Books, sketchbook

Find little spaces inside of you and tease them open

After Lonely City I read Crudo, of course. More qualified people have written about it so I won’t go into that, but I enjoyed it immensely. It was funny, raw, and brilliant.

“When she was young, she’d sliced up her own flesh at the blink of an eye, she loved to get truly abject, but now she’d dried out…not appetising exactly, not desirable, but fodder for someone, a pigeon, at least. Was this getting older? Kathy was worried about ageing, she hadn’t realised youth wasn’t a permanent state, that she couldn’t always be cute and hopeless and forgivable.”

It takes place over a few days in her fortieth summer, and she’s about to get married. It’s not often that we see ourselves reflected so accurately in literature with all our fears and pimples and headaches, and Olivia Laing as Kathy Acker was spot on.

Take a look at the covers too: The UK paperback edition which I read, and here’s the US paperback one.

Title & this quotation from Crudo

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Life, sketchbook

Tomorrow is our permanent address

While going through my archives, I found these pages from a 2004 journal. The brown boy and I had just gotten married, and I was resisting all the extended family’s combined pressure on me to start propagating the species.

In this angry book it seems that while I did not want to have a baby, I knew all about the details of bearing one. What a know-it-all I was.

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Life, sketchbook

Getting where we’re going

 

 

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[Sometimes in the living of every day

I often forget about the life of it

the intentionality, “the composing of the life”

that I once set out to do. The daily bustle,

that once emerged from me –

often swallows me up

until all I can do is hold on for dear life

to banal rituals

so that I don’t lose myself.]

Title: John Brehm

For pacificleo.

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