Latest Posts by moonmovement - Page 7
'I'll go.' But he doesn't go. He uses the future not the present tense
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
Beside the river are two things you never forget, that the moment you look at a river that moment has already passed, and that everything is on its way somewhere else.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
How do you capture someone who was always slipping away?
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
He cried as if crying was a language he alone knew and in it there was something urgent he needed to say.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
He just cried on, this hopeless hard retching as if the tears were shards and each one cut as it came out.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
here's Love and Death in the same breath
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
Hope may or may not be a Thing with Feathers. But it is definitely a Thing with Claws.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
He's got all that mind, all that inner country he keeps going around in, mines and craters, caverns and dead ends.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
My father bore a burden of impossible ambition. He wanted all things to be better than they were, beginning with himself and ending with this world. Maybe this was because he was a poet. Maybe all poets are doomed to disappointment.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
“There is only now; and no matter how this war came about, no matter how it is run, it belongs to us. ‘Because I am involved in mankind’. And one must remain involved in all mankind, even uselessly, and even if one is intellectually conditioned to doubt and despair. Otherwise one might as well be dead.”
— Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn
Come back. Tell us what you’ve seen. Tell us you met a god so reckless, so lonely, it will love us all.
—Traci Brimhall, from “Late Novena,” Our Lady of Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012)
it’s been two days and i’m still obsessed with this answer from céline sciamma about portrait of a lady on fire
“Those lovers are mostly gone. My hands remain—: like altars.”
— Natalie Diaz, from The Hand Has Twenty-Seven Bones—: These Hands If Not Gods (via wishbzne)
in 2005, bon iver locked himself in a log cabin in wisconsin for a now-legendary vibe check
i) robert browning / eurydice to orpheus (1864) ii) w.a. mozart / “parto, parto” (la clemenza di tito, 1791) iii) jessica waldoff / recognition in mozart’s operas (2006) iv) c.w. gluck / orfeo ed euridice (1762) v) catherine maxwell / the female sublime from milton to swinburne: bearing blindness (2001) vi) gerald griffin / the collegians (1829) film stills from portrait de la jeune fille en feu (sciamma, 2019)
“Dionysus is a god who takes human form, a powerful male who looks soft and feminine, a native of Thebes who dresses as a foreigner. His parentage is mixed between divine and human; he is and is not a citizen of Thebes; his power has both feminine and masculine aspects. He does not merely cross boundaries, he blurs and confounds them, makes nonsense of the lines between Greek and foreign, between female and male, between powerful and weak, between savage and civilized. He is the god of both tragedy and comedy, and in his presence the distinction between them falls away, as both comedy and tragedy…”
— Paul Woodruff, The Bacchae (Translated and Annotated)
Roman “hologram” ring from 1st century CE. Gold and rock crystal with a sculpted image of nobleman Carvilius Gemellus who died. young. The ring was discovered in 2000 from her mother’s tomb near Rome.
I have to say that is the most amazing Roman ring that I’ve ever seen.
what are the best academic essays you’ve ever read?
audaces: a study in political phraseology
“domestici hostes”: the nausicaa in medea, the catiline in hannibal
catiline’s ravaged mind: “vastus animus”
the two voices of virgil’s aeneid
in defence of catiline
antony, fulvia, and the ghost of clodius in 47 bc
the duplicate revelation of portia’s death
virgil’s carthage: a heterotopic space of empire
the taciturnity of aeneas
gender and the metaphorics of translation
I found this really cool list of women’s translations of ancient Greek and Roman texts! It lists English-language translations dating from the 17th century to 2015.
“In the first version, Persephone is taken from her mother and the goddess of the earth punishes the earth—this is consistent with what we know of human behavior, that human beings take profound satisfaction in doing harm, particularly unconscious harm: we may call this negative creation. Persephone’s initial sojourn in hell continues to be pawed over by scholars who dispute the sensations of the virgin: did she cooperate in her rape, or was she drugged, violated against her will, as happens so often now to modern girls. As is well known, the return of the beloved does not correct the loss of the beloved: Persephone returns home stained with red juice like a character in Hawthorne— I am not certain I will keep this word: is earth “home” to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably, in the bed of the god? Is she at home nowhere? Is she a born wanderer, in other words an existential replica of her own mother, less hamstrung by ideas of causality? You are allowed to like no one, you know. The characters are not people. They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict. Three parts: just as the soul is divided, ego, superego, id. Likewise the three levels of the known world, a kind of diagram that separates heaven from earth from hell. You must ask yourself: where is it snowing? White of forgetfulness, of desecration— It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says Persephone is having sex in hell. Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know what winter is, only that she is what causes it. She is lying in the bed of Hades. What is in her mind? Is she afraid? Has something blotted out the idea of mind? She does know the earth is run by mothers, this much is certain. She also knows she is not what is called a girl any longer. Regarding incarceration, she believes she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter. The terrible reunions in store for her will take up the rest of her life. When the passion for expiation is chronic, fierce, you do not choose the way you live. You do not live; you are not allowed to die. You drift between earth and death which seem, finally, strangely alike. Scholars tell us that there is no point in knowing what you want when the forces contending over you could kill you. White of forgetfulness, white of safety— They say there is a rift in the human soul which was not constructed to belong entirely to life. Earth asks us to deny this rift, a threat disguised as suggestion— as we have seen in the tale of Persephone which should be read as an argument between the mother and the lover— the daughter is just meat. When death confronts her, she has never seen the meadow without the daisies. Suddenly she is no longer singing her maidenly songs about her mother’s beauty and fecundity. Where the rift is, the break is. Song of the earth, song of the mythic vision of eternal life— My soul shattered with the strain of trying to belong to earth— What will you do, when it is your turn in the field with the god?”
— Persephone, The Wanderer. Louise Gluck (1943). (via mythandrists)
“I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me. The world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign & re-create myself…”
From the Wikipedia page about the Fermi Paradox: Given the high scientific probability for alien existence, why can we find no evidence of their existence whatsoever?
Above my own life on a crippled wing I soar, oh, I soar
Julia Hartwig, On the Heights tr. Regina Grol
and in a windowless attic some of me is in the smoke rising from the chimney
Anna Frajlich, Here I Am tr. Regina Grol
since you were unable to take all the bad you were given learn now to fight with your nails for every inch of ground under your foot
Anna Czekanowicz, A Polish Mother tr. Regina Grol
free me from my longing
Anna Czekanowicz, tr. Regina Grol
A great halo And a tightening in the throat
Dorota Chróścielewska, tr. Regina Grol
there is also the waiting, the kind which has survived hundreds of tides and ebbs of hours...Take them along with my body.
Marzena Broda, [Come back to me...] tr. Regina Grol
the smoke / carries my longing / - to Heaven
Barbara Brandys, By the Fire tr. Regina Grol