2011 Sep 13.
You’re so angry. It’s hard to read this because you’re so angry. You’re angry at the world, you’re angry at yourself, you’re angry at the people whom you’ve asked for help.
A weblog by Hao Lian.
A terrible secret guarded by golems.
A note that thanks you for being born, all those years ago.
You’re so angry. It’s hard to read this because you’re so angry. You’re angry at the world, you’re angry at yourself, you’re angry at the people whom you’ve asked for help.
Kreacher is what he has been made by wizards, Harry.
heartbreakingly beautiful writing
But I’m still angry at the events that took place and I’m still angry with these two heroes of mine who killed these two heroes of mine. I’m still angry for having my house burglarized. Wallace’s death brought for me a fresh version of the dread I was already experiencing after Rick’s suicide, this knowledge that life will never be like it was, it will be weirder and darker and happy at times and always always always more sad. I know now that everything Wallace wrote will be different for me than it was before. Even memories of his funniest writing include memories of the sorrow and desperation packed in there. My struggle when I do reach back into Wallace’s words will be to see beyond the shovel to the gut I felt when I heard he had died.
John Moe on David Foster Wallace’s suicide; David Wallace wrote Infinite Jest, a finite book that I finished two days ago in only the most literal sense of the word, finished.
I don’t know this young woman’s dad, but he doesn’t seem like a very good one. I’ll provide some anecdotal reference of my own, but I wouldn’t be surprised that many of us would feel better about their father than this asshole.
My pops sacrificed pretty much all of himself to raise our family (nine kids). He was downright selfless about it in all his moments of attending swim-meets or coaching soccer, seeing choir concerts and math bees, selling candy with the Boy Scouts, paying for who-ever’s speeding ticket or insurance, helping out when we fucked up rather than telling us how stupid we are, helping anyone move from apartment to apartment, or when there wasn’t money for rent or food or healthcare. Pretty much anything for his children, with reasonable, well understood limits.
We’re all (my siblings) doing our best growing up, we’ve all moved out and its just him and Mom now. Its all taken a toll on him. He’ll fall asleep at 10:45 watching ‘The Wire’ with her, and wake up early in the morning around 4:30 or 4:35, not knowing what to do. He has completed all his chores. What to do at that time in the morning. No cows to milk or babies to soothe or drunken children to pick up from the police. No news papers to deliver. Less responsibility as a father.
He’ll never be rich, never drive a beamer, never make a name for himself. Maybe he’s a loser or something, but he is one of the kindest human beings I’ve met in my time and I’d pray a thousand fucking rosaries for this young woman to have a father who understands that investing time and money into your family pays in returns that are not countable in any form of currency. And I don’t even own a rosary anymore.
localhuman on MetaFilter.
Sometimes a person walks into the room and your whole body just lights up like a Christmas tree, even though you’ve barely looked at them, and you have no idea why.
John Hodgman solves violent video games with the help of public radio.
From Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater:
Mushari dutifully went looking for a copy of the book for his dossier on Eliot. No reputable bookseller had ever heard of [Kilgore] Trout. Mushari made his last try at a smut-dealer’s hole in the wall. There, amidst the rawest pornography, he found tattered copies of every book Trout had ever written. 2BRO2B, which had been published at twenty-four cents, cost him five dollars.
[Mushari] was witless enough, too, to imagine that Trout’s books were very dirty books, since they were sold for such high prices to such queer people in such a place. He didn’t understand that what Trout had in common with pornography wasn’t sex but fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world.
From shinynew:
My sister did this to me when I was younger, but not quite as hard.
“If you rub your hands together it will smell like raspberries.” (Easily testable and not completely unbelivable.)
Does it and is hit.
“Why did you hit me?
“Why did you put your hand to your face?
“I … I trusted you.…”
She felt pretty bad about it.
It’s your story, your voice, your choices, and I don’t want to question them, but why these words?
Comments Written By Actual Students Extracted From Workshopped Manuscripts at a Major University, collected by Tanya Rey for McSweeney’s.
Once, on the first day of class, Angela Carter, who taught at Brown, was asked by a student what her own writing was like. She carefully answered as follows: “My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man’s penis.”
A profile of American creative writing education by Louis Menand on The New Yorker.
I went to see some live heart surgery yesterday. Sat in a auditorium for three hours watching the queer thing beating, then not beating for a bit, then beating again. Didn’t lose concentration once.