I will rearrange the furniture without mercy, because I know that when I find the right fit I will quit being so goddamn scared of the dark. I will eat all the food in this house, and all the paper, and when I am so full the darkness cannot fill me I will sleep soundly. Oh, the sound of it, nothing.

I’m not in love with you or anything, or trying to be, but I’ll memorize the shape of your back while you’re sleeping, because if I can internalize whatever it is that a man is when he’s sleeping, then maybe I can learn to sleep alone. The train rushes past and I realize this is foolish.

I pace the halls of my home like a ghost, or a rat, or a madwoman in one of those novels I can’t bring myself to read. An attic, or a basement, or a run-down bungalow out back, the grasses growing through the floorboards. A soup of shallots and watermelon blood. I can’t begin to tell you what goes through my head.

Give me a lineup of suitors and a long knife, and I’ll give you the god’s honest truth. We’re coming apart at the seams, it seems, and there’s not enough cocaine on the continent to make me forget what exactly I am. Whiskey, lemon, honey, tonic. Bird, stick, song and carrot. I’ll read your cards if you show me your hand, and if you show me your hand I’ll hold it. The night is almost as filthy as the day, and both would be yours if you’d own them.

Note written to myself, October 24, 2008:

“The name of the game is sensory overload, little buddy.”

the word of mouth, resting on my bookshelf. 

the glass of your eye in my coffee.

the myriad ways of taming.

the desirous ear, the lolling breath–who are we to slip, to unhinge ourselves to strangers?

the hair of your cheek is caught in my lungs, the tremor of your hand in my pockets.

a Southwest town burns down to the ground, and your thighs are aching. 

my bracelet breaks all over your bed. 

these are the methods of destruction: blonde, redhead, brunette, raven black. 

my bitterness wears a floor-length skirt, breasts bare and bruising in the sunlight. 

the object of my longing is a jar that will never be clean. 

tell me, love, what do you see on your ceiling as you sleep?

your grandmother’s fingernails, my drought and draft, the apples of the south, where do you go. 

the balloon string of memory

has fled to warmer climes.

Oh, how all the time between now and childhood stretches out before me

a knit scarf pulling apart. All the time between now and childhood

I have ached after you often in the manner of a child.

It twists the knife in me to know

the woman that I am has always been

lapping after your gaze

like a hound.

When I picture the devil, he still looks like you. 

The sight of you, moving through a crowd. The misting heat of bodies and too-bright lights. The weight of all my wanting got the building condemned. Its paint now shelters strangers.

But this, this goes in the pile of pains that help me know I’m alive.

It’s that urge to be a part of someone’s sense of adventure, to grip every moment of the world in my teeth and shake it. To look everyone dead in the eye. To climb fences and grab hands and grin with all our crooked teeth until the end. To try to feel everything we can until it’s gone. To try to find all the right words and the right people to say them to. 

You drop into my life like a slap in the face and then you’re gone again, but it brings the blood to my cheeks. This is not only self-destruction; the way I burn down when you’re around means I have to rebuild and remember. Phoenix, phoenix, unhinge my jaw for you and let my heart drop into my lap, because I am stronger than I used to be. 

I didn’t know who I was when I met you, and sometimes even now, the hair falling across your brow can make me forget. I am shedding the same tears, but every time I put myself back together I hope that I am slightly more aligned. Not for you, never for you, but for myself. My heart breaks every time I look at you, but it is the cracking of ice on the river, and the river will flow. 

i tried to write about everything i was thankful for, but i kept coming back to the way i want to hit you in the mouth. cheap whiskey in a dark alley, the world all moaning out around our heads. i tried to build a fragile thing, but then i broke it on purpose. your crooked teeth littering my bed sheets. 

i tried to find a hand to hold and found a telephone ringing at the bottom of a well. a coal mine, a coal miner, a minor key, a wet drag, a loose leaf, i said get me my memory for christmas. when I dream I still look like I’m fifteen years old.

everything in scraps and patches, the world disintegrating in the palm of your lap. i will suck dick at sunrise and i will remember to check the mail. my meter is running over your lips and i can’t remember what language is. enumerate the pieces of your body and tell me they are mine. your hair falling in the bathroom sink. every woman who ever left me. the sea.

stay up all night telling lies and tell me what the morning thinks. my father has gone to the south, my hair is turning white. i am always falling five percent in love.

from odditiesoflife:

The Mystery of “Nancy Drew” and the Author that Never Was

The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, and Tom Swift were all the product of one man, Edward Stratemeyer, a New Jersey author who wrote more than 1,300 books and eventually founded a syndicate of ghostwriters who pounded out juvenile mysteries based on his instructions. Thus book syndication was born. They were referred to as “book factories” and were extremely profitable.

Stratemeyer conceived the syndicate when his Rover Boys series proved so popular that he could not keep up with the demand for more books. He corralled a stable of hungry young writers, and in 1910 they were producing 10 new series annually. Each writer earned $50 to $250 for a manuscript he could produce in a month, working with characters and plot devised by Stratemeyer. He would review each completed manuscript for consistency and publish it under a pseudonym that he owned — Franklin W. Dixon, Carolyn Keene, Laura Lee Hope, Victor Appleton. Each book in a series mentioned the thrilling earlier volumes and foreshadowed the next book. The formula worked so well that when Stratemeyer died in 1930 his daughter continued the business; when she died in 1982 the syndicate was selling more than 2 million books a year.

This sounds cynical, but it worked because Stratemeyer had a sympathetic understanding of what young readers wanted. “The trouble is that very few adults get next to the heart of a boy when choosing something for him to read,” Stratemeyer wrote to a publisher in 1901. “A wide awake lad has no patience with that which is namby-pamby, or with that which he puts down as a ‘study book’ in disguise. He demands real flesh and blood heroes who do something.”

via neil-gaiman who said: Writing books. I am obviously doing it wrong.

“A wide awake lad has no patience with that which is namby-pamby"

“A wide awake lad has no patience with that which is namby-pamby"

THIS IS MAYBE THE BEST WRITING ADVICE I HAVE EVER SEEN

Stephen Nytas - A-Frame House (from the Playsets series)

I saw a few of his works at Columbia College Chicago's Glass Curtain Gallery the other day, and was really, really into them. Seen as large prints they are even more effective.

This series brings to mind the first chapter of Dodie Bellamy’s Pink Steam, which is itself a response to David Levinthal’s Barbie works. You should probably check out all those things if you are into creepy doll feelings.

roots-deep-mind-high:

• Find a complete stranger.

• Reveal to each other intimate details about your lives for half an hour.

• Then, stare deeply into each other’s eyes without talking for four minutes.

York psychologist, Professor Arthur Arun, has been studying why people fall in love.

He asked his subjects to carry out the above 3 steps and found that many of his couples felt deeply attracted after the 34 minute experiment. Two of his subjects later got married.

Almost more interesting to me is this bit from the BBC article:

“Another experiment showed that if people experience fear on a date they often misinterpret that feeling as love.”

also:

“In fact, people who both like the same level of thrills and excitement are more likely to be compatible.”

Hello, I’m Sid Branca, and I like to kiss girls who are into thrills. I like men who misinterpret fear as love. I don’t know how to talk to another human being, and I’m afraid of dying alone.

When We Refuse to Suffer (Album Version) - Jonathan Richman (Because Her Beauty Is Raw & Wild)

I’ve been pretty intensely battling with my bipolar disorder lately. I am, I suppose, undergoing a period of substantial growth. I’m learning a great deal, be it technical or intellectual or artistic or emotional. I am finally moving beyond my first stumbling steps toward some kind of adulthood, without dropping what makes me feel sometimes like a child staring with glee and terror and leaping into the arms of the world. I do, I do know that my life is good. I know that I am busy with many things that are important to me, and know that my loneliness is productive, my fear is productive. These things are useful to a point. I must finally, now, learn to be a woman alone and whole and truly in the world, and I do not regret the choices that led me here. But sometimes it is hard to live inside my head. My chest aches, my collarbone cracks open, my ribs are a gate swinging wide and all the dust the street kicks up gets in. I’m in love with everybody all the time, except when I’m not. I am falling apart at the seams, but I have arranged my disintegration well. I watch a stranger emerging from a building, eyes full of tears, and I have to grab a hold of something. A mailbox, a bike rack. If I touch anyone they will turn to dust, or worst, forget me, or even worse, remember. I barely know my own name. I wait for a bus. I imagine myself in a small pool of light at the bottom of the lake. I can’t stop seeing every color in the room, watching each movement of a body, hearing each sound as the shift of a symphony. I no longer know how to process life differently from something that is presented to me as art. My hands shake, I smoke too many cigarettes, I adore unavailable men, I draw a circle over and over and over again until it tears the page. I put my headphones in. I pretend to let the random chance of lyric state my mood. This song comes on.

This outfit belonged to the late fashion icon and magazine editor Isabella Blow, who committed suicide in 2007. Isabella was a huge influence on Gaga, and Gaga has been a major supporter of the Isabella Blow foundation, which provides funding both to arts scholarships and depression research. Isabella was a huge part of the British fashion scene, and Gaga considered wearing this to London Fashion Week a tribute to her memory. That doesn’t depoliticize it, of course, but is another layer of context for the intention behind the choice. And that you should probably all be getting somewhat less pissed at Gaga and more pissed at the British woman who discovered McQueen and poisoned herself after getting ovarian cancer. (Blow was also working on a book project about “beauty in the Arab world” not long before her death, although I don’t know what became of the project.)

Obviously I get why someone who has undergone persecution for wearing a burqa as a part of their religious practice could be offended, and I’m not attempting to delegitimize that. However, think of the thousands of bullshit Western teenagers who didn’t know what a burqa is earlier this year. Perhaps a few of them were curious, and did some googling. They now know slightly more than they did, and perhaps are slightly more tolerant. Yes, it’s tacky and ugly and insensitive, but I’ll take that over cultural isolationism and ignorant youth any day.

And of course, to reiterate what K said below, “people have no right to tell anyone what they can and can’t wear." 

clockwork-bomb:

myheadthinksalot:

faineemae:

gilderoy:

faineemae:

tufworld:

gagaroyale:

Backstage at London Fashion Week.

i just searched the lady gaga tag to see if tumblr savior is working ,and then i see this . she angers me so much

seriously what the fuck are you doing

you get my gif too

if you can wear it, why can’t she?

Because she’s not Muslim, because she’s not from the middle east, because she can’t fucking wear shit that has religious and cultural significance for the name of fashion while my sisters, myself and milllions of other muslim women still get shitted on by western society and are called oppressed for just wearing a hijab, let alone a full veil and face covering while this woman can wear a cheap ugly tacky piece of shit and call it a burqa.

Ya made a wrong turn on this one, Gaga.

Wrong.

Where did she call it a burqa? Sure it looks like one, and that’s how women wear one (except the color… and translucent veil over the face), but if she called it one then that’s what matters. Gaga’s also worn meat and came to an award ceremony in a giant fucking egg. She does weird shit. Let it roll.

If you wanna play devil’s advocate you could try to say that her wearing it is showing how it can be used as a fashion statement, meaning that there’s nothing wrong with it, meaning that people should get used to the image of it and therefore stop shitting on the burqa and hijab when women wear it for religious purposes.

I wear scarves on my head but not in the same style as Muslim women. Think about the 50s style of women tying scarves around their head to keep hair back, or just to travel. I don’t do it for any other reason but I feel more comfortable doing so. I have crucifix designs on jewelry and, sometimes, on t-shirts. I’m not Christian and I don’t see anything wrong with it (unless the image is being used in an offensive way). I have images of the Buddha in my home, and while I’m no Buddhist I do tend to pray/make wishes towards said statue.

You can come after me all you want and spout out stuff like PRIVILEGE and IGNORANCE etc. etc. but you know what? I don’t care. I don’t. I think it’d be better to be more concerned about the people who treat these religious objects as something to be ashamed of instead of realizing that 1: they have a value that can’t be ignored and 2: people have no right to tell anyone what they can and can’t wear. This goes both ways. I think you would be better off going after the people who attack you for wearing something crucial to your religion and something you take great pride in. If you disagree, go right ahead and keep fighting that fight against… what, again?

For all we know, crazy lady’s doing this as a very poor attempt at solidarity. You can judge her for it but it’s important to think of the other side of this, however much you don’t like it.

I’m not a Gaga apologist, and while I’m a fan of hers I’m definitely not worshipping all the shit she does, but she’s got her heart in the right place. That doesn’t excuse when she steps over the line, though I think that’s just as important as the times she falls short of the mark and ruffles some jimmies, like in this case.

I’d also just like to add that this is LADY FUCKING GAGA. Everything she does is to keep your eye on her so congratulations, you just did exactly what she wanted you to do.