…reading papers and manuscripts is one thing. Looking through someone’s e-mail is quite another, and the feeling of creepiness and voyeurism that overcame me as I sat with Gonzalez struggled with the unstoppable curiosity that I feel about Sontag’s life. To read someone’s e-mail is to see her thinking and talking in real time. If most e-mails are not interesting (“The car will pick you up at 7:30 if that’s ok xxx”), others reveal unexpected qualities that are delightful to discover. (Who would have suspected, for example, that Sontag sent e-mails with the subject heading “Whassup?”) One sees Sontag, who had so many friends, elated to be in such easy touch with them (“I’m catching the e-mail fever!”); one sees the insatiably lonely writer reaching out to people she hardly knew and inviting them to pay a call. In their reactions, one reads their bemusement, how hesitant they were to bother the icon, with her fearsome reputation.

With the software available today, the biographer who strives to put himself in the position of his subject is faced with new conundrums. One of the most intriguing tools that Gonzalez deploys is a program called MUSE, which can search an e-mail database and map the writer’s feelings with uncanny accuracy. You can see categories such as “medical,” “angry,” and “congratulations”; you can see, on a graph, what percentage of the time in May, 2001, for example, Sontag was happy or sad or upset.

As I was marvelling at this technology, I wondered how I would feel if someone searched my e-mail and revealed that I uttered an average of three hundred and twenty-one bitchy remarks per month, and that my weekly horniness index ranged from 34.492 per cent to 56.297 per cent. Should we, simply because we can, boil down human emotions and lives in this way? Would Sontag have wanted her life analyzed like this? Would anyone?

Benjamin Moser on Sontag’s “implacable archives.” (via snpsnpsnp)

Relationships change over time spent online. Where I used to want to know everything about someone I loved, I now want to know only what he or she tells me. Anything I find out about that someone, from someone else, I rule inadmissible. In Tao Lin’s new novel, Taipei, his protagonist meets a girl and spends hours searching Facebook for any photos she might have untagged of herself. Reading this, I sympathized, and thought he had doomed his interest. It seemed unfair – both of and to Lin’s character – to not see her as she wanted to look.

me in the summer on Miranda July’s email project. Thought of it reading this. (via snpsnpsnp)

I can relate. I spent my first real relationship this way—not listening to what other people said, wanting his idea of himself to be the only one that I received. But the messages were mixed and in the end I could have used some help to discern them. These days I’m not sure which way is right.
Perhaps looking for someone’s untagged photos is akin to finding candid snapshots of someone when they’re unaware a photo is being taken, where—as Jennifer Egan once put it—you see how someone really looks. 

We watch, for the most part impassively, as “The Night Alive” ’s five characters cling to the refuse-laden reef of their lives—a space littered with greasy food, misbegotten children, bloodstained T-shirts, used condoms, cheap cologne bottles, broken promises, the rubbish of love. From this they try to build a home, but there is no comfort there—not even a window through which to look out at the passing world… .

Hilton Als for the New Yorker on Conor McPherson’s “The Night Alive”

If the girl had been worth having she’d have waited for you?’ No, sir, the girl really worth having won’t wait for anybody.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (via illusionsvk)

It was said that I refused to grant any value to the maternal instinct and to love. This was not so. I simply asked that women should experience them truthfully and freely, whereas they often use them as excuses and take refuge in them, only to find themselves imprisoned in that refuge when those emotions have dried up in their hearts.

Simone de Beauvoir - Wikiquote (via alecresnick)

And you can never be great at anything unless you love it. Not be in love with it, but love the thing, admire the thing.

Oprah Interviews Maya Angelou - Oprah.com (via alecresnick)

And it has been
one hell
of a year.
I have worn
the seasons
under my sleeves,
on my thighs,
running down my cheeks.
This is what
surviving
looks like, my dear.

Michelle K., It Has Been One Hell of a Year. (via sulkystripper)

record moments, fleeting impressions, overheard dialogue, your own sadnesses and bewilderments and joys.

Ted Hughes on writing

1 Write only when you have something to say.
2 Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.
3 Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.
4 If nobody will put your play on, put it on yourself.
5 Jokes are like hands and feet for a painter. They may not be what you want to end up doing but you have to master them in the meanwhile.
6 Theatre primarily belongs to the young.
7 No one has ever achieved consistency as a screenwriter.
8 Never go to a TV personality festival masquerading as a literary festival.
9 Never complain of being misunderstood. You can choose to be understood, or you can choose not to.
10 The two most depressing words in the English language are “literary fiction”.

David Hare, writing tips.

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

David Bowie (via taylorbooks)

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (via thebentworld)

I’m not too enticed with it," said Mulloy, when asked his opinion of pro tennis in the 21st century. "The game has changed. There’s no net play, and that’s because the balls has less fuzz on them, and they go throughout the air faster, bounce higher, making it more difficult to get to the net. It used to be you had to end up at the net on every point to win. Now, you just stay back, have long rallies until someone makes a mistake.

Gardnar Mulloy turned 100! We went to his birthday! 

http://espn.go.com/tennis/story/_/id/10011290/tennis-true-living-legend-gardnar-mulloy

I wonder what it’s like to have a news article written about your entire life every time you have a birthday. 

Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.

C.S. Lewis (via fawun)

Tibetans try to see death for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things. This simple truth is hard to fathom. But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die and then go on to experience uterine rebirth or Judeo-Christian afterlife or out-of-body experience or a trip on a UFO or whatever we wish to call it. We can do so with clear vision, without awe or terror. We don’t have to cling to life artificially, or to death for that matter. We simply walk toward the sliding doors. Waves and radiation. Look how well-lighted everything is. The place is sealed off, self-contained. It is timeless. Another reason why I think of Tibet. Dying is an art in Tibet. A priest walks in, sits down, tells the weeping relatives to get out and has the room sealed. Doors, windows sealed. He has serious business to see to. Chants, numerology, horoscopes, recitations. Here we don’t die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think.

Don DeLilo, White Noise (via z-bra)

Lou and I played music together, became best friends and then soul mates, traveled, listened to and criticized each other’s work, studied things together (butterfly hunting, meditation, kayaking). We made up ridiculous jokes; stopped smoking 20 times; fought; learned to hold our breath underwater; went to Africa; sang opera in elevators; made friends with unlikely people; followed each other on tour when we could; got a sweet piano-playing dog; shared a house that was separate from our own places; protected and loved each other. We were always seeing a lot of art and music and plays and shows, and I watched as he loved and appreciated other artists and musicians. He was always so generous. He knew how hard it was to do. We loved our life in the West Village and our friends; and in all, we did the best we could do.

Like many couples, we each constructed ways to be – strategies, and sometimes compromises, that would enable us to be part of a pair. Sometimes we lost a bit more than we were able to give, or gave up way too much, or felt abandoned. Sometimes we got really angry. But even when I was mad, I was never bored. We learned to forgive each other. And somehow, for 21 years, we tangled our minds and hearts together.

It was spring in 2008 when I was walking down a road in California feeling sorry for myself and talking on my cell with Lou. “There are so many things I’ve never done that I wanted to do,” I said.

"Like what?"

"You know, I never learned German, I never studied physics, I never got married."

"Why don’t we get married?" he asked. "I’ll meet you halfway. I’ll come to Colorado. How about tomorrow?"

"Um – don’t you think tomorrow is too soon?"

"No, I don’t."

Laurie Anderson remembers Lou Reed. via Rolling Stone

You need to try to master the ability to feel sad without actually being sad.

 Mingyur Rinpoche via Laurie Anderson

One recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray from it.

Albert Camus - Wikiquote (via alecresnick)

I get depressed if I’m not making music. For the duration of my break from music, I was mildly depressed. I felt that there was “no time” for anything but work and duty, and I had a despairing attitude about it. However, it’s amazing how much energy a creative endeavor can bring. It can often give more than it takes. I squeeze practicing in between dinner and bedtime. My daughter and my husband play games and read books while I belt it out in the basement. It’s roughly an hour a day of rehearsing, but it’s enough to see a gradual improvement, and I come upstairs energized and happy. Music is self-centered in a healthy way for me because it’s introspective and meditative. It has to happen alone and at the expense of other duties. But it brings more vitality to my life and home than, for instance, a clean kitchen could bring. One notable difference for me now is that I have a partner who picks up the slack and with whom I share this experience. That makes it more communal– in fact, that makes it possible. I wouldn’t be doing this without Seth. I agree with you in the sense that the life of a solo artist can be very unhealthy and isolating. You’re holed up in a messy house with empty pizza boxes and tangled-up cables, and you don’t want anyone to come over and see the mess.

Shannon Stevens on music making in an interview with Sufjan Stephens

The hardest period in life is one’s twenties. It’s a shame because you’re your most gorgeous, and you’re physically in peak condition. But it’s actually when you’re most insecure and full of self-doubt. When you don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s frightening.

Helen Mirren, quoted in Esquire’s “What I’ve Learned”  (via aquilum)

I had exactly this thought, so great to be validated by Helen Mirren :.) 

I act and react, and suddenly I wonder, ‘Where is the girl that I was last year? Two years ago? What would she think of me now?’

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals  (via thatkindofwoman)