I took them, these placebo pills, because they allowed me to assert control over my impulses. I had once been a woman domineered by primitive and animalistic impulses, with too many opinions and too much attitude.
Why is pain so hard to describe? Of course, there’s the obvious issue: it monopolizes any brain space that might have been used to cultivate apt metaphors and precise descriptions. But even Greenwell’s well-wrought sentences—more vivid than most—leave the sensation out of reach.
If the Stalinist party line was Proletarian Realism, we could perhaps call The Girl a Proletarian Impressionism: not approaching anything like full abstraction, and yet focused considerably more on the sense of a given reality than perfect fidelity to the likeness you'd like it to have.
sunrise broken open
against rowhome
roof matchbox town
Among the power brokers of the art world, the recent weakness in the market hardly registers as a crisis. But the effects of this deeper, structural change will be felt outside of art's capitals.
my future seemed to spring forward from my mind without consent / i ducked, thinking i could tear range into the plan
Would you still love me if I had a brass nose? What if I were intractable? What if I were as old as the Sibyll? Beauty isn’t everything. I cannot recall the face of Bach.
These are games where understanding of the world—both its fiction and mechanical form—are, ultimately, the point. And importantly, they’re treated by developers with near equal weight, internally consistent. You don’t “beat” these games.
By being private it may be wildly public. How do you find yourself navigating these questions of audience, who a book is for, what its public role is, once it’s off the desk and out in the world?
I left the bank fully and completely realized as ELVIA INC, annual projected revenue: one million dollars.
In the moonlight, I thought I could read the lines around your smile, but I would not know the right thing—not then—and so there we were, with no one telling us how to begin, nor how to comply.
I will bend my articulable joints; I will bend my slender neck and set myself to the task of deciphering hermetic secrets scratched on tattered onionskin.