vidyastudies

[vidyastudies]

Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’

[vidyastudies]

I think this is my favorite poem.

#words

[vidyastudies]

i will never stop thinking about this poem my greek professor showed us

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[vidyastudies]

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, "Baked Goods" from Lucky Fish

#words

[vidyastudies]

#words

[vidyastudies]

what about blorbhov from my complicated russian novel though

#misc

[vidyastudies]

In the first poetry workshop I ever took my professor said we could write about anything we wanted except for two things: our grandparents and our dogs. She said she had never read a good poem about a dog. I could only remember ever reading one poem about a dog before that point—a poem by Pablo Neruda, from which I only remembered the lines “We walked together on the shores of the sea/ In the lonely winter of Isla Negra.” Four years later I wrote a poem about how when I was a little girl I secretly baptized my dog in the bathtub because I was afraid she wouldn’t get into heaven. “Is this a good poem?” I wondered. The second poetry workshop, our professor made us put a bird in each one of our poems. I thought this was unbelievably stupid. This professor also hated when we wrote about hearts, she said no poet had ever written a good poem in which they mentioned a heart. I started collecting poems about hearts, first to spite her, but then because it became a habit I couldn’t break. The workshop after that, our professor would tell us the same story over and over about how his son had died during a blizzard. He would cry in front of us. He never told us we couldn’t write about anything, but I wrote a lot of poems about snow. At the end of the year he called me into his office and said, “looking at you, one wouldn’t think you’d be a very good writer” and I could feel all the pity inside of me curdling like milk. The fourth poetry workshop I ever took my professor made it clear that poets should not try to engage with popular culture. I noticed that the only poets he assigned were men. I wrote a poem about that scene in Grease 2 where a boy takes his girlfriend to a fallout shelter and tries to get her to have sex with him by tricking her into believing that nuclear war had begun. It was the first poem I ever published. The fifth poetry workshop I ever took our professor railed against the word blood. She thought that no poem should ever have the word “blood” in it, they were bloody enough already. She returned a draft of my poem with the word blood crossed out so hard the paper had torn. When I started teaching poetry workshops I promised myself I would never give my students any rules about what could or couldn’t be in their poems. They all wrote about basketball. I used to tally these poems when I’d go through the stack I had collected at the end of each class. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 poems about basketball. This was Indiana. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I told the class, “for the next assignment no one can write about basketball, please for the love of god choose another topic. Challenge yourselves.” Next time I collected their poems there was one student who had turned in another poem about basketball. I don’t know if he had been absent on the day I told them to choose another topic or if he had just done it to spite me. It’s the only student poem I can still really remember. At the time I wrote down the last lines of that poem in a notebook. “He threw the basketball and it came towards me like the sun”

#words

[vidyastudies]

The other day we went to pick up our joint gift. On the way there we decided to wonder down one of my favourite streets: it’s right in the heart of the city but kind of hidden, quiet and lined with beautiful old specialist bookshops 🖤

#spaces

[vidyastudies]

Interviewer: Is it old-fashioned to think that the purpose of literature is to educate us about life?

Sontag:  Well, it does educate us about life.  I wouldn’t be the person I am, I wouldn’t understand what I understand, were it not for certain books.  I’m thinking of the great question of nineteenth-century Russian literature: how should one live?  A novel worth reading is an education of the heart.  It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world.  It’s a creator of inwardness.

-Interview with Susan Sontag in The Paris Review

#words

[vidyastudies]

college is like. i am the stupidest person in the world. i am a god. i am universally loved. these people only tolerate me because they live with me. everyone in this library desires me carnally. i am repulsive. i am myself. i am as far from myself as i have ever been. i am an adult and i have never left the womb. 

#misc

[vidyastudies]

IG

#spaces

[vidyastudies]

“We have tested the saying ‘tis always darkest before the dawn, and found that actually, there is a quite perceptible lightening in the sky before dawn.”

“Should we alter the axiom to be ‘it’s always darkest in the dead middle of the night’?”

“That’s depressing, and besides, it’s extremely geocentric. We know more about the universe now. Darker darknesses exist between stars, and there’s no real consistent ‘night’.”

“True. How about, ‘it’s always darkest in the places that light doesn’t reach’?”

“Still depressing, and also, doesn’t take into account the changes wrought by time. Light can conceiveably end up absolutely everywhere. Even–I know you’re going to say it so let me stop you right there–at the bottom of a black hole. The light gets sucked in. No one outside can see it, at the bottom of the gravity well, the light exists.”

“There was a point when light didn’t exist and all there was was darkness.”

“Right, but we’ve passed it.”

“But at one point light will leave the places it now is, and sooner or later–this is just the law of entropy!–sooner or later, all the light will be spent and chaotic.”

“It’ll be a faint, almost imperceptible glimmer, but it will be there. And more importantly, it will have been.”

“So what’s the idiom to be, then?”

“I’m thinking, once you have the memory of light, it will never be truly dark again.”

#words

[vidyastudies]

Mary Oliver, ‘north country’

#mary oliver #words

[vidyastudies]

the gardener, mary oliver

#screaming crying vomiting etc etc #words #mary oliver

[vidyastudies]

i don't believe in motivation.

i've read Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins and he mentioned something about the 40% rule.

when you think that you're doing your best and you can't push yourself no more, you're only at your 40%. the truth is, we don't usually live up to our potential because our mind is soooo inclined towards the path with the least resistance. he thought me how to have the willpower to wake up early and grind. (yup! the numbers listed in my bujo)

also, i hope you loved my froggie! i know i do :D (frogs always look like they're smiling, literally melts my heart all the time) i hope you have a good week ahead!

#journal

[vidyastudies]

actually my gender is thomas jordan photography

#art #misc

[vidyastudies]

i have a physics exam today and i woke up early to catch up on a last video. for the first time in my life, i bought myself something online. it comes on monday, and i’m so excited ! 

here are some little recipes i sketched out after spending a fun day in the kitchen last year

#journal