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Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson Biography

Poet

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“But whatever I am, I know that slipperiness isn't all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again--not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.”

HappinessPleasureInhibitionEvasivenessRevisitationsOrdinary Devotion
Author:Maggie Nelson
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“100. It often happens that we count our days, as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise. But really this is like hoisting a harness onto an invisible horse. "There is simply no way that a year from now you're going to feel the way you feel today," a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven't really changed.”

LifeSadness
Book:Bluets
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“I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. 'Love is not consolation,' she wrote. 'It is light.' All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”

LoveLight
Book:Bluets
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“The reparative turn, as applied to art, is in many ways a continuation of the orthopedic aesthetic, with the difference being that the twentieth-century model imagined the audience as numb, constricted, and in need of being awakened and freed (hence, an aesthetics of shock), whereas the twenty-first-century model presumes the audience to be damaged, in need of healing, aid, and protection (hence, an aesthetics of care).”

ArtCareArtistFreedomAudienceImpactTraumaShockMessageReparation
Book:On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
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“I’ve long had reservations about the emancipatory rhetoric of past eras, especially the kind that treats liberation as a one-time event or event horizon. Nostalgia for prior notions of liberation—many of which depend heavily upon mythologies of revelation, violent upheaval, revolutionary machismo, and teleological progress—often strikes me as not useful or worse in the face of certain present challenges, such as global warming.”

FreedomRevolutionNostalgiaMythologyLiberationRhetoricExaggerationEmancipationMachismoHyperbole
Book:On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
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“Because we tend--often correctly--to associate unfreedom with the presence of oppressive circumstances that we can and should work to change, it makes sense that we might instinctively treat the knot of freedom and unfreedom as a source of perfidy and pain. To expose how domination disguises itself as liberation, we become compelled to pull the strands of the knot apart, aiming to extricate the emancipatory from the oppressive.”

FreedomOppressionDominationConstraint
Book:On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
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“You’ve punctured my solitude, I told you. It had been a useful solitude, constructed, as it was, around a recent sobriety, long walks to and from the Y through the sordid, bougainvillea-strewn back streets of Hollywood, evening drives up and down Mulholland to kill the long nights, and, of course, maniacal bouts of writing, learning to address no one. But the time for its puncturing had come. I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one’s solitude right, this is the prize.”

RelationshipsSolitude
Book:The Argonauts
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“... I think it possible that I have watched too many blue movies for it to have a lasting hold on me. If you grow accustomed to wall-to-wall, even the slightest shred of mystery or plot can become an agitation. Who cares why these people have found themselves in this banal, suburban tract home in Burbank? He is not a delivery man; she is not a bored housewife. They are not the stars---their orifices are. Let them open.”

SexActingEroticaPornSimulacraFacsimiles
Book:Bluets
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“You’re looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations (all my favorite books in my preteen years: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Clan of the Cave Bear, The World According to Garp, as well as the few R-rated movies I was allowed to see—Fame, most notably, with its indelible scene of Irene Cara being asked to take her shirt off and suck her thumb by a skeezy photographer who promises to make her a star), then your sexuality will form around that fact. There is no control group. I don’t even want to talk about “female sexuality” until there is a control group. And there never will be.”

WomenSexualityAssault
Book:The Argonauts
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