It has been intense for me, lately. Mostly in good ways! A little bit in bad ones! I feel I’ve only just had a chance to stop for moment and look around me and take notice of what is happening in my mind and in my body. The heat makes everything worse - bring on the thunderstorms, I say.
It’s another low effort one today because none of the ideas I mentioned last time have finished cooking yet and I am, quite frankly, exhausted. I’ve been doing a lot of reading, though - and a lot of highlighting and annotating, which I personally think is the best way to read. So here’s a kind of commonplace book in miniature, an assortment of quotations that have struck me enough to mark them out, a snapshot of what I am thinking in and around and through right now.
“Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few detours.”
(The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam)
“In commodity exchange it’s as if the buyer and the seller were both in plastic bags; there’s none of the contact of a gift exchange. There is neither motion nor emotion because the whole point is to keep the balance, to make sure the exchange itself doesn’t consume anything or involve one person with another.”
(The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, Lewis Hyde)
“Any creation, primary or secondary, with any vitality to it, can “really” be a dozen mutually exclusive things at once, before breakfast.”
(The Word for World is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin)
“There is always this circularity in fantasy. The snake devours its tail. Dreams must explain themselves.”
(The Word for World is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin)
“These alternative cultural and academic realms, the areas beside academia rather than within it, the intellectual worlds conjured by losers, failures, dropouts, and refuseniks, often serve as the launching pad for alternatives precisely where the university cannot.”
(The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam)
“That is what the practice of an art is, you keep looking for the outside edge. When you find it you make a whole, solid, real, and beautiful thing; anything less is incomplete.”
(The Word for World is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin)