Speaking (and eating!) with aliens | Gabriela Santiago’s “Tamales in Space, and Other Phrases for the Beginning Speaker”

If you're craving a good story, Gabriela Santiago's "Tamales in Space, and Other Phrases for the Beginning Speaker" is a treat (and the perfect portion size for a lunch break!). I downloaded the audio version to accompany me during a work shift and kept finding myself rewinding to listen again, because I have horrible listening…

[lil thought] drawing tutorials, fat eyelids, dumb beauty standards

Back in the days when I haunted DeviantArt obsessively, I remember studiously trying to follow a drawing tutorial by an artist I admired, titled something like "How to Draw Eyes." Everything was going fine, I was proud of how my eye was turning out, and then about three-fourths of the way through came the instruction:…

James Baldwin’s smile

Is that not the most beatific smile you've ever seen? Seeing James Baldwin smile makes me particularly happy because most of the time, he looks so tired. I'm watching I Am Not Your Negro for a film class right now—Raoul Peck's powerful documentary strings together quotes from Baldwin's unfinished manuscript Remember This House with clips of Baldwin…

[lil thought] T.S. Eliot and why i like hyperlinks

I've realized through this blog that I very much enjoy adding unnecessary hyperlinks in all my posts. Why does this bring me so much glee? If I had to read into it (which, I mean, is all I do on this blog), I think it's because I really like the idea of this vast connective…

underwater singing and memory slips | Bon Iver’s “715 – CR∑∑KS”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_Fx1yq3A8M This lyric video got a lot of laughs when we watched it in my Literature and Music class; I love this song, but admit there's something a little silly about seeing the slipperiness of the lyrics so earnestly transcribed. They have the effect of being typed in real-time by someone who hesitates, backspaces, and…

postapocalypse now!!! – apocalypse from different angles

Here's the final project from my summer class, titled "Postapocalypse Now!" A bit self-centered to share my own project, but it's an easy post for a busy week and fun to process the ideas. Really this is an ode to a thought-provoking course and its awesome instructor, doctoral candidate Caitlin Scholl. (I am aware that this…

sputniks, spacetime, and superlunary lovin’ | Josh Pearce’s “Three-Body” and “Give Me A Spacetime”

SPACE ROMANCE. Please join me in entering the gravitational fields of two poems by Josh Pearce, "Three-Body" and "Give Me A Spacetime"!

seeking nourishment | Sarah Kofman’s Rue Ordener, Rue Labat

(content warning: discussion of eating disorder.)1   Ann Smock, friend of French thinker Sarah Kofman and translator of Kofman's memoir Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, visited my Comparative Literature seminar on memory and historical trauma. My first thought was that I really want a friend like Ann Smock—she spoke so affectionately and with deep insight into her…

“paper children applauding” | Frances Hardinge’s Fly by Night

So nice to revisit this childhood favorite :'). Though I'm trying to expose myself to new writers, familiar books are still the best comfort reading. Fly by Night has made me laugh out loud, but also tear up sometimes, just because I'm brought back to the simplicity with which I engaged with stories as a kid,…