sodom and gomorrah

"those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. the world was better off without them.

and lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. but she did look back, and i love her for that, because it was so human.

so she turned to a pillar of salt. so it goes."

- slaughterhouse five, kurt vonnegut

things i loved, but did not love enough

"from the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. one fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was ee gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was europe and africa and south america, and another fig was constantin and socrates and attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs i couldn't quite make out.

i saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because i couldn't make up my mind which of the figs i would choose. i wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and as i sat there unable to decide the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."

- the bell jar, sylvia plath

fainting spells

"but he dared not show himself, for what she wanted he could not give: his love was in the earth, shattered and still, dried flowers where eyes should be, and moss upon the lips, his love was faraway feeding on the rain, lilies frothing from its ruin. withdrawing, she went up the stairs, and joel, who listened to her footfalls overhead as she in her need of him searched the jungle of rooms, felt for himself ferocious contempt: what was his terror compared with miss wisteria's? he owned a room, he had a bed, any minute now he would run from here, go to them. but for miss wisteria, weeping because little boys must grow tall, there would always be this journey through dying rooms until some lonely day she found her hidden one, the smiler with the knife."
- truman capote, other voices, other rooms

hello to never

it's just as well i had already committed to a life of sin before i read the chronicles of narnia, otherwise that beautiful writing would have converted me. example, the last paragraph of the last narnia book, after it was revealed to the children that they had been killed in a train wreck as they ascend into aslan's country -

"and, for this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. but, for them, it was only the beginning of the real story. all their life in this world and all their adventures in narnia had only been the cover, and the title page: now at last they were beginning chapter one of the great story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."

the stranger

"nothing, nothing mattered, and i knew why. so did he. throughout the whole absurd life i’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones i was living. what did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his god or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? couldn’t he see, couldn’t he see that? everybody was privileged. there were only privileged people. the others would all be condemned one day. and he would be condemned, too.”

the stranger, albert camus

do you ever get the feeling while reading something, when all of a sudden you realise that something wonderful is happening, and with every word your life is changing? because i just got that.

the oval portrait

so i just finished watching vivre sa vie properly for the first time, and this scene and the finale it precedes is by far some of the most beautiful cinema i have ever seen.

"and in sooth some who beheld the portrait spoke of its resemblence as of a mighty marvel and a proof not less of the power of the painter than of his deep love for her whom he depicted so surpassingly well. but at length, as the labor drew nearer to its conclusion, there were admitted none into the turret, for the painter had grown wild with the ardor of his work and turned his eyes from the canvas rarely, even to regard his wife. and he would not see that the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sat beside him. and when many weeks had passed and but little remained to do save one brush upon the mouth and one tint upon the eye, the spirit of the lady again flickered up as the flame of the lamp, and then the brush was given and then the tint was placed. and for one moment, the painter stood entranced, before the work he had wrought. but in the next, while he yet gazed, he grew tremulous and aghast and crying with a loud voice: "this is indeed life itself!" turned suddenly to regard his beloved: she was dead."

psycho

i just finished reading american psycho, a picture of dorian gray and watching mulholland drive. i think all of these things were perfect to encounter around the same period of time, they seem to intertwine somewhat and are all equally powerful and terrifying. i feel as if each of these things would have changed my life on their own, but together they are all the more depressing and disturbing, and now i just feel numb.


"... there is an idea of a patrick bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though i can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: i am simply not there. it is hard for me to make sense on any given level. myself is fabricated, an aberration. i am a noncontingent human being. my personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. my conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago if they ever did exist. there are no more barriers to cross. all i have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem i have caused and my utter indifference toward it, i have now surpassed. i still, though, hold onto one single bleak truth: noone is safe, nothing is redeemed. yet i am blameless. each model of human behaviour must be assumed to have some validity. is evil something you are? or is it something you do?"
- from american psycho by bret easton ellis, probably the most shocking and traumatizing and amazing book i have ever read in my life.

her legs are chafed by sticky wings

"and why are you so firmly and triumphantly certain that only what is normal and positive - in short, only well-being - is good for man ? is reason mistaken about what is good ? after all, perhaps prosperity isn't the only thing that pleases mankind, perhaps he is just as attracted to suffering .. whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, smashing things is also sometimes very pleasant. i am not here standing up for suffering, or for well-being either. i am standing out for my own caprices and for having them guaranteed when necessary."

~ fyodor dostoyevsky, notes from underground

_________________________________________________________________

i'm reading a fantastic book at the moment called hey ! nietzsche ! leave them kids alone !, which is all about alternative music's roots in 19th century romanticism. it name-drops some fabulous artists: the smiths and morrissey, bowie, siouxsie and the banshees, the cure, the birthday party .... you name it. apart from some passages gushing over my chemical romance, it's fabulous. i'm try to read several books at the moment, actually. i'm more than halfway through persepolis, only part of the way through haunted by chuck palahniuk and i'm struggling through the great gatsby too.

_________________________________________________________________

tu veux ou tu veux pas

"yesterday's committee,

sticks, but a broken drum,

midnight in the city,

flutes in a vacuum,

shut lips, sleeping faces,

every stopped machine,

the dumb and littered places

where crowds have been: ...

_________________________

all silences rejoice,

weep (loudly or low),

speak - but with the voice

of whom, i do not know.

__________________________

absence, say, of susan's,

absence of egeria's

arms and respective bosoms,

lips and, ah, posteriors,

slowly form a presence;

________________________

whose? and, i ask, of what

so absurd an essence,

that something, which is not,

nevertheless should populate

empty night more solidly

than that with which we copulate,

why should it seem so squalidly?"

___________________

text from brave new world by aldous huxley

pandora's box

"[she] had an undefined conviction that to serve for another person than their proprietor traditions must be of a thoroughly superior kind; but she nevertheless assented to this intimation that she too must march to the stately music that floated down from unknown periods in her husband's past; she who of old had been so free of step, so desultory, so devious, so much the reverse of processional.

there were certain things they must do, a certain posture they must take, certain people they must know and not know. when she saw this rigid system close about her, draped though it was in pictured tapestries, that sense of darkness and suffocation of which i have spoken took possession of her; she seemed shut up with an odour of mould and decay.

she had resisted of course; at first very humourously, ironically, tenderly; then, as the situation grew more serious, eagerly, passionately, pleadingly. she had pleaded the cause of freedom, of doing as they chose, of not caring for the aspect and denomination of their life - the cause of other instincts and longings, of quite another ideal."

________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

text from pages 480-481 of portrait of a lady by henry james.

movie stills from die büchse der pandora [1929]