating everything in my own plain life with the trashy haute drama of Jessica and Chani and the skin bag of the poisonous drink, which compels, ultimately, the narrative of the novel: "It was like an ultimate simpatico, being two people at once: not telepathy, but mutual awareness."
by
Olivia Cronk
"The question is, in a way, what's the unit of what you're writing? And for some, what I would call modernist -- no matter how defined -- writers, the unit is the form and the whole. For me the unit has never been the form and the whole. For me, the unit tends to be the word, the sentence, the paragraph, the section. But then, the consciousness of the whole is there in real life. I care about people -- I care about the people in my life. But how to do that in fiction without resorting to stuff that I don't want to do, or know how to do."
by
Guy Cunningham
The important thing here, for my twenty-two-year-old baby brain, was not doctrine but language. Judee Sill’s and Julian of Norwich’s were ones I’d wanted for a long time: languages that let you be a part of something -- the church, punk shows -- even if you don’t agree with all of it. Languages that let you sit in the stands even if are not a cheerleader. Even if you are squicked by the cheerleaders.
by
Mairead Case
Bausch's performances are mostly comprised of seemingly unrelated pastiche and challenge even the most modern interpretation of dance. But if you start to break down what the dancers are doing with their bodies -- repetitively circling, searching, falling, failing -- it's clear that Bausch wishes to explore the notion that if the reiteration of an activity -- even a useless activity -- is repeated often enough, it can lead to enlightenment.
by
Jessica Michalofsky
"People are often confused when I use "Iraqi" and "Jewish" in the same sentence. It requires some explanation. For that reason, it feels like the political history I associate with has more to do with storytelling, with memory, than it does with current affairs. After World War I, one out of three Baghdadis were Jewish. Now, they say there are five Jews left in Baghdad. The number might be arbitrary but the significance of it is not lost on me."
by
Terry Hong