houseoforange

[houseoforange]

In the wealthier countries, a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed. When those horrors release a violence that reaches into our cities and our habits we're startled, we're alarmed.

Elena Greco, p. 363 (ebook) of Elena Ferrante's The Story of the Lost Child

#elena ferrante #lenù #elena greco #the story of the lost child #the west #western civilization #terrorism #mediocrity

[houseoforange]

Everything moves. A wish, a fantasy travels more swiftly than blood.

Raffaella Carracci, p. 289 (ebook) of Elena Ferrante's The Story of the Lost Child

CONTEXT:

"At first," she said, dividing the hair into two, and beginning to braid it without losing sight of her image in the mirror, "Dede resembled you, now instead she's becoming like her father. The opposite is happening with Elsa: she seemed identical to her father and now instead she's starting to look like you. Everything moves. A wish, a fantasy travels more swiftly than blood."

"I don't understand."

"You remember when I thought Gennaro was Nino's?"

"Yes."

"To me he really seemed so, he was identical to Nino, his exact image."

"You mean that a desire can be so strong as to seem fulfilled?"

"No, I mean that for a few years Gennaro was truly Nino's child."

"Don't exaggerate."

She stared at me spitefully for a moment, she took a few steps in the bathroom, limping, she burst out laughing in a slightly artificial way.

"So it seems to you that I'm exaggerating?"

I realized with some annoyance that she was imitating my walk.

"Don't make fun of me, my hip hurts."

"Nothing hurts, Lenù. You invented that limp in order not to let your mother die completely, and now you really do limp, and I've studied you, it's good for you. The Solaras took your bracelet and you said nothing, you weren't sorry, you weren't worried. At the time I thought it was because you don't know how to rebel, but now I understand it's not that. You're getting old properly. You feel strong, you stopped being a daughter, you truly became a mother."

#elena ferrante #lila #raffaella carracci #literature #biology #genetics #my brilliant friend #the story of the lost child #lenù #elena greco

[houseoforange]

God—I wrote, more or less—creates man, Ish, in his image. He creates a masculine and a feminine version. How? First, with the dust of the earth, he forms Ish, and blows into his nostrils the breath of life. Then he makes Isha'h, the woman, from the already formed male material, material no longer raw but living, which he takes from Ish's side, and immediately closes up the flesh. The result is that Ish can say: This thing is not, like the army of all that has been created, other than me, but is flesh of my flesh, bone of my bones. God produced it from me. He made me fertile with the breath of life and extracted it from my body. I am Ish and she is Isha'h. In the word above all, in the word that names her, she derives from me. I am in the image of the divine spirit. I carry within me his Word. She is therefore a pure suffix applied to my verbal root, she can express herself only within my word.

Elena Airota, p. 278 (ebook) of Elena Ferrante's Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

#elena airota #elena greco #lenù #those who leave and those who stay #my brilliant friend #italy #italian literature #literature #neapolitan novels #the neapolitan novels #god #ish #isha'h #man #woman #creation #myth #legends #mythos #language

[houseoforange]

In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.

Raffaella Carracci, p. 262 (ebook) of Elena Ferrante's Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

#raffaella carraci #raffaella cerullo #lila #elena ferrante #those who leave and those who stay #my brilliant friend #literature #italy #italian literature #neapolitan novels #the neapolitan novels #naples #napoli #fairy tales #reality

[houseoforange]

… [T]he disgusting face of things alone was not enough for writing a novel: without imagination it would seem not a true face but a mask.

Elena Airota, p. 208 (ebook) of Elena Ferrante's Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

#my brilliant friend #those who leave and those who stay #elena ferrante #elena greco #elena airota #lenù #literature #italy #italian literature #books #reading #novels #the neapolitan novels #naples #napoli #writing #neapolitan novels

[houseoforange]

Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.

Raffaella Carracci, p. 178 (ebook) of Elena Ferrante's Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

#raffaella carracci #raffaella cerullo #lila #elena ferrante #those who leave and those who stay #my brilliant friend #the neapolitan novels #neapolitan novels #literature #reading #italy #italian literature #naples #napoli #pregnancy

[houseoforange]

Nearly four years ago, a wildfire raged through Woolsey Canyon in Southern California, forcing people to flee from their homes, and I even remember a story about a woman named Laci Ping who reunited with her [minimally injured] house cat named Mayson after he fled from his own home while she and her family were evacuating. There were lots of stories like Mayson’s at the time, and I guess the animal angle really hit me in the feels because when I saw this photo posted by Wally Skalij for the Los Angeles Times of an owl resting on the beach, likely after a long journey away from the Woolsey fires, too, I had to repost it, wordlessly, just too sad about the state of their little corner of the world.

Sometimes these posts show up in my “memories” on Facebook, but this one has stuck out in my mind ever since then; it didn’t show up in my “memories” today, for instance. I can sense a stunned look in his eyes. I hope he’s OK wherever he is. I don’t wanna turn this post into a diatribe about how human beings generally suck, which they do, so I’ll leave it at that.

Anyway, I guess we’ve been lucky this season not to have too many wildfires because I haven’t seen any significant stories about disasters out on the west coast. Fingers crossed, eh?

#owl #owls #wildlife #wildfires #California #woolsey fire #Woolsey fires #photos #photography #animals #Wally skalij #Los Angeles times #laci ping #mayson #wildlife photography #beaches #woosley canyon #photojournalism #Southern California

[houseoforange]

Many moons ago, tmills published something of a playlist — or, I think he used the words "compilation album" at the time — inspired by the movie Drive (2011). A couple of songs from his user-created album eventually became longtime faves, including Electric Youth's "Faces" and this song that I'm sharing here.

Fave songs ebb & flow in each of our minds. One day you're humming ABBA in the office, and later you're belting Céline Dion at day's end underneath the shower (for the record, I have never belted Céline Dion in the shower, or in any place, really). Last night I remembered Groove Armada's "Paper Romance" here, and while I didn't belt the song underneath streams of disjointed jets of water — made so because I'm too cheap & lazy to clear off the hard water stains let alone buy a new showerhead — I visited YouTube to see the video. I had never seen the music video before. While I can't say that it's a particularly remarkable or memorable video per se, the aesthetic really jibed with my intellect in that moment.

I have kind of a whispery confession to make here. Sometimes (well, more like every week) I visit a lesser-known LGBT-friendly bar in a sketchy side of town, far from the trendy "gayborhood" of San Antonio. As I push forty years old, I'm increasingly aware that my shelf life among the glamorous, image-conscious Zoomers expired a long time ago. And it's fine. My generation pushed out the generation before it, and I guess it's my turn now — my turn to flee into the sinewy embrace of the "old hags" who waited patiently year after year for me to realize that my wiry hair accented by the receding hairline, my ballooning paunch, my wincing visage in the face of the DJ's earnest "nostalgic hits" that I swear I heard only a few months ago, are all neither welcome nor cute in the bars.

Speaking of Zoomers, my own generation is odd. It's a neglected micro-generation called "Xennials." Look it up! We exist. We're sandwiched between Generation X and Millennials. Now Millennials are also supposedly too old, and soon they'll come waddling into the oldie bar after me. But beyond being forgotten in the mix of two very loud, two very raucous generations, my identity as a gay Xennial has also been a nebulous, weird thing to me.

I grew up in the 90s accepting things like Don't Ask Don't Tell, where it was OK to be gay, but don't talk about it, OK? And DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act) was around, and DOMA meant that it was fine for gay people to have "civil unions," but we shouldn't get fully married because, you know, that's not cool. Do people still say "cool?" I haven't heard anyone say it in ages. Anyway, beyond these policies, the West was navigating a precarious relationship with Russia post-Iron Curtain, and we were also mitigating a diminishing social landscape made possible by the exponential growth of the internet. The 90s were really transitional, man, and I'm still traumatized by it.

Much of this uncertainty left me feeling profoundly conflicted in several ways, and I didn't have any help from the Big Two generations, including their gays: Generation X gays (and frankly all gays before them, too) are really loud & proud about their homosexuality — and rightfully so! — and Millennial gays are really subdued & mellow about their homosexuality, and Millennials used to be the future at one point, so I should probably emulate their reserved attitude, right? I don't know. I don't know where these 'tudes leave me, or how I'm supposed to think. Anyway, the point of this stream of consciousness is that I now visit the "oldie" bar, and I take the bus there because drunk driving no longer exists under Millennial law — ridesharing made drunk driving a thing of the past — and Generation X always drove drunk in any case, but that never meant that I had to follow their outdated example(s) either. So public transit is my option since I don't really fit in with drunk driving nor with ridesharing, especially since I'm too poor for it anyhow, and thank heavens for public transit, am I right?!

And so after visiting the oldie bar as I do every week, I watched Groove Armada's video, and I thought about how the girl in this video kinda reflected my mood, being alone in the middle of the night, stumbling onto the streets, mais mon Dieu qu'elle est belle quand coule son rimmel, and it's true because the bartender gave me a lovely compliment last night about how my eye make-up "pops" every week when I show up to our little haunt.

And then I saw the number of views on this video: a measly twenty-four thousand. And then I felt profoundly neglected and confused all over again.

According to Wikipedia, Groove Armada has been around since 1996. They've probably made so many hits before & after "Paper Romance," but Paper Romance must have somehow got lost in the shuffle — just like me.

Just like me.

Anyway, tmills, the original uploader of the music, probably doesn't even remember sharing his lil' ol' album. If you're reading this post, buddy, then thanks for the tunes! You also added Neon Indian's "Polish Girl" to the album, but I already had that song, so it's been a duplicate track in my library for ages now. I bet you also didn't know that Neon Indian, or at least the main talent from Neon Indian, comes from San Antonio too, just like me. Just. Like. Moi!

And as an epilogue to this whole journey, according to Wikipedia's entry for Neon Indian, an ex-girlfriend to the main talent in Neon Indian apparently conceived their very name, "Neon Indian." Their band's whole identity was borne of an ex-girlfriend, a lady whom I've discovered, after some light stalker-ish investigation, is also the sister of a guy that I used to date several years ago. Worlds collide, right? There's probably an anecdote here about identity and barely missed opportunities, but I've done enough instrospection in this post. Sayonara, all!

#groove armada #paper romance #groove armada - paper romance #music #music videos #gay #lgbt #homosexuality #tmills #tully mills #san antonio #alcohol #drinking #thoughts #stream of consciousness #streams of consciousness #neon indian #drive #drive (2011) #generations #millennials #generation x #xennial #xennials #bus #buses #public transit #youtube #doma #defense of marriage act

[houseoforange]

Let me just say that I really enjoy The Great North as well as pretty much all of Loren Bouchard's other wholesome creations. That being said, I sometimes feel like the humor in each of those shows relies a little too heavily on puns, so it tickled me to see Honeybee shut down this pun-train with some lady facts!

#the great north #honeybee #honeybee shaw #puns #humor #loren bouchard #television #television shows #tv #tv shows #hulu #art #women artists #artists #comedy #feminism #beef tobin #wolf tobin #judy tobin #moon tobin #pottery #pottery class #kilnin' it #streaming #streaming entertainment #as goldie as it gets adventure

[houseoforange]

The Yellowjackets theme song makes me want to break stuff and commit crimes.

I make this comment as a male, too. Not that males are the gatekeepers to aggression, but nobody can tell me that women aren't badasses. This show & this song are perfect examples of women being tough, powerful, and just plain awesome. I highly recommend it!

#yellowjackets #no return #television #theme songs #women #feminism #power #aggression #music videos #intro sequences #intro songs #intro theme songs #Youtube

[houseoforange]

#warren beatty #diane keaton #jack nicholson #reds #jack reed #louise bryant #communism #socialism #revolution #dissent #individualism #collectivism #movies #film #cinema #hollywood #john reed #john silas reed #ten days that shook the world #october revolution #russia #soviet union #bolshevism #bolsheviks #anne louise mohan

[houseoforange]

Excuse me, do you have a moment today to speak about our Lord & Savior Dare Wright?

#the lonely doll #dare wright #edith #mr. bear #little bear #photography #children's books #children's lit #children's literature #kids' books #october #halloween #horror #dread #existential blankness #creepy #creepy dolls

[houseoforange]

But that's what people were here for, the only reason we were on the planet at all: so that a star that flared and died a billion years before we were born would not pass away unobserved.

p. 359, Man About Town by Mark Merlis

#man about town #mark merlis #gay #gay literature #gay lit #joel lingeman #lgbt #lgbt literature #lgbt lit

[houseoforange]

pp. 282 - 284, Man About Town by Mark Merlis

They sat on the sofa with the gold slipcover. Sexton produced, from his shirt pocket, a pack of cigarettes and a plastic holder. He held up the holder. "This is phase two of a stop-smoking program. I've been at phase two for ten years."

"I know how it is," Joel said, lighting a cigarette of his own.

"I won't be getting to phase three."

"I'm sorry."

"When I found out I was… sick, I started calling people. People I hadn't talked to in years. My college roommate. My cousins in Iowa. My first lover. 'Hi!' I'd go. 'This is Chip! Chip Sexton!' They'd go, 'Oh.' Just like that, and then there'd be this long silence while they decided just how deeply they wished they hadn't picked up the phone. Finally, they'd say, 'Hi, Chip. Been a long time.'

"It was funny, when I asked them what they'd been doing, people didn't recap the whole last thirty or forty years or whatever it had been since we'd talked. They'd say what they'd done last week: Bunny and I went to the flea market, or Suzie got admitted to Dartmouth. Then they'd ask what was new with me. I'd say, 'Nothing much. Just happened to be thinking of you.' Pretty soon we'd hang up.

"I wasn't calling to tell them I was sick. I had this notion that I ought to tell them how much they meant to me. That I shouldn't… go without having told them that, it would have been a lie. The person at the other end of the phone didn't mean anything to me. Do you understand?"

Joel nodded wearily. He recited in a monotone: "It wasn't the same person. That person didn't exist any more."

"What? Oh, no. No, that's not what I'm saying. Of course it wasn't. I mean, for God's sake, Bunny — I don't even know what gender Bunny is, how could my first lover have wound up with a Bunny? But what I'm saying is… how old were you when you, whatever, fell in love with that picture?"

"Fourteen."

"Fourteen, Jesus. So you must be…" Sexton did the arithmetic and, mercifully, didn't say: You look older than that. "If he were the very same person, you wouldn't love him any more. That's really what I mean. My roommate meant something to me when I was twenty, my first lover when I was twenty-three, but I'm not the man who loved them. If there had been a — what do you call it? — a time warp, if through some magic of the telephone switching system I had got, on the other end, the same person I loved, unchanged, no daughter at Dartmouth, no Bunny — it wouldn't have mattered."

"Then why did you make the second call?"

"I'm sorry?"

"After you called the first person and… made this discovery, why did you call the second one, and then the one after that, however many?"

Sexton smiled. "Good question. I don't know. I guess I was hoping it would be different. That there'd be someone I still… felt some connection with."

Sexton put a new cigarette in his holder, looked at it for a while without lighting it. He murmured, "That's it, I guess."

"What?"

"I was trying to call myself."

#man about town #mark merlis #joel lingeman #chambers sexton #chip sexton #nostalgia #memory #past #the past #memories #death #dying #gay #gay lit #gay literature #lgbt #lgbt lit #lgbt literature

[houseoforange]

[M]ost of civilization consists of lies about the dead.

p. 183, Man About Town by Mark Merlis

#man about town #mark merlis #joel lingeman #lies #memory #gay #gay lit #gay literature #lgbt #lgbt lit #lgbt literature

[houseoforange]

Here was the truth: because Joel did not believe in Paradise, an eternal life, he was left believing in New Mexico. To be there with the Santa Fe boy, swimming, lounging, cruising forever. Just dwelling with him, as so many people have dreamt of a timeless dwelling with the altogether less attractive and unsmiling deity they have conjured up. Joel at least had incontrovertible evidence that the Santa Fe boy existed. Or that he had existed once. More than anyone could say about Jesus. For an eternity they would wash his Mustang, each of them wearing his little lo-rise trunks, then take a dip in the pool to cool off, pop a couple of brews and lie in the sun. They wouldn't touch. But he would look over at Joel from his chaise longue, raise his hips and adjust his wet trunks, lie back. Still looking at Joel, that sad impenetrable smile dawning on his face. Joel would smile back. They would not touch. For ever, Joel would live in that moment that was so much more intense than mere touching, that instant when you knew you were going to touch. Through aeons he would be with Him in Santa Fe and would be about to touch Him. Santa Fe. Holy faith.

p. 182, Man About Town by Mark Merlis

#man about town #mark merlis #joel lingeman #faith #homosexuality #lgbt #gay #gay male #santa fe #santa fe new mexico #santa fe nm #new mexico #gay lit #gay literature #lgbt lit #lgbt literature

[houseoforange]

Our quote of the day is from the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr

#taxes #civilization #civilisation #oliver wendell holmes jr #oliver wendell holmes jr. #the economist #quotes