“DEAR WOMEN:

I know that you are not cattle. I feel alone inside of you. I walk around and the dead insects crunch. I don’t know what to say about your beauty. What is it exactly about the feeling of excludedness a certain kind of girl makes you feel in your arousal. Dear complete women, dear intelligent women, please do not take things lying down.

[…]

Nobody cares about your intelligence I do not care. I want a world to live in.

[…]

I will not train myself to love this shit.”

9:35 pm  •  16 August 2012  •  8 notes

fluvicoline:

dionne brand.

anne carson.

jan zwicky.

some robert bringhurst (the presocratics!)

some don mckay.

hector de saint-denys garneau.

seriously though dionne brand.

ETA: fred wah! waiting for saskatchewan! so good.

see also:

daphne marlatt

gail scott

nicole brossard

erin moure

susan holbrook

rachel zolf

sina queyras

m. nourbese philip

so many! sososo many. and seriously, dionne brand. also check out the book ‘prismatic publics: canadian women’s poetry and poetics’ for an excellent introduction to some of these writers. 

now can we talk about canadian artists? because the lesbian national park rangers and the feminist art gallery (fag) give me so many feelings.

eta: lisa robertson is also canadian, though now living in france. she gave a reading here in mtl earlier this year, and gail scott and erin moure lovingly (brilliantly) heckled her from the audience. also erin moure brought a box of wine to her own reading and shared it with everyone, which felt very winnipeg to me even though the reading was in montreal. turns out she’s from alberta, which, close enough, prairie vibes.

(Source: plasmodiocarp, via cuntext)

2:42 am  •  7 August 2012  •  18 notes

“I often write about material I feel resistance to, material that makes me uncomfortable, because that creates a charge for me, a sort of erotics of disclosure.”

— Dodie Bellamy

1:25 pm  •  1 July 2012  •  16 notes

“

She sees the present as a great tear, a great rip in the surface of things: the gap of which is at first impossible for her to move across (…does not thinking seek forever to clamp a dressing over the gaping and violent wound of the impossibility of thought…?) It is awareness of this that makes linear narrative impossible. A virtually tragic awareness, for the writing “I,” which modernists began to “deconstruct” as they recognized that gap (accepted to give up power) has, in her case, been “deconstructed” a priori by social conditions. She is not only split between the self and the “real”, but also within the self…

So the question becomes how to write across the almost … hysterical … overdetermination of her gaps…

Maybe my resistance to the narrative conventions of the novel have to do with what I think of as its Protestant qualities: its earnest representation of the “real,” its greed for action, its preference for the concrete over the philosophical.

A compromise might be possible: structuring the story by means of the fluctuations in her … (dare I?) hysterical voice. The use of the voice invoking a poetic meaning in excess of the sentence….

Blows: violent and unusual interruptions in her narrative texture-which texture the writing is hopefully starting to discover. More and more I intuit that it has to do with starting from a negative point: a crushed ego that doesn’t see its boundaries.

”

— Gail Scott, from “Paragraphs Blowing on a Line”

12:50 am  •  30 June 2012  •  6 notes

“Simone Weil was a performative philosopher. Because her texts are really notebook writings, there isn’t ever any subject that’s apart from her. Which is not to say she’s writing “memoir” or “autobiography.” Channeling her subjects through her person, Weil does what writers do. She is constructing a narrative in realtime—arriving at a state of openness, witnessed by her audience, the reader—in which thoughts fly in and out according to who’s listening. In Weil’s philosophy, just like in narrative or phone sex, it’s not the story that we’re really hearing, it is the fact and act of telling it. Her thought approaches narrative—an emotional transparency that occurs when someone else is listening to you.”

— Chris Kraus

12:22 am  •  30 June 2012  •  14 notes

“This entry is a complete and total waste of technology.”

- my livejournal circa 2005

2:18 am  •  13 June 2012  •  2 notes

“woody-allen-esque father”

10:20 pm  •  10 June 2012  •  3 notes

“…things are so bad, so minimally imaginative for women’s prospects when it comes to thinking about the relation of the sexual theater to capturing a life, that people tend to do the thing they heard about doing just to get through the situation, and if it means poisoning themselves and wearing out their bodies, or being over- or understimulated, even, they’ll do it.”

— Lauren Berlant

(Source: supervalentthought.com)

11:42 am  •  16 May 2012  •  5 notes

“Now I am looking at the archive, which is like looking at your hand after a manicure.”

— Lauren Berlant

(Source: supervalentthought.com)

11:39 am  •  16 May 2012  •  6 notes

7:04 pm  •  9 May 2012  •  1 note