March 2012
28 posts
“I wanna take you to a gay bar, gay bar, gay bar.”
—Sylvia Plath (via incorrectsylviaplathquotes)
For The Dead - Adrienne Rich
I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer
The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself
I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped
or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight
“I always say that love is a combination of six things: Care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust. And it’s like baking a cake. You may have all five ingredients and miss one and so your cake isn’t going to happen. I think the majority of people in the United States have a lot of care in our lives, but we don’t always have a lot of love. I think it’s important to make that distinction, because you can care about somebody Monday through Friday and abuse them on Saturday. But in the practice of love, abuse is antithetical. You cannot love anyone and dominate them, hurt them, because once you’re doing that you’ve moved yourself out of love.”
—bell hooks (via mattachinereview)
- Carrie Mae Weems: After thinking about postmodernism and all this stuff about fractured selves, and so on, when I was constructing the Kitchen Table series, Laura Mulvey's article "Visual and Other Pleasures" came out, and everybody and their mama was using it, talking about the politics of the gaze, and I kept thinking of the gaps in her text, the way in which she had considered black female subjects.
- bell hooks: That's exactly what I was thinking, though you and I didn't know each other at the time. Her piece was the catalyst for me to write my piece on black female spectators, articulating theoretically exactly what you were doing in the Kitchen Tables series.
- CMW: All the pieces in the series highlight "the gaze," particularly the piece where the woman is sitting with a man leaning against her, his head buried in her neck, a mirror placed directly in front of her, but she looks beyond that to the subject.
- bh: Go, girl.
- CMW: At the audience, right?
- bh: Hm-mmmm. Yes.
- CMW: You know, just using that as the beginning and the turning point to flip all that shit around, and to start creating a space in which black women are looking back, right?
- bh: Right.
We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
“I hate to think
I ever functioned
as a lane
for someone else’s desire.” —
I ever functioned
as a lane
for someone else’s desire.” —
Eileen Myles, “Ponder”
From Not Me.
(via queermyquery)
