thoughts
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When Empathy Kills: Tolstoy & Flaubert
It makes me shake with rage to think of classical novelists who try to imagine being a woman and find no rational way to live in the restrictive male dominated societies and so have write their protagonists into killing themselves. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina jumps in front of a train Gustav Flaubert’s Emma Bovary eats…
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A Despair
It’s end of day and I’m pushing away from my desk in my office in my home where I pour my brilliance and energy. Everyday I am revolted that this office is my studio. The place I make art. The place I read poetry. The place I photograph myself trying to have a good time…
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Aesthetics I Wish I Could Live
Perhaps these are out there and people are already living them — if you know them, give me their contacts! GhostFlapper This is my dearest desire. To have died at the height of your youth and power as a flapper in the 1920s. BFFs with Josephine Baker. Crushed on and rejecting of Hemingway. Beads and…
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Take My Choice
I’ve removed choice from my days for many things – feeding my cat and rabbit, thinking about art, eating. But there are many choices that remain – when to feed them, whether to also look at or learn about art, and hugely what to eat. decision fatigue …even thinking whether to keep writing about it…
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A Mindscape of Frost and Fate
I do not stop on paths contemplating how they’ve been pre-travelled. I do not dawdle in wintry woods. Things need to be done, and seeing their need, I see the silver path to fulfillment. Each idea, each priority, every whim and fancy that floats before me, whether offered, imposed, or simply appearing, they all receive…
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I love surrealism.
I love the bends and gasps it makes in my brain, melting this and stretching that. That flower is a beautiful face, and those spiders will shelter us from the desert rays. I love the painters of surreal paintings: Miro’s playful lines that lead the eyes to newness, Magritte placing objects in my face, Kandinsky…
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Big Feelings
Big feelings are absolutely a hallmark of writers. Despair Ecstasy Joy I’m sure even writers who mechanically pump out a new book every 6 months to a year (Kristen Hannah, Steven King, Colleen Hoover, Raymond Chandler, etc.) feel massively in their chests and limbs the loves and fears of their characters. The secret is being…
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Water Makes a New Path
I watched an episode of a murder solving show once, one of the ones where the audience is supposed to want the detectives to hook up. Worse, one of the ones where the audience is super comforted by the murder show, I think the term is cozy murder or cozy mystery. Calling it mystery is…
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Specializing and Girlhood Dreams
My first love was painting and even now when I am tired thinking in words can feel like a barrier — but some charcoal, brush, or ink feel like extensions of my body. All intuition. Pure expression. But a blank page or canvas daunts me now, like words did back then. What is this reversal? …
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The Temptations of Public Discourse
Is it even possible to not engage in public discourse? To question this reality in my own head, perhaps might short circuit the premise. But otherwise, as soon as I say it out loud to my rabbit, or my husband, or my sister, it is in someway publicized – reformatted and prepackaged for THEIR consumption.…
Erin Oubliette 