theparisreview:

“The city is being constructed by an old woman born in 1881 who wants to record all the important events in her life so that she can remember them. Each year that she has lived is designated by a street, and each week is represented by a door. The doors belong to places where important events occurred. The blank doors are for those weeks that she can’t remember. The old woman hopes that out of her memory and forgetfulness, as recorded in the streets of doors, a pattern or sign will emerge and she will one day see the story of her life. Every door opens on a small closet-like space. Only one door in each street of doors leads to the next street. It is therefore necessary to go from door to door searching for the entry door.”

—Alice Aycock, from “The First City of the Dead: The City of Doors (1914)”

(via calisthenicswithwords)

veggielezzyfemmie:

Feminists Install Temporary Memorial to Rape Survivors on Washington Mall

by Sarah Mirk on February 15, 2013 - 10:34am

The National Mall got a new memorial yesterday, if only briefly. As part of One Billion Rising, Baltimore-based feminist group FORCE installed a temporary memorial recognizing survivors of sexual assault. The group created giant letters out of a statement from a rape survivor and floated the eight-foot-tall words onto the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

(via problem-dogs)

“The thing is, though, those happy little children in the photos? They’re nothing but ghosts, tiny spirit-girls haunting old Polaroids. When you are used to pretending that everything is ok, that you are a normal family with loving parents, you develop a really excellent false smile. You can do it on command, like a trained dog. But if we’re going to get real, if we’re to bring any semblance of verisimilitude into this, let’s look at the true pics: my father drunk and vicious, smashing up a bedroom suite, or beating the dog, or whipping my sister and me with a belt, or getting blind drunk and forcing us into the car, where he’d drive and scream at us for hours, or, in a series of nightmarish images, like some flipbook from hell, let’s see my father wrap his hands round my mother’s throat and strangle her. See me and my sister punching and kicking at his legs, trying to stop him? See our little teeth biting ineffectually at his pant cuffs?

[…]

“When I look back at those girlhood photos, the one my father sends me, I don’t have the urge to spout platitudes, like abuse survivors that tell their inner child ‘You are strong, you’ll be OK.’ I just can’t do that. Instead, I do this: I lean in close to that child, and I tell her, ‘Run, girl. Run.’”

(Source: ponys, via mystickynotes)

It’s been almost two weeks and I think I’m healing well so far. I don’t like to be on painkillers and I’m not good at being the person in need of care as opposed to the caretaker… but my friends are really great at providing help and company and good conversation. I have never felt so supported and, like, part of a community before! Also I am finally able to read again — as in, actually follow a text and not just space out into confusion — so that’s wonderful.

…

Two times that I cried about my accident:

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"The old musty album with its foxed and crumbling paper seemed to breathe a reek of the vault, turning up one by one these dead faces with their wan and loveless gaze out toward the spinning world, masks of incertitude before the cold glass eye of the camera or recoiling before this celluloid immortality or faces simply staggered into gaga by the sheer velocity of time. Old distaff kin coughed up out of the vortex, thin and cracked and macled and a bit redundant. The landscapes, old backdrops, redundant too, recurring unchanged as if they inhabited another medium than the dry pilgrims shored up on them. Blind moil on the earth’s nap cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am, I am. An artifact of prior races."

Cormac McCarthy, from Suttree

Mrs Venable: Such a pretty name for a disease. Sounds like a rare flower, doesn’t it? Night-blooming dementia praecox.

Dr Cukrowicz: What form does her disturbance take?

Mrs Venable: Madness. Obsession, memory. She lacerates herself with memory.

—Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

"We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales, we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable…"

William Faulkner, from Absalom! Absalom!

“Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.” (Thomas Szasz)

[in which I am at the (st)age where desperately trying to collect & archive remnants of my own past is the only writing that matters]

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Last week, I witnessed a birth. I know that it happened at 11:59 am on February 21st, 2012, that her grandmother made her a pink elephant blanket, and that she arrived an “overly punctual” three days ahead of schedule. I know this because she was tagged in seventy-three photos on Facebook; images that linked to her very own profile, created by her parents. Her birth is the first major event on her page’s timeline, and she “checked in” at the hospital about eighteen hours prior to her birth. Madeline’s birth can be observed and verified thanks to a user-friendly platform that archives and shares everything she does for an interactive audience. Those actually present at Madeline’s inaugural breath were ready with cameras and smart phones, uploading photos of her before she was even free of her umbilical cord. We witnessed her delivery through the eye of a camera, or an illuminated screen – documented via the best angles and speediest of status updates. Supposedly, this means the event was real, its verisimilitude acheived through its digital artifacts, its online chronicle – its meticulous documentarians. The world is no longer experienced through rapt attention, but rather through multi-tasking surveillance and a cache of preoccupations. Has the fixation with recording our every exploit replaced our emotional awareness of an actual experience?

(via Caitlin Moore at DailyServing)

One of my most serious concerns about some day being a parent is How to Explain Social Media to My Child.

Mommy what are you doing?

Oh, just… constructing, performing, analyzing, and documenting my identity/life and commenting/reacting/validating the identities/lives of others via this electronic device.

But WHY?

I DON’T KNOW. I don’t really get it, honey, it feels important and meaningless at the same time.

The photo on the left is “‘Karen B.’ holding her newborn daughter for the last time on August 1, 1966” from this Adopted or abducted? article (via Yahoo!News). Right side is myself, May 2006, home from the hospital after willingly giving my daughter up for adoption.

I guess I wanted to get all pissy about Yahoo/Dan Rather elevating/validating these stories for Public Consumption, stories that women have been telling that are out there (even if not everyone knows, they are out there, I promise), and that Too Little Too Late is what I think about when I think about men sympathizing/apologizing these days, even though I don’t want to feel that way forever…

But I don’t care about talking about that stuff because of “Karen B.’s” face and because of how that immediately reminded me of my own photo which I thought is like the same face, only a bit more polite, because I am friends with the lady who took that photo and because my situation was not the same, but similar.

The pictures from my daughter’s birth were taken on film and so I didn’t see them for a few weeks after the fact. So I had these memories and journal entries and an idea in my head about what everything looked like, and I was excited to see the pictures. But when the pictures came they immediately overrode my memory and it was the strangest thing — like I had accidentally objectified myself, like my mental images weren’t stable enough — because now, when I think about that day, I don’t visualize what I saw through my own eyes, I see the pictures instead. I see myself looking at myself. I tell this story all the time in class discussions when fellow-artists defend photography’s memory-making/preserving aspect, to illustrate its objectness, and because it is a casual way to let someone know This One Time I Had a Baby and Gave Her Away and It All Worked Out in the End, NBD.

In any case, then that was how I thought of myself afterwards: I thought of myself as that picture of myself, and how that is the face of realizing you were wrong about actually being able to control anything in your life at all. That’s the face of growing up real fast, overnight, and how even if you’re getting drunk every day you are doing it with the utmost responsibility and maturity. That’s the face where your young & naive assumption that you could trust everyone ‘til they (always shockingly and impossibly because People Are Good, Right?) hurt you suddenly changes into the suspicion that everyone is out to get you and you are going to have to be wary ‘til they prove their trustworthiness. That is the face where you understand that no matter how much you know and remind yourself that everything will be okay and you made the right choice and the best choice for you and certain parties involved and that you are still truly happy, you are still crushed and resentful that you’ve seen this total unfairness and complex imbalance and you should’ve known anyway, ‘cause dad always told you, Nobody Ever Said Life Was Fair. You have a regret that you are going to carry around forever, you have a sadness that has influenced every decision you’ve made since that moment.

That is the face where you hold this paradox of having experienced something that is at the same time the most beautiful and the most devastating thing that ever happened to you, and it is okay, you have accepted. It is giving UP not giving up.