s.penkevich > Books: non-fiction‎ (71)

‘We’re trying our best so the pipeline needs to be developed. This starts way back with the record companies, radio. I can shout as loud as I like but we need to get everyone on board.’
—Emily Eavis

‘I have projected myself into the other with such power that when I am without the other I cannot recover myself, regain myself: I am lost, forever.’

‘If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a "weakness" or an "absurdity": it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.’

‘Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.’

‘Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language — the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.’

‘A beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else, and which has naturally something else after it. An end is that which is naturally after something itself, either as its necessary or usual consequent, and with nothing else after it. And a middle, that which is by nature after one thing and has also another after it.’

‘Love comprehends all things, and as you'll soon see, it makes folks do some pretty strange things. Such as sending a valentine to someone you hate. Stalk others who are in throes of passion and exact your murderous intentions upon them. Reassemble your one true love's body after it was brutally dismembered.’

‘Those who saw the paucity of their own imagination in the two-way mirror you held up to them attacked the mirror, tried to reduce it to fragments which they could then rank and grade, tried to dismiss the shards where your image and theirs remained - locked but ready to soar. You are an artist after all and an artist is forbidden a career in this place; an artist is permitted only a commercial hit. But for thousands and thousands of those who embraced your text and who gave themselves permission to hear your language, by that very gesture they ennobled themselves, became unshrouded, civilized.’

‘Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.’

‘[Researchers] exposed people to a fake Disneyland pamphlet entitled, 'It's time to remember the magic? The point was to activate childhood memories of a visit to Disney-land. However, there was something odd about the pamphlet: it featured a message from Bugs Bunny - a Warner Brothers cartoon character that couldn't possibly have been present at Disneyland. After exposure to the ad, about 25 to 35 percent of participants claimed to have met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. People offered up specific details too; about 60 per cent of those who claimed to have met Bugs remembered they hugged him, and one individual even recalled Bugs holding a carrot.’

‘A song is expansion into the past, a photo is finitude. A song is the happy sensation of time, a photo its tragic side. I’ve often thought that one’s whole life story could be told just with songs and photos.’

‘The horror at the other end of our love, as if the outside world had always to be there, beyond the kitchen window.’

‘I now realize that the only thing that can justify scientific and philosophical endeavor, and art, is not knowing what nothingness is. And if the shadow of nothingness, in one form or another, does not hover over writing, even of a kind most acquiescent to the beauty of the world, it doesn’t really contain anything of use to the living.’

‘I feel there’s nothing we could do together that would be better than this, an act of writing at once united and disjointed. Sometimes it also frightens me. To open up your writing space is more violent than to open up your sex.’

‘Many albums and movies can’t be streamed and lie stranded in physical formats, in the tar pit of the past. Hyperlinks to pieces I wrote only a few years ago have already rotted like rope bridges.’

‘It took effort to cultivate our enthusiasms in a desert, but it’s clear now that we took the desert’s role for granted. Knowledge tends to stick when you’ve toiled for it.’

’the Age of Browsing encouraged second chances. Owning physical media forced you to reckon with it, to rewatch it, to appreciate it. (Maybe you sometimes tried too hard to appreciate something, but there are worse sins.) We steeped ourselves in stuff, and the stuff would start to sink in. Art has always required second—and third and fourth—chances to saturate the mind.’

‘To dwell on a single poem, to the exclusion of others, isn’t just okay; it’s a function of devotion. To cling to a work of art—to revisit it, to steep yourself in it—is to approach the state of prayer. It’s to open your mind to the possibility of being tinted. Of being transformed. Streaming platforms, on the other hand, flood the mind. They set it afloat and bear it away—on to the next novelty. They promise abundance but deliver a deluge.’

‘Their pursuit of beauty means lifting, shaping, dieting, dyeing, injecting, slicing, scarring, painting, curling, padding, cutting, starving, concealing and revealing. When women are already socially conditioned to compete with one another, narrowing the ideal only makes the competition more fierce. In one study, 80 percent of women interviewed said that they competed with other women over physical appearance.’

‘I couldn’t reconcile promoting those treatments to young women with my feminism, I was fighting in my head with how I could be a part of the industry in a positive way – how I could wrestle my beliefs with my complicity and my future in the industry. Ultimately, I decided to quit my job.’

‘In my early twenties, it had never occurred to me that the women who gained their power from beauty were indebted to the men whose desire granted them that power in the first place. Those men were the ones in control, not the women the world fawned over.’

‘According to the 2023 Girlguiding report, 81% of girls and young women aged eleven to twenty-one have experienced some form of threatening or upsetting behavior online, compared to 65% in 2018.’

‘If you’re used to a twinkly eyed Santa beaming kindly at little boys and girls at this time of year, perhaps the only thing more disturbing than having huge monsters attack you is watching them pick off children in the crowd.’

‘It’s the formless unfamiliar, the shadow that lives below the shadow, the one we sense but have not named or cannot yet name, there’s where the real terror lives. And so we name our monsters.’

‘If I die, remember that I, we, were individuals, humans, we had names, dreams and achievements and our only fault was that we were classified as inferior’
—Belal Albabbour

‘Don’t patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he’s stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.’

‘To induce a person’s change of heart is different from challenging the tremendous force of collective denial. And denial is arguably the opposite of recognition. But even denial is based on a kind of knowing. A willful turning from devastating knowledge, perhaps, out of fear.’