quote of the day, for t, who knows it’s always been so much about (created in, given wings by, lived in hopes of someday finding) the language:
fading rapidly are the days when the spoken word satisfied a yearning for insights into whatever there was to know about the world, where words carefully chosen and artfully expressed carried us beyond the mundane demands of getting through another day. –tom walsh
i don’t believe in killing time.
that rare, random descent 
Great quote. Agreed totally. Bummer too.
I think this describes what we’re (you know who you are) all about.
if we insist that the written word is taking its place. rather than just that the days of people remembering & caring about the spell-making importance of words are behind us all. which way do you read it? it’s totally out of context, of course (& i have no idea what its context was), so we have to go all new-critic (ew) & act like the text is all there is…
uh, yeah “ew.” new criticism ::skin crawling::
okay… enough tantrum throwing from me.
this quote reminds me of an ani difranco lyric (from “i’m no heroine”), and it is so moving to me everytime i hear the song (which i’ve had on repeat for numerous 6+ hour road trips — a frightening admission, no doubt) that i have to say…
the spoken/sung word still “gets” me.
here it is…
I’m no heroine
at least, not last time I checked
I’m too easy to roll over
I’m too easy to wreck
I just write about
what I should have done
I just sing
what I wish I could say
and hope somewhere
some woman hears my music
and it helps her through her day
and coming from ani, the “power-player” (my term), this vulnerability is… well… damned profound, heart-palpitation-causing, and fucking awe-full… as she always, amazingly is… even and especially at her most vulnerable.
“I sing what I can’t say.”
WOW.
I can’t process where that hits in me, but it hit something right on.
no doubt. it does the same to me. 🙂
vulnerability in the otherwise-powerful is one of the most compelling, enticing, “heart-palpitation-causing and fucking awe-full” thing in the world, as i suspect you know from & in all sorts of circumstances.
i went looking for this one & didn’t find it in my entensive list of ani songs; i found “superhero” instead, where she makes a similar move (although without the emphasis on modes of expression, so i’m derailing the linguistic focus here, aren’t i?):
“i used to be a superhero
no one could touch me, not even myself
and you were like a phonebooth
that i somehow stumbled into
and now look at me:
i am just like everybody else”
yeah, i love the “phone booth” line. 🙂
the songs on her _live in clip_ album. you’d love it!
my interpretation, how I relate it to myself, reminds me of that feeling of searching through text, through words for some sort of meaning that ultimately is not expressed in those words. so I search elsewhere for that meaning – whatever it is because I don’t know it till i find it but never find it – because I haven’t found it in words, but it’s not in music or in conversation or in art or in hugs either. and so i keep searching and that search for that thing that I’ll know when I see it is what drives me on. i have a nostalgia for a past that seems to have had some parameters that gave words a certain power of making things permanantly so, but all I’ve got now in this present is uncertainty to sift through – and not even in one medium!
and i used to words to try to express that and so i feel the meaning hasn’t been properly represented. and so, my interpretation.
oh, and another way to look at it, as a growing-up thing: we’ve all passed from a time of innocent (naive?) belief in what we read into a time of believing almost none of it, and so we’ve traded the comfort of definition for the excitement of choosing to see uncertainty in almost everything we read.
and now, after writing that, I have no idea whatsoever how or if that blurb relates to me at all because I don’t know what it means anymore.
i’m getting parallel pictures out of this:
one’s where there’s something to say & an impossible large lexicon & no guidance, & i end up playing tori songs & writing down her words instead, because there’s nothing else to do.
the other one’s where you’ve read something, & you’re sure you know what part of it said, & you’re trying to show it to somebody else, & you flip through the damn book for HOURS & the words you’re sure are there never appear.
Yes, and all that, too;)
I think this is all part of what I mean when I say it’s what we’re all about.
You are so wonderful, btw, and I can’t wait to see you in a couple weeks! you’re truly beautiful. i’m having a really sappy day, and I just love love love you! yay!!!:)
you can’t kill time silly, it’s too busy killing you!