Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
This is how affliction works: it “deprives its victims of their personality and makes them into things.”
Robert Zaretsky • The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas
How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a note book. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going throu
... See moreJoan Didion • On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
The less we understand about a disease or a symptom, the more we psychologize, and often stigmatize, it.
Meghan O'Rourke • The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness
Certain images underscore an unbridgeable gap and a never-to-be-toppled hierarchy. When a group of people is judged to be “foreign,” it becomes far more likely that news organizations will run, for the consumption of their audiences, explicit, disturbing photographs of members of that group: starving children or bullet-riddled bodies. Meanwhile, th
... See moreTeju Cole • Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time (Berlin Family Lectures)
It’s the homogenizing logic of paranoia that works overtime to flatten or disregard such differences; it’s the homogenizing logic of paranoia that demands that all people have the same response to them, and always will.
Maggie Nelson • On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
This Sontag quote maps onto my essay framework of voice (sight, sound, spirit):
“What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”
See more: imagery, concision, motif;
Hear more: rhythm, reputation, rhyme;
Feel more: tone, perspective, subtext.
𝒷𝑒𝒸𝒸𝒶 🌪🥩🍸💸 • O.J. SimpStack
Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ‘somebody,’ to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over animation. One can either see or be seen.
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