buckle up fucklehead

The thing is, I’m healing.

books read in 2020: the secret history by donna tartt (★★★★★)

the whole room was full of Classics wlwTM and we Absolutely Could Not Handle This Like Even a Little Bit. I got so distracted thinking about her during my workout today that I accidentally did 15 more jumping jacks than I was supposed to, which I think is the gayest sentence I’ve ever written.

how do I describe the way she speaks? it’s this very floaty, dignified, vaguely curious, uncompelled, but very intentional style of diction, like if you met god at a garden party and she handed you a pitcher of cream and asked you why you think you should get into heaven. I wrote down the phrase “Your ridiculous little glasslike soul” and I don’t remember in what context she said it, but THAT’S the vibe.

she is screamingly funny but relentlessly deadpan. “You know Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for—” she pulls down her glasses and looks at us, like a librarian who moonlights writing erotica – “sodomy.” She had us do an “interactive portion” during one of her poems, instructing the right side of the audience: “Your part is simply the word Deciduous? With a question mark at the end.”

She has flawless comedic timing, and she does not use filler words. Remember this line from Elektra? it sums up her sense of humor PERFECTLY:

She spices up her wit by dropping in the occasional mind-blowing quote like “Tears are all about the weeper, aren’t they?” and “Roses and hurricanes are too much as they are to be anything else, to be damaged by metaphor.” and “Do I frighten people, saying there’s no back wall? Nothing between you and your heart of darkness?”

like. she is an incredible writer and I’m not about to denigrate her translations by saying she didn’t put work into them, but I honest to god think that is just How This Woman’s Mind Works. she is on “not to me, not if it’s you” and “someone will remember us I say even in another time” levels of galaxy brain wordcraft, but IN REAL LIFE.

I came up to her after the reading and asked her to sign my Bacchae copy. I did not say much to her besides that I was a fan, because I got the sense that if I formed a complete sentence in her presence she would see directly through me and reach into my body and swallow my entire ribcage like a snake.

Peaky Blinders (2013- )

‘so maybe i wanted to give you something more than a catalog of non-definitive acts, something other than the desperation’

‘take a body, maybe / your own, dump it gently. all your dead / unfinished selves and dump them gently’

‘i think i’d rather keep the bullet this time. it’s mine, you can’t have it, see, im not giving it up’

‘when you bang your head on the wall you have to remember / you’re on both sides of it already but go ahead, / yell at yourself’

‘a man takes his sadness down the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river’

‘tonight you’re thinking of cities under crowns / of snow and im staring at you like ‘im looking through the window, counting birds’

‘i had to make up all the words myself. the way / they taste, the way they sound in the air’

‘please keep him safe. / let him lay his head on my chest and we will be / like sailors, swimming in the sound of / it, dashed / to pieces’

‘i’ll be your slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue and final resting, walking around with this bullet inside me’

‘i ran and i knew you wouldn’t catch me. / you are a fever i am learning to live with, and everything is happening at the wrong end of a very long tunnel’

‘i clawed my way into the light but the light is just as scary. id rather quit. id rather be sad. it’s too much work.’

‘someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure. im sure you remember, i was on the phone with you, sweetheart’

‘and the tug of a simple / profound sadness when it sounds so far away’

‘here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed’