borges could have written a four-page story about the madman who builds a museum while writing a novel about building the museum, but pamuk wrote the novel, built the museum, and then wrote a book-length catalogue about it.
(Source: roswitha)
“I am writing this down because I know that in an hour, or a day, or a week, I will be listening to the lies again for a while. How else do you live? How do you go on in the world without accepting that the injustice is just, or not your problem, just a little, just for now? How can you walk in a world where the truth is true instead of breaking down and crying? So we internalize the lies for a while in order to let things make enough sense to get through the day. Gravity pulls comfortingly down. The alternative, the raw, vulnerable, pulsing truth can only be taken in doses, even if they’re bigger doses every day. It’s so hard to just let it be real. How can you let it be real? How can you really pull off the lid and look down into that darkness and let the truth—that you live in a world where you’re not considered fully real, fully human, and that if you were considered real, what was done to you would be considered unacceptable, retch-inducing, but you’re not and it isn’t?
You have to tell yourself the stories. Just for now. Just until you’re strong enough to bear the weight of the truth and see with clear eyes, if you ever get that strong.
”
“‘One needs to be able to touch, smell, lick, and fornicate with certain parts of the book’s binding in order to experience the real and truly complete reading experience. Anything else is not reading. Also you can read the words on the pages if you want but this is not necessary.’
Ok first, wow. Second, am I missing something with this booksmell thing? Because I feel like a lot of the books I have been unfortunate enough to smell somehow managed to be sour, bitter and kind of like musty ass and once I may have accidentally inhaled a small silverfish also. This may have been because most of these books were not second or third hand books but eleventy-twelvty hand books which spent a large amount of time on the pavement and people may have peed on them at some point also. Which led me to think, hay maybe this aspect of molesting your reading material as part of your reading experience is actually a privilege. I say this as someone who has often not been able to get my hands on “real” books, but I could access ebooks and podcasted books which were available even in my tiny corner of the world and often for totes free. I think that eating and rubbing a book all over your body may be one of many reading experiences. I don’t think it’s the only one, the real one, the true one, the authentic one, the original one, or the best one ever. Not all of us have the means to buy and do that to our books. Many of us may not want to do that also. I don’t think that means that we are not reading because we are not reading like you are.
”
“We let Willow cut her hair. When you have a little girl, it’s like how can you teach her that you’re in control of her body? If I teach her that I’m in charge of whether or not she can touch her hair, she’s going to replace me with some other man when she goes out in the world. She can’t cut my hair but that’s her hair. She has got to have command of her body. So when she goes out into the world, she’s going out with a command that it is hers. She is used to making those decisions herself. We try to keep giving them those decisions until they can hold the full weight of their lives.”
(On why he let Willow cut all of her hair off)
For this I will watch Men in Black 3.
(Source: larepublicadedet)
On Facebook, just now.
“I hope you understand why your family didn’t inscribe that God vs Manto argument on your tombstone as you had wished. Censorship even in my death, you protest. No Sir, just common sense. I hope that you are up there with your creator, being argumentative, still carrying on that debate about who is better at the storytelling game. (That kind of thing, by the way, is called a creative-writing workshop these days). If your old friend Ismat Chughtai drops by while you are having that debate, you and your creator should take a break from arguing and say to her: we’ll both go in the kitchen and make tea, why don’t you write us a story.”
“I could be big for them
I could hold them all
My belly could be a city
where everyone was so loved
they wouldn’t need jobs. I could be
the hyperreal
post-scarcity dragonhearted singularity.
I could eat them
and feed them
and eat them
and feed them.”
“That said, I’m not calling to “reclaim” such practices — for the questions like, whose traditions? At what point were they practiced? Who stands to gain access to these reclaimed traditions, are ones to bear in mind — but to take a hard look at this business of “finding queer practices” in many “third world cultures” that authors like Devdutt Pattanailk and Ruth Vanita are invested in. Such studies and fictional retellings are almost always along the lines of, “See these people can be queer too” or (worse) saying, “This is our legacy! This is our history!” without seeing the “we” is constructed at the cost of excluding anyone who doesn’t have “sacred Hindu texts” as a part of their history. The more dangerous subtext of this emerging genre is, queerness can exist in [regional language], but has to be rescued by English, receive its marks of legitimacy and then we can have a “tradition” to consume and call our own.”
