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Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
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“I know what it’s like to be appetite of your own appetite, / citizen of what savages you, / to dare bloom pleasure from your wounds— / and to bleed out from that bouquet.”
— Natalie Diaz, from Postcolonial Love Poem; “Minotaur”
(via luthienne)
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“and we are amazed, and we have no words, and our hearts ache from the wondrous beauty of it all…”
László Krasznahorkai, Seiobo There Below
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“Even love can’t keep people from eating at each other.”
— Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
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“PhD programs in general have fostered this culture, online in particular, that insists that being a doctoral student is this really terrible difficult thing. I remember there was a blog that was popular when I was in grad school and writing about this stuff that was called “Dissertation Hell”. It was just all self-reflectively about just how hard and terrible and impossible it was to be a PhD student. I do not like these cultures. Here is why I think these cultures emerge … My observation at the time when I was a grad student is that, a lot of PhD students struggled with the worry that what they were doing was not a real job. Their friends had real jobs where they had to go to an office and work hard all day, their parents had real jobs, and let’s be honest, being a doctoral student does not feel like a real job. You go in, you see your professor maybe once or twice a week, there can be whole days where you do nothing, and other times where you’re busy. My somewhat flippant analysis was by cultivating these cultures of misery around doctoral work, it at least gave you a way of saying, hey this is really hard. This was implicit, you might not be doing this consciously, but it was a way of saying, oh this is really difficult, so therefore it’s justified as something to do. The other aspect at play behind these cultures is that there’s just almost no structure in doctoral programs, and for some people, and by some I mean basically most, it’s really really hard. It’s really really hard sometimes to build up a years worth of self motivated work with high stakes evaluation, without structure, without milestones along the way, and so some of this sense of failure and misery is just that it’s novel. Lack of structure is a novel set-up for work that takes some adjusting to. I point that out only to say, those are largely constructed cultures. … You are going to be fine. Focus on the process.”
— Cal Newport, Deep Questions Podcast (14th June 2020)
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