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redcheekdays

The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

redcheekdays

There’s an idea in many space stories, that the cosmos is a place of transformation, a crucible in which things burn, and if humans venture out deep enough they also burn, and become more fully who they are—that even in the wildest reaches of space, there we are, most pure and dark and bright and realised, somehow coming home. Our bodies come from stars and we find in space all that we are—terror, strangeness, beauty, hope.

redcheekdays

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit.

redcheekdays

We haven’t evolved a hero story that’s female. We’re always trying to fit women’s stories into this male structure, which is this rising action, this powerful conflict, and this falling action. And I think a female hero story is not that. It’s something else. Women are trying to recover their voices, which is a much quieter, deeply existential, and frustrating journey.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/24/carrie-coons-existential-journey-to-tv-stardom

redcheekdays

A Baba Yaga is the ultimate tester and judge, the desacralized omnipotent goddess, who defends deep-rooted Russian pagan values and wisdom and demands that young women and men demonstrate that they deserve her help. But what Baba-Yaga also defends in the nineteeth-century tales collected in this volume are qualities that the protagonists need to adapt and survive in difficult situations such as perseverence, kindness, obedience, integrity, and courage[…] In all the tales Baba Yaga is compelling and dreaded, because she forces the protagonists to test themselves and not to delude themselves that there is an easy way to reconcile conflicts.

redcheekdays

Laughter is not our medicine. Stories hold our cure. Laughter is just the honey that sweetens the bitter medicine.

redcheekdays

To be rendered powerless does not destroy your humanity. Your resilience is your humanity. The only people who lose their humanity are those who believe they have the right to render another human being powerless. They are the weak. To yield and not break, that is incredible strength.

redcheekdays

McSWEENEY'S: Why write poetry?

LINDENBERG: I think there is a general misconception that you write poems because you "have something to say." I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say. Poetry allows us to hold many related tangential notions in very close orbit around each other at the same time. The "unsayable" thing at the center of the poem becomes visible to the poet and reader in the same way that dark matter becomes visible to the astrophysicist. You can't see it, but my measure of its effect on the visible, it can become so precise a silhouette you can almost know it.

redcheekdays

I cleaned my apartment when no one was coming over, and cooked elaborate meals with no guests in mind but myself. I began to learn to say “no” to things, to define space for myself. I considered decisions longer, and hurt people less. With no one else’s needs into which to escape, it becomes much more difficult to skid through life on self-delusion and comfortable ignorance. Living alone is a confrontation with the mirror, a removal, if only for certain hours of the day, from the social contract, outside the systems of manners that grow up around women like strangling vines. It is becoming the witch in the forest, powerful and watchful and silent, setting visitors on edge. [...] The things I miss could be seen as childish, a state of being in which I was never obligated to consider anyone’s needs other than my own. Women are pushed out of childhood so quickly, shoved without ceremony into the heavy social obligations of adulthood. Living alone is a reminder that we can make our bodies antisocial, hoarding our selfishness and our silence. Loneliness and solitude are privileges of thoughtless and full-throated adulthood traditionally handed to men and kept from women. They are the strange and rich pleasures of the world beyond the social, beyond the structures of home and family.

https://catapult.co/stories/the-fierce-triumph-of-loneliness

redcheekdays

SENSE AND MODERATION ARE FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TO BE KILLED BY SOMETHING THEY DONT LOVE

redcheekdays

Never underestimate the importance of having someone in your life who makes you want to be a better person.

https://twitter.com/dauvoire/status/761410197596299264

redcheekdays

The first political act we have [to do] right now is to choose love over fear, because we live in times when fear and cynicism are used in a way that is very pervasive and persuasive, and our first duty when we wake up is to believe in love.

http://variety.com/2017/film/news/venice-film-festival-guillermo-del-toro-aquatic-creature-sex-the-shape-of-water-1202543821/

redcheekdays

The poet does not forget or forgive: she haunts. She is unafraid of her anger, understands it as love. For herself.

redcheekdays

In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.

redcheekdays

Cities have often been compared to language: you can read a city, it’s said, as you read a book. But the metaphor can be inverted. The journeys we make during the reading of a book trace out, in some way, the private spaces we inhabit. There are texts that will always be our dead-end streets; fragments that will be bridges; words that will be like the scaffolding that protects fragile constructions. T.S. Eliot: a plant growing in the debris of a ruined building; Salvador Novo: a tree-lined street transformed into an expressway; Tomas Segovia: a boulevard, a breath of air; Roberto Bolano: a rooftop terrace; Isabel Allende: a (magically real) shopping mall; Gilles Deleuze: a summit; and Jacques Derrida: a pothole. Robert Walser: a chink in the wall, for looking through to the other side; Charles Baudelaire: a waiting room; Hannah Arendt: a tower, an Archimedean point; Martin Heidegger: a cul-de-sac; Walter Benjamin: a one-way street walked down against the flow.

redcheekdays

Lately I’ve been spending a good part of nearly every day thinking about love. Romantic love. The kind of love that involves french kissing and mix tapes and spooning in New York City in the summer when it’s by most people’s standards too disgustingly humid to spoon. The kind of love you wanna bring home to your grandma and say, “Grandma, look at this love! Just look at this LOVE!” Lately I’ve been thinking about who I want to love, and how I want to love, and why I want to love the way I want to love, and what I need to learn to love that way, and who I need to become to become the kind of love I want to be…….and when I break it all down, when I whittle it into a single breath, it essentially comes out like this: Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.

redcheekdays

When I love, I love for miles and miles. A love so big it should either be outlawed or it should have a capital and its own currency.

redcheekdays

And I realized you could like something and not like it at the same time. Not like loving unconditionally; that’s an act of desperation. This was different, like respecting somebody for being a mess because you’re a mess too.

george lass ("dead like me")

redcheekdays

My mother boils seawater. It sits all afternoon simmering on the stovetop, almost two gallons in a big soup pot. The windows steam up and the house smells like a storm. In the evening, a crust of salt is all that’s left at the bottom of the pot. My mother scrapes it out with a spoon. We each lick a fingertip and dip them in the salt and it’s softer than you’d think, less like sand and more like snow. We lay our fingertips on our tongues, right in the middle. It tastes like salt but like something else, too—wide, and dark. It tastes like drowning, or like falling asleep on the shore and only waking up when the tide has come up to your feet and you wonder if you’d gone on sleeping, would you have sunk?

The Alchemy: Salt from Water

redcheekdays

To feel anything deranges you. To be seen feeling anything strips you naked.

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crooked as corkscrews