There is no reward for being the good girl. There is no moment when the universe sends you a note saying, "Because you are thin and quiet and helpful and don't take up space, here is your solid gold house." There is just you, waiting for this and, when it doesn't come, deciding that it's because you won't deserve your reward until you're even thinner, or until you stop ever asking for what you want, because you did that like three times in the last year and clearly need to be punished for your appalling selfishness. The good-girl reward never shows up. (In the case of things like raises, the reward will only show up if you ask for it, which is why silent martyrdom is self-sabotaging.) People far more selfish and thoughtless than you will always seem to be doing better, and no, it's not fair, but you have to stop doing anything that you are only doing in the hopes of getting a gold star or you will drive yourself insane. If you do something stereotypically good-girl-ish because it's genuinely something you like to do, rock on. But pay enough attention to your own motivations to know the difference.

Speaking of differences, telling yourself, "The house needs to be clean," versus telling yourself, "I want the house to be cleaner," can change entirely your attitude about housework. At least it did for me, this morning. Also helpful: thinking about standing in front of Anubis' scales with various other women and having him say, "Okay, the only thing I'm putting in this scale is whether you kept your house spotless, and anyone who didn't gets eaten by the crocodile demon," and even the crocodile demon saying OH COME ON.

- Burning My Study

'Might Boredom Be My Form of Hysteria?'

It seems correct I think that having not logged into Blogger for something like 2 years I have either forgotten how to use it or the medium itself has forgotten how to be used - it seems only right to attempt to write in such an ephemeral and outmoded form, since that is the only thing that holds my interest nowadays - is it a failure, is it going to drift away, has it gotten so small to be on the verge of disappearance... To blog is seemingly not at ALL like riding a bike - I have completely forgotten how this works. This sense of the private in public. I have forgotten what it's like to have readers. Have I been asleep for two years? Have I written anything? How am I somehow still here?

....

I think I have clung so much to Bartleby lately because it is a story of antagonism to professionalism and New York, it is the New York no, the refusal of concepts of success and industriousness, of participating. And that Bartleby refuses to tell anything about himself, which is a desire of mine, (the dream to write a book about nothing, as Sofia writes me). And that Melville, I read online, wrote it after the failure of his most recent book, its dismissal in the press, and so I like to think of it as a portrait of a failed writer as well. Last week there was the big reading of Melville's Moby Dick at the Whitney, I was asked once to do it when I moved here, and I said no, because I said, I have never read the book, which I'd like to, perhaps when I retire soon to a farmhouse in Massachusetts, since moving here I am asked often to do events, of some character or another, usually interviewing authors, usually involving my gender and its various discontents, and my strategy is usually to say no to everything, and then occasionally, say yes, and for the ones I say yes to I dread and drag my feet and usually cancel at the last minute, but sometimes show up and am quite competent and professional, although sometimes like Barthes bored and paralyzed at the panel, while the next day I wilt all day to attempt to restore any semblance of my self. Luckily since I say no to everything I'm usually not asked to do much anymore, even though I live in Brooklyn I've never been asked to do the festival, here, I found myself complaining to Sheila about this this summer and she responded, quite rightly, that if I was asked I would say no, and would be irritated. But as I was waiting for my daily identical bagel order at the cafe just now, jittery from a morning of too much coffee and a surprising burst of writing, I mused to myself that there should be some sort of alternate public reading of Melville's shorter, other work, only nobodies should be asked to do it, it will be sponsored by no one, everyone will cancel at the last minute or not show up because of nerves, we will not be able to locate a space except at the back of a bookstore that doesn't carry our books, we will all refuse to read or somehow sabotage the performance, there will be no one in the audience.  Really, since no one will read, and no one will attend, it's best, really, at this point and time, to just indefinitely cancel it.

....

I love how outmoded the blog has become, how nostalgic and quixotic this meandering long-form. I like that this is so long that no one will read it. The same conversation where John asked me if I had read Bartleby, I told him my favorite discovery of yesterday, was writing the word "digressions," and thinking instead "depressions," and I wonder how that would look as a form - a "depression," a kind of digression, sinking deeper and deeper, would I have found then, the ultimate melancholy form.

- I am the Daughter of Winfried Georg Sebald

gpoy

“Here I am!” shouted the desert, loud with life, for there was still life in it, waiting, stored like seed. “Here I am. Did you forget me? Forget me despite your dreams of the sun and the rain and the antique tribes who roamed me one with their herds and their weird ways? You, who moaned and whined, covering metal-tape with cries and yearning, you, you effete thalldrap. Now’s your chance to prove you can do more than sit on your tail complaining and drinking sapphire wine with your tears of self-pity. Come, come and do battle with me, come and fight me. I’m more than a match for you. I’ll devour you if I can, but I’ll do it cleanly and openly, not with words and dark little tanks in Limbo. Don’t be afraid of human death and human age. I’ve see it all, and I know it. It’s just dust blown over the rocks. Look at me, how dead and old I seem, and yet, watch me grow, watch me live. Come on. Come and find me. I’m waiting.”

- Tanith Lee

what doesn't kill us makes us stranger

We watched Jessica Jones from 6 PM yesterday to just about 5 PM today (with time out for food, sleep, ahem other activities and 10-15 minutes when Netflix froze in the middle of the finale) and DAMN, it was amazing. I don't know when I've seen a better show. I think I liked every single minute of this and Agent Carter and Mad Max Fury Road. I've been really happy with a lot of TV and movies (this, Gone Girl, Ex Machina, Dark Matter) and it's really nice, after a long while of feeling out of step with critical and popular darlings (Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Hannibal, Age of Ultron, Interstellar, Foxcatcher, Birdman, American Sniper) to get that big hit of loving something again. Burning through that was like reading a great book, getting all swept up.

(There's a shot at a pivotal moment in "AKA Take A Bloody Number" where Jessica jumps down from a balcony onto a moodily blue-and-purple-lit stage and lands in that characteristic action heroine pose of knees deeply bent and feet planted, and it is I swear to God nearly a shot for shot remake of a famous moment from the second episode ever of Buffy that used to end the opening credits. It's like this huge signal that Jess is now going to KICK ASS, and I actually yelled something like, "That's Buffy! She's Buffy!" even though Trish is in a lot of ways more like Buffy, more consistently. I would be really surprised if that doesn't get pointed out on the DVD as a deliberate homage. There are some other similarities, but that was pretty amazing.)

(I told a dear friend "no fucking lie, this show is like 'Faith and Buffy 2.0 with bonus Gunn if Whedon hadn't fucked it up and the two of them really were the most important things in each others' lives'.")

Fiona Apple - "Hot Knife" (Official Music Video)

Rondellus - Verres Militares (War Pigs)

First track from the album "Sabbatum: Medieval Tribute to Black Sabbath", released in 2003.

ALMOST AS GOOD AS GARMARNA COVERING HILDEGARD OF BINGEN

Metallica - One (medieval cover by Stary Olsa)

and, not tomorrow but the day after --

JESSICA JONES JESSICA JONES JESSICA JONES

all this and Crimson Peak! It's like someone up there knows it's my birthday month.

THE SECOND SEASON OF LES REVENANTS RETURNED (HEH) AND NOBODY TOLD ME ABOUT IT YOU ARE ALL REALLY FUCKING FIRED

The Returned has never been about answers, though it’s not always about the questions, either. It is, in large part, about the nature of living with grief, and what it means to hold on to the past. Specifically, the way small, almost incidental moments in life can turn out to hold great weight. This is still not a show to watch while idly checking Twitter: Fleeting sidelong glances, tossed-off comments, flashes of people or places—they all potentially hold the key to entire future storylines.

Warren Zevon - My Shit's Fucked Up (Live on Later)

anti-depression playlist

The M.V.P.'S - Turnin' My Heartbeat Up
Shirley Ellis - Soul Time
The Younghearts - A Little Togetherness (featuring the Northern Soul film dance club)
Four Tops - Standing in the Shadows of Love
Four Tops - Sugar Pie Honey Bunch
Four Tops - Reach Out I'll Be There (someone needs to do a Sam Wilson fanvid to this song)
Chris Clark - Do I Love You
The Combinations - Whatcha Gonna Do
Frank Wilson - Do I Love You
Sugar Pie DeSanto - Soulful Dress
Sugar Pie DeSanto - Git Back
Aretha Franklin - Think (The Blues Brothers Version)
Tiny Topsy - Just a Little Bit

(How sad am I? I sat there and played Frank singing Do I Love You via UTU like FIVE TIMES last night to motivate myself before I could get up off the sofa and take my medz. No. Really. FIVE TIMES. Christ almighty.)

Goes along with anti-depression breakfast: poached eggs on whole-wheat toast spread with hummus, sauteed fresh pineapple and red bell pepper, coffee with milk.

books read in November 2015

Fiction is in red. Date of first publication in (parentheses).

106. Poison, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer (2006)
107. Tea From An Empty Cup, Pat Cadigan (1998)
108. How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy, Stephen Witt (2015)
109. The Poisoner's Handbook, Deborah Blum (2010)
110. Bryant & May: London's Glory, Christopher Fowler (2015)
111. The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson (2015) (choked with theory)


all 2015 booklist posts

random Twitter pretty

"What is done is done," says the bowl. Iraq, 9th c. pic.twitter.com/3dXWd3bQez

— Rabih Alameddine (@rabihalameddine) November 5, 2015

The 5 Planets represented as the gods after whom they were named, part of an English textbook, 1122 @britishlibrary. pic.twitter.com/qdVpcg1DmG

— History of Astronomy (@HistAstro) November 4, 2015

The dune lands of Titan: Fensal (north) and Aztlan (south). Learn more at https://t.co/uv7nu0dQeE pic.twitter.com/znbpznyK3V

— CassiniSaturn (@CassiniSaturn) November 2, 2015

Hozier - Angel of Small Death & the Codeine Scene (Live at the Edge)

Chelsea Wolfe - Halfsleeper (live acoustic)

First mistake on page nine, "White Light/White Heat....only had three chords" - "White Light/White Heat" has five chords.

Ahhh, music snobs, I fucking love you.

(I saw Lou perform that live at Bumbershoot in 2002. It was FUCKING AWESOME. What you can't hear is all of us screaming "WHITE LIGHT" and "WHITE HEAT" during the refrains.)

Pass Thru Fire

The exact line is “ . . . Pass thru Fire licking at your lips. . . .” My other favorite line is “ . . . there’s a door up ahead not a wall.” There are many favorite lines of mine that run through the album “Magic and Loss.” It was originally intended to be about Magic, real magic, the ability to make oneself disappear. I had heard stories of magicians in Mexico with strange powers. I thought if I put out songs about magic they would get in touch with me and tell me their secrets. After all, people are always telling me their secrets, and I often put them in song as though they happened to me. Unfortunately two friends died of a virulent cancer within one year of each other while I was writing and so “Magic” became “Magic and Loss.” I wished for a magical way to deal with grief and disappearance. I wanted to create a music that helped with loss. It seemed we are always starting over, given a chance to deal with things again.

- Lou Reed, Pass Thru Fire

But while the war in Iraq is widely accepted to have been a disastrous mistake, another crucial event during the George W. Bush administration has long been considered unfit for political discussion: President Bush’s conduct, in the face of numerous warnings of a major terrorist plot, in the months leading up to September 11, 2001.

The general consensus seems to have been that the 9/11 attacks were so horrible, so tragic, that to even suggest that the president at the time might bear any responsibility for not taking enough action to try to prevent them is to play “politics,” and to upset the public. And so we had a bipartisan commission examine the event and write a report; we built memorials at the spots where the Twin Towers had come down and the Pentagon was attacked; and that was to be that. And then along came Donald Trump, to whom “political correctness” is a relic of an antiquated, stuffy, political system he’s determined to overwhelm. In an interview on October 16, he violated the longstanding taboo by saying, “When you talk about George Bush—I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time.”

Trump’s comments set up a back and forth between him and Jeb Bush—who, as Trump undoubtedly anticipated, can’t let a blow against him by the frontrunner go by without response—but the real point is that with a simple declaration by Trump, there it was: the subject of George W. Bush’s handling of the warnings about the 9/11 attacks was out there.

- Elizabeth Drew in the NYRB

And again, this is all part of consensual sex, the kind that is supposed to be women’s feminist reward. There’s a whole other level of confusion around the smudgy margins when it comes to experiences like the one I had at college 20 years ago. It was an encounter that today’s activists might call “rape”; which feminist hobgoblin Katie Roiphe, whose anti-rape-activist screed The Morning After was then all the rage, would have called “bad sex”; and which I understood at the time to be not atypical of much of the sex available to my undergraduate peers: drunk, brief, rough, debatably agreed upon, and not one bit pleasurable. It was an encounter to which I consented for complicated reasons, and in which my body participated but I felt wholly absent.

“A lot of sex feels like this,” Gattuso wrote in May, after her popular Crimson columns drew the attention of Feministing, a website at which she has since become a contributor. “Sex where we don’t matter. Where we may as well not be there. Sex where we don’t say no, because we don’t want to say no, sex where we say yes even, when we’re even into it, but where we fear … that if we did say no, or if we don’t like the pressure on our necks or the way they touch us, it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t count, because we don’t count.”

- Rebecca Traister

....and sticks to you

Being stuck in the middle is a big responsibility. We are the sole conduit for the Millennials to communicate with the Boomers. Basically, we know it all! That is a huge responsibility! Think about it for a minute. I can not only locate a book on Amazon that I want to read and then proceed to download it and read it digitally, but I also can find that same book using the Dewey Decimal System. I am really great at taking pictures with my phone and then backing them up on the Cloud for future use. I can also use a slide projector and an overhead projector, and I still have my first camera, a Polaroid....a huge benefit that my generation has over both the Boomers and the Millennials is our ability to see both sides, and then act accordingly. We are like glue holding this mess together. 

- via

This is too fucking chirpy and cutesy for me to embrace fully, but yeah: Gen X is the true sandwich generation.

Seven sins God of stone All is true Down to the bone

I thought you died alone A long long time ago

you've got to pick up every stitch

"Beyond the Veil," Henry Vaughan (1622-1695)

They are all gone into the world of light!
And I alone sit lingering here;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.
It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast,
Like stars upon some gloomy grove,
Or those faint beams in which this hill is drest,
After the sun’s remove.
I see them walking in an air of glory,
Whose light doth trample on my days;
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,
Mere glimmerings and decays.
O holy Hope, and high Humility,
High as the heavens above!
These are your walks, and you have showed them me,
To kindle my cold love.
Dear, beauteous Death! the jewel of the just,
Shining nowhere but in the dark,
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust,
Could Man outlook that mark!
He that hath found some fledged bird’s nest, may know
At first sight, if the bird be flown;
But what fair well or grove he sings in now,
That is to him unknown.
And yet, as Angels in some brighter dreams
Call to the soul when man doth sleep,
So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes,
And into glory peep.
If a star were confined into a tomb,
Her captive flames must needs burn there;
But when the hand that locked her up, gives room,
She’ll shine through all the sphere.
O Father of eternal life, and all
Created glories under Thee!
Resume Thy spirit from this world of thrall
Into true liberty.
Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill
My perspective still, as they pass;
Or else remove me hence unto that hill
Where I shall need no glass.

life isn't so bad

Atlanta in the Joaquin rain pic.twitter.com/D0GSdGdw50

— kristin hersh (@kristinhersh) October 3, 2015

Kristin Hersh, "Flooding" (live acoustic)

books read in October 2015

....how the fuck is it October already? Usually I hit the hundredth-book-read mark well before now, I think. Anyway, my reading dropped off precipitously, partly due to bouts of illness/depression, partly due to a burst of actual writing, and mostly due to screwing around on the internet. Fuck that. Back to reading. I find those "read only books by women/minorities" challenges interesting -- I'm thinking I'll try women-only authors for the month of October. This has already knocked out Pratchett rereads! (Rereading is my other big drag right now. It's comforting, it's familiar, I've done enough of it this damn year.)


Fiction is in red. Date of first publication in (parentheses).

94. Representing Sylvia Plath, ed. Sally Bayley and Tracy Brain (2011) (yes, I am either stupid or hardcore enough to read 'academic' shit like this even when the last time I was near a grad school program was 1997) (PS it was terrible)
95. A Carlin Home Companion: Growing Up with George, Kelly Carlin (2015)
96. Don't Suck, Don't Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt, Kristin Hersh (2015) (amazing, heartbreaking)
97. American Pain, John Temple (2015) (pretty sensationalistic, plus the main POV character is a raging asshole, and no sympathy for addicts is really displayed at all)
98. Disclaimer, Renee Knight (2015)
99. Asylum, Jeannette de Beauvoir (2015)
100. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Joan Aiken (1962) (reread of childhood book)
101. Twain's End, Lynn Cullen (2015)
102. Fanny & Henry: An Alternate Ending to Mansfield Park, Sherwood Smith (2015)
103. Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Le Guin (1985) (reread)
104. The Little Men, Megan Abbot (2015)
105. The World Before Us, Aislinn Hunter (2015)


all 2015 booklist posts

you'd think if the Internet is truly the bestest 'library' ever one damn person could source something this good

Now I am quietly waiting for

the catastrophe of my personality

to seem beautiful again,

and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and

brown and white in trees,

snows and skies of laughter

always diminishing, less funny

not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of

the year, what does he think of

that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,

perhaps I am myself again.

- Frank O'Hara, "Mayakovsky"