"It really expounds on the self-conscious dorky nature of Canada, as epitomized by all our self-conscious dorky icons (the beaver; the igloo; coloured money and excessive coinage; Tim Horton’s; politeness). Canada is like that kid who plays the tuba and whose mother still picks out his clothes every day. He might be cool but you’ll never know."

"This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.

But you have to choose: live or tell."

this is my running list of women writers who define badass

meaghano:

• joan didion
• marilynne robinson
• alice munro
• mary gaitskill
• grace paley
• anais nin

Who else?

(I don’t think Lorrie Moore is a badass, but that is certainly up for debate. I’m not even sure what I mean, but I just don’t think BADASS when I think of her.).

Runners up include: Carson McCullers, Dorothy Parker

(for personal reference)

Life Stories

from The Tent by Margaret Atwood

I’m working on my own life story. I don’t mean I’m putting it together: no, I’m taking it apart. It’s mostly a question of editing. If you’d wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.

I was born, I would have begun, once. But snip, snip, away go mother and father, white ribbons of paper blown by the wind, with grandparents tossed out for good measure. I spent my childhood. Enough of that as well. Goodbye dirty little dresses, goodbye scuffed shoes that caused me such anguish, goodbye well-thumbed tears and scabby knees, and sadness worn at the edges.

Adolescence can be discarded too, with its salty tanned skin, its fecklessness and bad romance and leakages of seasonal blood. What was it like to breathe so heavily, as if drugged, while rubbing up against strange leather coats in alleyways. I can’t remember.

Once you get started it’s fun. So much free space opens up. Rip, crumple, up in flames, out the window, I was born, I grew up, I studied, I loved, I married, I procreated, I said, I wrote, all gone now. I went, I saw, I did. Farewell crumbling turrets of historic interest, farewell icebergs and war monuments, all those young stone men with eyes upturned, and risky voyages teeming with germs, and dubious hotels, and doorways opening both in and out. Farewell friends and lovers, you’ve slipped from view, erased, defaced: I know you once had hairdos and told jokes, but I can’t recall them. Into the ground with you, my tender fur-brained cats and dogs, and horses and mice as well: I adored you, dozens of you, but what were your names?

I’m getting somewhere now, I’m feeling lighter. I’m coming unstuck from scrapbooks , from albums, from diaries and journals, from space, from time. Only a paragraph left, only a sentence or two, only a whisper.

I was born.
I was.

I.

(via fiddlersgreen)

"

But the more I wrote the more I discovered that faking it is a continual theatre of necessity, No other way to be in language, but to bluff your way through it, stalling for more time. And when I get it, that little gap of renewal, I see the accent not in my own little voice, but there in the mouth of the word within the word, there in the “land only of what is,” right there at the tips of our fingers, in the “sniff” of the pen as it hunts the page.

"Music for bus journeys is different to music for driving; sitting behind the wheel you are filled with the exhilarating sense of possibility, the feeling that you could go anywhere; on bus journeys your destination is always limited by the bus route, and your music is, by and large, confined to your headphones rather than billowing out of a car speaker system. Accordingly, the best music for bus journeys always seems characteristically introspective, the kind of music made for dreamers and loner."

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
‘Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away

—a.e. housman

black shoes, black socks, black shirt, indigo jeans, brown hair, black coat

If it weren’t a problem of cultural appropriation, I would learn to wear saris and then wear them every day, because I think they’re the most beautiful garments yet invented for women. However, given that I’m a mostly-white girl living in central Canada, and I work in an anti-racist environment of a major university, I think I probably can’t carry it off.

I’m getting used to seeing women in a huge range of hijab. When I started university in 1995, it was relatively rare to see women in headscarves. On any given day now, I see girls and women in hip outfits with stunning scarves wrapped around their hair, women in swirling hair-veils that cover them to their hips over contrasting, flowing dresses, women in severe black chadors with kick-ass shoes and jeans showing at the hem, and a few women in niqabs, swathed in grey and settled in corners under the stair studying calculus.
I feel very drab sometimes.

I know there’s a particular racism in objectifying non-whiteness. That said, I wish there was some straightforward way I could let people, particularly women, I see know how fabulous I think they look.

In this spirit, I randomly complimented some guy’s elaborate beard this morning. He was wearing sweatpants. I think he may have had the flu.

—jane st. clair

the once and future king

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

—T.H. White

laniate

wordjournal:

verb • to tear in pieces