"By fifteen, I was composing orchestral scores which went unperformed for the most part, and justifiably so. They were difficult, unlistenable, and wildly pretentious, though, thankfully, I didn’t learn the word “pretentious” until I was eighteen, thereby freeing me up to be unbearably guilt-free for most of my adolescence."

Sarah Vowell, speaker to/of my soul

Having just finished this book, I will now spend the rest of my Saturday trying to reconcile how something so painful and beautiful and important could also include one of the goofiest similes I have ever encountered in a celebrated literary work: “She and I’d been orbiting each other like nervous rabbits.”

(via The Library of Congress on Flickr)

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Blue Nights, already slaying me.

"When Willis’s early essays were originally collected, she chose to annotate them with footnotes that sometimes (she wrote) “quarreled with” her own arguments, rather than changing the pieces to reflect her “political or intellectual hindsight.” One of the pleasures of reading these essays is seeing that her willingness to take on any opponent extended even to her younger self. She treated this opponent the way she treated all of her opponents, both political and personal: with scrupulous fairness and a kind of moral rectitude that makes her rhetorical victories intensely satisfying to read."

Emily Gould on Ellen Willis

I am reading Out of the Vinyl Deeps right now (finally) and feel like I am learning as much about writing and thinking as I have from the last few years of my general existence combined. So exciting.

Going home this weekend; most likely gonna raid childhood bedroom for all its L’Engle.

"Of course, there were unfortunate women who drank, to the eternal disgrace of their families, just as there were women who were insane or divorced or who believed, with Miss Susan B. Anthony, that women should have the vote."

Pour one out for Gone With the Wind, which turns 75 today. (Here’s a nice story from NPR about Margaret Mitchell’s Atlanta apartments, which played this AM and reminded me of the date.)

(Source: gutenberg.net.au)

"The people who settled the town called successively Terminus, Marthasville and Atlanta, were a pushy people. Restless, energetic people from the older sections of Georgia and from more distant states were drawn to this town that sprawled itself around the junction of the railroads in its center. They came with enthusiasm. They built their stores around the five muddy red roads that crossed near the depot. They built their fine homes on Whitehall and Washington streets and along the high ridge of land on which countless generations of moccasined Indian feet had beaten a path called the Peachtree Trail. They were proud of the place, proud of its growth, proud of themselves for making it grow. Let the older towns call Atlanta anything they pleased. Atlanta did not care."

Gone With the Wind, I am so sorry for brushing you off all these years.

"W’en you is mahied, you kin eat, too,” retorted Mammy. “W’en Miss Ellen yo’ age, she never et nuthin’ w’en she went out, an’ needer yo’ Aunt Pauline nor yo’ Aunt Eulalie. An’ dey all done mahied. Young misses whut eats heavy mos’ gener’ly doan never ketch husbands."

This book just makes me want to eat and eat and eat…

(Source: gutenberg.net.au)

"

“I won’t think of that now,” she said firmly. “If I think of it now, it will upset me. There’s no reason why things won’t come out the way I want them—if he loves me. And I know he does!”

She raised her chin and her pale, black-fringed eyes sparkled in the moonlight. Ellen had never told her that desire and attainment were two different matters; life had not taught her that the race was not to the swift. She lay in the silvery shadows with courage rising and made the plans that a sixteen-year-old makes when life has been so pleasant that defeat is an impossibility and a pretty dress and a clear complexion are weapons to vanquish fate."

Scarlett O’Hara: Kind of a proto-Mean Girl?

(Source: gutenberg.net.au)