Category: quotes

In a recent newsletter, Austin Kleon linked to this quote from writer Sasah Chapin:

“When this happens—when expectation breaks down, and you are living in a shipwreck of your expectations—a precious state of being can dawn, if you’re lucky. This is the state of Playing In The Ruins. You’re not seeing the landscape around you as something that needs to transform. You’re just seeing it as the scrapyard it is. And then you can look around yourself and say, okay, what is actually here, when I’m not telling myself constant lies about what it’s going to be one day. Who am I actually, in this fallen place, this actuality foreign to my hopes and dreams.”

Why am I thinking of “ruins” now? OH, NO REASON. But I guess I’m also ready to look around and say “what is actually here” and what that is is…each other. Government won’t save us but we can take care of our neighbors. We can be a kind stranger on the internet. Here are some ways to do that:

• Find your local mutual aid society and get involved. The Salt Lake City one has community fridges; I bet I can help keep them stocked.
• Go to GoFundMe, search “name change,” and filter by “close to goal.” Then throw in some money and help a trans person get their name legally changed.
• It’s also Transanta season, which lets you send at-risk trans kids things from their wish list. I’ve donated before and signing the gift notes with, “We love you,” honestly probably did more for me than the recipient, but it felt good.

I just started reading a short story from A.S. Byatt, which appeared in The Paris Review thirty (!) years ago and then made it into a short story collection: “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.” You can read the beginning of it here, in The Paris Review, and oh it’s a good time–dense and rich and wandering.

This description of the “narratologist” heroine!

Her ancestresses, about whom she thought increasingly often, would probably have been dead by the age she had reached. Dead in childbed, dead of influ­enza, or tuberculosis, or puerperal fever, or simple exhaustion, dead, as she travelled back in time, from worn-out unavailing teeth, from cracked kneecaps, from hunger, from lions, tigers, sabre-toothed tigers, invading aliens, floods, fires, religious persecution, human sacrifice, why not? Certain female narra­tologists talked with pleasurable awe about wise crones but she was no crone, she was an unprecedented being, a woman with porcelain-crowned teeth, laser-corrected vision, her own store of money, her own life and field of power, who flew, who slept in luxurious sheets around the world, who gazed out at the white fields under the sun by day and the brightly turning stars by night as she floated redundant.

I mean, damn: “She was no crone, she was an unprecedented being, a woman with porcelain-crowned teeth, laser-corrected vision, her own store of money, her own life and field of power…”

It took me 30 years to learn that Dr. King was a radical and I didn’t learn about the Poor People’s Campaign he organized before his assassination until this year. (It involved 3,000 people camping on the Washington Mall for 6 weeks! You’d think someone would have mentioned it!)

Anyway, here’s a quote from the man himself:

And one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society.

Despite all the work I’ve done on myself, despite trying to reframe creative endeavors as a process, not a binary, I realized I still expect myself to be able to do the new job perfectly after less than a month. Because it’s just writing! I should be able to do that, I’ve done it forever, it’s easy…except when it isn’t.

Austin Kleon linked this last week in his newsletter and it blew my mind. It’s from a book by Verlyn Klinkenborg, as blogged by Mandy Brown:

If you think that writing—the act of composition—should flow, and it doesn’t, what are you likely to feel?
Obstructed, defeated, inadequate, blocked, perhaps even stupid.
The idea of writer’s block, in its ordinary sense, exists largely because of the notion that writing should flow.

But if you accept that writing is hard work, and that’s what it feels like when you’re writing,
then everything is as it should be.
Your labor isn’t a sign of defeat.
It’s a sign of engagement.
The difference is all in your mind, but what a difference.

It’s  a new week and here are some words for it, from Sister Corita Kent.

It’s hard not to look at the date of this (40 years ago) and be discouraged at how far we still have to go to “share as equals” but… the crocuses have always come up.