The sexual outlaw sat alone in her room, considering her options.
Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock, Vere Chappell
Via a screenshot on Mari’s instagram stories. Could also work as the opening to a The Hold Steady song—imagine Craig Finn shouting this along the lines of “Charlemagne in Sweatpants.”
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
“The Modern Essay”, Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Crystal.
If this is faith, it’s faith built on spectacle and reinforced by mutual grievance.
“The Weird Religious Fervor of the Trump Faithful”, Melissa Gira Grant for The New Republic
Only in Midtown Manhattan would such genuine but assuredly basic competence be mistaken for excellence.
“Save Penn Station”, Thomas De Monchaux for New York Review of Architecture
Some runner-up sentences from this essay:
Yet the rat—virally pizza-schlepping or otherwise—is the natural sigil and familiar of New York City: maritime, hungry, brave, ingenious, ambitious, unsentimental, disloyal, charismatic, sociable, adaptable, violence-capable, possessed of a nocturnal glamour and feral beauty.
By smashing our nice things and then hating ourselves for doing so, we get to have it both ways: to identify with the Barbarians as well as the Romans, with the rats as well as the gods.
On his own small estate the growling old vagabond threw up his own mountain range, like an old volcano, and its geological formation was Dust.
Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens
Quoted in Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture by Adam M. Romero. The book traces how agriculture became a sink for industrial waste (e.g. arsenic-based pesticides in the late 19th/early 20th century were a way of disposing of arsenic waste produced in copper smelting, cyanide fumigation in California citrus groves utilized potassium cyanide from Philadelphia slaughterhouses and tanneries); the events of Our Mutual Friend kick off when the protagonist inherits his estranged father’s industrial waste empire. I just got to the chapter in Economic Poisoning about petrochemicals, which is pretty insane!
It etched new filigrees in my rage.
A member of my thesis committee in an email to me, sharing feedback
I like the idea of a baroque rage replete with delicate tracery, also this made me feel pretty good about my work.
In this game you play a roulette ball exploring a landscape of various casinos in search of the titular “american dream”, becoming obscenely wealthy via blind submission to statistically rigged games of chance, also known as meritocracy.
“Ball With Feet: A Tribute”, HarmonyZone
Submitted by v.