the yak occidental

Here is a selection of memorable quotes from  Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke by Heart by Jen Sookfong Lee What is real, and what I know for certain, is that there are spaces in which we move from destination to destination, spaces through which we move with so much velocity that we are impossible to define, spaces that require change, that ask us to access one of the multiple identities we carry at any given moment, that allow us to be as fluid as we want to be. It’s a beautiful fact. And it’s ours. p.134 For the first time, I realized my grandfather and father had both been young men when they came to this country, walking the streets of Vancouver with a straight posture that sometimes read as primness, even as they carried an unwieldy burden of otherness and fear. At nineteen, I walked those same streets with. Slouch, dragging the hems of my oversized pants on the sidewalk. I never worried that I might be stopped on the street by police, that my presence could be construed as i...

Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing [...] This doesn’t mean being naive or undeceived, unaware of crisis or undamaged by oppression. What it does mean is being driven to find or invent something new and sustaining out of inimical environments. p. 4 We’re so often told that art can’t really change anything. But I think it can. It shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers other ways of living. Don’t you want it, to be impregnate with all that light? And what will happen if you are? p.8 Is art resistance? Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil. But it seems to me that whatever else you do, it’s worth tending to paradise, however you define it and wherever it arises. p. 128 Fiction can do that: can make a spa...

I have a goal of reading as many books by women as I possibly can. Here is a list of what I read January-March 2024. Ironically, the first book I read this year was by a man (Raymond Carver) and I hated it. Some of the stories were decent, and I only read it because I love  Time Ain't Accidental  by Jess Williamson (she sings about reading Raymond Carver by the pool bar like a lady). Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality: Stories  by Lindsay Wong was brutal and dark but I enjoyed it much. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories by Raymond Carver White Cat, Black Dog: Stories  by Kelly Link This Woman’s Work: Essays on Music edited by Sinéad Gleeson and Kim Gordon Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Irma Voth by Miriam Toews This is what it sounds like: what the music you love says about you by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas Beloved by Toni Morrison Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality: Stories by Lindsay Wong  A Complicated Kindness by Mi...