isleofgont

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There shall be a fire that knows your name, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you.

Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

#book excerpt #southern reach trilogy #annihilation #jeff vandermeer

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"Intimacy" by Ada Limón

I remember watching my mother with the horses, the cool, fluid way she’d guide those enormous bodies around the long field, the way she’d shoulder one aside if it got too close or greedy with the alfalfa or apple. I was never like that. Never felt confident around those four-legged giants that could kill with one kick or harm with one toss of their strong heads. To me, it didn’t make sense to trust a thing that could destroy you so quickly, to reach out your hand and stroke the deep separateness of a beast, that long gap of silence between you knowing it doesn’t love you, knowing it would eat the apples with as much pleasure from any flattened palm. Is that why she moved with them so easily? There is a truth in that smooth indifference, a clean honesty about our otherness that feels not like the moral but the story.

#poetry #ada limón #moshe's thoughts

[isleofgont]

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952) by James Baldwin

[Image description: An excerpt from a novel. It reads:

And something moved in John's body which was not John. He was invaded, set at naught, possessed. This power had struck John, in the head or in the heart; and, in a moment, wholly, filling him with an anguish that he could never in his life imagined, that he surely could not endure, that even now he could not believe, had opened him up; had cracked him open, as wood beneath the axe cracks down the middle, as rocks break up; had ripped him and felled him in a moment, so that John had not only felt the wound, but only the agony, had not felt the fall, but only the fear; and lay here, now, helpless, screaming, at the very bottom darkness. /End description

#james baldwin #go tell it on the mountain #book excerpt #moshe's thoughts

[isleofgont]

a little diary about trying to find a middle ground between being spiritual and being a schizophrenic

#poetry #visual poetry

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— Ursula K. Le Guin, from “A Rant About ‘Technology’”

#uklg #essays

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#art #uklg #roccanon's world #the left hand of darkness #the dispossessed

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Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952) by James Baldwin

[Image description: An excerpt from a novel. It reads:

Her mother was always angry and Elizabeth paid no attention; and later, her aunt was perpetually angry and Elizabeth learned to bear it: but if her father had ever been angry with her - in those days - she would have wanted to die. /End description]

#book excerpt #james baldwin #go tell it on the mountain #moshe's thoughts

[isleofgont]

"Forgiveness" by Ada Limón

It was the winter of manatees, Captain Rhonda and her chartered pontoon boat floating down the Crystal River. It was the winter

you hurt me and that day of dumb hearts when you brought me truffles and perfume like a performance. At the tiki bar in the cold

February Florida wind Rihanna played over the staticky speakers that were hidden behind a fake coconut, something about giving up,

or saying something. At the restaurant later, the couple we laughed at, in their late fifties, for maybe being swingers, all the uniform tables, identical roses

in cheap plastic vases. Even my deep cleavage and the layer cake were trying too hard. Still, we committed to the event of us and made a joke

about not hurting each other again. We weren’t married yet, everyone was free to leave, and the next afternoon you went to work and I took a boat

down the river to see the manatees. It was back when I got lonely often, I called and asked if I could bring my dog on the boat. I couldn’t.

So tranquil and patient, the manatees moving, so many mysteries even in the shallow water. Captain Rhonda showed us their hideouts, their shadowy places.

People took pictures and pointed and you could see the scars on the older animals from propeller blades and still they rolled on together in the silent water.

Back on shore, you found me by the too-cold pool watching a group of loud teenagers drink in the hot tub. One shirtless boy kept flexing and flexing

while the girls, engrossed in conversation, never noticed. And aren’t we all alone in the end? You put your head for a moment against my chest.

Then, all I could hear was our breathing, and I understood we were both human and animal-hearted, bound to the blades, and bound to outrun them.

#poetry #ada limón #moshe's thoughts

[isleofgont]

I have a million more scans to post and two more books to scan but no time to do any of it T_T I think going forward my strategy may be to set aside time on a specific day of the week to do image IDs and scan every week.

I enjoy running this blog, it's just hard to keep up with at school when I am not specifically setting aside time for it

#moshe's thoughts

[isleofgont]

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952) by James Baldwin

[Image description: An excerpt from a novel. It reads:

He did not know where he was. There was silence everywhere - only a perpetual, distant, faint trembling far beneath him - the roaring, perhaps, of the fires of Hell, over which he was suspended, or the echo, persistent, invincible still, of the moving feet of the saints. He thought of the mountaintop where he longed to be, where the sun would cover him like a cloth of gold, would cover his head like a crown of fire, and in his hands he would hold a living rod. But this was no mountain where John lay, no robe, no crown. And the living rod was uplifted in other hands. /End description]

#james baldwin #go tell it on the mountain #book excerpt #moshe's thoughts

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"What the Body Told" by Rafael Campo

Not long ago, I studied medicine. It was terrible, what the body told. I'd look inside another person's mouth, And see the desolation of the world. I'd see his genitals and think of sin.

Because my body speaks the stranger's language, I've never understood those nods and stares. My parents held me in their arms, and still I think I've disappointed them; they care, They stare and nod, they make their pilgrimage

To somewhere distant in my heart, they cry. I look inside their other-person's mouths And see the sleek interior of souls. It's warm and red in there-like love, with teeth. I've studied medicine until I cried

All night. Through certain books, a truth unfolds. Anatomy and physiology, The tiny sensing organs of the tongue

Each nameless cell contributing its needs. It was fabulous, what the body told.

#rafael campo #poetry #moshe's thoughts

[isleofgont]

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952) by James Baldwin

[Image description: An excerpt from a novel. It reads:

“Elisha-“ he began, and looked into Elisha’s face. Then: “You pray for me? Please pray for me?”

“I been praying, little brother,” Elisha said, “and I sure ain’t going to stop now.”

“For me,” persisted John, his tears falling, “for me.”

“You know right well,” said Elisha, looking at him, “I ain’t going to stop praying for the brother what the Lord done give me.” /End description]

#book excerpt #james baldwin #go tell it on the mountain #moshe's thoughts

[isleofgont]

“Perhaps my only real expertise, my only talent, is to endure beyond the endurable.”

-from, “Annihilation,” by Jeff Vandermeer

#annihilation #southern reach trilogy #jeff vandermeer #book excerpt

[isleofgont]

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952) by James Baldwin

[Image description: An excerpt from a novel. It reads:

His Aunt Florence and his father faced each other.

"Yes, Lord," Aunt Florence said, "you was born wild, and you's going to die wild. But ain't no use to try to take the whole world with you. You can't change nothing, Gabriel. You ought to know that by now." /End description]

#james baldwin #go tell it on the mountain #book excerpt #moshe's thoughts

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"The Unspoken" by Ada Limón

If I’m honest, a foal pulled chest-level close in the spring heat, his every-which-way coat reverberating in the wind, feels akin to what I imagine atonement might feel like, or total absolution. But what if, by some fluke in the heart, an inevitable wreckage, congenital and unanswerable, still comes, no matter how attached or how gentle every hand that reached out for him in that vibrant green field where they found him looking like he was sleeping, the mare nudging him until she no longer nudged him? Am I wrong to say I did not want to love horses after that? I even said as much driving back from the farm. Even now, when invited to visit a new foal, or to rub the long neck of a mare who wants only peppermints or to be left alone, I feel myself resisting. At any moment, something terrible could happen. It’s not gone, that coldness in me. Our mare is pregnant right now, and you didn’t even tell me until someone mentioned it offhandedly. One day, I will be stronger. I feel it coming. I’ll step into that green field stoic, hardened, hoof first.

#poetry #ada limón #moshe's thoughts

[isleofgont]

“But then what? What occurs after revelation and paralysis? Either death or a slow and certain thawing.”

-from, “Annihilation,” by Jeff Vandermeer

#book excerpt #southern reach trilogy #annihilation #jeff vandermeer

[isleofgont]

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952) by James Baldwin

[Image description: An excerpt from a novel. It reads:

More than his words, his face caused John to stiffen instantly with malice and fear. His father's face was terrible in anger, but now there was more than anger in it. John saw now what he had never seen there before, except in his own vindictive fantasies: a kind of wild, weeping terror that made the face seem younger, and yet at the same time unutterably older and more cruel. And John knew, in the moment his father's eyes swept over him, that he hated John because John was not lying on the sofa where Roy lay. /End description.]

#james baldwin #book excerpt #go tell it on the mountain #moshe's thoughts