amandapalmer: a very long & personal new blog“the ocean at the end of the lane (a book & marriage review)”read it at http://bit.ly/OceanBlogand a favor: if you enjoyed this blog, please share the link around. i wanna do my own weird little part in promoting the book.p.s. “The Blender” image was commissioned by Land Transport NZ and developed at Clemenger BBDO (Wellington, NZ). the design team was Philip Andrew (executive creative director), Mark Forgan (art director), Jamie Standen (copywriter), Scott McMillan (agency producer), Lindsay Keats (photographer), and Geoff Francis (retoucher). View high resolution

amandapalmer:

a very long & personal new blog
“the ocean at the end of the lane (a book & marriage review)”
read it at http://bit.ly/OceanBlog
and a favor: if you enjoyed this blog, please share the link around. i wanna do my own weird little part in promoting the book.

p.s. “The Blender” image was commissioned by Land Transport NZ and developed at Clemenger BBDO (Wellington, NZ). the design team was Philip Andrew (executive creative director), Mark Forgan (art director), Jamie Standen (copywriter), Scott McMillan (agency producer), Lindsay Keats (photographer), and Geoff Francis (retoucher).

(Reblogged from amandapalmer)

thumbsup4rockandroll:

satanic2chainz:

the simpsons was always teaching life lessons 

Thinking of the community photoset colleen and colin just reblogged

(Source: mysimpsonsblogisgreaterthanyours)

(Reblogged from joleebindo)
So basically Lemony Snicket predicted tumblr.

So basically Lemony Snicket predicted tumblr.

(Source: a-sip-0f-keseys-k00l-aid-42)

(Reblogged from stonedmegle)
amandaonwriting: Literary Birthday - 16 June Happy Birthday, Joyce Carol Oates, born 16 June 1938 Joyce Carol Oates - Writing Advice Don’t try to anticipate an “ideal reader” – there may be one, but he/she is reading someone else. Don’t try to anticipate an “ideal reader” – except for yourself perhaps, sometime in the future. Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless! Unless you are writing something very avant-garde – all gnarled, snarled and “obscure” – be alert for possibilities of paragraphing. Unless you are writing something very post-modernist – self-conscious, self-reflexive and “provocative” – be alert for possibilities of using plain familiar words in place of polysyllabic “big” words. Keep in mind Oscar Wilde: “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.” Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst. This advice first appeared in The Guardian 12 Quotes I never change, I simply become more myself. Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn’t have the personality of a politician. We don’t see the world that simply. I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Anyone who teaches knows that you don’t really experience a text until you’ve taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class. Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.  I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people’s lives when they go in one direction, not another. If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework — you can still be writing, because you have that space. The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we’re reading, we’re thinking. It’s a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we’re looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there’s not as much reflective time. And it’s the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me. When people say there is too much violence in [my books], what they are saying is there is too much reality in life. When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer. I used to think getting old was about vanity — but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul. Oates is an American author of more than 40 novels, a number of plays and novellas, many short stories. She also writes poetry and nonfiction. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, and the National Humanities Medal.  Source for Image By Amanda Patterson for Writers Write View high resolution

amandaonwriting:

Literary Birthday - 16 June

Happy Birthday, Joyce Carol Oates, born 16 June 1938

Joyce Carol Oates - Writing Advice

  1. Don’t try to anticipate an “ideal reader” – there may be one, but he/she is reading someone else.
  2. Don’t try to anticipate an “ideal reader” – except for yourself perhaps, sometime in the future.
  3. Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!
  4. Unless you are writing something very avant-garde – all gnarled, snarled and “obscure” – be alert for possibilities of paragraphing.
  5. Unless you are writing something very post-modernist – self-conscious, self-reflexive and “provocative” – be alert for possibilities of using plain familiar words in place of polysyllabic “big” words.
  6. Keep in mind Oscar Wilde: “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”
  7. Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

This advice first appeared in The Guardian

12 Quotes

  1. I never change, I simply become more myself.
  2. Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn’t have the personality of a politician. We don’t see the world that simply.
  3. I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.
  4. Anyone who teaches knows that you don’t really experience a text until you’ve taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.
  5. Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.
  6.  I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people’s lives when they go in one direction, not another.
  7. If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework — you can still be writing, because you have that space.
  8. The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we’re reading, we’re thinking. It’s a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we’re looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there’s not as much reflective time. And it’s the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.
  9. When people say there is too much violence in [my books], what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.
  10. When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.
  11. I used to think getting old was about vanity — but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.
  12. Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.

Oates is an American author of more than 40 novels, a number of plays and novellas, many short stories. She also writes poetry and nonfiction. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, and the National Humanities Medal. 

Source for Image

By Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

(Reblogged from nuestrasenoradeputazos)

“Losers are people who are so afraid of not winning, they don’t even try.”

(Source: miafarrows)

(Reblogged from misandrymoments)
“

I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn’t a documentary or a cartoon — you can’t. You cannot. There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one.

There are not any.

By far your best shot, numbers-wise, at finding one that’s at least even-handedly featuring a man and a woman is Before Midnight (on 891 screens) so I hope you like it. Because it’s pretty much that or a solid, impenetrable wall of movies about dudes.

Dudes in capes, dudes in cars, dudes in space, dudes drinking, dudes smoking, dudes doing magic tricks, dudes being funny, dudes being dramatic, dudes flying through the air, dudes blowing up, dudes getting killed, dudes saving and kissing women and children, and dudes glowering at each other.

Somebody asked me this morning what “the women” are going to do about this. I don’t know. I honestly am at the point where I have no idea what to do about it. Stop going to the movies? Boycott everything?

They put up Bridesmaids, we went. They put up Pitch Perfect, we went. They put up The Devil Wears Prada, which was in two-thousand-meryl-streeping-oh-six, and we went (and by “we,” I do not just mean women; I mean we, the humans), and all of it has led right here, right to this place. Right to the land of zippedy-doo-dah. You can apparently make an endless collection of high-priced action flops and everybody says “win some, lose some” and nobody decides that They Are Poison, but it feels like every “surprise success” about women is an anomaly and every failure is an abject lesson about how we really ought to just leave it all to The Rock.

At The Movies, The Women Are Gone : Monkey See : NPR

The whole article is fantastic, as is pretty much everything Linda Holmes writes.

(via kdhart)

(Reblogged from sparrowwingsandfragilethings)

femmesandfamily:

titotibok:

Janani - “trans/national” (CUPSI 2013)

 

When I tell my mother 
how long I’ve been sitting
in the shiftiness of a female body,
she cries
a million different kinds of monsoon tears.
She tells me about
the white men who colonized her country,
her nightmares.
her mother’s sari soaked in saltwater,
the traumas she screams about 
this is what I remember
when I talk to white trans men
and witness the million different ways
they take up space
in my community,
and speak for trans women of color,
and treat femmes as arm candy,
and do not own their position as white men.

Brothers,
what I mean is
did you think the M in FTM stood for misogyny?
What I mean is
what about your female socialization
do you think affords you a free pass to patriarchy?
What I mean is
I understand your bodies have not always been yours
but they have always been beautiful,
you have always had words for them. 

My testosterone is made by Israel’s largest company.
There is colonization running through my bloodstream
Every time I take a shot
my muscles feel out of place for several days.
But there is some perverse satisfaction in this,
that even in my body
masculinity takes up too much space.

Mom, you’re right.
this is a painful process.
It is violence.
It is scarring.

But I’m trying to believe in something greater:
that there are ways of being a man
that do not involve being a white man.

When I tell my grandmother
that I’m ready to be honest with my body,
she says,
ok, make sure to call me more often,
and I’m sending you a drum set.
For days I have no idea what she means
but then I realize 
in India only boys ever play the drums,
and what my grandmother means is
there are ways of being a man
that do not involve being an American man,
that you can still play your music with us,
that I do not have words for this process of your becoming
but I will work around it with art and love.

Grandmother, mom,
there is a way to do this ethically.
I will build some other, new-old kind of masculinity.
I will not worry about the words for it in English.
I will honor the mothers in my history,
the goddess in my name,
I will play the drums for you.

holy wow

(Reblogged from ink-splotch)

(Source: xxbecstarrittaxx)

(Reblogged from langxue)
View high resolution

(Source: englishmajormade)

(Reblogged from leonardmccoysass)

raptorific:

I’M SO ANGRY

SOME 16TH CENTURY ASSHOLE WROTE “GOD B W YE” IN A LETTER AS AN ABBREVIATION FOR “GOD BE WITH YE”

AND IT APPEARED AS “GODBWYE”

WHICH WAS THEN READ AS “GOODBYE”

AND THAT’S WHY WE SAY “GOODBYE”

BECAUSE OF 16TH CENTURY CHAT SPEAK

(Reblogged from ourinfinitethoughts)

vociferocity:

jennstarkid:

if-dementors-were-pink:

can we just take a moment to imagine little cute six-year-old hermione reading matilda

and peering into this book about a smart, bookish girl who could move things with her mind

and then can you imagine her concentrating very hard on the books on the bookshelf and slowly, slowly, getting them to move

OH MY GOD

holy shit

(Reblogged from sharpestrose)
laughterkey: geardrops: aiglet12: sesamestreet: Today, Sesame Workshop launches its newest initiative, Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration. This bilingual (English/Spanish) multimedia outreach initiative provides much-needed resources to support and comfort young children (ages 3–8) throughout their parents’ incarceration. Go to http://www.sesamestreet.org/incarceration for more information and project resources. Sesame Street - consistently more progressive and more useful than most things. holy shit This is a thing that so many kids are dealing with that Sesame Street is addressing it. You tell me we haven’t declared war on our own citizens. View high resolution

laughterkey:

geardrops:

aiglet12:

sesamestreet:

Today, Sesame Workshop launches its newest initiative, Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration. This bilingual (English/Spanish) multimedia outreach initiative provides much-needed resources to support and comfort young children (ages 3–8) throughout their parents’ incarceration. Go to http://www.sesamestreet.org/incarceration for more information and project resources.

Sesame Street - consistently more progressive and more useful than most things.

holy shit

This is a thing that so many kids are dealing with that Sesame Street is addressing it. You tell me we haven’t declared war on our own citizens.

(Reblogged from geekybombshell)

(Source: officialclintonmcphail)

(Reblogged from kelofmindelan)
(Reblogged from stonedmegle)
amandapalmer: tattoos come into my life a lot, but this one broke my heart open. neil and i both see a lot of tattoos of our words and works on people’s skin, and we have lots of weird tattoo anecdotes. last night I signed the inside of a girls thigh at the littlefield show and recommended that she walk home bowlegged because seriously that shit will sweat right the fuck off on a hot New York night. neil proudly tells the tale of the time someone got his signature on their arm in a signing line and then returned to the same signing line three hours later with saran wrap covering the freshly inked proof. some people get my face tattooed on them. that always feels surreally challenging, to look at my own visage staring back at me from somebody else’s arm or back, like knowing I have sister-spy-selves all over the world, hiding under hoodies in the deep winter. if you hadn’t noticed, i’ve been battling a kind of depression for the last few months. circumstances make it pretty understandable, i’m facing some crushing personal and business problems and feeling lonely and at loose ends in pretty much every department. the last time i was this low i was in college - unable to get out of bed and skipping classes. it wasn’t until i escaped the setting that things turned around. maybe tour will help. it never does. anyway, i’m not so fucking depressed that i couldn’t write a song, which was the saving grace of last week, and having the house party in nashville actually directly kicked my ass to finish what i’d started, which was a massive blessing because i have a bad habit of finishing songs 59% and then leaving them for years unless i have an active instant-gratification motivator (usually a show, and even better if its a show for 50 people in a house, where i feel safe to fuck it up). so as i was writing and wandering from the verse into the first chorus, the words “i am bigger on the inside” spilled out and i thought…i can’t fucking use this. can i? it had ricocheted from doctor who into my incredibly dark mood, and i felt conflicted…on the one side my little sobbing song and on the other side, hoards of people in tardis t-shirts. fuck it. yes. and i used the lyric. i played it, two hours after finishing it, for a teeny room of 15 people at the nashville house party and cried through most of the second and third verse. a few days later i flew to milwaukee to play for pride festival. i was having a rough night. the darkness was getting the better of me. against all better judgment (it was an outdoor festival celebration of YAY) i stuck the song towards the end of my set - a quiet, 8-minute introspective and repetitive ukulele song that I couldn’t play through without my throat getting stuck because it was just too fucking sad. the crowd had never heard the song, because it didn’t exist anywhere. i cried through verse two and three again and it was fine except that I went straight into the ukulele anthem afterwards and had a giant shiny glean of weeping-snot on my upper lip for the whole song. whatever. yes. after the show i signed for a few hundred people. a boy asked me to write the chorus lyrics on his chest. the next day, he sent me this picture. he’d had them tattooed. beat that, neil gaiman, i said, as i showed him the tweet, collapsing into a pile of useless blubbering on the floor of my mind. but actually…there is no competition. and this is what i see and understand about him, about me, about you, about doctor who, about coincidence, about the millions of ingredients and chances that lead us to this moment right here where we are facing each other (maybe through a screen, maybe not). we are all connected - there is no way out, nor should there be. say yes. love amanda p.s. the body & the tattoo belong to gavin michael batker, @shizaminnelli on twitter. p.p.s. i hope to record the song soon. stay with me.

amandapalmer:

tattoos come into my life a lot, but this one broke my heart open.

neil and i both see a lot of tattoos of our words and works on people’s skin, and we have lots of weird tattoo anecdotes. last night I signed the inside of a girls thigh at the littlefield show and recommended that she walk home bowlegged because seriously that shit will sweat right the fuck off on a hot New York night. neil proudly tells the tale of the time someone got his signature on their arm in a signing line and then returned to the same signing line three hours later with saran wrap covering the freshly inked proof.

some people get my face tattooed on them. that always feels surreally challenging, to look at my own visage staring back at me from somebody else’s arm or back, like knowing I have sister-spy-selves all over the world, hiding under hoodies in the deep winter.

if you hadn’t noticed, i’ve been battling a kind of depression for the last few months. circumstances make it pretty understandable, i’m facing some crushing personal and business problems and feeling lonely and at loose ends in pretty much every department. the last time i was this low i was in college - unable to get out of bed and skipping classes. it wasn’t until i escaped the setting that things turned around. maybe tour will help. it never does.

anyway, i’m not so fucking depressed that i couldn’t write a song, which was the saving grace of last week, and having the house party in nashville actually directly kicked my ass to finish what i’d started, which was a massive blessing because i have a bad habit of finishing songs 59% and then leaving them for years unless i have an active instant-gratification motivator (usually a show, and even better if its a show for 50 people in a house, where i feel safe to fuck it up).

so as i was writing and wandering from the verse into the first chorus, the words “i am bigger on the inside” spilled out and i thought…i can’t fucking use this. can i?

it had ricocheted from doctor who into my incredibly dark mood, and i felt conflicted…on the one side my little sobbing song and on the other side, hoards of people in tardis t-shirts. fuck it. yes.

and i used the lyric.

i played it, two hours after finishing it, for a teeny room of 15 people at the nashville house party and cried through most of the second and third verse.

a few days later i flew to milwaukee to play for pride festival. i was having a rough night. the darkness was getting the better of me. against all better judgment (it was an outdoor festival celebration of YAY) i stuck the song towards the end of my set - a quiet, 8-minute introspective and repetitive ukulele song that I couldn’t play through without my throat getting stuck because it was just too fucking sad.

the crowd had never heard the song, because it didn’t exist anywhere. i cried through verse two and three again and it was fine except that I went straight into the ukulele anthem afterwards and had a giant shiny glean of weeping-snot on my upper lip for the whole song. whatever. yes.

after the show i signed for a few hundred people. a boy asked me to write the chorus lyrics on his chest. the next day, he sent me this picture. he’d had them tattooed.

beat that, neil gaiman, i said, as i showed him the tweet, collapsing into a pile of useless blubbering on the floor of my mind.

but actually…there is no competition.

and this is what i see and understand about him, about me, about you, about doctor who, about coincidence, about the millions of ingredients and chances that lead us to this moment right here where we are facing each other (maybe through a screen, maybe not).

we are all connected - there is no way out, nor should there be.

say yes.

love
amanda

p.s. the body & the tattoo belong to gavin michael batker,
@shizaminnelli on twitter.

p.p.s. i hope to record the song soon. stay with me.

(Reblogged from amandapalmer)