Tag: Reading

asdfg

Erica AveyLeave a comment

“

Producing language, we wank, we eat, we regurgitate, we research, we demonstrate, we expel; with what has been expelled we repaper our bodily walls, and this wallpaper is intricate, befouled, and potentially asemic—nonsignifying scratches without a linguistic system backing them up, scratches we nominate as words by agreeing together that this scratch means wank, that scratch means cang, this scratch means diatomaceous, that scratch means masks… Literature—the respite of the fallen—is the process of making do with mask and task, diverting ourselves with tasks that mask our disenfranchisement. We are disenfranchised, regardless of our station, because we belong to an earth that will continue to bear our presence only if we remain adequate custodians of this material envelope, fragile, in which we dwell, an envelope consisting of just a small interval of habitable temperatures. To unmask the systems that will destroy our possibility of inhabiting the earth is the task of a language that operates through masks and the avoidance of tasks.”

-Wayne Koestenbaum
The Writer’s Obligation

não é nada

Erica AveyLeave a comment

“

There we lived for a time, a time incapable of passing, in a space one could not even think of measuring. A passing of time outside of Time, a space that knew nothing of the usual habits of real space… O futile companion of my tedium, what hours of happy disquiet seemed to be ours! Hours of ashen wit, days of spatial longing, inner centuries of outer landscapes… And we did not ask ourselves what it was for, because we took pleasure in knowing it wasn’t for anything.”

-Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet

〄

Erica AveyLeave a comment

“

Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by still another: the two circle each other and stop. Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it is punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter—like the throb of a heart made of jelly.”

-Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye

psychic hygiene

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“

He had already learned by experience that faith and doubt belonged together, that they govern each other like inhaling and exhaling, and that his very advances in all aspects of the Game’s microcosm naturally sharpened his eyes to all the dubiousness of the Game.”

-Hermann Hesse
Magister Ludi

blinking

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“

What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal a myriad of origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”

-Ocean Vuong
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

2018 reads

Erica Avey1 Comment

Books read:

  • Devotion by Patti Smith
  • Dreams of a Spirit-Seer by Immanuel Kant
  • Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna
  • Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso
  • Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
  • Anecdotal Theory by Jane Gallop
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
  • Island by Aldous Huxley
  • The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future by Cynthia Eller
  • Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
  • The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda
  • The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir
  • The White Album by Joan Didion
  • The Emperor Wears No Clothes by Jack Herer
  • Anthropocene Feminism edited by Richard Grusin
  • Our Right To Drugs by Thomas Szasz
  • Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag
  • A Wave in the Mind by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • And the Pursuit of Happiness by Maira Kalman
  • A Musical Hell by Alejandra Pizarnik

P.S. I didn’t do this last year, so here’s my books read in 2017. All still adore.

2017 list:

  • Blindness by Jose Saramago
  • The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
  • The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre
  • The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby
  • Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • The Meek One by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks
  • White Girls by Hilton Als
  • The Art of Losing Control by Jules Evans
  • Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
  • We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • You Found a Beating Heart by Nisha Bhakaa
  • Supernatural by Graham Hancock
  • The Psychedelic Experience by Leary, Metzner, and Alpert (Dass)
  • Be Here Now by Ram Dass
  • Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
  • The Divine Art of Dying by Karen Speerstra and Herbert Anderson
  • Infectious Madness by Harriet Washington
  • A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
  • Future Sex by Emily Witt
  • The Joyous Cosmology by Alan Watts
  • Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
  • Just Kids by Patti Smith